Thanks, @k00b! You nailed it on the tipping, it's a bit like listener sponsorship. I mainly wanted there to be as little friction as possible for a new visitor to hear new music, but also encourage supporting artists at the same time.

So I have a proxy/middleware server running that can connect to any wavlake server and link it up with the front-end. The front-end has its own caching layer with stats like plays, etc. Once a server is registered to a user on wavlake.com, the user then can create and manage tracks via the site. There's a lot of friction in the connection/registration process currently that I need to sort out, but would like to see what kind of appetite there is for this model in general before going down that road.

Austin sounds like a fun time, man. Would love to at least check out Pleb Lab in the near future :)