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Comment by alisson_dover | Hacker News Reader

Because it's a different business? No one needs to run anything. Bandcamp offers an easy way for musicians to have a fairly customizable online presence with a flexible pricing model, a merch store, and, importantly, plug into a larger platform's discoverability mechanism.

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yeah but when i talk to artists, they tell me they love the process of creating music. they don't have the money or interest for procurement, warehousing or customer support. They just want feedback on their new beat...

I think that's probably why they use Bandcamp. They aren't interested in setting up their own ecommerce presence.

That's the idea of Bandcamp.

Get the benefits of those things without doing them yourself.

Every band is eventually faced with making a tough decision:

1) Do it for the love of the music.

2) Become a business.

Some bands are lucky enough to do both - not most. Survivorship Bias is key here, and the overwhelming majority of bands do not make any money or perhaps even lose money chasing their passion.

"Just getting feedback" is cool when you're in it for the love of music. For the rest - you do need a way to market yourself, sell merchandise, promote your next show, sell downloads or CD's, etc.

Even then, I think Bandcamp fills the niche for musicians who want to continue doing it for the love of music and want to better serve their community. E.g. they can offer downloadable lossless music for free.

The vast majority of profession artists I know and love have a Bandcamp account. Maybe in the early stages musicians just want feedback on their new "beat". However, at some point they want to have a professional looking profile with releases that they can sell, with a community they can reach out to, merchandise they can roll out at their own pace, etc etc.

You are probably talking to very early stage musicians who would enjoy using Soundcloud over Bandcamp for feedback reasons.

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