podtunes

About

podtunes is a browser-based music player. Its library is populated exclusively from feeds tagged medium=music in the Podcasting 2.0 namespace and indexed on PodcastIndex.org.

Audio files are never re-hosted or downloaded. Every play button streams the original enclosure URL directly from the artist's feed.

Artists are identified by their itunes:author value combined with the feed's owner email, so multiple releases from the same artist collapse into a single profile page.

Playback is anonymous — no account required. Accounts are on the roadmap.

Music vs. talk podcasts

PodcastIndex's medium=music bucket occasionally contains talk shows that discuss music rather than release it. podtunes runs a lightweight classifier over every feed — combining feed categories, average episode length and title keywords — to keep the catalogue focused on actual music. Talk podcasts are hidden from every listing, chart and search result and do not influence the artist ranking.

Lightning boosts

Feeds that publish a <podcast:value> block get a Boost button on their artist and release pages. Payments are sent directly wallet-to-artist as Lightning keysends with Podcasting 2.0 TLV metadata — podtunes never touches the money and holds no keys.

The current build supports WebLN wallets such as Alby. Support for Nostr Wallet Connect (remote wallets like Alby Hub, Mutiny, Coinos, Primal) is on the roadmap so users without a browser extension can boost too.

How we rank artists

podtunes quietly computes an internal relevance score for every artist so lists like the artist directory can surface interesting profiles first. The score is not displayed anywhere in the UI — it only influences ordering. It combines the following signals, recalculated daily:

  • Charts presence — position on the Podcasting 2.0 V4V Music Chart (higher rank = more points).
  • Editorial recommendations — appearance and popularity on PodcastIndex's music recommendations.
  • Recency — how recently the artist released something, with an exponential decay of roughly a two-year half-life.
  • Release cadence — number of distinct releases in the last twelve months.
  • Catalog depth — total releases and total tracks, log-scaled so deep back catalogs are rewarded without dominating everything.
  • Collaboration graph — how often the artist is credited on other artists' releases via <podcast:person> or value splits.
  • Podcasting 2.0 adoption — small bonuses for a <podcast:value> block, a <podcast:funding> link, and a <podcast:person> profile image.
  • OP3 listener signal — 30-day download counts from The Open Podcast Prefix Project for feeds that route their enclosures through OP3, log-scaled so a few very popular shows don't drown out the long tail.

User-driven signals — plays, boosts, follows — will feed the score once accounts land. The score is deliberately opaque: it is a soft nudge for discovery, not a public leaderboard.