Anti-algorithmic music: How Bandcamp is helping artists beat the odds

Y'all are awesome!

Any chance that the app will get Chromecast support?

Just wanted to say thank you for what you helped build. I buy almost all my albums on BC nowadays (the exception are those few who aren’t on there). And I love being able to listen through a whole album before deciding.

If you're affiliated with bandcamp, I have a question: is there something like bandcamp radio coming out sometime? I don't know about others but I have trouble actually discovering stuff on bandcamp. Every artists page seems to be cut off from other artists and I haven't found a way to just let random or similar artists be played.

Jamendo has radios, "best of" and "trending" lists per genre, artist, tag and across their whole music selection which makes discovery really easy. For bandcamp, knowledge of who's who seems to be necessary and I don't have the time to be that into music. That's why jamendo has been getting my money lately.

Thank you for the last decade or so of amazing music. Love Bandcamp.

Bandcamp had been my favorite music store since it launched, it's simply "how things should be done" ! It's the first place since the mp3 boom where I actually spend money and feel really good about it. Big up!

Thanks for a great site - I love how shopping for music on Bandcamp feels quite personal. I particularly like that it is all based around the record label - especially in more niche genres, the labels are absolutely fundamental and there’s a good chance that if you like a record, you’ll find loads more interesting stuff on the same label.

For whatever reason, Spotify etc. seem to demote the existence of the label to a tiny font with no label “home page” or anything. You can search by label but it’s pretty hidden and doesn’t work 100%. I wonder if part of their long term plan is to remove labels from the equation...

Anyway, I was wondering if you had any plans for a public facing API to search your catalogue? I’ve got loads of ideas for content discovery tools but the lack of an API makes them impractical. For example, I built this to find your top Spotify artists on Bandcamp, but without an API all it can do is link off to a search so it’s quite a frustrating UX: https://tomduncalf.github.io/supportify/

Your platform changed the way I consumed and discovered music. Now I complemented that with a steaming service but still fall back to BC for some material.

Really digged the job puzzles you had too... even when I wasn't actively looking was fun to solve. Just a shame you're not hiring at the moment.

A lot of listeners chiming in about how great Bandcamp is for listeners, but I also want to sing the praises of the experience as an independent musician publishing music.

Even a nobody like me with no label and no interest in marketing my music can trivially upload my music, manage my own page with my own branding (in theory), and get the stats I care about on how people engage with the music. For free (technically for a revenue share, but I don't sell my music)!

And unlike something like Spotify/iTunes/Soundcloud, the platform is not the dominant brand when someone visits my Bandcamp page.

On top of all this, Bandcamp's been super generous with dropping their revenue share during the outbreak to help artists.

So yeah, I love everything about it. Bandcamp's hands-down my favorite music publishing platform, no contest. Thanks and long may it continue!

Thank you for all of your hard work! I consistently hold up Bandcamp as a shining pillar of how to do media distribution right. Keep being excellent!

Any underground IDM recommendations?

IDM? Industrial death metal?

seconded, bandcamp has been my primary source of music for quite a while. I admire the company very much, use the site daily, and annoy people with my frequent pitches.

that said, I have to disagree with you about the app. in particular, the cache seems to be the source of my woes. it's difficult (impossible? I don't even know) to deal with any payment or cart related features through the app.

my main problem is that songs regularly get stuck in a bad state, only starting the songs at random points instead of 0:00, and the only way I've discovered to fix this once and for all is to delete all data. sometimes songs just won't play, and I retreat to youtube to listen to something that I've already purchased.

> On a related note, if there were a similar site for drm-free movie purchases, I’d be all over it.

No joke. Call me old fashioned, but I love self-hosting my music collection and BandCamp is a key in facilitating that. I would do the same with movies if it were an option.

I've been waiting Caladan Brood to put their music on streaming services for ages, but they've been on BandCamp forever! You're not from Salt Lake City, are you?!

You could also just reencode the flac files to opus/ogg yourself, it's not like that takes any resources to speak of

Exactly. I was just about to post that, I'm going to be buying a few discographies tomm. Specifically, Carpenter Brut's stuff who released a really crazy film based [1] on its music video for Turbo Killer [2]. It's worth checking out if you're into rock-sounding synthwave with 80's themed psychedelic visuals.

I'm also buying like 3 more to support artists.

ABout 7 years go now, Soundcloud enabled Bitcoin donations, and about a team of 5 guys includin me went on a tipping frenzy and tried to get adoption going that way. It was funny, because reddit allowed for direct Bitcoin donations there via a bot and you could name it whatever you wanted. So we did the same on Soundcloud, it's funny because I log into my old soundcloud account at the History of them is still there.

Anyhow, I tipped like 20-30 guys on SC and even got some runway from an early adopter ($100?) to take it further and met a few EDM guys coming into Hollywood/LA area for a few sets and tried to explain it to them as none of them picked up there funds. Apparently, Soundcould didn't do a good job of notifying them that they had money waiting for them so ultimately it failed.

I ended up giving the Bits I had left into people who set up full nodes on the network. But I always thought, especially as a DJ myself, that supporting artists with micropayments would be a good solution. Youtube now allows for tipping in their chatbox as I saw a few in house performances/sets be tipped by followers and fans, but it was always over $1+, which is awesome, but entirely impractical if you want people to send what little they may have on hand to listen a song/remix/dj set/podcast for most people unless you have a very dedicated and quite frankly affluent followers. I'd rather have a 100k-million fans tip 10-50 cents then the four or five die-hards give $10 so I can continue to make content. Paetreon, Gofundme, Kickstarter and such are just needless middlemen at this point and hosting content is super cheap with even multimedia with a $5/month vimeo account.

Anyhow, happy hunting tomorrow, I'm all digital now so I can buy and support a lot more music/artists I otherwise had to ignore because of format.

1: http://bloodmachines.com/

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er416Ad3R1g

This. Absolutely this.

I used to be terrible for "less legal" downloads until I discovered beatport, Juno and bandcamp.

I'm pretty sure bandcamp is one of the reasons for my vinyl habit now. Complete 180.

While this is true, it should also be noted that distributors have already updated their business model to take a cut of Bandcamp sales. e.g. label X uses distributor Y to manage the process of their tracks in as many online stores and streaming platforms as possible, and to collect revenue. Distributor Y then takes the credentials for Bandcamp and operates that in the same way as it does everywhere else, taking a certain sizable. It's still better than the old model but it doesn't mean all money goes to the artists.

Excellent! The code looks clean too.

I'm looking for a tool to export Spotify playlists to text/csv and can only find weird commercial solutions; maybe the way to go is to use `spotify-web-api-js` and build it on the client side.

This is cool.. I was trying to figure out how to get macOS next/prev controls to trigger events in Safari but haven't had any luck. This seems like a cool API for doing that sort of thing (though, sadly, no Safari support)

Nice.. https://paysagedhiver.bandcamp.com

The one (20 minute) track that I listened to had sort of a atmospheric Bathory feel.

I actually find it refreshingly anti-commercial that Bandcamp has a fairly basic app and a low key approach to curation. I think having a very basic player in the app fits well with a kind of anti-DRM "it's your's now, we don't care what you do with it/BYO[everything else]" mentality.

Focusing on an app often seems to lead to a slippery slope of metric driven development, feature creep, engagement analytics, notifications, etc. First it's personal playlists, then it's publishing playlists, then it's liking other people's playlists, then it's artist endorsed playlists, then it's sharing playlists to other social media platforms, then it's being notified that a playlist you like has been updated, etc. etc.

(My one gripe with the app is the slightly childish decision to hide the download links for music you already own.)