Faircamp is a free Bandcamp alternative
wedistribute.org
wedistribute.org
The Bandcamp fridays, the curation, the interviews, the selectors, the IRL presence at Record Fairs or at events like Record Store Day...Considering the strong communal experience it was, the idea of federating (and further distancing) the space between the artists and the audience sounds more like a downgrade.
If you're leaving hosting and promotion entirely as an exercise to the band/artist, you're not meeting the actual need. Bandcamp (mostly) met the need of artists and music enthusiasts. Unfortunately it's now in the hands of an entity that seems to care about neither.
We're watching that start right now with AI. which is probably the real danger of AI: locked in work flows, exploited by capitalism to leverage shitty outcomes as a way to drive up profits and downgrade outcomes.
Sure, we could redefine the physical basis of this blackhole of the internet metaphor via regulations, but corporations are not governments and do not need to follow any specific multifaceted approach to long term vision.
Sure, it enables it. Without it, you probably haven't got enough users to survive anyway.
So, the choice is on the company. Money breeds bullshit and companies want money, so they leverage their leverage, which happens to be their users. Then the shit just gets worse.
TXitter is "living" proof that people don't give a shit as long as they can get their endorphins from likes. So, to some extent it's also people feeding on the validation that likes from strangers gives them and not even people they know or care about.
I'm not sure that even without corporate greed the network effect would not turn toxic.
Picture a perfectly ethical company with 2m users logging in daily and interacting across different planes. The company can do everything it can to preserve its integrity and user rights but the users themselves will enshittify eventually.
People love validation and likes are basically crack. It's changing too with short-form content sucking peoples' lives away 30 seconds at a time. Clickbait is also becoming more nefarious and AI is being leveraged to further worsen it.
IMO, the modern internet is turning into a swamp of fast-validation, instant-grattification, and endless competition for that 0.5s you have to grab a user's eyes. It's all going to shit.
Good luck watching YouTube in any sane capacity without significant effort. Also, good luck using websites that call themselves "for the real web" but morph into Medium, Substack, Reddit, and pretty much anything else.
That's me being jaded I guess. But the internet is falling in a way that most people don't care about. Same as Reddit. Same as Twitter. Nobody gives a shit about integrity as long as they can get their dopamine hits one tap at a time.
That's awesome. Bandcamp is my primary go-to for music, but I have to admit that I've never found much value in their discovery features, articles, etc. It's pretty great that Bandcamp can serve both of us what we need.
Hence my confusion over the use of the word "was".
I still listen to it every day because it's highly curated and has tracks unavailable on any service, but quality-wise it definitely feels like I'm plumbing the depths of a DVD collection when everyone else is watching Netflix.
It was really a shame when what.cd went down, that was arguably the most complete archive of recorded music anywhere.
Disclaimer: I'm far from an audiophile, I just know from personal experience that if your source is low volume and your output is cranked up you get a lot of...distortion? Interference? Artifacts? I don't know, it just sounds staticky and worse.
Mostly noise because you're amplifying it as well, and possibly artifacts because material converted at too low levels (which is the case of old CD rips that weren't normalized before encoding) wouldn't use all the available headroom, therefore losing one bit.
* not every artist has a donation link. * I don't get the album for free otherwise
So I think it's totally ok for the service to give 10% to bandcamp (or whatever camp it will be in the future).
But I would be really happy when something like Faircamp takes off, and is easy for artists to use (or labels etc.), so they would be having more control, while providing a clean interface (unlike e.g. Qobuz)
I have a completely different experience.
Bandcamp will survive because it's primarily an independent online music / record / merch store. All that other stuff is just .... it's bloat and fluff that gets in the way of the music tbh.
Since it seems like you might have not heard, as of last year bandcamp is no longer independent (which I assume is the impetus for projects like the OP):
https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/epic-games-acquires-ba...
edit: ah, unless you meant "a store for independent music" instead of "an independent store for music", english
yeah, the first one. (it's late on a thursday and terraform is being difficult, limited spare brainpower).
As somebody who obviously didn't pay attention to any artist on the platform, of course anything beyond a quick, one-click, Amazon-style storefront will be "getting in the way of the music," for you.
There's already a solution for that, though:
Go shop on Amazon, if you don't care about what percentage of the profits the artist gets. They have the patented "Buy now with 1-Click®" experience, and it'll likely be faster for you to purchase using it.
Personally, I want a world where people can afford to make music for a living, and Bandcamp was great at doing everything it could to try and make that happen for as many people as possible.
When I read the original parent it was everything else that I was like “meh, Bandcamp would be perfectly fine without any of that”
Bandcamp Fridays just got lumped into the quote tbh.
I’m tired. It’s Thursday. Terraform was kicking me in the head today.
Although I can never remember which bloody Friday is Bandcamp Friday so I think I’ve managed to do like one of them.
Bandcamp was going for like 10 years before the Fridays existed. If they needed to go to keep the store online, I’d be fine with that (not that I think that’s necessary).
Oh and I used to work for a performing royalties organisation… so… yeah… I kind of do care about how much artists get paid for their work.
Yeah it would be great if making a living off music was feasible for more people.
But the magic is in the fact that’s it’s not. There’s magic in the sacrifice.
Edit — this part of your reply was annoying me.
> As somebody who obviously didn't pay attention to any artist on the platform, of course anything beyond a quick, one-click, Amazon-style storefront will be "getting in the way of the music," for you.
For me… the connection to the artist happens through the music that I buy from them.
So you know what. Yeah, I would buy off amazon. Or boomkat. Or bleep. Or redeye. Or phonica. Or honest johns. Or SOTU. Or juno.
I’m an absolute record store whore. I have no allegiances.
Because buying the actual music is the important bit I believe.
Why?
Because no one buys music anymore.
That’s why artists have to tour so much — to make that living you spoke about. Because no one buys anything these days.
Well… I do. But I’m weird.
I couldn’t care less about instagram posts or posting photos of people hanging out in the studio tho. That stuff is pure bobbins as far as I’m concerned.
Bookmark this silly site: https://isitbandcampfriday.com/
I buy physical copies. Is good enough for me.
I can't deny that.
> Because buying the actual music is the important bit I believe.
Congratulations on abstractly purchasing music without caring how much of it actually ends up in an artist's pocket and feeling proud of it! Vinyl is 15-20% for the artist on a good day, and usually worse after vendor markups. MP3s on most platforms are at least a 15+2.5% haircut for the artist.
> That’s why artists have to tour so much — to make that living you spoke about. Because no one buys anything these days.
> But the magic is in the fact that’s it’s not. There’s magic in the sacrifice.
Saying that you didn't care about workers getting paid was weird, but equating "making music" inherently with a vow of poverty is kind of beyond the pale. You're a (presumably) well-compensated person working on something far less useful to society than music, "the cloud." Plenty of countries have programs to compensate their artists fairly (like countries that force a percentage of radio play to be in their native language, or by local artists), and these countries don't have "less magic" because of it.
I don't even blame pirates, but this weird middle ground of being willing to spend money but not caring if a good deal of it goes to corporate middlemen so you can have the abstract, hipster, "At least I buy things!" experience is so bizarre.
This doesn't sound right, there are 8 billion people in this world, a large chunk of them potential 'artists' with sufficient motivation, and not everyone is motivated by money.
- a very generous cut for the artist - how well the site functions - it does just enough, very practical. Clean UX and UI - flac
I think the absence of that sort of "pick-a-winner-and-interview-them" does a lot for making things flat and fair for all. The primary people who get grumpy about getting rid of that are the people whose job it is to be curator/interviewer/etc. I'm not terribly sad if they go away.
no one person can sift through every scene and genre to find the good shit, and there's plenty of bad shit. i can do that for like, one scene
bandcamp articles generally delivered me more quality finds with more variety than automated "you may also like..." curation systems a la spotify or last.fm.
it's not like the latter are truly democratizing anything either--once getting big on spotify (or nowadays, tiktok) became important commercially, you got a whole ecosystem of influencers behind the scenes offering promotion in those systems. getting boosted via a faceless "chill sunday morning coffee music" playlist is still curation
Today's album of the day post was about Japanese Acid Folk, not something I care about at all. But it wasn't a bad way to start the day with something new. https://daily.bandcamp.com/album-of-the-day/various-artists-...
I suppose it seemed valuable to me that the various writers or editors could focus on niches, not the best of the month and this month it is written by a metalhead.
If anything I thought the suggested albums at the bottom iss a bit too skewed toward certain bands. I'm not sure if that's targeting by user, or if there are too many connections in people's purchases to avoid making the links. On the other hand, the artist suggested albums at the bottom are almost always worth a listen if they have taken the time to add any.
The tech to create content may have exploded in the last years, but the ability to truly connect and discover (and I mean ways to build cultural, emotional and social connections in and outside of the internet) has plummeted.
I don't agree that technology is strictly at fault here, but this side of the equation has been heavily ignored due to the less immediate monetization options. We've gone for the "intensive farming" of art and culture compared to more "sustainable" approaches, and we're experiencing the equivalent of desertification following a monocolture.
I am a pretty regular listener to music on Bandcamp, and I have never heard of any of these things.
To me Bandcamp is a minimalist distribution medium and simple media player for independent artists.
I think it's neat but this isn't competition for Bandcamp. Could be cool if you just want to host some music tracks on a nicely formatted page though.
Or they could use a platform that was explicitly designed to address their needs without any fuss.
Webshop is, like, the entire point of webcamp.
Talking as an indie artist here.
I've been digitising my music collection since the early 2000s in FLAC – which was pretty expensive on disk space relative to the size of hard drives back then. It's been fun but also somewhat worrying to hear my daughter ask why I don't have every song in the universe, but also why my music plays without internet connection or dedicated app. I feel her generation won't own anything anymore, and I still have to make up my mind whether that's a good or a bad thing. Without getting political, I fear art, music, software and other intangible goods might end up acquired, centralised and in the hands of lawyers at increasingly larger monopolistic corporations, and for some reason, a lot of grassroots artist initiatives seem to falter and end up going nowhere.
I will support Bandcamp, Faircamp or any place where I can get the music I like in CD quality without DRM. I want to support artists and I hope at least some of these more independent music outlets stay alive to cater to us who care about both artists and fans not to end up as vassals to a profit-extraction rental system for third parties.
I don't know if the age ranges of our children are similar or not, but once my kids discovered that I have a huge music collection that doesn't require an internet connection, they've started assembling their own.
I think that there are a lot of people who just don't understand there are options other than streaming, or that there are benefits to having your own collection that streaming can never provide. Once they learn otherwise, they may want those benefits as well.
With my children, they still stream music from commercial providers -- but they also maintain offline collections for the music they really care about.
Doesn't have to be a literal iPod, and if it is, maybe modding one would be cool to use better formats, and might get her friends interested in the concept. A lot of the generation coming up are interested in CDs, tape and vinyl too.
This was interesting too: https://www.fastcompany.com/90974412/apple-ipods-vintage-tec...
But if you just need to easily sell your music in digital format (which is what Bandcamp started as), there are options.
There are, but very few of them seem to provide for downloading full albums in nonproprietary lossless formats.
Not to the artists who put their music there.
Looks like I can buy albums there. Check. Can I listen to a full album? It seems like you only get samples.
It also is very sparse and doesn't really give a great band presence. I'm guessing the selections are populated by labels rather than artists?
It doesn't do much at all for recommendations.
Platforms like HDtracks and Qobuz are not a "Bandcamp alternative" when considering the business reasons that artists use Bandcamp.
Bandcamp lets small independent artists upload their own songs without a distributor middleman.
In contrast, HDTracks only gets music from distributors like established record labels. Example discussion when somebody asked about it: https://gearspace.com/board/career-work/1358709-how-do-i-get...
The main pain however is that some labels (usually Sony) stubbornly don't allow lossless downloads...
That "on your server" part is going to make is unsuited for 99.9+% of bandcamp artists, and speaking as someone who buys an awful lot of music on bandcamp, I would have some concerns as well. (Not least of which being that with bandcamp I can download purchased music years after purchase, even if artists have died or bands broken up, I wouldn't have that guarantee here).
Oh, wait. They did already!
https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.h...
Bank transfer isn’t universally the most popular method of e-commerce transactions. For example, PayPal seems to be the most overwhelmingly popular online payment method in Germany. In the UK, PayPal and debit cards are the leaders. Debit cards are also generally popular globally (a debit card isn’t the same as a bank transfer).
https://blog.2checkout.com/popular-online-payment-methods-gl...
https://www.rapyd.net/blog/the-top-payment-methods-in-the-un...
This speaks more toward someone like a musician needing a solution that has many payment options to appeal to a wide breadth of customers, not some kind of dig on US e-commerce and banking because “Europe does it better and the US is stuck in the 19th century.”
Note that this isn't guaranteed, especially for smaller bands that get picked up by a label. Most of the time the label just makes the releases hidden, so they're no longer displayed publicly, but can still be downloaded. However, some labels delete the release instead, so it's no longer downloadable from your collection.
The best approach is to take advantage of the fact that Bandcamp lets you download everything and simply download everything you buy and keep backups (as you would with any other important data)
Even if there aren't labels requiring artists to hide or delete music from Bandcamp, you never know if Bandcamp could just go down one day for financial reasons and then you're screwed.
Beets doesn't maange handle the extra files that the zip often includes, such as PDFs of linear notes, the sheet music I once found included, or band photos. Maybe someday I'll figure out a good archive for everything that isn't "the literal zip file".
Looks like with this making federation available there's just a need for someone to come in and set up a trustworthy portal that collects federated music and provides the customer (music purchaser) UX. Assuming they can find a way to federate the payments (skim a small fee for using the aggregator's payments, instead of direct linking to various musician's purchasing systems), this should make hosting the infra for a site like this manageable, based on the lower decentralized media.
That's a long way to go to get to something that, in tandem, would be a 'bandcamp alternative', but I can't help but get excited for the small steps! They do often open doors for the bigger steps!
https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/candy-japan-hit... is an old (2015) but still relevant illustration of this.
Centralizing payments requires human monitoring and capital cushions. With services like Stripe this can be cheaper, but still requires nontrivial resources.
That stuff gets incredibly complicated, incredibly fast.
I'm assuming you have doubts about the practical feasibility of charging "that much". But it has, historically, been one of the best cost-to-compensation models ever created, with entire industries being built around enshrining an ever-more predatory pricing structure that funnels more and more of the product profit to a small council of investors.
>With the recent sale of Bandcamp to predatory VC extractive vultures, and the main move to finalise that sale was to fire all the recently unionised staff
I suppose the next move is to squeeze the artists, then the consumers.
Did they explicitly go after the unionized staff?
Or do they mean they fired people, and a subset of them also recently unionized?
The union filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.
After talking to some artists + musician friends, it was clear that a SSG was going to be a non-starter for most of them.
Currently it just supports simple track upload + playback, but plan is to add Artists, Albums + RSS feed.
Code: https://github.com/stereosteve/SHYM Demo: https://tunez.stereosteve.workers.dev/
There is no auth and everything you upload will be deleted in the coming days. But feel free to upload some tracks!
They have an app but it is incredibly underpowered and lacking logical features.
Each band can list their tour dates but there is no feed where users can see all of the bands that are going to be in their area, etc.
Just very frustrating because all the primitives are in place, but there’s no product vision.
Hard disagree.
The coherent vision for Bandcamp is:
- Give a place for independent musicians to upload their music to showcase and sell music and merch with one click and no fuss (and a reasonable sales cut).
- When fans buy music, they get the files (no app, software, DRM, or any bullshit).
That's all. Nothing more is needed.
The "alternative" doesn't offer that. It will fail.
Bandcamp also offers a streaming app like Spotify etc for all the music users have bought on the platform.
Cool part about Itch is that it's already got an established community around it, and that's very unlikely to change.
Still, I think getting viable alternative software is a huge checkbox on the path to getting good alternatives. Now there just needs to be an affordable hosting company that'll run Faircamp for up-and-coming artists.
For professional musicians that is a big deal
Professional musicians are a tiny proportion of musicians
For those of us who create for the love of creation payment is not the point. The main point is reach. Can I point you at my music, where you can access it without me, or you, having to be Uber geeks?
We want you to come to our shows. We would like to cover our costs, Yes, but the most important part is having an audience for our art
The cost of recording music is orders of magnitude less than it was, getting it available, with out becoming hostage tio horrid platforms (looking at you, Google) is very hard
I am hoping this will help
The next step would be to let musicians put their own songs in public libraries and let them choose between two models:
- sell direct to consumer
- pay-for-access (Patreon style). The "twist" I'm thinking would be that customers could define a global fixed monthly amount, and split to the musicians according to how much they listen.
My idea would be to take a flat fee from musicians just for the service, no commission on sales, etc. Would that be a good model? Also, how does one go on about to break the network effects of these?
Curation. Bandcamp isn't what it is because of the technology, the money, the business model or whatever. It is (was?) Bandcamp because of the curators, the community and the humans behind it.
Find the best way of replicating those things and you have a chance at least :)
The idea of using the Fediverse is precisely to leverage the existing network and to let people use my service even if its own "local" community hasn't reach critical mass yet. Maybe the question is how I can reach these people now?
I guess the industry thinks pay-per-view platforms like Amazon, YouTube, etc. are good enough?
I mean, a friend's living room is an alternative to Madison Square Garden when a musician's ambition is noodling around for a few friends.
Too bad Web3.0 crowd is all about hype and make-money-quick schemes, otherwise it's a perfect fit for the problem of selling musing directly.
Trans-border sales/transfers without crypto is a pain, thousands of musicians get locked out of their money because politicians keep playing their idiotic "big boy" games.
But for me Bandcamp is primarily a collection of music I like, like other people would have a shelf with CDs or Vinyls. This doesn't really do that. "Just install it on your server" probably sounds a lot harder to an average musican than to an average techie as well (sure, there's overlap, but it's not the same).
I also really don't understand all the comments online as if the sale from Epic to Songtrader was a sale from the boy scouts to darth vader. Didn't Epic buy them as a pawn in a legal battle? The sale people should be grumbling about was the one to Epic... and the people they should be complaining about are the founders who sold. :-/
When Epic bought the platform I do remember a similar reaction from folks, along with confusion because why would a gaming company buy a music platform, and what kind of dumb sweeping changes were they going to make? The Songtradr acquisition at least makes more sense from an industry standpoint. Personally, I feel better with the platform in their hands rather than Epic's
I guess many people will cheer that on these days, though. Conformity is the new punk?
Any examples? Which side is "wrong"?
Which is perfectly fine IMO - that stuff can stay below ground.
As for the other guy, I'll just leave you his own video on the subject to help you decide on your own whether his story makes any sense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlmGvQln2Aw&t=835s (My opinion: he deleted his own tracks to generate a fake persecution controversy. The absolute lunacy of what appears to be a white guy insisting that they banned him because he's mixed-race is ... fascinating.)
I know that's not the same for artists who have made more of an investment in it, promoted their bandcamp.com URLs and all, but as a consumer I'm content to continue using it as long as it delivers value to me, and cease using it when it does not.
I'd rather Bandcamp be independent and am still upset they sold out, but I like Songtradr much better than Epic as an owner. Their main business is facilitating B2B sales, which I think of as the same category as what Bandcamp does. They don't own music (except incidentally, from acquisitions) and don't have ties to RIAA and major labels like Spotify does.
Main source for Songtradr info, although I've also done some outside reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37699552
Perhaps people in the electronic scene are wary after the experience of Beatport selling to SFX and rapidly starting to suck. But in that case Beatport had already been trying to reinvent itself to some degree for several years ahead of the sale. Bandcamp was different because it pretty much knew what it was going to be in the beginning and still is that now, so it seems like a sustainable business, as long as the new owners are willing to just let it be.
- Virtually immediately following the Songtrader acquisition using the credit card checkout began giving 'security code mismatch' errors. This is a false positive and clicking the 'Complete purchase' button about a minute later is the workaround I've been using since. I'd never experienced the error in the years prior and this has been tried with multiple different cards.
- There's no longer a live ticker on the home page showing the latest track/album purchases around the world.
Still there for me.
Nope, I also have cross-site cookies blocked and no issues with the ticker
Did we ever get clarification if that was blanket layoffs including their tech talent or they were mostly targeted cutting of secondary stuff like the journalistic wings?
Which, I mean it sucks for the writers that were there, but the journalism wasn't part of Bandcamp I was using, and I assume that's the case for most others. If the tech side is still generally intact? I would assume it would stay hunky dory.
Anyhow, Epic runs an e-store and generally treats its employees well and so I was fine with them taking it - there was synergy there.
Songtradr seems to be mostly about hoarding music rights, and is buying up music e-stores left and right, and did a large downsizing first thing after they bought Bandcamp. I think pessimism there made sense.
Don't forget, you can only upload original tunes to bandcamp (no covers). If songtradr wants to exploit those rights further (publishing licensing, better PRO work, etc), they have to pay the artists - which most artists would love.
What? Here’s a black metal cover of Hit me Baby (One more time): https://spider-god.bandcamp.com/track/baby
There are tons of covers on BC, never heard of that restriction.
Presumably they don't bother enforcing unless the rights holder makes a complaint.
See "are covers ok" here (this predated the Songtradr acquisition, FWIW) https://bandcamp.com/terms_of_use
Apple sells all types of digital goods - movies, music, and games/apps.
Google used to sell the same 3 types of digital goods, until they decided selling music instead of renting it is an anachronism.
A true merger of Epic Store and Bandcamp would give Epic a similar kind of positioning as Google and Apple. Come to our e-shop to buy and download digital goods.