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Comment by Night_Thastus | Hacker News Reader

I'm really bummed. I love Bandcamp. It's the only place I can buy music FROM THE MUSICIAN with very little overhead, and download a high-quality lossless track. Amazon only lets me buy crap-quality MP3s. Apple is opaque about it, putting either lossy AAC or lossless ALAC in the same M4A containers. >:(

The only good alternative is Qobuz, which is frustrating to use and charges absolutely massive overhead.

But unfortunately it feels like Bandcamp keeps getting screwed over somehow or another. Most people these days want to stream, not to buy and download. :(

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I too loved Bandcamp for its sane approach to acquiring new music; unlike "most people" I refuse to use the streaming-only services, and insist upon buying albums and listening to exactly those selections I choose (and I prefer to listen to albums in their entirety, even today).

Perhaps I'm just old and set in my ways, but choices made by others, especially algorithmically generated "options maximizing my engagement", hold no attraction for me whatsoever. Losing such freedom of choice would be painful in the extreme.

I also refuse to use streaming services, and prefer to curate my own music - but for me, it's less about algorithmic suggestions, and more about actually owning the things I've paid for.

A streaming service or an artist can pull music from a service (see Neil Young), but they ain't going to be reaching into my hard drives and pulling the mp3s out of it.

I am all in on owning things as well. To the point that I'll buy Blu-Rays where I can too, rather than sign up for an extra streaming service.

With music in particular, I definitely see discovery as a problem though -- particularly these days when "radio" isn't really a thing (at least for me). Spotify might be able to fill that gap, but I haven't really tried yet.

I'm also worried that "owning digital things" is going to become harder and harder as time goes on, but I haven't quite been able to put my finger on what the tipping point for that is going to be.

Yeah it seems like it's going in that direction. The new generation seems fine with streaming services, now. I worked for a few customers who want to retain their physical music in their homes with a media devices and stream it to all their devices in the home. Slowly but surely many home entertainment devices that store music have been slowly removing those features in favor of streaming services. This has been making it very hard for people to retain physical copies of their music without some sort of custom solution that has to be maintained.

For me, I refuse to use music streaming services, I rely heavily on my digital music collection most of which comes from Bandcamp. Bandcamp is the last bastion of physical digital music where there is direct interaction between musicians and music lovers. If it dies, we are screwed. If its possible, id actually like to see it be supported from donations like Thunderbird is if it was possible. I don't like the idea that it relies on commercialism.

Or just go to another country - when I moved to Singapore most of my hip hop was removed from my library

Ownership is indeed the other reason I don't do streaming. I pay for a track or album, download it, and it's mine.

I do see this capability disappearing in coming years, however; especially with growing use of "AI" tools to, say, craft ever more complicated barriers to avoiding rent-seeking.

This is me as well. Streaming services don't serve my needs at all.

I find algorithmic suggestions pretty much useless, but they're easy to ignore so don't really enter into it.

I used to leech Mp3's with the best of them, trawling through blogs enmasse before music was consolidated by giant aggregators. DI.FM is different though, its a streaming service, curated by humans (who are the worlds best DJs), has a sustainable buinsess model and lets you download streams.

Its very intersting how my music taste has evolved over the years, the more genres and types i was exposed to, the more i discovered. Nothing beats going to a concert you dont know anything about and having the night of your life. Im one for nostalgia, no doubt, but i think listening to the same song, in the same tone, over and over again, is a simplistic view of music and ruines its potential magic. Music and moods are instrinically linked. What happens if i was to listen to my favourite rockband, but instead mixed into chillout music that ebbs and flows over 5 or 10 hours. I get to hear the songs i love, in different ways, evoking different emotions and memories. I find that extends the life of music, not run it into the ground, dulling all those memories that triggered your love in the first place. I kissed that girl for the first time listening to this song, fades if you listen to that song everyday.

Spotify is automated radio, warts and all. Popular amoung the consumerist sheeple, often coupled with tv and shopping subscription technoligies. Society has always had this cross section of music interest, chinstroker outlets always existed at fringes, hardly able to survive in the world they helped create. Music sells. Captalists like to sell things people love to buy. A victim of their own success. Such is the harsh reality of this economic system, things just cant be done, they have to be done to death, then revamped and rebranded and the cycle goes on.

> I used to leech Mp3's with the best of them, trawling through blogs enmasse before music was consolidated by giant aggregators

That's not the only alternative. I've never done that.

> Its very intersting how my music taste has evolved over the years, the more genres and types i was exposed to, the more i discovered.

I couldn't agree more! But streaming services (or old-school radio) doesn't work well for me when it comes to discovering new music. I get that plenty of people find that a great path and more power to them.

But for me, streaming services are like radio you pay for, and music radio has never been a thing of value to me at any point in my life.

And, financially speaking, "radio you pay for" makes no sense to me. If I'm paying money, I want to have the music available to listen to any time I want, on any device I want -- not just when a DJ decides it's time to play it, or only when I have an internet connection.

But don't get me wrong -- I am not saying that streaming services are stupid and shouldn't exist. I'm just saying that they don't provide value to me, personally.

I too listen to albums in their entirety and don’t interact too much with autogenerated content.

But I was on Apple Music and now I’m on Spotify. The amount of new albums I get to listen to would put a massive dent in my bank account if I was buying them as I go.

I still purchase Vinyl and the odd CD, but that is reserved for my top must have records. A flat rate for music just makes sense to me, and allows me to check out and discover so many more new artists than in the old days, where my music taste was much narrower and confined to more mainstream “classic” rock and the like.

Sounds like Bandcamp is perfect for you. You can stream full albums for free, then buy and download the odd ones that you really like.

I WANT for bandcamp to work for me. But……

For the few albums that are there sure, it works. Unfortunately the vast majority of the time there isn’t anything there. Most artists just aren’t on bandcamp. Or the artist is on there but only a subset of their albums are. Even if I started using it more, it would be so rare, as I’d need to go use Spotify or my own physical/digital collection most of the time, which means when the album ends I’m more likely to keep listening on the current platform, not think to switch back to bandcamp to see once again if the newest Metric album is suddenly there, or if any albums apart from one are there etc. Also the amount of similarly named artist/albums that are tributes or fan “sequels” or straight up just the same named artist a a little bit of friction to make search.

Bandcamp exists in an odd space where unless I’m willing to have my music choices heavily restricted it then it loses out to traditional a-la-carte purchasing of albums whether physically or on digital storefronts, or to just using a streaming service. If I was a young kid in primary school again, it would still lose out to pirating music as well I think.

That's fair! Bandcamp's model is awesome, it just doesn't have the coverage (yet?).

bandcamp is still pretty generous with streaming. I own maybe a third of the music on bandcamp that I listen to.

Just to offer a counterpoint - there's so many indie and small bands I've found while listening to Pandora. Most or all of which I would have never discovered otherwise.

Sure, maybe they don't pay as much as me buying the CD would for the artist - but I likely would have never found them any other way. Now, they get something every time I listen to their songs.

I would, however, enjoy much higher quality audio. Even with the top tier Pandora plan, it's still MP3's, albeit high quality MP3's.

I tried a couple streaming services a while back, and them rather annoying. I've discovered a lot of good new bands through Bandcamp, just reading about related bands in genres I like. The annoyances of the various streaming services just push me away, and yes, potentially to my own detriment in missing out of artists I might not discover any other way.

Those people don't listen to music, they consume background sound. I don't care if it sounds snob, that's how most people treat music.

This is an interesting point, actually. I rarely play music in the background when I'm doing other things -- but I listen to a lot of music. When I do, I put an album on and listen to it with my full attention. In other words, I listen to music like other people watch movies.

It was only in the last few years that I learned that I was unusual in this.

That's how truly good albums shine, specially if you do it in the dark, you can travel to different worlds :) But yeah most people don't have the patience.

Can I safely assume that you also listen to some albums multiple times to get to know them? If so I'd like to know which are some of your favorites.

> Can I safely assume that you also listen to some albums multiple times to get to know them?

Absolutely yes. Like with good books and movies, you can't really appreciate music fully on a single listen. And a lot of music reveals wonders only after you've become very familiar with it.

Also, with some of my favorite artists (Kate Bush comes immediately to mind, but she's not the only one), I often dislike their music on first listen. It's only after sitting with it a few times that I fall in love with it.

It would take too long to list my favorites, but here's what I've been listening to over the past week: Martina DaSilva, Oriana Curls, Yello, Frank Zappa, early Pink Floyd, miscellaneous Venezuelan salsa bands.

I once went to a "blind concert" (basically a pitch black theater) where they played Atom Heart Mother, I didn't know that album but I was a big PF fan, and it was a wonderful experience.

> Venezuelan salsa bands

Like Zeta?

Atom Heart Mother is a wonderful piece of work. The albums I've listened to in the last week were Obscured by Clouds and Meddle.

> Like Zeta?

I'm actually new to the genre and still finding my way by listening to single songs from different groups to figure out the ones that appeal to me the most (that's why I didn't name a specific band). I hadn't come across Zeta, but they look like the right sort of thing. I'll check them out. Thanks!

Meddle is one I listened to religiously for a while. I do find that I can get obsessed and then "burnt out" with a particular album or even band. This happened to me with PF, I can still listen to them, but not with the same focus.

And that's not entirely a bad thing, because it makes me value more the (few) bands or composers who stand that test.

Salsa is wonderful to explore, in particular if you're able to find a good group to watch live :)

Can you explain why you are so opposed to streaming? I actually do both and own a few hundred lossless albums as well. Usually if I think something is moderately good, I'll purchase a lossless copy (unless I buy a CD of it, which I'll rip to my collection). However streaming is a more modern version of radio to me when I don't want to dig around playlists. I'll find new music I like from whatever spotify or apple music serves up if it's new to me, quite often. Just curious.

Streaming is very different from radio: https://thebaffler.com/downstream/big-mood-machine-pelly When I pay for music I don't want harvesting of my listening habits to be part of the price.

Im the total opposite, I don't want to own music (some things sure) but streaming services allow me to use the music I like to listen to wherever I want. I can make playlists and organize how I want it even make my own "radio stations" for different moods.

There is no way I can and will buy the amount of metal music I consume lol.

Also the algo that suggests new music is awesome! I learned about a lot of new bands just by using that feature.

Alot of the time, you can just email their booking email asking to buy their album with cashapp et al and they'll gladly take your money and ship you a zip file of MP3's, assuming the band/artist is small enough.

There is slightly more friction involved in this scheme. Just a little.

Yes, however, if your goal is to give your money to the people you want to give it to, there isn't a better way.

And you could replace Dropbox quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

funny thing: i recently happened into the solution to that age-old question of "how do i transfer some file(s) between two computers in the same room". i now run an anonymous FTP server on my laptop, open to the LAN. prior to this Dropbox _was_ one of the solutions, but recently i've used that FTP server for the job several times with both Linux and Windows users.

yet, you jest.

Sometimes I’ll just throw up

    python -m http.server

In a directory as a lazy way to transfer a file (especially to my phone).

It is not encrypted, and I wouldn’t be that surprised if it was also vulnerable in some ways, but it sure is easy (and it is only for lan, and pretty brief).

If you're fortunate enough to have Ruby installed, you can save three full keystrokes:

  ruby -run -e httpd

Exactly what I do as well

The keywords you want for that file transfer are "Magic Wormhole".

Yes, it works on Windows, Linux, and OS X.

Magic Wormhole is great, but sometimes unbearably slow for bulk transfers. (I imagine the public relay server used for the common NAT-to-NAT case is sometimes overloaded.)

His comment was: "how do i transfer some file(s) between two computers in the same room".

All the problems with NAT traversal should be avoided in that case.

Fair, but my comment is for other readers, too.

(Also, being in the same room doesn't always mean direct connection is allowed. I've seen wifi networks that forbid it.)

Samba also works just fine for that job.

Did you try syncthing?

I never get tired of the classics.

(dig, dig, dig... where did I get that... music... found it!)

http://magnatune.com (correct, there is no 's' there... that's odd in today's world)

> Since 2003, we've found and recruited the very best independent musicians and shared revenue 50/50 with them. Much of our music is exclusively available here. Nobody has spent the time to curate a collection like we have.

They've got some interesting licensing (as in lack of royalties)...

Though... Not entirely sure anymore about this. It feels like it is just running as a zombie site that's paid up (no news in the past decade)... but it's still running and streaming.

Funny to see Magnatune mentioned, HN is probably the only place I would ever see that. You got me out of lurking as I had to share.

The founder and CEO of Magnatune is John Buckman. Per his Linkedin he is still the CEO of Magnatune, in addition to some of his other projects like BookMooch and iLicenseMusic.

Magnatune is certainly in zombie mode, as Buckman started an espresso machine company that really took off and gave him notoriety, Decent Espresso. It uses an Android tablet to control and the app he wrote is written in Tcl/Tk. It's a fascinating project and how I became familiar with him and his previous endeavors.

I hope this won't result in Bandcamp going to shit, but I have to say I'm pretty worried. It's the only place I buy music. Band releases album -> I buy it. When I'm looking for new music, I typically look at the collections of other people who bought an album I enjoyed.

There's also 7digital.... which is now, also owned by Songtradr. Or Amazon, which doesn't sell music in my country.

Or Apple. Which seems to resent even still running the itunes music store, they don't even have a web front for it.

I miss google music. It did the job of a digital record store really well

Ditto. Also GPM was a bit buggier and more bloated feature-wise than YTM, but the ability to clean your ID3 tags in the web browser was wonderful.

And now YTM is getting podcasts so everything old is new again... but worse.

One can stream on bandcamp, through an app or the browser

can one stream a mix of music sourced elsewhere and bandcamp music? If people have to keep switching apps, I think that's going to limit the appeal to people who are a bit more serious/intentional about every "listen". There's a lot of those, but it's still a minority.

Any time I download music from Bandcamp, I drag it into Apple Music on my Mac and it syncs to all of my devices, sitting in my library like any other album.

It’s actually one of the reasons I use Apple Music over Spotify, the process to do this in Spotify is much more convoluted.

Spotify’s process is that the files need to be locally accessible from any computer playing the music, or they must be synced manually to the mobile app.

Lack of a real library is why I ditched Spotify for Rdio years and years ago, and why I switched to Apple Music when that became a thing. And I still run a Plex server, partially for the PlexAmp player.

But you still can’t even just add them to your library in Spotify, you have to put them in playlists, and then download that playlist on your phone, and then they’ll be on your phone. At least that was the system last I used it

While not automatic, YouTube Music can do this. You can basically upload your own music. Create playlists that mix yt songs and songs in your collection. You can upload on one machine, and access the uploaded song from anywhere, so you're basically using their cloud.

Wait, really? Won't I get accused of pirating my CDs? Is it officially okay to rip my CDs to a cloud provider?

I can tell you that I wasn't accused, but that it's also for private consumption only, no way to share the songs, so they might not be that strict. No idea though. You can read about the feature here: https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522

You can deploy navidrome, point it at a hard drive full of your music, and then stream from the frontend or using an app like subtracks.

Apple just can't get over their NIH obsession and support FLAC like a normal store.

I have my music download stores set to give me ALAC so that's a normal store for me. :-)

To be fair it really doesn't matter since it's quite easy to convert between lossless files.

I prefer ALAC too since I use iOS devices. However let's not pretend that Apple supporting FLAC wouldn't make things easier.

Bandcamp provides ALAC as one of their format options, too.

> Most people these days want to stream, not to buy and download

To each their own. For me Soundcloud wins hands down because of social network effect and gets me continuous stream of mixes. I really don't care what was the authors journey to releasing an album. A lot of music soon going to be generated anyway.

I really despise Apple Music for its album centric view and lack of good playlists. Spotify is somewhere in the middle.

It's funny; this is the polar opposite of how I listen to music. I only listen to albums, and 95% of playlists I listen to are my own and just contain a series of albums.

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...

Too bad their prices for lossless downloads for the quick searches I just did are outrageous. Don't even need to get into the very limited catalog.

I really haven't found any problems in collecting 320k Mp3s as a producer myself.

I think if most people knew the real way most modern music is produced and mastered now (on laptops), and how a lot of masters and music catalogues behind the scenes are literally re-encoded from mp3 backups, they'd see that lossless music is not an exact science.

Flac is also not universally supported by playback devices, and can become unsupported at any time faster than Mp3, so using more universal formats is not necessarily a bad thing.

That being said, I use HD lossless WAV copies for all of our own masters.

Regardless of how good high bitrate MP3s can technically be, my experience with MP3s has been poor. I can't remember the last time I got one that was of good enough sound quality that it didn't annoy me to listen to it.

That's why I go with lossless encodings. They aren't a guarantee of good sound quality, but the odds of them being so are much, much higher.

Personally, I don't actually care about whether or not FLAC is widely supported across devices. My media center will do on-the-fly conversions and lets me stream to anything, and if I need a different format for some reason, I can just convert from the FLAC to whatever I need.

I understand. I think the reason why they charge more for lossless is the additional bandwidth required to download them. Cloud host providers charge based on bandwidth, so they pass that cost on to buyers. I do know 320k VBR is usually undesireable, sometimes converting a 320k Mp3 back to WAV can cure some problems with frequency loss and artifacts... I don't know the specific answer to your dilemma, as flac formatted files are not usually something I use. Best of luck though! :/

I have no actual dilemma. Bandcamp is still good, and there's a chance that they will remain so. If they go away/get bad, that's just the loss of one source of high-quality music. There are others -- even if I'm only left with physical CDs.

it's a specialist catalog, but very popular within its niche

Seriously avoid any product with tencent before its too late.

On top of Qobuz (which is great) there is also Ototoy (mostly for japanese indie music).

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