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Comment by winternett | Hacker News Reader

As a musician once on there, I joined, spent a lot of time carefully designing my page and uploading my catalogue, and then I paid $20 a month for their premium service for absolutely no traction on the site beyond external promotion I did.

The UI on BandCamp has been vastly outdated for ages now, it was very hard to navigate and find new music by genre. i only go there to buy music if I have a direct link.

It's a pre-soundcloud site, and even soundcloud (with a superior UI) was going broke years ago. I was unaware they had a staff of developers, I envision most of them were on the bench most of the time.

Bandcamp doesn't even allow YouTube video embedding for music videos, which is a huge mistake alone.

Music platforms should be heavily promoting any independent artist that pays them a monthly fee... They seem to think that monthly subscription money form hard working artists is simply for extra file storage above free accounts.

I can't wait until something far better with an artist focus comes along, and no that is not Spotify.

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> i only go there to buy music if I have a direct link.

> Bandcamp doesn't even allow YouTube video embedding for music videos, which is a huge mistake alone.

> Music platforms should be heavily promoting any independent artist that pays them a monthly fee... They seem to think that monthly subscription money form hard working artists is simply for extra file storage above free accounts.

You haven't really understood the value Bandcamp offers and you're criticising them for not being something they never claimed to be.

You need to do your own promotion.

This is exactly why I have Spotify rather than bandcamp. It finds music I like, regardless of musician effort. I found more new musicians in the first year of Spotify than decades before.

It’s a loss for everyone if good music goes unheard.

It’s a loss to musicians to have a monopoly like Spotify (who likes to recreate popular songs with their own artists and label) be the gatekeeper to what is good music.

From a service perspective, it’s great. I have the worlds music at my fingertips. From a music perspective it’s horrible. I have one company dictating streaming payments and terms on an entire industry and you’re f&$ked if you don’t play nice. Ask Taylor Swift.

Agreed. Spotify is a terrible alternative for the musicians.

Myspace and Mp3.Com used to be the road map to how sites should be run, but venture capitalism and publicly traded companies ruined the entire ecosystem.

I had high hopes for SoundCloud but in the end, VC’s always win.

They still pretty much same. I don't get any audio ads, some ads in my stream, but never seem to be playing. Premium offering is stuck somewhere in 2009 when offline playback was a thing. Lack of integrations with Homepod & Tesla is somewhat becoming a problem. Still no way to filter your stream or get know what bitrate you are streaming.

(I studied with one of the founders)

Soundclouds problem was always that they started out as basically a free service for a particular niche(artist to label contacts), starting to charge(pissing off people who expected free forever) and then moving out of the niche made it so they never really had a footing for something people would pay for.

The problem with so many "internet unicorns" from the 2000-2010 era is that they handwaved per-customer costs as hardware/network costs and assumed that as long as they scaled then salaries would be a minor part, we as an industry are now trying to dig ourselves out of that hole with a even shittier AD experiences just as that AD market is crashing down.

free money for VC via low interest rates was a terrible strategy for creating innovation that would last.

yes, I was very hopeful for sc: such a waste.

> Spotify is a terrible alternative for the musicians.

I'm not a musician. I'm a listener trying to find music that I like to listen to. Do you have a recommendation for us on the other end of the speaker wire?

there's this neat website/app called bandcamp, you may have heard of it somewhere. it asks you to occasionally buy albums, rather than pay a fixed fee.

> trying to find music that I like to listen to

As mentioned, my problem, as a listener, is discovery, which bandcamp doesn't address.

As a listener, Bandcamp is my favourite place for discovery bar none. Find a genre or label and start exploring the catalogue. Find other users with similar tastes and explore their lists. Follow artists, labels and users to see their activity stream.

It's not as passive as just hitting play on a playlist, but I've discovered so many incredible artists and labels this way. I'd be genuinely devastated if Bandcamp goes away.

This is, effectively, what the recommendation systems do. They suggest songs/artists that users with similar tastes liked, and songs with similar styles (there's deep analysis/categorization of the sound of the song).

I prefer an automated process, rather than clicking about, navigating lists. It's ok that this is my preference.

NTS Radio, Rate Your Music or Discogs should be great, deep rabbit holes that lead to new and interesting discoveries.

I’m afraid if bandcamp doesn’t address discovery and SoundCloud doesn’t either then you’re referring to the “shuffle-radio” where you discover new music without doing anything? This is how Brooks Jefferson got to 60m listens in the first place. “Sounds like Garth Brooks!” Because it’s his songs sang by a wedding singer.

> then you’re referring to the “shuffle-radio”

No, recommendation systems, like Spotify uses, uses crowdsourcing and song analysis to drive the "radio". You can make "song radio" that has the same style/feeling as a song, artist, or genre.

Junodownload is where I buy music most. They have a wide variety of options and fair pricing. It's much easier to find and browse music there. Our link: https://www.junodownload.com/labels/Ruff+And+Tuff+Recordings...

can you follow up on the recreating popular songs and how spotify wronged taylor swift?

Sure, quick google searches… there’s definitely more but this gives you enough info.

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-denies-its-pl...

https://kotaku.com/spotify-music-streaming-fake-artist-ai-ap...

https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/fake-artists-have-...

https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/dispute-resolution/dispute...

https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/9/15767986/taylor-swift-appl...

And honestly, for some of this stuff, I understand Spotify’s position. At the same time, their willingness to promote fake artists with copy cat songs to circumvent paying royalties to BMG or such is why musicians are eating ramen and only a handful of musicians are eating steak.

There's a ton of stuff like this, where the original artist isn't on Spotify, but these "covers" are:

https://open.spotify.com/track/6t6VE10ixs4wyyIgAbJzvz

https://open.spotify.com/artist/6RuIbUAQK9fmBq08AbY6XE

Honestly, I wish Spotify would stop "improving" their client and use that money to get more artists on their service.

Ugh… that last one. 65m listens followed by 40m and so on. This is exactly my point. Who the hell is this?

I'd say you're very much in the minority then. Spotify is notorious for its weak recommendation system.

Compared to what? Genuinely asking, because I like Spotify's recommendation system yet I always have the feeling that it can be better... even with the recent enhanced shuffle playlist and efforts to provide more contextual recs.

YouTube music, Pandora, I'm sure there are others.

Spotify likes to feed you back stuff you liked even if it's only tangentially related to what you're asking for. It also repeats the same recommendations for things like radio over and over again.

I feel like it's been improving with them offering more ways to discover music that sounds like what you heard but not the same artists.

But yeah I still feel more can be done. Their new Hi-Fi package is supposed to have more options too.

I had the same experience you describe with Pandora for years, has it improved recently?

That is borderline tragic to hear. Pandora acquired __the__ music streaming service when it came to discovery, rdio, and did absolutely nothing with it.

You describing your experience with Spotify is my same experience with Pandora. It's awful, they have like 10 songs

Real, living breathing DJs. They are a way better way to discover new music.

Listen to a set and pull out Shazam whenever you hear something you like. It can even dump all that into a spotify playlist

For me its the only way to fly

I listen to music a lot, but never got algorithmic recommendation systems. It just seems too soulless.

Personally i still listen to the radio (streamed online obviously), in the UK NTS Radio (nts.live) and Rinse FM (rinse.fm) are good. Very few adverts, NTS is pretty much listener funded, not sure what Rinse do as I rarely hear ads.

The shows get archived on SoundCloud so you can ID tracks and find them on Spotify later if they were that good.

yep. Add wfmu.org which also has archives and has live chats every show.

I would also add dandelionradio.com. All their streaming shows are uploaded to mixcloud. I'm a little worried though because their DJs always point to their artists' bandcamp pages to help you find the music.

on the flip side to this, I don't have Spotify because curating music is a hobby of mine. The research from various sources - forums, FB groups, Discogs, Bandcamp mailing lists, etc. is part of the journey.

Is there a place you share your playlists? Would be curious to have a listen.

Fuck Spotify. They've played a major role in drastically reducing any chance of significant revenue flowing to musicians, in complete contrast to Bandcamp.

People hearing your music is nice and all (I like it when people hear my stuff on BC), but it is orthogonal to the revenue that used to be associated with making recorded music available. There's far, far more music out there than anyone will ever be able to listen to, and I consider the possibility of even 1 paid milkshake for a musician much more important than some random number of listeners who heard the track on Spotify. I appreciate that you may see things differently, but I think that you're wrong.

THANK you. Spotify is no Bandcamp substitute. Not even close. Not even remotely the same category of thing. Yikes.

> People hearing your music is nice and all

As a listener, this is my entire concern, use case, and reason for paying for a streaming site: finding new music to listen to. I don't think I'm unique. Artists should get more, which is why I pay for Spotify Premium, but the use case of a listener is important. Bandcamp doesn't address that, for me.

There is more music on Bandcamp than you could listen to in a lifetime. More comes out in a week than you could (probably) listen to in a week.

So when you sayd "finding new music to listen to", there's a hidden implication in there: you want to find new music that is on Spotify (which in turn implies things like major labels, artists seeking or expecting breakout etc.

Bandcamp is an amazing resource for discovering new music, but a subset of all new music, just as Spotify is. It's fine to say you prefer what you can find on Spotify, just don't make the claim that Bandcamp somehow isn't up for this general task.

I'll rephrase: I don't want to find the music. I want recommendation of music that I might like. I want a mostly passive experience, where I can click a like button to get more like that, added to feed. I don't want to actively search, because I'm doing other things when I listen to music. If I find a song that interests me, I'll listen to the songs "radio" to find similar artists. This is an acceptable use pattern.

> which in turn implies things like major labels, artists seeking or expecting breakout etc.

This is nonsensical [1]. I follow YouTubers have their music on Spotify. Some are just spoof songs.

[1] https://artists.spotify.com/en/get-started

I’m unaware of anything on Bandcamp that is remotely as useful to me as the auto-built playlists and artist/song radio tools in Spotify. That there’s “a lot” of music on either platform is meaningless if the tools to find things I’d like don’t work for me.

I get the compensation model sucks for artists. I try to buy things from bands I like. But ultimately, if artists don’t like the Spotify model, they should pull their music - but I’m going to continue to use a platform that gives me access to everything I’d ever want to hear for like, $10/mo.

> but I’m going to continue to use a platform that gives me access to everything I’d ever want to hear for like, $10/mo.

I'm going to continue to use a platform that can only cost as little as it does because the people who create the art that motivates the entire existence of the platform get paid essentially nothing

well, uh, bravo, I guess.

Then they should pull their music. You know, the part I said that you cut off so you could what, poorly paraphrase my position as negatively as possible? To what end? Was your day that bad that you needed to make someone else look little to feel better about it?

But uh, bravo, I guess.

I think the auto-built playlists are bad. Not only because they slip in something jarring, but even the "This is..." playlists can't be trusted. They often mix artists with the same name who have nothing to do with each other.

No, I think it's for active discovery Spotify is good. I have never enjoyed everything on the Discover weekly playlist, quite often it contains stuff that makes me ask "why did you even think I would like that crap, Spotify". But when it hits, it hits amazingly well.

And yet you're listening to Spotify, still, instead of 'albums you bought'.

This is really the point. It's not new: radio was the previous way to have music discovery for 'free', or at least unmetered, with its own costs and issues.

If Spotify made no pretense that it even attempted to pay rights holders anything it'd probably fit its role even better, but it actively tries to supplant the whole concept of having to buy or own albums or music at all. It's designed to be what you have INSTEAD of buying music. When it hits, you don't need to buy music.

The music MAKERS might need you to buy their music, but Spotify is for helping you ignore that.

Heh. How about an ad-supported Spotify, except literally all the ads are for bands and live gigs and music? Bring payola to Spotify. You never pay for it, but you get radio levels of interstitials and they are all from music producers trying to sell their album or single, all for literal music. Albums used to get late-night TV ads and label promotion…

"And yet"? Did you respond to the wrong post?

I have not been able to use Bandcamp to discover music. Even for music in niches that are so tiny that they're not on Spotify, I didn't find them on Bandcamp (I found them on YouTube). Bandcamp's recommendations for me are lousy.

does Spotify pay artists more for listens on premium? I seriously doubt it.

All the revenue goes into a big pot, then split up [1].

That pot is 95% premium users [2].

[1] https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/

[2] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/120314/spoti....

It's separate pots for ad listens vs. subscriber listens. AFAIK there are also separate pots by country, since subscription fees and profitability of ad markets vary widely by country.

Do you have a reference for this? If the pots are different, what's the practical difference, when the majority of the profits, and payout, comes from premium?

This is easy to check. Yes, premium listens are pooled separately from ad-supported listens.

If an artist is extremely popular with ad-supported listeners, that doesn't let them eat into the pool of payments from premium listeners.

Note, however, that listens are pooled by country, not per user. So premium accounts running background music in a hair salon 6 days a week will decide where your subscription money goes far more than the music you listen to.

Originally, this was because the big record companies demanded it. Now, the record companies are having second thoughts, but Spotify, which has adapted to the funding key favouring background music, are the ones resisting.

Buy on Bandcamp but also listen on Spotify, isn't it perfect for both?

I think you've identified the major problem for musicians: there's so much music available today that the value of writing more has crashed. The value to listeners is now in the delivery infrastructure and recommendations.

The population of music lovers, people that have favorite bands, genres, albums, want more music. Those who listen passively and do not own or care about albums and don't go to concerts etc. can be safely ignored; Spotify is fine for them.

> Those who listen passively and do not own or care about albums

I see it very differently. I care about good music. There's an incredible amount of good music out there, and it's rare that an album is full of it. Your definition of "good" may vary, but mine isn't really influenced by the artist. Most albums are mostly not-good-music. I'm picky, and look at unrelated songs independently. This is why I don't really care for albums. I feel no debt to a single artist or a nothing-more-than-release-time-related collection of music, which is what most are.

Some albums I do considered a complete, single, work, but that's relatively rare. Daft Punk - Random Access Memories is a good example, in my opinion.

I don't see what concerts have to do with anything. Those are often related to luck and finances/privilege.

Ah the no true Scotsman argument. I have favorite bands and genres, I support local bands when I find them, I go to concerts when I'm able, though I don't live in an ideal location for it. I play music and I try to get together with others to play. And I use Spotify. I'm not interested in owning albums, you can stream an album or individual songs.

I spent years buying music, ripping the CDs, organizing files, etc. I'm very glad that I don't need to bother any more. I don't own the medium the music is stored on, I don't really get why it matters.

> I don't really get why it matters.

Support, experience, control. Physical media supports the artist. When you play a physical album you experience the whole album. When you own an album you control it and it cannot be taken away, edited or lost.

Streaming doesn't support the artist. Streaming obliterates coherence of albums. When you stream music you do not control it and it can be taken away, edited or lost without your knowledge or consent.

There's a few albums I love listening to all the way through every time. But for the most part I want to listen to the songs I like. I think about all the times I've found one song that really moves me on an album I don't care for, your suggestion is kind of like "well you should miss out on those gems".

Physical media doesn't support the artist much better either, that's been a topic of conversation since I was a kid.

>our suggestion is kind of like "well you should miss out on those gems"

No, I'm the same way. Sometimes an album only has 1 good song; other times an album is great but I can't stand 1 or 2 songs. The important thing is that I listened to the whole album! I'm judging the songs in the context of their creators. I'm experiencing them together and in order, and that's a very different experience than interleaving songs. Interleaving is fine and can be an artform in itself (we used to call it a "mix tape") but I believe you owe it to the artist to listen to the thing they made in its entirety. It would be like reading a book collection interleaving the chapters. It's not fair to you or the authors.

That's how I feel about it. You ARE missing something.

>Physical media doesn't support the artist much better either, that's been a topic of conversation since I was a kid.

I have many musician friends, and they would ALL disagree with you quite strenuously. The money they make on streaming is ~0. The money they make selling CDs is almost all profit - and it's also the thing they made instead of sliced and diced and mixed with other things other people made.

> I'm experiencing them together and in order, and that's a very different experience than interleaving songs.

I don't follow. You're free to listen to full albums, in sequence, on Spotify. You can listen to any song at any time in any order, from the album, or custom playlists. It's just a large catalog of music where you can click and play/queue anything you see, with some recommendation systems that create custom playlists you can choose to listen to.

I'm getting the impression that many people criticizing these streaming services don't understand what they actually are.

Prepare for your music to disappear at any point. Licensing deals end and albums you love are suddenly removed from platforms. I understand that's an acceptable trade off for a casual listener. I actually use Spotify for previewing albums and consider it great value.

However any music I care about I buy as I plan to own my library for decades to come.

Plus, you're missing out on a lot of great music that never has been available on streaming platforms.

> Prepare for your music to disappear at any point.

So far it's only happened because the musician himself pulled the music, and I wasn't really enthused after that to try and find it again. As the gp said, there's so much music now... I might be missing out on some music but if I've already got too much to ever listen to then why does that matter? In fact, having to make the choice to purchase is necessarily going to limit the amount available and my willingness to take a chance on it.

Streaming has opened up so much for me that I would never have found browsing music shops. Of course if Spotify disappeared then I'd have to find another service or buy the music then. A problem for it's time.

You know what Glenn Jones (American guitarist), Talisk (Scottish folk), Tonbruket (Swedish jazz), Daniel Herskedal (Norwegian jazz, tuba), The Books (New York, sound collage), Yom (French klezmer clarinetist), Kongero (Swedish folk a cappella), and Naragonia (Belgian accordion folk) have in common?

That 1. I supported them on Bandcamp 2. I would never have found them if it wasn't for Spotify's discover weekly.

I could list a lot more artists for which this is true. It's not even counting the ones I found indirectly.

This is maybe something artists should be aware of when they think they get such a good deal from Bandcamp and such a bad deal from Spotify. It's not as simple as that. I'm sure it's true that most people who promise you "exposure" are trying to exploit you, but that doesn't mean you can ignore how you actually got in front of the audience you have.

The problem with this angle is that Bandcamp also has discovery features through which you may have found a different (or maybe an overlapping) 8 artists too. There's a good chance they would not be the same, and there's a argument that it might feel more difficult (Spotify appears to work VERY hard at getting better at prediction, Bandcamp is more like human curation, which is to say less reliable but also occasionally more serendipitous).

I see that indirectly, Spotify likes to recommend me stuff that has gotten attention from a few specific human curators: NPR desk concerts, the Mark Radcliffe Folk sessions (a BBC program I believe), and A Prairie Home Companion. So it's not an either-or, I would not even have heard of those curators without Spotify.

But some of the best stuff Spotify has found for me, has had ridiculously few plays and no obvious human curator connection.

Bandcamp just isn't in the same league, and I'd say Spotify is far better on serendipity too. It's far from predictable what it will recommend, there's not many human curators you can say that about (including the three I mentioned).

> It finds music I like, regardless of musician effort.

This isn't really true...musicians must put forth a ton of effort just to be part of the songs that are recommended to you. Spotify favors and rewards those who promote their music on other platforms, since it scours the web for articles mentioning your name and people posting about you on social media in order to determine how far up in the "rankings" you should be when someone asks for a similar sounding song.

Is this assumed or is there public info about their algorithm?

In the first song of my Discover Weekly, if I google the very unique artist name, I get exactly four hits: their bandcamp page, their website, their Spotify page, and their YouTube channel that hasn't been updated in a 9 months, with that last video having 120k views. The rest is unrelated to them.

This doesn't refutes what you're saying, but I would have exactly 0 chance of finding them on my own, with the effort they're putting in.

Discover Weekly specifically requires artists to "pitch" their songs to Spotify. If you're already following the artist, their new releases that have been pitched are supposedly guaranteed to show up on your Discover Weekly. Otherwise, I believe it's someone at Spotify who picked that song which then distributes it to "relevant" listeners.

Again, is this assumed, or do you have something public that can be linked to? The only explanation of the algorithm is what I would expect, rather than some silly humans in the loop: recommendation based on user activity and the analysis of the song style [1].

https://medium.com/the-sound-of-ai/spotifys-discover-weekly-...

Can I buy music from Spotify? As in, be able to download a non-proprietary, lossless encoding of the music?

If not, Spotify is worthless to me.

If you re-frame Spotify as a way to discover music, it's not worthless.

Feel free to use Spotify to find artists and give them money however you want.

Also, nobody is stopping you from spending your time finding new music and giving money as directly as possible to the artist.

Spotify can be seen as a way to increase your exposure to new music, and for that it might be worth the $XX/month to many people, the ability to stream/cache it is a nice addition, but you don't have to rely on it as a way to give money (a pittance) to artists you like.

> If you re-frame Spotify as a way to discover music, it's not worthless.

It is to me, though. I don't need another way to discover music. I have that well-covered.

And by "buy music", I wasn't referring to a way to pay artists (that would be a followup question if I didn't already know that part). I mean, can I download the music in a high-quality, open-standard, format?

I thought Spotify only did streaming, and I am not interested in a streaming service.

> have that well-covered.

Could you share your secrets?

No secrets. I get recommendations from my friends, I keep track of what musicians/producers/etc. were involved in producing music that I love, and seek out what other works they were involved in, etc. I pay attention to incidental music I come across and pursue it.

I've been doing this for decades and as a result, I have a very eclectic collection that covers almost all genres. This approach may not work for everyone, but it works very well for me.

Sounds like you’re not in Spotify’s market if you don’t want to stream and you don’t care about discovery. It’s probably not the right service for you.

That's exactly what I was saying, yes. Bandcamp, however, is right up my alley.

That's interesting - I usually don't like Spotify's recommendations.

Youtube was much better at that IMO, but I've tried to stop using it due to the Google connection.

I don't really know where Bandcamp stands - I've bought music there that I found on YouTube, but haven't used it to find new stuff.

> I usually don't like Spotify's recommendations

It requires that you like songs, and listen, of course. I have around 1600 liked songs. It knows me well enough at this point.

That hasn't helped any. I have almost 1100 liked songs, several dozen liked albums, and several years of near daily listening. The recommendations are still less good (for me) than what YouTube recommended without an account, just based on my listening history.

I've been satisfied, but that's good to hear. I'll give it another try.

My biggest problem with the Spotify recommendation is that it seems to be a bit "sticky", recommended recent listens more than anything.

I think that's what I don't like about it, also.

It seems like it gives me recommendations too similar to what I'm already listening to.

Spotify has a catalogue that appeals to people that like pop music. Bandcamp provides an outlet for artists that aren't part of the pop music spectrum. I'm deep into electronic music and Bandcamp is the _only_ place that some artists are even listed, and it's become an amazing space for artists that want to release limited press special edition records - pre-ordered by fans to cover the manufacturing price. Prior to this I acquired a few cool records via Kickstarter, but Bandcamp is preferable.

Furthermore, Spotify are well known for paying artists next to nothing. Bandcamp are well known for letting artists take the majority of the purchase price of their music.

Not to mention, listening to mp3s is for chumps!

Bandcamp is the best there is (for now) if you want to financially support the artists you like. I spend a lot of time in record stores (both physical and digital) but they are mostly extinct now. There's a few I still frequent: Juno, Boomkat, Hardwax among them, but the more the world turns to services like Spotify, the less room there is for real music stores.

It's super annoying how the internet kills everything that was good. Bullshit for the masses over quality service for people that care.

yep. I use both daily but find bc more valuable. bc does little to help me find new music (so I get my leads elsewhere) but once I know what I want it is more likely to be on bc than spotify. spotify does a good job of helping me follow artists I already know, but not so great identifying new ones. I'm sure that depends on what you're looking for tho.

It probably depends on music genre, but Bandcamp hosts a ton of music that's not available anywhere else. Spotify is great for popular music, but a lot of small/niche artists have presence only on Bandcamp, both digital and physical. Pretty much all of my vaporwave/futurefunk/synthwave vinyl records are from Bandcamp.

Just calling someone dumb isn’t constructive. Instead tell them what you think Bandcamp had to offer.

Bandcamp let me pay a musician for a song, regardless of how unknown or unpopular a band was. You’re three dudes in your mid-thirties playing open mic night and passing a hat around, and definitely cannot afford to get on Spotify or Youtube Music, but you can get on bandcamp and a few people can pay $5 for a song they liked when they were tipsy.

Also YT Music quality is shit. I bought a new pair of headphones and though they were defective until I played some songs encoded by yours truly as opus files.

> Bandcamp let me pay a musician for a song, regardless of how unknown or unpopular a band was.

This is what made me love Bandcamp. I get to pay the artists more-or-less directly, and as a person who tends not to be into the Big Music Names, Bandcamp is utterly amazing, chock full of smaller artists doing wonderful things.

> definitely cannot afford to get on Spotify

How so? There aren't necessarily any upfront costs for getting on Spotify; several aggregators offer a "we take a cut of your earnings" model.

Even without a cut, there are several virtual distribution services like DistroKid and TuneCore which for a flat fee will take care of submitting whatever WAV one created to all streaming platforms. Getting it noticed is a whole other story.

Anyone can get on Spotify. See Distrokid for example.

Bandcamp is (was?) to music as Flickr is to photography. It's a portfolio site, that doubles as a means to buy things from that portfolio. It's the thing an artist's social media pages link to to say "here's my body of work for you to browse through." Where browsing through that portfolio — listening to 30-second previews of songs, etc — doesn't require signing up for any service, but is just a regular part of the public web.

Not 30 second previews of songs, in general: the whole song, often many times over.

Plus multiple download formats, including losslessly compressed formats such as FLAC.

Plus the best return to the musician of any similar platform.

I'm talking about what you get without having to sign in. Even with free albums, IIRC you can't fully preview the song without "buying" it, which means signing in first. The signed-in experience is mostly akin to the signed-in experience of the iTunes Store. It's what you get when not signed in that's unique.

That's incorrect. Bandcamp does not require sign-in for full preview, and you do not need to buy it either.

There are decisions that can be made by some artists, although I don't recall being offered "full preview requires signin" when I put my own album on BC.

>Even with free albums, IIRC you can't fully preview the song without "buying" it, which means signing in first.

Actually, you can! Fun fact, unless an artist/label has explicitly limited what you can listen to without having made a purchase, you can listen to most of the music on Bandcamp in full, without buying it, an unlimited number of times if you're not logged in. The way it works is that, if you're logged in, you get a set (~3?) number of listens before Bandcamp basically says, "Yo, you seem to dig this, you should prolly be a mensch and throw some dough to the artist(s)/label." If you're logged out, I'm not sure what the limit is (if there even is one?), but it's likely easily circumvented by clearing cache/cookies.

It's the same when not logged in, the playcount is stored in cookies yes.

Thanks! I'm usually logged in on all devices so it's been a while since I've tested it logged out.

I know a lot of musicians that use it. I have been making music for over 20 years. What musicians want from sites like this is to be able to offload their marketing so that they can focus on making music, not to have boilerplate functional features (like bulk file uploads) for a fee.

Sites and apps now avoid giving any real promotional value to users because they can later sell it to them incrementally. It's a tactic to keep artists primarily promoting the platform in addition to promoting their work on the platform. Very little value overall, as now there are tons of competing music and social platforms available, but all of them offer the same desperately weak promotional value to musicians.

See, for me I like that Bandcamp is just a store. That I see an artist I like on social media, click their bandcamp link, and if I like their music I buy it. I don't use its recommendation features, and the only social feature I use is the ability to follow an artist and thus get news-bulletins about their work.

Once you get to an artist's page, the UI is simple and clean and Just Works. I can see their releases, buy and download them easily. That's what I want when shopping.

Imho, Bandcamp shouldn't even offer that kind of $20 "promotion subscription" thing you mention. Just sell music, take the cut, and be done with it.

Honestly my only real UI complaint about Bandcamp is that artists often move between labels and collabs and the label runs the bandcamp page so their music is mixed in with all their labelmates. That's where I find it gets very confusing. Like most of Lauren Bousfield's albums are at

https://laurenbousfieldanyev3r.bandcamp.com/

except her latest album which is here:

https://orangemilkrecords.bandcamp.com/album/salesforce

and is not linked from her personal page at all. Another album (Palimpsest) is linked from her personal page, but if you click on the artist of that one it takes you to a different label (https://deathbombarc.bandcamp.com/).

So obviously something is horribly wrong with navigation in how it handles labels and the like.

Off topic the article but I _love_ her new album

Also funny since I originally heard NDAD through a Spotify recommendation before eventually buying her discography on Bandcamp

Yeah, I got into shopping for weird stuff on Bandcamp when we went remote, started out with postrock and postmetal stuff and then a Twitter thread about the strangest music made by trans women made me a fan of Bousfield.

Sweet Jesus... this is Danza/Frontierer/Car Bomb levels of heaviness but with experimental pop instead. I'm gonna have to ease myself into this album.

Hah, it's just the one track "Hazer" that goes full grindcore, the rest of the album is a bit more... hard-mode in a Japanese rhythm game if it was super-distorted hyperpop.

excellent point and excellent example

This is an interesting perspective to say the least. I’ve been impressed with the work their developer team has done over the years.

I can’t say I shared your troubles finding new music on there. It’s been the best place for me to discover new artists. The recommendation systems, following artists, and their unique write-ups on artists, scenes, genres are quality.

You’re take on what they ‘should’ be doing seems very misguided. I’m surprised that you think Bandcamp Pro is a hands-off marketing and promotion service. They are absolutely clear about what they offer for $10/month, and no where do they say they’ll promote your music for you.

They have provided an entire guide for _how_ to promote on bandcamp: https://bandcamp.com/guide

While the feature-set isn't the best, I find their simple UI to be a breath of fresh air and easy to navigate.

The UI is good overall, but the search system is the worst I've ever seen. And there's no "open in app" link on the mobile site. Been like this for as long as I've been using it. It's like they don't want to be more successful than they already are.

But that's a good thing. "Open this in the app" links are the worst advertising scum on the web.

Generally I'd agree with you, but for certain apps, it would be nice to be given the option. I never want to be forced to use the app, but sometimes when looking at a bandcamp page and checking out the music, I'd like to switch over to listening in the app, since I don't have to keep the browser window on top for it to continue playing. The only way to do that is to go use the (bad) search feature in the app to find the thing you're already looking at in the browser.

Not the answer you wanted but…

Why not to favorite what you’re looking at in the browser and then open favorites in the app…if it turns out you don’t like what hear, unfavorite.

Precisely. I specifically want to use the Bandcamp app, but there's literally no way to switch from web to app. There's no way to put a URL into the app, and the search is so incredibly bad that it's almost impossible to find the thing I'm already listening to, even when I'm already logged in in both places.

> The UI on BandCamp has been vastly outdated for ages now

That's what I like about it. It's essentially what MySpace was supposed to be.

Yup, that BC's UI hasn't changed since 2016 is a good thing.

I’m not sure where you got the idea that the premium service included promotion. Last I looked, the subscription simply unlocked some specific features. If you just paid for it and hoped that meant your band was going to be promoted, you threw your money away, but that hardly seems like bandcamp’s fault.

He's thinking of engagement and discovery like youtube or the old MySpace experience for independent music creators. People land on the page and discover new artists and easy discovery of new ones.

Ok, but still, that isn’t something bandcamp claims to do. How can one be upset they didn’t get that?

Bandcamp always struck me as a place for producers to sell to DJ’s since you can get high bitrate MP3’s and lossless files.

A pattern I’ve seen is that artists will put a new release on Bandcamp a week before it’s available on streaming services. This lets them pull in more revenue by selling the album for $10 to enthusiasts before it’s released to the masses.

I always enjoyed their weekly Bandcamp radio show. It was a great way to discover new artists, often from genres I would not necessarily listen to.

Not sure why they stopped it some years ago. Real pitty.

> soundcloud (with a superior UI)

You lost me there.

Bandcamp was profitable at least until their sale to Epic.

I'm the opposite. Found Bandcamp UI pretty good, intuitive and no bs, discovered tons of good music through the Discover section on the bottom front page. Also the Bandcamp blogposts are the among the best music article. Soundcloud on the other hand I would only go via directly link. I guess it also relates to the genre you're interested in, my favorite artists probably never post to Soundcloud.

A lot of the things you dislike about the platform are things I like about it. No bloat. You buy music and download it.

This is a bad take. It’s massive in the electronic space.

What's wrong with a paid storefront for artists? Considering the rest of the ecommerce ecosystem, 20$ seems fair. Have you considered that 20$ is just the cost of doing business?

Discoverability is a problem yes, but I don't know that it's a solvable one. And if Bandcamp tried seriously to solve it, they would likely have to rely on investment money, and eventually enshittify the platform.

$240/yr is too much for simple hosting- a small artist can get that for free these days, especially if they don't need DRM. For the price you'd expect promotion and discovery.

It's not just the web hosting it's the whole trusted vendor you already have an account with.

Yes, you can get that for cheaper, but then you're not the customer you're the product.

If you tried rolling your own solution you'd be paying more than 20$ per month.

I pay $0 a month to host a website. A number of artists I've bought from have you pay with paypal and a download link is included on your receipt. That's what, nine cents per transaction plus five percent, and minimal egress charges from a cloud provider.

Hosting costs money and you're getting that for free, so there's something else going on there.

You're paying for PayPal on their margin.

> so there's something else going on there

Cloudflare free tier as a CDN. They're on the record about why they do it- mainly, it generates large sales leads, makes it easier to hire, and provides them a community of willing QA testers for new features.

Hosting costs for a small website are literally pennies a month if your content can be cached. Plenty of truly free origin hosts available. GitHub Pages is a popular ine.

> You're paying for PayPal on their margin

So? Bandcamp charges 15% for small artists.

Right, so Cloudflare makes their money one way or another. If at some point they decide it's not worth it to host free content anymore then you're out of luck.

That's what I mean, there is a cost of doing business and someone has to pay it. It sounds like Bandcamp was a shitty partner too, but the larger point still stands I think.

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