Is Bandcamp the Holy Grail of Online Record Stores?

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!)

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 feel I simultaneously

* 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.

In chrome, go to settings > Search > Manage Search Engines

Add a new search engine, use this url:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:bandcamp.com %s

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.

Me too. Funny how that seems quaint these days. I hope owning music (or God forbid, lossless) never goes away entirely.

Bigger market and money. There are more phones than PC's.

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.

(And yes, Bandcamp is great!)

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!

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.