More choices are always welcome, but the strength of Bandcamp primarily was the zeitgeist and the culture around it, not the tech.
The Bandcamp fridays, the curation, the interviews, the selectors, the IRL presence at Record Fairs or at events like Record Store Day...Considering the strong communal experience it was, the idea of federating (and further distancing) the space between the artists and the audience sounds more like a downgrade.
To me the strength is the ability to buy the music files directly without hurdles and without being trapped in something like iTunes
"Was"?
Doesn't everyone just rip now with youtube-dl/yt-dlp?
I always thought audio quality was something for snobs, but recently my car's aux input died and I burned a few CDs with yt-dlp rips and I get it now. Youtube's 128kbps makes me wince on some of the quieter recordings, even compared to my previous setup of Spotify over a lackluster LTE connection.
It might be relevant that you're burning them at a set volume, and your only way to increase volume is by bumping up the output volume, whereas any sort of mp3 player you can bump up the volume of the source independently from the output. Maybe if you burn them at a higher volume and keep CD player's volume lower you'll have better luck?
Disclaimer: I'm far from an audiophile, I just know from personal experience that if your source is low volume and your output is cranked up you get a lot of...distortion? Interference? Artifacts? I don't know, it just sounds staticky and worse.
Mostly noise because you're amplifying it as well, and possibly artifacts because material converted at too low levels (which is the case of old CD rips that weren't normalized before encoding) wouldn't use all the available headroom, therefore losing one bit.
I managed to collect a rather massive digital music collection when p2p was en vogue.
I still listen to it every day because it's highly curated and has tracks unavailable on any service, but quality-wise it definitely feels like I'm plumbing the depths of a DVD collection when everyone else is watching Netflix.
Support for artists and flac as the other comment already said (as well as clean UX)
If you want to support artists you'd be way better of just making a direct donation.
Sure, but:
* not every artist has a donation link. * I don't get the album for free otherwise
So I think it's totally ok for the service to give 10% to bandcamp (or whatever camp it will be in the future).
But I would be really happy when something like Faircamp takes off, and is easy for artists to use (or labels etc.), so they would be having more control, while providing a clean interface (unlike e.g. Qobuz)
can't get flacs from YouTube and some people also want to support the artists.
And buy vinyl, CDs and t-shirts etc.
Can get flac from tidal or qobuz. I buy vinyls and go to concerts. That’s how I support musicians. Bandcamp is very nice imho
No, I want to pay for my music. Otherwise why would the author continue such beautiful music?
Probably not. Bandcamp still sells albums, Amazon as well, and there are bunch of streaming services out there. If everyone was ripping from YouTube how would they stay in business?
I certainly don't, mostly because I want to pay the artists I appreciate. But also, the sound quality is awful.
Still possible but the company itself is being sold and resold, now in the hands of an actor that seems to conflict with its mission, unless I am mistaken
Hardcore Bandcamp user here - it's been sold, but other than layoffs, the user experience has remained essentially exactly the same. Especially with regards to OP's point about buying the files directly without hurdles. Songtradr has yet to announce any future changes to the platform as well. For all intents and purposes, it's the same as it ever was.
Hence my confusion over the use of the word "was".
Let's hope that it continues to be so, and that there aren't internal changes ongoing to impact this
I have a completely different experience.
Bandcamp will survive because it's primarily an independent online music / record / merch store. All that other stuff is just .... it's bloat and fluff that gets in the way of the music tbh.
Bandcamp Fridays gave (and presently, still give) 100% of Bandcamp's cut to the artists. Any "replacement" platform that doesn't have it will mean the artists get less money, which gets in the way of the music.
As somebody who obviously didn't pay attention to any artist on the platform, of course anything beyond a quick, one-click, Amazon-style storefront will be "getting in the way of the music," for you.
There's already a solution for that, though:
Go shop on Amazon, if you don't care about what percentage of the profits the artist gets. They have the patented "Buy now with 1-Click®" experience, and it'll likely be faster for you to purchase using it.
Personally, I want a world where people can afford to make music for a living, and Bandcamp was great at doing everything it could to try and make that happen for as many people as possible.
You’ve focused in on the Bandcamp Friday thing.
When I read the original parent it was everything else that I was like “meh, Bandcamp would be perfectly fine without any of that”
Bandcamp Fridays just got lumped into the quote tbh.
I’m tired. It’s Thursday. Terraform was kicking me in the head today.
Although I can never remember which bloody Friday is Bandcamp Friday so I think I’ve managed to do like one of them.
Bandcamp was going for like 10 years before the Fridays existed. If they needed to go to keep the store online, I’d be fine with that (not that I think that’s necessary).
Oh and I used to work for a performing royalties organisation… so… yeah… I kind of do care about how much artists get paid for their work.
Yeah it would be great if making a living off music was feasible for more people.
But the magic is in the fact that’s it’s not. There’s magic in the sacrifice.
Edit — this part of your reply was annoying me.
For me… the connection to the artist happens through the music that I buy from them.
So you know what. Yeah, I would buy off amazon. Or boomkat. Or bleep. Or redeye. Or phonica. Or honest johns. Or SOTU. Or juno.
I’m an absolute record store whore. I have no allegiances.
Because buying the actual music is the important bit I believe.
Why?
Because no one buys music anymore.
That’s why artists have to tour so much — to make that living you spoke about. Because no one buys anything these days.
Well… I do. But I’m weird.
I couldn’t care less about instagram posts or posting photos of people hanging out in the studio tho. That stuff is pure bobbins as far as I’m concerned.
Bookmark this silly site: https://isitbandcampfriday.com/
Oh I have. And I always forget anyway.
I buy physical copies. Is good enough for me.
I can't deny that.
Congratulations on abstractly purchasing music without caring how much of it actually ends up in an artist's pocket and feeling proud of it! Vinyl is 15-20% for the artist on a good day, and usually worse after vendor markups. MP3s on most platforms are at least a 15+2.5% haircut for the artist.
Saying that you didn't care about workers getting paid was weird, but equating "making music" inherently with a vow of poverty is kind of beyond the pale. You're a (presumably) well-compensated person working on something far less useful to society than music, "the cloud." Plenty of countries have programs to compensate their artists fairly (like countries that force a percentage of radio play to be in their native language, or by local artists), and these countries don't have "less magic" because of it.
I don't even blame pirates, but this weird middle ground of being willing to spend money but not caring if a good deal of it goes to corporate middlemen so you can have the abstract, hipster, "At least I buy things!" experience is so bizarre.
This doesn't sound right, there are 8 billion people in this world, a large chunk of them potential 'artists' with sufficient motivation, and not everyone is motivated by money.
Since it seems like you might have not heard, as of last year bandcamp is no longer independent (which I assume is the impetus for projects like the OP):
https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/epic-games-acquires-ba...
edit: ah, unless you meant "a store for independent music" instead of "an independent store for music", english
yeah, the first one. (it's late on a thursday and terraform is being difficult, limited spare brainpower).
Yep. Just as anybody can stand up a social media platform clone - the value is in the network effect and content on the platform. Because of the content and discovery features on Bandcamp, I've discovered several bands I'd never have heard of otherwise.
If you're leaving hosting and promotion entirely as an exercise to the band/artist, you're not meeting the actual need. Bandcamp (mostly) met the need of artists and music enthusiasts. Unfortunately it's now in the hands of an entity that seems to care about neither.
and that network effect is what allows for enshittification to proceed unabated.
We're watching that start right now with AI. which is probably the real danger of AI: locked in work flows, exploited by capitalism to leverage shitty outcomes as a way to drive up profits and downgrade outcomes.
Well, you need the network effect but I don’t think the effect itself causes enshittification. The constant need for massive growth and big numbers to sate investors causes companies to drift from their original mission and morph into something soulless and purely driven by profit, despite sometimes already being wildly profitable. There is irony in me saying this on HN but the longer-term effects of VC money really really ruins good things.
the network effect _allows_ enshittification, to the point that it's almost entirely why enshittification is allowed. The momentum into a ecosystem is much different than coming out. Once the Business realizes they've hit that "event horizon" enshittification necessarily flows from pure capitalism.
Sure, we could redefine the physical basis of this blackhole of the internet metaphor via regulations, but corporations are not governments and do not need to follow any specific multifaceted approach to long term vision.
How could the network effect reasonably not occur for any decently popular [socially-inclined] service? Whether or not the company does anything to encourage it, with enough users it happens regardless.
Sure, it enables it. Without it, you probably haven't got enough users to survive anyway.
So, the choice is on the company. Money breeds bullshit and companies want money, so they leverage their leverage, which happens to be their users. Then the shit just gets worse.
TXitter is "living" proof that people don't give a shit as long as they can get their endorphins from likes. So, to some extent it's also people feeding on the validation that likes from strangers gives them and not even people they know or care about.
I'm not sure that even without corporate greed the network effect would not turn toxic.
Picture a perfectly ethical company with 2m users logging in daily and interacting across different planes. The company can do everything it can to preserve its integrity and user rights but the users themselves will enshittify eventually.
People love validation and likes are basically crack. It's changing too with short-form content sucking peoples' lives away 30 seconds at a time. Clickbait is also becoming more nefarious and AI is being leveraged to further worsen it.
IMO, the modern internet is turning into a swamp of fast-validation, instant-grattification, and endless competition for that 0.5s you have to grab a user's eyes. It's all going to shit.
Good luck watching YouTube in any sane capacity without significant effort. Also, good luck using websites that call themselves "for the real web" but morph into Medium, Substack, Reddit, and pretty much anything else.
That's me being jaded I guess. But the internet is falling in a way that most people don't care about. Same as Reddit. Same as Twitter. Nobody gives a shit about integrity as long as they can get their dopamine hits one tap at a time.
That's awesome. Bandcamp is my primary go-to for music, but I have to admit that I've never found much value in their discovery features, articles, etc. It's pretty great that Bandcamp can serve both of us what we need.
I think Bandcamp does a great job bringing artists closer to the audience without any of those things like interviews, curation, IRL presence. Honestly, those things always rubbed me the wrong way since they felt like the kind of marketing that we get through traditional means (e.g., Rolling Stone articles), except with an indie flavor: some music nerd picked a winner and put them forward, and artists who didn't make the cut by the Bandcamp tastemakers take more effort to find.
I think the absence of that sort of "pick-a-winner-and-interview-them" does a lot for making things flat and fair for all. The primary people who get grumpy about getting rid of that are the people whose job it is to be curator/interviewer/etc. I'm not terribly sad if they go away.
This isn't really what you're posting about I do find curation and reviews to be valuable, if you avoid reifying them too much. I often see a bit of an anti-critic sentiment, mostly from people who disagree with a review for something they've got strong feelings about one way or another, but I don't want to spend the time to extensively search through the Sturgeon's law wasteland of indie music. Algorithmic recommendations are sometimes helpful but don't often encourage me to branch out as much as reviewers, especially when it comes to unknown unknowns. The fact that a lot of indie artists find it hard to get attention is really just the nature of the game. There are a lot of musicians and aspiring musicians out there.
they were pretty consistent about picking good artists though, which was great for scenes i dont follow myself
no one person can sift through every scene and genre to find the good shit, and there's plenty of bad shit. i can do that for like, one scene
bandcamp articles generally delivered me more quality finds with more variety than automated "you may also like..." curation systems a la spotify or last.fm.
it's not like the latter are truly democratizing anything either--once getting big on spotify (or nowadays, tiktok) became important commercially, you got a whole ecosystem of influencers behind the scenes offering promotion in those systems. getting boosted via a faceless "chill sunday morning coffee music" playlist is still curation
Literally a few minutes ago Adam Neely (Pretty famous youtuber and Jazz player) posted a video specifically about this point[1], and I fully agree with his thesis: If you take out the "music nerds" as the gatekeepers, their place will be taken by Google/Instagram/TikTok indexing and MinMax algos and whoever can influence those.
The tech to create content may have exploded in the last years, but the ability to truly connect and discover (and I mean ways to build cultural, emotional and social connections in and outside of the internet) has plummeted.
I don't agree that technology is strictly at fault here, but this side of the equation has been heavily ignored due to the less immediate monetization options. We've gone for the "intensive farming" of art and culture compared to more "sustainable" approaches, and we're experiencing the equivalent of desertification following a monocolture.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RceZ8VS8PbQ
And I thought the bandcamp did a good job with the best of the month lists because it wasn;t just what sold best. I frequently started my morning listening to the bands from one of the articles on the homepage while I drank coffee and got caught up. For categories like hip hop, ambient, or folk I don't follow enough to have a grasp of who or what I might like, so I treated the articles like a radio show, a chance to stumble on something interesting. The posts focused on a specific region and genre were usually worth the read, and I appreciated how sometimes there were links to some artists side projects in a different genre.
Today's album of the day post was about Japanese Acid Folk, not something I care about at all. But it wasn't a bad way to start the day with something new. https://daily.bandcamp.com/album-of-the-day/various-artists-...
I suppose it seemed valuable to me that the various writers or editors could focus on niches, not the best of the month and this month it is written by a metalhead.
If anything I thought the suggested albums at the bottom iss a bit too skewed toward certain bands. I'm not sure if that's targeting by user, or if there are too many connections in people's purchases to avoid making the links. On the other hand, the artist suggested albums at the bottom are almost always worth a listen if they have taken the time to add any.
For me it was all about:
- a very generous cut for the artist - how well the site functions - it does just enough, very practical. Clean UX and UI - flac
I should say is all about. BC still does all those core most important things. Long live Bandcamp.
I am a pretty regular listener to music on Bandcamp, and I have never heard of any of these things.
To me Bandcamp is a minimalist distribution medium and simple media player for independent artists.
Same, as well as letting me stream it when I can't play from my downloaded library, such as from a work computer.
Certainly not the tech. It's 2024 and their iOS app is still not ipad-compatible.
I thought I used it years ago on an iPad. It was just a scaled up iPhone app so the resolution was bad but, then again, how many pixels do you really want in a music player?
Actual the thing is that I can buy and own music pretty hassle free. I haven' t really figured how this freecamp sitegenertor helps selling/buying music (including hard copies)
The big draw for me is the curation, articles, scene reports, bandcamp weekly, all nicely and simply integrated with a way to listen to what you're reading about on the platform. Recommendations from humans as opposed to the Spotify algorithms. There's a lot of music on the internet, Bandcamp's offering for me is helping me to find some of it that I can connect with.
I typically use Pandora for my discovery and then buy on Bandcamp first (if available), then Amazon (eww, I know, but this is the catch all failure-path). The Bandcamp curation stuff seemed… interesting I guess? I’m glad they were able to employ some music experts. But it is hard to beat system that is tailored to your taste.