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.
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.
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.
Bookmark this silly site: https://isitbandcampfriday.com/
I buy physical copies. Is good enough for me.
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.
Hence my confusion over the use of the word "was".
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.
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.
* 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 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.
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.
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.
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
- a very generous cut for the artist - how well the site functions - it does just enough, very practical. Clean UX and UI - flac
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.
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.
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.
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.