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Comment by layoutIfNeeded | Hacker News Reader

It's not a music service. It's a service for artists to sell their stuff. Period.

If you want playlists, social networking, or whatever crap, you have to look elsewhere.

> It's not a music service. It's a service for artists to sell their stuff. Period.

Well, not really. As per their About Us section, “Bandcamp’s mission is to create the best possible service for artists and labels to share and earn money from their music, and for fans to discover and enjoy it.” Discovering works nicely, but as for enjoying, they really have issues with volume control and even the basic loudness level. Also their mobile app does not let you download music to listen to later offline (or without taxing your mobile connection), which is a shame.

The discover part takes place on Bandcamp, but Bandcamp's involvement ends after you've bought and downloaded the music. The enjoyment part that comes afterwards happens on your device, using whatever music player you prefer to play the files you just downloaded. It's enjoyable because you get a bunch of zipped, DRM-free .flac files you can play on any device, instead of being bound to some specific app or in-browser player.

At least that's what I think the intended use case for Bandcamp is. That's how I've always used it.

>> whatever music player you prefer

i prefer to not have to use one... it's 2020 after all

What does this mean? You just listen to music in your head?

He wants a player to be given to him as part of the package. Which is nice. I think the most efficient market would incentivize a holistic package where you pay for someone to make the hard decisions for you while letting the experts take the core content and use it however they like.

There’s a Bandcamp app that does that, if you find it an insurmountably terrible burden to drag some files onto the iTunes icon in your dock.

And Bandcamp's target audience prefers to own their music and knowing that it will be on their device of choice tomorrow or in 30 years without the fear of losing it due ending licensing deals. Not to mention all the obscure and rare music that never made it to streaming services in the first place.

Your preference is well served with Spotify & Co. No need for Bandcamp to use the same streaming approach.

> playlists

https://buymusic.club/ sources bandcamp for user generated playlists. Also, youre able to follow fans and labels do actively message and talk to fans. Its very minor but I think its a sufficient level of interaction.

> Period.

No, actually. Why do these "preview" pages have songs that unlock after I buy if they're just previews? Why does the collection page (heart icon) open a player when I play an album directly from there?

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