I love Bandcamp for the simple reason that they're one of the few very few music stores that digital distribution right according to my standards - for music, this means lossless & DRM-free by default, ie. the same thing physical CDs offer (and Bandcamp makes things even more convenient by allowing you to download in several formats, both lossy and lossless, according to your preferences). While DRM isn't usually an issue with digital music purchases today, way too many stores still offer lossy by default, with lossless requiring either paying extra or - even worse - simply not being available at all.
It really is sad how often legal digital products are inferior in quality to their physical versions, even though with digital you could pretty much always offer more than what the physical formats allow.
Also, another common scourge of digital distribution that Bandcamp doesn't suffer from: region locking. They don't support it and don't intend to do so either: https://bandcamp.com/help/selling#region
I love bandcamp. Partly because they just give you the music as a single zip full of audio files. No shitty downloader utility or anything.
I tried to buy a digital album on Amazon once. They offered digital downloads of MP3 files, so I figured it couldn't be so bad. It was. I bought the Interstellar soundtrack. It was 20 to 30 tracks in it. I went to download it ... Amazon told me I could use some Amazon MP3 downloader to download the album, but it wasn't available for my platform. Instead, I get brought to some music browser of the tracks I've bought. There's checkboxes next to each of the tracks, a download button, and no "select all" button, so I check each track and click download. Amazon then tells me that downloading multiple tracks at once is only supported if I use their Amazon MP3 downloader (still not available for my platform). I have to check one track at a time, and then click download. I then have to uncheck that track, then check the next track, then click download again. In what universe is that a good experience? Who the hell envisioned that as even a good backup method for obtaining whole albums? I'm lucky I only bought one album.
I just gave up and acquired the soundtrack through other means which didn't involve ridiculous rote checkbox dickery or proprietary downloader plugin nonsense. I'm pretty sure I finished before I would have finished downloading each individual track from Amazon.
I wonder how many potential customers they lost with their downloader bullshit though. While my OS at the time did support it I couldn't be bothered to install a random binary just for a different music store.
They lost quite a few sales to me due to their ministrations. And I literally just made my latest music purchase 2 days ago on Bandcamp. First time buying on their site. Easy, quick, got exactly the formats I wanted. I kind of wish every artist was on Bandcamp.
They're great for physical goods. My wife's disabled and I have a day job, so we work our Amazon Prime hard. I disapprove of their tax shenanigans in the UK, but frankly we'd be fucked without Amazon or something like it.
Yep, Bandcamp is the one site I go to when I discover new and interesting articles. If they're on there, half the time it's an impulse-buy of the whole discography. If they're not on there, chances are I won't bother any further. I don't know how it is as an artist, but as a tech-savvy consumer the experience is tremendous.
I've saved rather a lot on the discography discount promos that artists will offer from time to time. When I like someone's output it's an excellent way to expand a collection/taste in one purchase as I can hit play and rather than listen to one or two albums have hours of similar content. Especially for genres I wouldn't normally think of buying it can be an attractive deal (such as recently with some superb electronic ambient/glitch and house from one artist, listened to it for weeks).
Vladislav Delay [1]. He's an obscure but apparently well-regarded Finnish electronic artist that a mastering engineer whose blog I follow [2] put me onto. I started with the album Vocalcity, then Multila and after a few more knew it was my kind of thing.
I buy from Bandcamp and voluntarily pay double just out of general principle. I listen most of music via Spotify out of convenience, but I'll gladly financially support any band that offers an honest product.
Is an audio signal lossless? That question doesn't make sense. Analog audio is limited by bandwidth and signal-to-noise. Digital audio is limited by its Shannon-Nyquist parameters.
(Monty's show and tell for geeks is great if you have even the slightest interest in these things!)
Compared to what? Are vinyls all pressed off of an analog source? Does that mean new vinyls can't be made after the master is degraded? I'm curious what you mean here.
Edit: You're being downvoted which I think is unfair. It's completely logical that higher sample rates and higher bit depths "should" sound better, and certainly the music industry wants you to believe that. Unfortunately it's simply not true above a certain threshold.
"Lossless" here is defined as "stays the same once it has entered the digital domain", and not "identical to the real-life source", and so CDs are in fact lossless.
> "Lossless" here is defined as "stays the same once it has entered the digital domain", and not "identical to the real-life source", and so CDs are in fact lossless.
That's certainly not the usual sense of "lossless" as applied to recordings, since it would make mp3s lossless as well. We generally say that mp3s are lossy because the mp3 encoding process loses information that was present in its input, not because the encoded mp3 degrades when played (it doesn't!) or when copied (it doesn't!).
CDs, as the original source of music, cannot have this sense of "lossy" or "lossless" usefully applied to them. (You could claim that the performance is the original source, in which case it's still not possible to apply the lossy-vs-lossless concept, as no lossless recording of a physical performance is possible.)
It would not apply to MP3:s, because by the time it hits the MP3 encoder it must ALREADY be digitized, and it loses quality as it goes through the encoder.
An MP3 encoder works with digital data to start with, so the data is already in the digital domain. The data out does not contain all the information from the data in, so it is definitely not "lossless".
> You might be surprised to learn that "HD audio" often has worse sound quality than "CD quality".
That only applies if you have a perfect master.
If you want to listen to a song mastered for CD, unless it’s 24/192, it’ll likely clip at several points.
Which is about 90% of songs today.
And if you want to remix the song, or use an equalizer, or other effects, you’ll also want 24/192.
And nowadays the ultrasonic effects he describes don’t even affect mobile phones anymore, and storage is plenty – making the disadvantages he describes moot.
That's not true, after you band-limit a 24/192 file and convert to CD quality there will be no clipping. Nobody can tell the difference in a blind test between CD quality and higher.
That’s a problem with the mastering, not the recording format: There’s plenty of dB available in a CD to cover the full range of human hearing.
Sadly you have no guarantee that a random 24/192 recording wont have the same compression / clipping problems that plague CDs thanks to the loudness wars.
Well, not "a random" remaster, but most of the time, the hi-fi versions are just a reencoding of the actual master, at the mastering resolution of 24/192.
Which is quite awesome, because that doesn’t have clipping.
Basically, what I want, is ideally the master, in the original version.
Just like I’d prefer RAW images with a header telling my program which settings to apply for rendering – but still allowing me to change exposure.
The 'master' has already been mastered. If it didn't it would sound awful. The conversion to redbook format is just one small step at the end of the process that has nothing to do with clipping.
Yes however to be truly lossless, each sample amplitude would need infinite precision, which is not physically possible to record. Also real world sounds are not bandlimited.
I get what you're saying, but the human ear has it's limits. Blind A:B testing with CDs vs the higher-resolution SACDs has had mixed results - there are a very few people who can consistently tell the difference, but everyone else might as well be coin-flipping.
Yes. Plus the implementation filters can not be ideal as it would require infinite resources and in practical implementations have several species of non-idealities.
You know, this whole "flame" kind of thread happened based on your comment looks to me simply like the argument about the terminology (the meaning of particular words), and doesn't seem to be anyhow meaningful.
If we think thoroughly, one can say that anything that comes through the cables, amplifiers and speakers is lossy. Just because it's not the direct transmission of the sound from the music instrument to a human ear through air. As we all know, our ear is a pretty complex audio sensor that consumes sound waves from multiple directions (perhaps, the unlimited number of directions) - direct and reflected waves. So if someone says that all the performances of every rock or electronic band are "lossy" just because the sound gets transmitted through a limited number of speakers (not to mention the number of sound effects getting applied - distortion, hi/lo-frequency filters, reverb, compression etc.), that guy could be onto something in actual fact. That position also has some grounds and rights to exist.
Also, I doubt one can precisely emulate the actual performance of an artist with just 2 (5, or even more) recorded channels. As every performance, from the listener perspective, also depends on the location, current place's acoustic parameters, etc. (say, if you are in a garage with metal walls, the sound is reflected differently than in an open field or mountains). As well as different people attending a music event will hear different kind of sound, simply because each of them will be located in a different position and receive different/unique sound waves from different directions. From this perspective any record of that exact concert would be "lossy" (not the same) for every single person.
Some people in the thread discussed whether the audio record keeps lossless after mastering. Well, you could say, applying any filter to a record (regardless of whether your intention is to make it sound better or not) distorts/changes the record anyway. Especially keeping in mind that it may involve eq-filters and compression for different frequency bands. I mean, do we lose something in that case? Sure. Do we call it "lossy"? I suppose most people don't.
The other guys tried to use the limitation of a human ear as an argument as well. But this is also debatable. Where would we stop that way? Exclude all the frequencies above 22KHz off the consideration while speaking of "lossless" vs. "lossy"?
I might be mistaken here, but I think applying the term "lossless" to CD quality is a convention amongst the most people simply to have some kind of a common measurement standard to refer to as a basic "unhurt" record in the digital space. Whether it is correct or not technically... Well, I am not sure it really matters now.
PS That being said, you seem to have got down-voted wrongly. While you may have an opinion which is a bit different from what the other people have regarding the use of "lossless" thingy, you don't seem to have said anything bad. I am voting you up myself just trying to negate that wrongdoing. :) BTW, I even didn't know that one can down-vote here. Every time I visit this web-site, I feel like I got back in 80s in terms of how this forum looks like (UI/UX). I wonder when YC will finally do something about that and align it to the contemporary web standards. It's super weird that the company funding most promising startups in 2016 has a forum-like kind of stuff lost 20 years behind. Sorry for the off-topic.
I really like that Bandcamp supports "pay what you want" as an option, I find I'm always more likely to buy music when that's a possibility.
That being said, I also wrote a BandCamp scraper, https://github.com/Miserlou/SoundScrape , so maybe I have weird priorities. Either way, I love BC way, way more than SoundCloud.
In the long run, at the scale that BC-type artists operate, I think that the merch game is actually bigger than the paying-for-music game. They've made a few moves in that space, but I get the impression that BigCartel is actually the sleeping giant. I think whoever can combine BigCartel, BandCamp and a _manufacturing_ component into a single experience will be the winner.
I don't know if the freedom of Bandcamp's model is the primary psychological factor for me in this behavior, but I find myself much more liberally spendy (paying more than what the artist usually asks, if it's an option) with this platform than I have been on any other. From watching the front page where they give you a live feed of people purchasing music, including how much more than the asking price they pay, I don't think I'm alone.
* judge authors and artists more leniently when I get to choose what to pay
* and pay more, partially just to support a good cause (I know the artist/author pockets most of it) and I guess partially to spite the big labels and make it more attractive for other artists to leave the dark side.
Not if you want lossless tracks. Beatport's lossless surcharge is absolutely insane.
A good example is 'Ils - Bohemia (Remixes & Exclusives)'. [1] This album consists of 35 tracks which in MP3 format is £18.35 inc. VAT ($20 USD).
However, should you want it in WAV or AIFF format (they don't offer FLAC) and the album suddenly costs £41.54 ($54.32 USD) due to the ridiculous £26.25 surcharge. After adding VAT @ 20% the total comes to £49.85! It would be over 7 times cheaper to buy the physical CD from Amazon [2] and rip it yourself.
I don't understand how Beatport can justify charging these exorbitant prices for lossless tracks? Even their MP3 prices aren't great compared to the competition. [3]
Their target audience is DJs, and a lot of their catalogue is only available there or on limited-print vinyls. If you can buy an album elsewhere or on CD, don't buy it on beatport.
I remember friend having a lot of trouble using Beatport without flash.
Same goes with Soundcloud - works well 80% of the time, but then some tracks wouldn't forward and just keep loading forever. Must be some DRM involved.
The article points out that Bandcamp is trying to expand their Editorial staff. I think that's akin to "mission creep" or dangerously close to opening up "payola" avenues. Beatport turned un-profitable when it tried to do more than just being a download site. Now, they've (allegedly) returned to good profitability by chopping off the unwanted appendages that SFX had pushed downward. Personally I'm happy that they went back to doing what they did best...and coupons!
To me, SoundCloud feels like a whole other domain of music distribution. I listen to a lot of small artists, all of whom are mainly based on SoundCloud. It serves as a place to catch up with their new release and what they like ( using the repost system ). And practically all of the artists who actually sell their music, put up links to BandCamp for people to purchase their tracks from.
Sound scraping the preview MP3s? While this is trivial (view source, you can find the URLs starting popplers5.bandcamp.com), it strikes me as ... a bit tawdry. These are indie artists.
Spotify seems to be partially gearing for that. A lot of reasonable sized artists' pages have an "Offers" section where they sell records and other merch.
Bandcamp is the only place I buy music online. They just seem so honest: Fair pay for musicians; free streaming prior to purchase; drm-free multiple formats, including FLAC. They don't even try to make it hard to rip mp3s from the streams, they have just focus on providing an amazing product which the consumers (hopefully) recognize as deserving of their money.
My only complaint is poor support for finding music by bands if they have released records with more than one publisher. For instance searching for my favorite band Shining returns a page[1] with 4 of their albums, but their best album: Halmstad is found is released by osmoseproductions and thus found on their page [2].
I've found a "site:bandcamp.com" google search to be much better than using their own tools. But I have to do this so often with other websites' poor navigational tools that it's a total afterthought. Not an excuse, though.
I have it set up so I can just type e.g. 'bc' and whatever I want to search for. You can obviously also use it for any other sites, just change what goes after the colon, but keep the %s.
This is actually a very good observation. Bandcamp is great as a music store (for both fans and artists), but the discovery mechanism is rather non-existent. We believe in the overall model and are trying to fix it here - http://tuneself.com – essentially providing music streaming (for free, without ads and legally) but integrating the same core model as Bandcamp has, so the fans could pay for the music only when they think it's worth it.
"The artist gets 85 percent. Always, the artist gets to know who’s buying, without a third party in the way."
This quote sums up why Bandcamp makes sense to artists. Listening now to music off Bandcamp. Buy Vinyl also get .flac an the artist gets the dollars and data. How good is that.
DRM free flac is one of the main reasons I go bandcamp when available. I have my own in home media server, so being able to actually have the songs is important.
I had inherited a dual xeon 64gb ram server and I started tinkering with home server stuff. But its loud and hot and very much meant for a datacenter and not a basement.
So I'm working on migrating the server to raspberry pi's and AWS, depending on power needed and ARM availability.
My only issue is that a dual xeon with that much ram can run a LOT of stuff at once. and I have a lot of minor things packed into it. I think almost all the stuff will run on raspberry pi's, but I might wind up needing 20 of them at this point.
But yes. I think a small NAS and a raspberry pi running a media server should basically be a given for people these days. It's an amazing concept to actually own and control data.
+1. Bandcamp is the way to support artists, besides being imminently usable for the customer.
I find it perplexing when some artists' web sites make the iTunes and Spotify links more prominent and in some cases don't even include the Bandcamp link despite having the record listed there.
You can choose to require an e-mail address when people download your free music, but it's not the default setting. I'm not sure about paid downloads, though.
I've received several thank you's from musicians after purchasing their discography for like $15. It really feels like you're directly supporting them and is one of the main reasons I love Bandcamp!
Bandcamp is the best. I personally admire those guys.
Over last few years they have done for the music industry much more than anyone else in the business. Yet avoiding a huge buzz that the other players generate (like Spotify, Pandora, Apple, etc.).
* They seem to be the only profitable company in the online music business,
* They pay directly to the content owners (artists and labels) avoiding stupid useless institutions like RIAA and SoundExchange,
* They don't raise hundreds of millions just to squander them on advertisement,
* They are actually helping increase the income for indies,
* They provided tools to anyone to easily sell their music and merch,
* And it's still just a couple of dozen people working there.
This company is kind of the ideal example that every single startup should follow, I believe. Instead of infinite noise and funding rounds keeping unprofitable for years, they just did the job and continue to grow.
Bandcamp is the first place I look to buy music from a band I like, because of their fair revenue share. Many times, it's the only place I look: I'm reluctant to shop at other online music stores and streaming services because so much of the music industry is toxic, and I don't want to put money into that system to sustain it.
Since we're discussing online record stores, CD Baby needs to be mentioned as the indie music retailer back in the early 2000s. Its founder, Derek Sivers, is one of those awesome Web 1.0 geeks that built things for love, not money: https://sivers.org/
I bought so many $5 CDs of unknown bands from CD Baby back in my college days when I had the time to just page through and sample hundreds of artists in whatever genre I was in the mood for at the time. (I was one of the weird college kids who paid for music in the era of Napster and Kazaa, even if it was only five bucks a pop.) I discovered a lot of bands that way. Thanks for helping to make that possible.
God, that $5 sale was one of my best ideas. I should write about it some time.
The $5 price didn't kick in until you had at least 3 CDs in your cart that were in that $5 sale.
So it was a way of encouraging people, who came to just get one album, to browse around and get a few more.
Albums were still priced at $15 or whatever, until you had at least 3 of this sale items, so it could take a $15 order for one CD and turn it into a $15 sale for 3 CDs.
The customers were thrilled. The musicians who got discovered because of it were thrilled, because they opted-in to the sale. (They'd usually do it for their older albums that weren't selling anymore.)
It was a huge win, almost doubled sales, and was one of those things I thought of on a Tuesday, programmed on Thursday, and launched on Friday.
It's funny you should post this. I literally bought an album from CD Baby yesterday: my first one since you'd moved on.
It was a quite a different experience than I had remembered.
On the other hand I have bought quite a few albums from Bandcamp and am I big fan.
I do still have a wistful fondness for CD Baby. And they've kept their word; my little brother sent in a half dozen copies of his CD back in 2003 and it's still available for purchase!
CD Baby & Tunecore have traditionally - maybe not recently - charged artists a premium for access. When I looked into CD Baby they wanted $20/yr to host each release, LP or EP, etc. To me I knew I'd never recoup that, so I felt it was kind of similar to the old industry model of making the opportunity seem too good to be true.
CD Baby has never had an annual fee. See http://members.cdbaby.com/cd-baby-cost.aspx It was always just a one-time up-front cost because for every incoming album, I (and later, others) would do about 45 minutes of work: scanning album art, digitizing the CD, spell-checking the bio and song titles, listening to some of the music to include in future recommendations, and finally putting the CD on the physical shelves in preparation for sale. Even with digital distribution, this up-front cost was still needed because a new album arriving meant many gigs of uploading out to 50+ different digital retailers. So, CD Baby's main profit model was a cut per sale. 9% of digital income, or a flat $4 per physical CD sold.
Tunecore's model has always been to take 0% or almost no fee per-sale. Instead that annual fee is their main income. I think you might be thinking about Tunecore, in your comment here.
Funny thing is (and I feel like I'm saying this confidentially, but fuggit, HN comments, here we go), I always thought Tunecore's model was kinda brilliant because it tapped into the ambitious musician psychology better.
At CD Baby, we'd often get emails/calls from musicians thinking of signing up, saying, "Let's say, conservatively, that we sell 100,000 copies. You'd be making $400,000 just off of our one album!"
I'd wince and say yes, that's right. Then I'd tell them that the average artist - https://sivers.org/lines - sells under 20 copies, not over 100,000. But everyone thinks they're the exception.
So that's the kind of person that would see Tunecore's model and think, "Ha! Only an annual fee and then I get to keep 100% of my 100,000 sales? Hell yeah! I'm going to save $400,000 going with Tunecore over CD Baby."
Ideally, a company could offer both pricing models, and let the client choose their optimistic or pessimistic sales prediction.
I appreciate you clearing that up - re: up front versus annual. I was mistaken in recollection and did not intend to disparage the platform if I did so. Sometimes I cross wires with who does what and it is not from malice. The market is getting a bit more populated, and that's great!
I'm certain there are many happy clients of various platforms and competition is good for both artists and customers.
If you're in the biz and would be interested, I highly recommend the Michael Nelson series on Stereogum.com titled "Who's Buying" because he does some real deep dives into the financials and marketing and customer engagement details that aren't surface-level. It's nerding out type of stuff, and while his tone is very casual and occasionally confrontational, I do appreciate the effort to continue to present interesting thoughts for both artists and fans to engage with as they're comfortable.
My biggest reservation about "the industry" is that it's easy to be a dreamer, to think about potential, and reality often is a disappointment. That's not good for a customer, though it may be a good business model for a distributor. I do think transparency has been a real issue for many, many years, and companies that work towards moving the needle back toward a positive relationship deserve credit.
Keep an eye out for his new book, coming out in a few months. I read the advance copy, and it's the best book for musicians I've seen in many many years.
Bandcamp is now my go to place to buy music. It's a welcome relief from the bloat of iTunes, and the oversaturated wasteland of Spotify. It's a great place to discover new music, and it plays fair with artists.
In a previous era, I would stream my library from an old Mac to my laptop via iTunes Shared Libraries, with most of my collection being in Apple Lossless. However, ALAC files from Bandcamp wouldn't stream.
Core Audio described the tracks from Bandcamp as "not optimized". Apple closed the radar (http://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=2014403) as a duplicate without any indication of what was wrong. Bandcamp took a look at the issue and changed their transcoding pipeline to ensure they generated "optimized" ALAC files.
I still buy albums from Bandcamp, but with iTunes compatibility no longer a concern, I now download the FLAC versions. To be different I then losslessly transcode to WavPack, but that's a discussion for another forum.
One of my favorite ways to waste time on the internet is to watch the sales ticker on the Bandcamp homepage go by, and click on any album people pay more than the minimum for. Found some pretty good music that way.
Bandcamp is a great model for mid-tier bands that believe recorded material is a viable source of revenue outside of selling hard-copies at a merch table at shows. Bandcamp is great for 1-2% of the music purchasing public. Bandcamp is a fair, equitable platform for artists.
Weaknesses:
Other than 1-2% of the music purchasing public, Bandcamp is not a go-to source for music. Bandcamp's espoused value is that recorded music has value, which, other than integrity of Copyright, is a highly subjective perspective, because very rarely do album sales - long term - provide a living wage revenue stream. To my knowledge, releasing through Bandcamp does not provide free access to other distribution platforms like Spotify, iTunes, Tidal, Amazon, or YouTube, which means, if I'm right, it is a walled garden.
Editorializing:
A long time ago I made the decision to go with DistroKid instead of spend my time on Bandcamp. I don't regret that maneuver. I appreciate Copyright protections as an artist, and understand the compromise I've signed up for. Bandcamp is a much more above-the-board platform than signing a deal with a record label, and that isn't to be ignored. I just have sincere gut-based reservations that they have significant market penetration to put it in a high enough time investment tier.
I only claim to speak from my own experience. It offers value to others. I simply chose a different on-ramp to the information superhighway.
> To my knowledge, releasing through Bandcamp does not provide free access to other distribution platforms like Spotify, iTunes, Tidal, Amazon, or YouTube, which means, if I'm right, it is a walled garden.
That makes no sense. Bandcamp is a storefront site/minisites, you can put your music on bandcamp and put it on everything else as well. In fact, the Bandcamp faq specifically redirects people looking for distributors to DistroKid and notes that you can put your music on any other store you wish.
Either you don't understand what bandcamp is, or you completely misunderstand the concept of walled garden.
There is no "copyright protection" really. It's just the illusion that major players in the music biz and their affiliates are trying to deliver to the crowd. Digital music was, is and will always be pirated, and you have no protection from that. It's just the technology, the internet. As long as you release audio and people can buy it and play at their homes, they can make it digital and transfer online. The second you upload a song to any music platform, and make it downloadable, people can find it, download, and transfer, as you may say, "illegally" and do it any way they want. And there is no magic behind that. If I listen online to a song, its data is being transferred to my computer to be played eventually on my speakers. And that means that one can easily sniff it and store separately. The only way to fix this is to change the way people perceive music online. And Bandcamp has done a lot in that direction. Essentially, they fight "piracy" trying to change the mindset of the listener.
Strange as it might sound, I'm really in agreement with you. Coming into music as a second generation guitarist, I was pretty much told not to look at sound recordings as anything other than a business card. Making money from them is a pipe dream. What the best thing about the internet and sharing is that listeners who actually want to listen to things can, and setting music free into the world is supposed to be about that in my opinion - sharing and expecting nothing but appreciation in return. I remember taping songs off the radio so I could listen to them later because I really enjoyed the sounds. The internet is kinda like that on steroids, and that's not a bad thing in my opinion.
I like how Gabe Newell asserted (paraphrased) that piracy is more of a "distribution & price point" problem than something inherent in business. The major players in the fight against Copyright Infringement are multi-national corporations that would sell cow shit at a 150% markup if they could get people to buy it. There's a lot of altruism that goes into becoming a fan, to sharing something with somebody else, and then wanting to buy a ticket to a concert.
My newest reference point of how this can work - and work well for everybody - is Run The Jewels. Both RTJ1 and RTJ2 were released free, and I burned them on disc and banged them so hard I'm sure my car speakers hate me. From there though, I saw them at a ~500 person venue in support of RTJ1, and then at a 2,000 person venue - sold out - in support of RTJ2. There are ways to make money from fans, but I am very jaded on the model of trying to make people pay first and then pay more later.
I love busking. I take my guitar and a little amp out on the street and play for nothing because I love what I do and I want to share it. I think it kind of refers to the motivation of why somebody wants to get into music.
Is it a path to be a star, or is it something to reflect just who you are?
Thanks for taking the time to share your perspective and cheers.
Well, I hope over next years more artists will think the way we do. You know, people apparently can ignore the reality, but not forever. The music industry has changed a lot over last couple of decades because of the technology, and it will change much more and for the better, I am pretty sure.
I am 100% with you. Especially regarding the direct support from fans. Bandcamp, Kickstarter, Patreon, and other similar online projects proved the validity of their models pretty well. I mean it's not necessary to force people to pay. If you are good at what you do, if you are open to directly communicate with your audience, if you can developer your "brand"/"name" online well, you have great chances to succeed, and to get supported by people who love what you do. I believe in goodness of people in general. :)
While we are talking about b2c Stores, why are there no good b2b stores?
I've tried licensing a song for our Promo YouTube Ads, and its frustrating as hell because in most cases even with small Artists your only Option is the contact Page of their Label, which then doesnt reply for days or weeks at a time... Until then i've cut 3 Videos with royalty free music. Why isnt there some aggregator where i could find an estimation for my usecase and start the process from there?
It feels like that could be an avenue where bandcamp could make some good movements - increase revenue stream/options for their members, flexible licensing terms, etc.
tl;dr hell yes. As a listener and buyer, they just get everything right. Including discoverability - I frequently dredge the new arrivals section for reviews in Rocknerd http://rocknerd.co.uk and it's ridiculously easy.
I don't have direct experience as an artist, but I do know a pile of musicians who've got back their catalogues and happily put up their complete works for a few bucks a pop. I urge you to check out Severed Heads, an old industrial-dance band who do pretty okay with this approach: https://severedheads.bandcamp.com/ They just take a reasonable percentage and get the hell out of the way.
Go on - try out Bandcamp and give some deserving band a bit of cash today.
Sorry to go off topic, but what's the purpose of the New York Times paywall if you can bypass it with the "Reader" button in Safari and read the whole article, even with a better layout for reading?
To try and gently prod people into paying? Or because a lot of people don't know about or use the reader button. Or a lot of people don't have iPhones or are on their computer?
I do have an iPhone and do use the reader feature, but actually never thought to try it with nytimes articles before.
Bandcamp has been heavily used by many hardcore punk bands for a few years now. The ability to charge a reasonable price for high quality downloads or give them away for free and also sell physical media like records and tapes is a huge deal for lots of punks. There's been several ways of digital distribution of music before Bandcamp, but few of them offered an easy means of getting up and running and monetizing the music in multiple ways (if desired, that you don't have to at all is super important here). It's really the convergence of features rather than any one in particular.
I think for punk bands that might not even be on a label being able to get your music out there without a big upfront investment is more important than artists on larger labels because in that case distribution is usually at least partially handled. That's why the hardcore punk scene has been somewhat of an early adopter of Bandcamp when compared to more mainstream artists.
Also, the band the article mentions in the first paragraph, Mace, is totally worth a listen. Definitely one of my favorite bands coming out of the Midwest right now. If you can get your hands on volume 2 the "No Friends" zine it comes with a flexi that has them and some other great stuff on it.
> Also, the band the article mentions in the first paragraph, Mace, is totally worth a listen. Definitely one of my favorite bands coming out of the Midwest right now. If you can get your hands on volume 2 the "No Friends" zine it comes with a flexi that has them and some other great stuff on it.
Might just be the guitars and the logo, but getting a heavy Urban Blight vibe! Cool stuff
The author is stating that they typically used it for punk, only recently noticing bigger and more mainstream acts are using the service.
As a musician, I can't sing their praises enough. Especially if you aren't particularly huge (<10,000 copies are being sold) and you're part of a community, there is virtually no benefit at all to publishing on itunes/spotify/play.
Is that really the consensus for small artists on Spotify? If I get a band recommendation or stumble across someone (online or happen to see them live) the first place I am going to look for more of their stuff is Spotify.
Sure a small act is going to make no money out of it but I think that they would have more chance of increasing their fan base which will pay for things in the future.
>> Is that really the consensus for small artists on Spotify?
It's not. I don't think there is any consensus with this stuff and there doesn't need to be. You need to do what's best for you. If you can't spend most of the year touring then ignoring streaming and focusing on bandcamp is the way to go. If you want to tour and grow your audience Spotify is essential imo, especially if you're targeting a younger demographic. It's amazing how quickly your music spreads when it hits a playlist (even just a regular users playlist that their friends follow).
I'm going to assume Betteridge's law applies here...
...And now that I've read the article, I think I'm right. This sounds like an advertisement, to be honest. But I'm not really even sold. I feel like if the argument is that it's more directly supporting the artists, maybe it would be better to use something like Patreon[0]?
Bandcamp and Patreon serve artists at different scales. As a part-time musician who uses bandcamp for bands/solo projects, I much prefer the "single product" model (fans paying for a single track/ep/album as they choose) rather than an ongoing payment structure. I have zero illusions that I'm ever going to "get big" (read: support myself) from making music, so bandcamp allows me the opportunity to share my music and if fans choose to pay for it, great! I'd feel very uncomfortable soliciting recurring payment for something I do a few times per month.
Very nice to read your perspective, especially as you describe yourself as self-funded (aka part-time). Making money from sound recordings is like a lottery - to me, unless it's being approached by an ad agency offering industry rates for a campaign, a recording is simply like a business card. I enjoy sharing my music creations and would rather they "be out in the wild" than try to pile up penny fractions that won't even buy me a tank of gas. I'm happy you like your path! Keep on doing what you do when you can.
Worked for CHVRCHES - always loved how one of the dudes wore his SoundCloud ballcap as kind of an indicator of how they started. Their Guitar Center Sessions episode is very much worth the view in my opinion.
Feels like an AD doesn't it. I minimized the first few comments and then scrolled all the way down to see if someone thought this was an ad, sure enough and you've been downvoted to death.
It really is sad how often legal digital products are inferior in quality to their physical versions, even though with digital you could pretty much always offer more than what the physical formats allow.
Also, another common scourge of digital distribution that Bandcamp doesn't suffer from: region locking. They don't support it and don't intend to do so either: https://bandcamp.com/help/selling#region