Bandcamp has been sold to Songtradr. What does this mean for the musicians?
rocknerd.co.uk
rocknerd.co.uk
I have a straightforward guide on how to get up and running on windows here: https://github.com/easlice/bandcamp-downloader/issues/21
You should always archive your collection anyways. One negative thing about bandcamp is that artists/labels/bandcamp can remove anything at anytime for any reason, so things you paid for can straight up disappear. This was very disappointing to discover. Note that sometimes things are set as hidden, rather than outright removed. This info may be outdated, as the relevant support page seems to gave changed from the last time I looked at it.
Because of their no DRM policy and full on downloads, not just streaming, Bandcamp has basically become the only place I’ll buy music outside of CDs.
I’m happy enough to hand artists money if it’s easy and I can archive a lossless copy, but if they start fucking around with things, I’ll go right back to doing what I was before. That said, if they fix the outright removal of paid things problem, and start treating “artist” as first class instead of “label” in searches and links, I’ll be singing their praises.
Just so you know, Apple and Amazon also offer DRM free music downloads. Obviously, you have to actually buy the individual song or album, not a streaming plan.
In Apple's case you do need to install iTunes to get your DRM-free file (on Windows, I'm not sure what the status is on Mac nowadays), which kind of sucks.
Don't know about Apple because iTunes doesn't have Linux support and the whole setup of downloading an app in order to download a file strikes me as a bit gross.
iTunes downloads are AAC, 250+ kb/s (remember this bitrate is with a more efficient codec).
I'm probably opening a can of worms here, but I'm really quite skeptical more than one in a million people could tell the difference between iTunes and lossless in a blind test. Maybe drop that to one in a thousand for Amazon vs Lossless. (I really do wish Amazon offered AAC downloads.)
They are DRM-free, but I wouldn't characterize the MP3s as "very good quality". They're only OK. It was the quality of their encodings that got me to stop buying music downloads from Amazon.
I haven't heard every lossy encoding, of course, and there may be an actually good one that escaped my attention.
Double-blind tests have made this abundantly clear.
If you really can hear a difference, you've either got particularly poorly compressed files, or are in a tiny minority of us.
Lossless (when used properly and able to algorithmically guarantee what comes out == what goes into the compression toolchain) avoids the whole issue altogether, and that's what's valuable about it.
Focusing on whether compression captures every nuance of uncompressed sound is the wrong battle. The real battle is against careless distributors and bad artifacts introduced by poor compression settings and often incorrectly coded compression utilities used throughout the music industry.
(ie we on hn might all be using Lame or the Fraunhofer mp3 encoders, but a lot of music producers/distributors will be using custom / closed source encoders, or even audio workstations with the encoder implemented in hardware, and those might or might not be encoding mp3 correctly.)
Whether it's because of the math or because of poorly done encoding is only of academic interest. It happens regardless of the cause. Using a lossless encoding resolves the issue entirely.
Higher bit rates (and probably improved encoders) help though.
It's not a problem in any other codec though. You probably couldn't hear the difference in AAC or Opus.
Do you have a reference for the MP3 issue?
The highest frequency band doesn't have its own quantization level meaning it's hard to control the bitrate when there's detail in it.
Carry on listening to a format most people use for purposes other than listening if that works for you. I can't stop you with a simple dependent clause. You're safe.
I only buy music on itunes as a last resort, so I don't have a huge sample size.
Should also note I can't hear the different between well-encoded 320kbit and FLAC. But lower bitrates (256kbit and lower) on mp3 are audible.
flac is a lossless format. If it started as 24 bit wav, nothing is lost when you get the flac version of that. it's just smaller.
More importantly, the problem isn't trying to hear 96dB of range all at once. The baseline is fixed in place, so when you have a quiet section all those high bits are 0 and you need the low bits to have enough detail by themselves. And a whisper is pretty far from the quietest thing you might have in a track.
If you can hear the dithering noise, then I'm pretty sure there are sounds you're hearing that would be wrong or missing without the dither.
7Digital is one of those money-losing companies that keeps being passed from owner to owner.
7digital is chock full of spam. Spotify, for all their faults, has some people who care about quality on those sort of things (the old Echo Nest people). 7digital and their white-label frontends don't, they're skeleton crew operations.
I hope they understand, they can't run Bandcamp like that. Bandcamp has had problems like this in the past, with people spamming the services with other people's music and pretending to be them. It happened to an old classmate of mine who's a reasonably well known Jazz musician. Someone pretended to be her on Bandcamp for years.
If this roll-up company plans to run Bandcamp like 7digital, there will be a ton more of stuff like that.
The 7digital acquisition is still pretty fresh, so your experience with them was the state of things prior to the acquisition. Also moving forward, remember that this was already the state of things on Bandcamp, lest people forget and think that the impersonations started after this acquisition.
Songtradr's core business has been B2B sync licensing. One of the reasons "Trust" is such a big deal on the website is that very large brands can't risk having a debacle where it looks like they've stolen music. So we do a lot of vetting of information before music is made available to our B2B partners.
Rest assured that if things slide in a direction, it'll be towards more vetting, not less.
Consider that lossless is good not only for listening, but also for transcoding. For example, when you want to use a media player with limited formats, or when the inevitable future codecs become popular.
(And for archival of digital source material, lossless is the only sensible option.)
> And for archival of digital source material, lossless is the only sensible option.
I work in digital preservation and one thing everyone is keenly aware of is the cost of storing large amounts of data. Archivists like lossless, of course, but if it’s below the level where humans can notice problems they’re often more forgiving than you might think because preserving twice as many works with the same storage budget has its own appeal. Your personal music collection is probably small enough that it fits in your personal storage slop but maybe that’s not true if you’re a huge fan or partial to high-res soundboard recordings, and if you’re archiving for a larger group you’ll start to exhaust what capacity you can get for free.
But hard drives are cheap. I have a multi-TB hard drive that is used exclusively to store my music. When that fills, I'll just get another.
For me it’s about having a reference/master copy to archive and then modify, cutting parts away I don’t like, applying equalization, etc and compressing for streaming/loading on a device. I am not going to compound losses on a file if I can help it.
Storage space is trivial these days, so just grabbing a flac file and declaring that it’s perfectly as the artist intended removes any potential cognitive load of trying to evaluate audio quality or “which of these mp3 files is the best one to archive” anxiety.
Basically: Start clean, stay clean, and move on.
It's impossible to be a casual user of the Apple ecosystem. There are photos on my kids iPads that I'd like to save to the family archive, but I can't muster up the energy to work out how to do it again.
I've done it before but long enough ago that I've forgotten the method but remember the frustration and effort - I know it's going to be less than what my exaggerating memory tells me, but... eughhhh, Apple.
My hunch; no way Apple and Amazon will not watermark. But that is just based on behavioral inference, not on knowledge or data.
The backup thing did happen, though:
https://medium.com/@__Tux/using-bandcamp-as-a-backup-solutio...
I actually love watermarks as a solution for DRM-Free media, because they make illegal sharing more cumbersome but don't impede legitimate customers (at least in any way I can think of). In fact, I kind of feel like watermarks add value, lending an authenticity to my purchase which a pirated copy wouldn't have.
Another laughable requirement from the land of 'it just works'.
Bandcamp just packages the album in a simple ZIP file that can be opened anywhere, desktop or mobile.
Don't forget Qobuz: https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop
They not only have streaming plans but also let you buy the music files directly.
https://github.com/cookiengineer/me-want-cookies
(Uses Netscape cookie format)
https://github.com/meeb/bandcampsync
Does much the same thing, but it unpacks the zips and tracks the directories. It can run as a docker container which syncs your collection on a daily timer. The use case is to download your purchases to local directories for use with Jellyfin/Plex/etc. You can just buy music and it'll appear on your local media server automatically within a day.
I had paid things removed from my bandcamp collection a few years ago. The only recourse provided by band camp was to contact the artist(al things were from the same artist). If the experience of another user that responded to you about being able to download removed things that were paid for... well that is much better than the bandcamp experience since I can not download things that were removed.
That seems borderline illegal.. I can't imagine Valve removing a Steam game from someone's library if they already bought it without the Internet giving them a lot of bad press, they'll just delist the item from being purchased.
If they get a lot of customers that effectively treat them as a streaming service, tough, I suppose I can see that there might be a certain impedance mismatch of expectations there.
It's impossible to know what Epic is thinking know, or even when they bought BC, but 6 months sounds like how long it would take to sell Bandcamp off as a retaliation for unionizing.
bandcamp staff unionizing might have been a consideration in deciding to sell the company, but i don't think it's fair to call that "union busting".
In my middle management experience, being profitable and owned by a company that didn't share the business domain was best as they mostly left us alone as long as we were profitable. When they finally got bought by a similar business, that's when they tried (and failed) to merge jobs. I've since left but they've recently been spun out yet again.
As many other commenters have pointed out, Bandcamp is a great service. For me, it's really the only place I purchase music because of its commitment to paying artists fairly and offering FLAC downloads of the purchased music.
Again, thank you and good luck!
As an aside, I support unionisation precisely as the counterpoint it is intended to be, and any management actions against unionisation should be treated with suspicion and I generally look at that kind of behaviour as the base reason why unions need to exist in the first place.
(Both sides can be corrupt, but if there's only power on one side, then the corruption is both more likely to occur and increase).
I hope the unionisation thing is totally unrelated to this situation.
I'm international, so I'm not represented by the union, but I support them for exactly the same reasons that you state here.
I don't think it's related to the unionization. I'm sure it didn't help, but Epic also spun off SuperAwesome today.
I feel like Bandcamp 100% fits better with SongTradr than Epic.
1. How are benefits/compensation? Competitive?
2. Are there a lot of international remote employees at SongTradr? Bandcamp has a lot of people around the globe and we'd love to know if SongTradr is likely to make offers internationally or if it'll just be near offices.
3. Do you like working there?
2. Lots of international employees. No exec-level requirements of working from an office, but some teams may have their own rules.
3. It's middle of the pack, but that's mainly because I get stuck doing jobs I hate because I'm the only one with the experience, and we've got a client breathing down our neck. it's the burden of being the Sr Dev, but eventually, I'll have trained my team well enough that I can do a bit of real innovation... until then, I really believe we're enabling artists to make a better living by opening up a market (sync) that has generally been reserved for artists that are already living comfortably.
FWIW, at least some ("one"?) musicians are cautiously optimistic about this:
I really hope that Bandcamp will survive!
As I see it maybe there is a void which will need to be filled.
It feels like there is absolutely no direction except "grow customer base in every way except treating our customer and employees like humans", to the point where they give games away, and still can't take over the market.
In which way Epic did not treat employees like humans? I know few people at Epic myself and I've never heard them say anything but Epic being their best employer in their career, by far.
Also, how do they not treat customers like humans?
But for real. What kind of company needs to list a bunch of random companies and say they are "trusted by" them. If you need to tell me how trusted you are then I really don't trust you.
We support the artists by finding diverse ways for them to monetize their music. I've purchased a dozen albums on Bandcamp. All of the artists are already on pretzel (our content acquisition team works hard, especially on internal referrals), but I look forward to simplifying the process down to a simple click (right now it's DDEX and spreadsheets)
I'm not a fan of our marketing, but it's more aimed at content licensees, not licensors.
My buddies and I did a project for them a few years back working on a song discovery mechanism (which they patented) for use when finding songs to pitch for things like ads and tv shows that might be of interest to your company.
Music supervisors are a big part of our business, so I'll pass this link up the line (I'm an engineer)
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/23/09/13/1877d77...
And they misspelled my name as Lain :(
Heads up: i suppose that should've read "DMCA'ed"?
Songtradr has done a good job with previous acquisitions, including mine. I'm no longer working on that product, but it's doing well. I don't agree with every decision being made for it, but I didn't before the acquisition, so... no big change there.
Music Services is a tough place to do product development in. Nobody is flush with cash, so all deals are percentage based... so you have to generate pass-through revenue. It's impossible to generate revenue from the general public, as they can get music from spotify/youtube for free, so you have to find a niche.
I know several startups in the music space that are begging to be acquired because they didn't realize they needed pass-through revenue, they thought they could do what another company was doing, but cheaper, but the problem is that few established labels are willing to move off their old providers, as they value their industry relationships.
People have already mentioned that some music disappeared from the catalog because artists pulled it. I wonder if this acquisition would make it more common.
While it's entirely possible, I've never heard of this specific thing happening. Companies want music that is popular. They might pay enough to make music exclusive in the B2B licensing, but they don't want music that nobody can listen to. The only thing I could think of is if a movie/game wants to buy out an album as their soundtrack, but again, I've not heard of this actually happening, at least pulling back a release.
Likely music disappearing from Bandcamp is likely because the artist signed with a Label and the Label wants exclusive ability to market the artist's music.
A part of my fear is that they'll try to "improve" the service.
In any case, I'm just afraid. Hopefully, time will show my fears were unsupported.
So... Epic sells bandcamp, a profitable business unit, to another entity which will then sell bandcamp assets back to ... Epic. ?? And Epic's competitors. Why would Epic go out of its way to support a company that is supporting its competitors?
I'm still boggling that Epic thought tiny independent record labels would be good for pressuring the union to stop. Tiny labels these days tend to be set up by musicians who work too hard and who likely have close personal knowledge of working shitty jobs. Epic really had NO IDEA.
(while I work for SongTradr, I know nothing of the acquisition, so this is just speculation)
How sued would I get?
Then, like the other response mentioned, there's the streaming aspect. You, probably won't get sued, but anyone that streams with that music will get muted on Twitch and Revenue Claimed on YT.
Why build a minecraft mod for this, when you can just play music on your computer and turn off the minecraft music? A few hotkeys and you don't even have to swap screens to change the music.
If they're profitable then why do we need to play these games? Why can't we keep a good thing going?
I’m not saying Lichess will do something like this, but have you heard the saga of the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan (ERIM)?
It grew out of the University of Michigan — as a non-profit. Its president and board spun off a for-profit subsidiary owning the majority of its work, people, and assets and leaving a small fraction for the non-profit.
Then, the for-profit entity was bought by a succession of other entities: Veridian, General Dynamics, and now MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates.
I only learned of this while working with a graybeard from the original ERIM during their General Dynamics days — he was still sore about it.
So never doubt a president/ceo and board if they’re really determined in going for-profit!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Research_Insti...
This language is offensive (to me [0]) and sexist. Feel free to use it if it really floats your boat, but you could get the same effect without the implicit sexism just using "oldster". You could also say "older colleague", or even just "person".
[0] and I don't even have a beard
That being said, if the person was an actual human being, and subsequently had a graybeard (as I do!) - would that still be offensive?
I don't intend to be combative, simply trying to learn!
But the term "graybeard" is known in these circles as a reference to an older, always male, programmer.
What actually matters is that they've been around the block enough times to understand (for example) that Rust probably will not solve every programming issue known to current programmers. Their gender and facial hair status is not really relevant. "Corner office grump" would be another term that I'd find entirely acceptable: non-gendered, unconcerned with physical appearance, but encapsulating much the same sort of personality that "graybeard" is attempting to evoke.
To respond to your descendant response to a sibling comment, he was not, however, a programmer: he was an engineer.
The OP is referring to a specific person (and used the pronoun 'he'). It is in fact not considered by any reputable etymological source as a slur or as a sexist term in any capacity.
The term is widely used by younger programmers in online discussions to refer to unnamed (and it oftens seems as if the name is almost not actually known) older programmers. I've seen it on HN, Reddit, Twitter (RIP) and Mastodon. It's not a reference to specific person, it's a reference to a perceived role.
Even if a person has/had a gray beard, why is that the characteristic used to describe them?
And it is sexist only in an implicit sense: it is obviously a term used to describe (a) only men (b) older programmers. There is absolutely no chance that someone says "I talked to a graybeard about it" to mean that they spoke to a (older) female programmer.
It's been programmer's slang for a very, very long time. At least back to the '70s.
I'm a graybeard, and I don't avoid using the term, nor do I find it offensive. It just means someone who's been doing this for a long time.
> There is absolutely no chance that someone says "I talked to a graybeard about it" to mean that they spoke to a (older) female programmer.
Since I've absolutely heard it used in reference to female programmers, there is more than "no chance".
In my experience, it's a bit like the term "guys". It may have been gendered at first, but it has largely lost the gendered connotations.
It's generally a term of respect for a more senior, knowledgable person.
> oldster
Isn't that ageist?
Sell the service to users and re-launch as a co-operative.
* Unlike many other tech foundations, it's a 501(c)(3) charity, which dramatically limits the ability of industry titans to buy influence — since donations are tax deductible and thus cannot be used to unduly advantage any commercial entity.
* The Board of Directors is elected by the "Membership", which is primarily comprised of individuals who have contributed the most towards ASF projects. It's a sort of co-op structure which ensures that the org stays aligned to the interests of certain stakeholders.
(FWIW I used to be very involved at the ASF but have not been active for several years.)
I've often wondered whether an analogous charitable organization owned by musicians could slot into music distribution, in the space of DistroKid / TuneCore / CDBaby — handling royalties, QC'ing releases, and bargaining with audience-facing distributors like Spotify, Amazon, Apple, etc.
But just because something is a charity with a Board of Directors doesn't mean it can't be looted in various ways. It's happened before and will happen again.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/climate/patagonia-climate...
https://hbr.org/2022/10/what-happens-when-a-company-like-pat...
Because that isn't enough we must have infinite growth.
They reach profitability, then they throw off dividends, which the shareholders invest in (presumably) new businesses.
NOT "they keep the profits to create infinite growth themselves."
However, most of the HN discussion on issues like this is for things that'll never happen, so I don't see any difference.
What's the source for the profitability claim?
there are people working on questions like "what if the owners could have exited to their community instead of Epic"
> Pay 1/4 of a penny the first time you play, then a little more each time you replay. Then it’s yours forever.
How much is "a little more"?
Owning songs after you've listened to them enough is a nice idea, but since my library is about 20k songs, that's 28k dollars until I own them all, so it's not like I'd ever have hopes of not having to pay to listen anymore.
There are a couple of differences with Bandcamp, I would invite independent music lovers to check it out
Getting Bandcamp off the books is likely to make the business look better to investors.
Investors like to see a company divest themselves of non-core-competency sections of its portfolio, it's good for business!
Investors are sheep.
Time to reset the panic clock!
[1] about three months before they folded due to the original plan[2] not working.
[2] which involved getting record companies to easily license their music and yes, you are probably laughing at about the right level just now.
I know that was meant facetiously, but the music in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for one is quite beautiful and made with actual instruments like piano, oboe, violin, guitar. Interactivity is one direction for true innovation in contemporary classical.
I'm pretty sure they'd annoy even more people if they thought, "Oh so you liked Wagner, you must love Zelda".
edit:
Magic trick: open one (1) album. Change it to FLAC. Download.
Now FLAC is default for the others you open.
I used to be a huge what fan, primarily for discovery. Never would've known I liked atmospheric black metal if not for them.
When they closed, I didn't really have enough "in" in the scene to know where other refugees went, so I just shopped around for anywhere else that would let me get "real" (in the what sense of real - decent encodes from raw source material that have the full spectrum and aren't just FLAC encodes of "high quality" mp3's). I don't pretend to be able to hear the difference, but I like it for archival purposes. I have plexamp transcode the audio anyway when I'm on mobile.
Turns out most people don't give a shit so most places don't offer flacs. Except bandcamp. Plus they pay artists fairly, which ended up being as important to me as the flacs as I came to support indie bands for whom selling on bandcamp was a huge lift. I like seeing CDs literally come from residential addresses in Sweden. I like supporting the random 1 dude making awesome metal out of his basement.
Users also make wonderful charts on this website. also, hello from a fellow what refugee!
The other useful resource I will mention is "soulseek" (https://www.slsknet.org/news/) which is basically old-school direct downloads, and includes a lot of obscure music that you won't find on AppleMusic/Spotify.
Happy trails!
But now? Songtradr smells like an investment bank, one that looks at music as "content" or "IP" and wants to license the hell out of it -- and ultimately, own as much of the rights as possible.
They do not strike me as aligned with artist interests, or with the spirit of Bandcamp, which, admittedly, at this late date is mostly a fantasy.
Bandcamp represents the last, best refuge for artists in a world where most companies offer you "exposure," what else would you want, stop whining about being paid, etc. Bandcamp means payment. Which means livelihoods.
I don't trust SongTraitor.
So that can be one less thing you worry about, we're not buying up music.
I joined through the https://pretzel.rocks acquisition (which is where the above mentioned music came from), and they've kept our niche-industry-best 70/30 split on that product.
We're not the bastion that Bandcamp is, but we DO focus on ensuring that youtube influencers and tiktok stars are paying their fair share for the music that they use. We make sure that cosmetic companies using indie artists are paying market rates and not taking advantage of their naiveté.
I hope (though I can't guarantee) that we're able to keep Bandcamp the way it currently is. The company has treated my previous company/brand well, and I'm hoping that carries forward to a brand that carries MUCH MUCH MUCH more gravitas.
But holy hell do I hate our name. We've got other brands that we could use as our main name, but we went with the one that sounds like "Traitor". I blame this on our founder being an Aussie and they sound clearly distinct when they're both in his accent.
Thanks,
Someone who've spent thousands of dollars on Bandcamp
Allow us to assure you that you will enjoy our latest AI music generation suite as well as an cutting-edge state-of-the-art next-generation AI album cover generator. In tandem with these remarkable enhancements, we will be sprucing our algorithms allowing you to expand your ears to the emerging artists at the forefront of the industry.
Furthermore, we are introducing a suite of premium subscription options, enriched with the ability to curate offline playlists, meticulously optimized at a pristine bit-rate of 32kbps.
Drawing inspiration from the insights garnered from record labels these enhancements epitomize our pioneering advancements, we eagerly anticipate your enthusiastic feedback of these remarkable transformations.
Sincerely ~ out of touch CEO
I think at this point I try to just not care anymore. Software and businesses that are currently great will go to shit and there's nothing I can do about it. Try to enjoy it whilst it lasts and don't get too attached or involved.
Sincerely,
someone who has been bitten too many times.
* after adding a browser player volume slider
Coudn't agree less. Listen: I love Bandcamp and buy a lot of music there. However, it could be so much better. It is far from perfect.
For starters: the collection view. It's as barebones as possible, just a simple grid of stuff you bought. No way of separating albums and tracks (which is why I don't buy single tracks anymore because it just clutters my collection). No way of sorting according to different criteria. No possibility for more compact views (list view, anyone?). I get that lots of people just download stuff and use their own music management software/app, but in that case: why is there no way to download stuff in bulk? Sorry, but it's simply bad. Another thing that has annoyed me for years is if artists release through labels: If I click on an artist, I want to see their music, not all music from the same label so that I have to painfully look through the whole catalogue to find more music from the same artist. Also, if I want to be notified for new music from that artist, I can only follow the label, so I get notified for everything they release. What kind of insanity is this? With very few exceptions, I don't care about labels (sorry label owners, but that's just how it is).
Another point is discovery: Through Bandcamp, I have discovered way more new music than through any other service just by browsing through new releases and the daily picks. However, there's so much more potential here. There already are fans you can follow and artist recommendations, but it's just all extremely clunky and discovering people with similar taste in music is basically impossible. Bandcamp has so much information about my musical taste and which artists I like, it should be able to do much more with this.
What you describe only happens if a label uses an artist account. Bandcamp introduced label accounts years ago, encourages using them and to my knowledge offers a way to turn artist accounts into label accounts. With a label account both entities, labels and artists, are separated. The label catalogue merely links to the artist's release page while the artist's account can feature releases on several different labels. Of course the release/album page still offers a way back to the label page. It all works as one would expect.
Here's an example for a release by Matthew Halsall on Gondwana Records using a proper label account: https://matthewhalsall.bandcamp.com/album/an-ever-changing-v... - notice the link to Gondwana Records in the upper left corner.
It's very easy to pick up some small but niche artist that is not on Bandcamp, and upload their music pretending to be them. (It's of course very illegal, but I personally know artists this has happened to).
It's harder to fake an entire label. Before you buy anything on Bandcamp, check that their label links to them, otherwise you could well be supporting a scammer.
With a label account users clicking on the artist on a release page will go to the actual artist page which might contain releases from all kinds of labels.
Yes, quality control is something else where Bandcamp could drastically improve. New releases are riddled with questionable stuff. Blatantly copying an existing artist is one thing, but often it's popular stuff just slightly modified, usually pitched up/down with some new drum loop and then called a day. I know there's a whole artform in remixing/mashups/etc., but there's a line somewhere where it just becomes a lazy rip-off.
for how much music there is, the discovery tools are kinda lacking. you can't really browse the full catalog. especially for stuff that's previously released, but not "popular enough" to be surfaced in 'best selling' sorts. stuff that doesn't make it into 'new' - which can literally be like 'oh, this released a week ago? it's not new already', and doesn't make it into 'best selling' that really only makes already popular stuff more popular, which isn't doing much for actual discovery of others. there's a lot of music that's out there and just yet to be discovered, and it's being held back by platforms that don't really do anything with it. held back by a catalog that lacks browsing tools and doesn't get more things brought to surface. i'd rather see platforms move on from 'making popular stuff more popular' and 'only ever showing stuff that's new new new', and make an actual effort to make all things discoverable.
Hell to the no!
I primarily use bandcamp for my music, but it's most definitively not perfect. I think I use about 3 browser addons for simple quality of life improvements.
Sometimes the player is on the top left, sometimes it's bound to the bottom, sometimes it's inlined and you can only press play without fast forward.
I think by default there are no or only a few shortcuts?
Playlist only from your collection and mobile only, not on desktop?
I lowkey had high hopes for bandcamp when epic bought it. I though the cash would make them rework the UI into a more consistent experience.
Very sad. Bandcamp was wonderful ... while it lasted.
I understand the inclination to pessimism, and it may well be very well grounded, but we should perhaps try to be optimistic and aggressively activist at the same time.