Hacker News Reader

Comment by politelemon | Hacker News Reader

Some places such as Amazon and Bandcamp still allow downloading the music files. Is there a similarly lopsided revenue model in these cases, as there is for streaming?

Anyway it seems that the industry is pleased with where it ended up, the link between then and now is a bit tenuous. However it's also on us that we willingly handed over control to streaming companies for the convenience. Think about the number of times we've justified something by it being the cost of a few coffees a month. TV, music, Adobe.

View on HN

I follow 2 rules:

1. If an artist has a bandcamp, I buy.

2. there is no second rule

Indeed. I used to buy amazon mp3s, but they jacked around a couple of times to make it harder to download whole albums, at which point I stopped and won't buy on amazon anymore. I know currently it's pretty easy to download whole albums, but they torched my trust. On Bandcamp, I buy it. Not on Bandcamp, nope.

Qobuz has a pretty chill process too. I don't actually trust their servers that much, (or anyone server) so I download albums as soon as I bought them. What I wish for when downloading digitally is getting the booklet (or liner notes) of the albums. It's nice knowing who was involved in the project and the thoughts/story of the artists.

0. If an artist sells direct I buy directly from their site.

Only if that artist can provide me with a voucher code to “purchase” the bandcamp music which allows me to stream/play offline in the app. Exception being vinyl-only releases by which usually a high quality WAV is provided to buyers.

Many artists I follow are not on Spotify anyway.

Once one of my favorite underground artists deleted his album that was available on soundcloud. I messaged the guy without expecting any response, imagine how shocked I was when the guy made the album public on bandcamp just for me so I could download it for free. No way, I had to buy it

7/10 is my Bandcamp threshold (NYP releases can go as low as 6/10), off-Bandcamp that rises to 8/10 (personal ratings, not some music site), both for CDs that I’ll then rip into the FLACs I’d have downloaded off Bandcamp, and the bad-for-archival MP3s.

And of course, there’s the Japanese where you are often lucky if they even release something on a public streaming platform, physical releases are expensive imports and even Apple/Amazon often don’t sell the digital files.

>Amazon

Guarantee you these are lots of bootlegs and other-region copies behind resold. So probably Amazon is worst for the artists because even the labels are getting cheated there.

>Bandcamp

As I understand it, this is (was?) one of the few places an artist could still get a good deal. Bandcamp positions itself more as a marketplace and takes (iirc) 16ish percent. Let me check that against their website:

"when a fan buys something on Bandcamp, an average of 82% of the money goes to you" (https://bandcamp.com/artists?from=footer)

So yeah, they get a lot of the niche weird music. I buy a lot of NWOTHM music off there for this reason.

Also, Bandcamp has "Bandcamp Fridays" (or similar name), where for the entire day, 100% goes to the artists.

I keep a list of music that I add to when I come across something I want to buy, then when the Bandcamp Friday comes around, buy everything on the list.

Hello fellow NWOTHM fan. (So much of it is so bad, but every now and then there is something awesome)

Not normally a big fan of the genre, but in case you missed it, there was the slightly proggy, slightly powery trad release last year that exploded in popularity (relative terms, 281 Bandcamp buys which is more than most of the music I buy :D) earlier this year: Mother's Guilty Pleasure Part One by Noor https://noorband.bandcamp.com/album/mothers-guilty-pleasure-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com