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Comment by TomasSedovic | Hacker News Reader

I didn't know Bandcamp but a few days ago I wanted to buy the Bastion soundtrack. The Bandcamp link was the first hit on Google and it was linked from the game's official page so I went there.

I could listen to all the songs without restriction, pick from a variety of reasonable formats (including ogg) and download the same album to my computer at work the next day without any trouble.

This is how you do it. They treated me like a customer not a criminal and it was actually easier than using BitTorrent. I was happy to give these folks my money.

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Bandcamp is a fantastic service, my friends and I absolutely love it. I love the ability to preview the mp3 audio at 128kpbs without flash. Noting that bandcamp takes 10-15% of the sale, with the rest going to the artist is what keeps me going back there first to look for music instead of iTunes.

Only downside is discovery of music on bandcamp, a side project I'm currently working on is a tool for myself to find new music on bandcamp; unfortunately their APIs aren't designed for finding similar artists.

Heh, the reason I used Bandcamp instead of iTunes is that it runs on Linux and that they actually want my money :-).

At least in some countries (mine included) you can't in fact buy music or video from iTunes. They won't accept your paypal or credit card.

There is a workaround -- buying and redeeming gift codes. But honestly, I can't be arsed to that.

oh, please do that! I agree that it's hard to discover new content on Bandcamp. Apart from that the service is great. Very transparent and straight process of buying and a great full length player that has no issues on mobile devices.

Being a musician and considering moving to Bandcamp since the small labels I worked aren't very good at marketing their releases, I wonder how Bandcamp works for other artists compared to other stores like iTunes, amazon, etc. Are there any stats available?

Take a look at last.fm and their API - they have a pretty good relevant artist graph.

I made something to show it off a year or so ago: http://richardlyon.co.uk/coffee/lastfm.php?artist=mogwai (switch from 3d to 2d if it's being a pain, change artist in URL to something you like)

I dont suppose its open source is it? I'd really like to see how you've done it / what you used. Is it on gitHub?

UPDATE: @richthegeek, Thanks much appreciated.

Yep - http://github.com/richthegeek/coffeegraph

A more update version of the graphing program (without the lastfm stuff) is visible at http://richthegeek.github.com/coffeegraph

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