I will shamelessly promote the bandcampsync [1] CLI tool for automating downloads of your bandcamp library and bandcamp-sync-flask [2] wrapper that I built so I could invoke it from the web on my phone after I buy an album.
I had been using a combination of aria2 and a link scraper plugin for years to download bulk out of bandcamp because of how fast their API will time out.
Thanks for sharing your work!
Rate Your Music (RYM) has been invaluable for me in discovering loads of music, I'd highly recommend it
I looked up an artist there (Dio), and then an album (Holy diver). Neither page helped me find "similar" music
You can also click on any one of the band/album's genres and look at the charts.
Maybe I should set that goal as well, for 2025 I had 120 ;)
Love bandcamp, love navidrome! And if you are on Android and don’t mind using closed source, paid (one-time) software, Symfonium is pretty much the best mobile player you can get for selfhosted streaming.
The best part for me is going to record stores again. CDs are SO cheap now, especially used ones. I’ll usually pick a few out of the dollar bin just based on vibes and the cover and rip them when I get home. I’ve found some cool stuff. It’s like a treasure hunt.
Don’t miss Spotify one bit.
Also the price of decent (Sony hifi grade, not ES) CD players used is great too.
Frank turner-ish vibes but I don't think it was actually him.
It's completely un-googlable though, and even the LLMs aren't much help on this one.
Yes, it is (unless the CD player is so bad that it can't do adequate error correction). What I do is rip the CD to my music server, which is where I listen to the music from. Then the quality of the CD player isn't important, as long as it works correctly.
most tools do it badly and just accept what the drive gives them in default mode, often with glitches
Like, ripping seems easy to me, you rip with something that supports a checksum database, and if it comes out with a correct checksum then it's right.
Also not everything is in AR/CTDB. Maybe 3% of the 1000+ CDs I've ripped had no records yet, though I do tend towards the obscure. I rip these again with EAC, which is set up to automatically do CTDB submission. (Usually I'm using the redumper tool which has some specialized features.)
Without external verification it's best to dump it twice and ensure they're bit equal, preferably with a different drive to minimize error correlation.
Only issues come from damaged retail discs and dead burned ones.
The industry has collectively decided that since CDs/DVDs are just about converting digital bits into other bits deterministically, there's no value left to differentiate, and everyone started selling absolutely nasty plasticky junk.
The new Sony unit I got was a loud rattly garbage, that even though it did the things it needed to do, made such an awful noise that I had to take it back. The other one I got (don't remember the brand) was no better.
I took that one back too, and I shelved the issue, but it was kind of remarkably terrible experience for me.
Is it a budget issue or sound quality issue?
I say this as my primary CD player is actually a Panasonic DVD player from the year 2000. This is the exception that proves the rule. At the turn of the century many quality DVD players were sold and marketed as primarily CD players with the added capability of being able to sell DVDs.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/317751858636 e.g. £65 doesn't even remotely get you close to listenable in vinyl.
I don't understand this, are you saying higher than ES or lower than ES?
I thought ES was their top "Elevated" Standard?
Also my library card is much better for legacy music exploration. It scales too.
There's a tool called cdparanoia[1] whose goal is to babysit the CD drive and ensure that it gets a complete, perfect, uninterrupted stream of bits off the drive, and will use a lot of tricks to go back and re-read any data that didn't come back cleanly. I always used it with abcde[2], which was a wrapper around it with album lookup, tagging, and ffmpeg support. I highly recommend anyone amassing a CD rip collection take a look at it, both are still packaged in present-day Ubuntu.
[1] https://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html [2] https://abcde.einval.com/wiki/
Or you can run EAC in wine.
Make sure you enable its MusicBrainz support. I used to painstakingly input all the band / album / track title metadata but then discovered that people were already doing it for me.
However, then you go down the MB rabbit hole with obscure music that no one has ever inputted. Still, it's a quick and easy way to contribute and then it's available for everyone.
In case you'd like to take a look, shameless self promotion: https://aaronholbrook.bandcamp.com/music
I have to go through my back catalog, and add all my music, but I appreciate your perspective and for wanting to support artists!
So validating to know someone enjoyed my work enough to buy it.
Thank you to everyone who's taken a listen, and thank you to the person that bought it!
<3
I listen mostly in the old school way, full albums of my favourite artists, so I suppose it would be quite unexpected to stumble into AI music this way.
If you are explictitly looking for music by specific artists, then you get their music obviously.
I love this conspiracy theory. Which track doesn't Spotify pay royalties for? Considering that it licenses 100% of its music from external distributors.
"Why pay royalties if it's just going to be BGM for a massage parlor?" could be their reasoning.
If a corporation can do something that will make them more money than they'd make not doing it you should expect them to do the profitable thing. Corporations don't care about ethics or even the law. Maximizing shareholder value is their purpose. They exist only to take from the many and give to the few. It's not a conspiracy theory to assume that they'll be doing exactly what they are designed to do.
When they do that, let's talk. But that's not what I asked, is it?
https://edm.com/news/spotify-using-ghost-artists-minimize-ro...
As I already wrote elsewhere, no one, including the article's own authors, understood a single thing from the article.
Spotify doesn't produce its own music. It licenses 100% of its music from external distributors. Apart from a few scammy companies there are dozens of companies whose entire repertoire and catalog is ambient/background/noise/elevator/shopping mall music etc. that they commission from ghost composers.
There is literally money being paid to distributors for these tracks. To quote the original article you didn't even read, this one: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
--- start quote ---
Epidemic’s selling point is that the music is royalty-free for its own subscribers, but it does collect royalties from streaming services; these it splits with artists fifty-fifty.
--- end quote ---
Wait, what about "no royalties" crap? Oh, all of that is just "per Pelly". Though I'll admit that there are probably companies that license music for a flat fee (though I assume those would be rare).
Also note: Spotify doesn't pay artists. Spotify doesn't have direct contracts with artists. Spotify pays distributors and rights holders. And then those, in turn, pay royalties based on their contracts with artists. (According to one of the ghost artists interviewed, he is paid significantly more than he would be if he was trying to release music himself, BTW).
So Indiy artists can't directly put their music on Spotify? Sorry I have no idea how this works, I guess that's the point of Bandcamp?
No one can put their music directly on Spotify.
--- start quote ---
https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/getting-music...
Distributors handle music distribution and pay streaming royalties.
Work with a distributor to get your music on Spotify.
# Choose a distributor
See our preferred and recommended distributors: https://artists.spotify.com/providers
These distributors meet our highest standards for quality metadata and anti-infringement measures.
Note: Most distributors charge a fee or commission. Each service is unique, so do a little research before picking one.
If you’re a signed artist, your record label likely already works with a distributor who can deliver your music.
--- end quote ---
It used to just be stuff like white noise and rain sounds, but it has expanded to essentially be a modern Muzak replacement.
For situations when people don really want “music” and just need “contextually appropriate aesthetically pleasing sound”
Someone had clearly just set up a few prompts and let the AI get on with it, creating probably hundreds of channels of this stuff.
But unless these tracks are treated differently in Spotify's payout system, they're extremely profitable, and because payments come from a common pool, they hoover up payments which would otherwise have gone to artists people actually like.
This only happens in genres where most listeners don't care about the artists they're listening to, think "chillout", "focus" or "easy listening." That kind of music is a commodity, Taylor Swift (or Metallica or Mozzart or whatever) is not. This has been proven.
My hypothesis is that those genres would otherwise lose Spotify the most money, as people often play that kind of music and never turn it off. Because Spotify pays per listen, the user who attentively listens to their favorite artist a few times a week is much better for them than somebody who has "chillout" playing on their echo 24/7.
Spotify doesn't have deals with artists because Spotify doesn't have direct contract with artists. Only with distributors.
> My hypothesis is that those genres would otherwise lose Spotify the most money,
How would they "lose Spotify money", and how is this different from top artists on Spotify?
No one actually understands what's written in this article, including the authors themselves.
Also note how you didn't provide a single track that Spotify allegedly pays no royalties for.
Literally in the very article everyone links to but is incapable of reading there's even this text:
--- start quote ---
Epidemic’s selling point is that the music is royalty-free for its own subscribers, but it does collect royalties from streaming services; these it splits with artists fifty-fifty.
--- end quote ---
The allegation is that Spotify pays out to entities which are ultimately owned by themselves, or that they get kickbacks in other ways like ad purchases (probably illegal, but hard to prove if you're at all clever about it).
I remember I found a track a few years ago, by the artist Mayhem. No, not the metal band. The background music artist Mayhem. Which only ever released two tracks. One of which, "Solitude Hymns", happened to get featured in one of Spotify's playlists, and managed to rack up more plays than any track by the more famous metal band at the time.
They haven't scrubbed it. Just look it up.
It's not really unsourced. It's just very rarely talked about. I think you may get an article once every 10 years questioning the actual rights holders and distributors.
I mean, you get people in these discussions on HN that don't even know that Spotify (and other streaming services) don't even have direct contracts with artists and everything is going through intermediaries.
> I remember I found a track a few years ago, by the artist Mayhem. No, not the metal band. The background music artist Mayhem. Which only ever released two tracks. One of which, "Solitude Hymns", happened to get featured in one of Spotify's playlists, and managed to rack up more plays than any track by the more famous metal band at the time.
Thank you! You're the only one who could point out a weird track.
41K monthly listeners for the band. The track got 20 million plays because it was featured.
That's where the gray zone begins: was this band with two songs picked because it is cheaper to include (for whatever reason) or was it just lucky (like some other bands that got big through streaming like Glass Animals).
What is hard though, is finding out which aggregator/intermediary/record company collected the payments for mayfly Mayhem's plays. I have not succeeded at that, if you find a way to get that information out of Spotify, do tell me. It's probably actually easier to find out who made the music. MBW managed to find out that at least some of these tracks were made by well-connected Swedish producers, as I recall.
There are a billion ways you could cash in on this. A dead easy one is "music written for hire by a company you own".
Even if Spotify is not doing the slightest thing like this, suggesting that they might is not a conspiracy theory. Quit trying to tar every proposed view of the world you disagree with with that label. You're just making it easier for the actual grand conspiracy theorists.
> Even if Spotify is not doing the slightest thing like this, suggesting that they might is...
...textbook definition of conspiracy theory
Also note how your entire text is just unsubstantiated claims. Including emotionally charged words like "terrorist cell" that give your words so much weight and meaning.
You would not call a prosecutor who accuses someone of "criminal conspiracy" a conspiracy theorist, even though they have a theory that someone is conspiring.
A terrorist cell is just another example of a real type of group which obviously conspires. You're not a conspiracy theorist for believing they exist.
Conspiracy theorists is something we call people who believe in a grand conspiracy, one which, had it been real, would have required superhuman levels of coordination and secrecy. That's the brush you for some mysterious reason want to tar critics of Spotify with.
And for the second time this week, someone demands "evidence" for expressions of distrust.
Funny then that to illustrate your point you use this example: "You would not call a prosecutor who accuses someone of 'criminal conspiracy' a conspiracy theorist". You know what separates criminal prosecutors from conspiracy theorists? They have to provide evidence.
Or this example: "A terrorist cell is just another example of a real type of group which obviously conspires. You're not a conspiracy theorist for believing they exist." Yes, because we have evidence that they exist.
See how this works? A theory with no supporting evidence is a crackpot theory.
For example, I can say anything I want about you. When asked about evidence, I can lapse into demagoguery about terrorist cells or something. Perhaps you are a part of a terrorist cell? Otherwise, why bring them into discussion?
And sure, if you insist I'll refrain from speculating why you're so obsessed with defending a megacorporation and insisting they deserve the benefit of doubt. Feel free to provide evidence to explain. (Remember, by your own standard, your own opinions aren't evidence).
I'm pointing out unsubstantiated claims, often to people who don't know jack shit about music industry (e.g. that's why almost every comment in this thread has a variation of "Spotify doesn't pay artists, Spotify pays rights holders")
Note how you still haven't said anything of substance except emotions and ad hominems. But sure, your position is correct and valid, and not mine.
Since many high volume Spotify users just want “something jazzy” in the background, it helps them reduce royalties.
Spotify doesn't do it because Spotify doesn't produce music and doesn't have direct contracts with musicians.
> Since many high volume Spotify users just want “something jazzy” in the background, it helps them reduce royalties.
How does it help them reduce royalties when they don't produce their own music and license 100% of their music from distributors and rights holders?
1. Spotify doesn't pay artists. Spotify doesn't have direct contracts with artists. Spotify pays rights holder and distributors.
I really wish people who have strong opinions on music industry learned at least the absolute bare minimum about the subject.
2. Again, bringing back to my original comment: where's the evidence for that? E.g. the one and only article everyone links [1] and doesn't bother to understand literally has statements like this:
--- start quote ---
But at the end of the day, [the ghost musician] said, it was still a paycheck: “I did it because I needed a job real bad and the money was better than any money I could make from even successful indie labels, many of which I worked with,” he told me.
...
Epidemic’s selling point is that the music is royalty-free for its own subscribers, but it does collect royalties from streaming services; these it splits with artists fifty-fifty.
--- end quote ---
That doesn't mesh well with the narrative of "Spotify bad, doesn't pay royalties, etc.", does it?
[1] https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
You are still being unnecessarily pedantic. Most of us understand that there are layers to this, but ultimately, what we care about is how much an artist is paid per stream and what streams are being preferred over others.
https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/help-information/site-modera...
Partially correct. That only happens if you don't have the loop functionality activated.
Autopilot in, autopilot out.
But still fuck this AI slop.
I have more than enough music made by humans to listen to for the rest of my life without ever turning to algorithmic recommendations.
I am vindicated in my choice to use an ipod with an aux jack every time Android Auto can't decide whether to connect over USB or bluetooth and just doesn't play audio until I restart the phone and the car...
Spotify, on the other hand, induced a level of visceral disgust I'd never felt before when I stumbled across an AI-generated album supposedly made by an artist I enjoy. In this case it was somebody that had been dead for 15 years - they were hijacking her Spotify page to promote it as a new release. I'm not an AI reactionary but I found this absolutely fucking gross. Having AI-generated music for four-hour YouTube videos of anime girls sitting in apartments on a rainy day is fine. Desecrating the body of work of a departed musician is decidedly not.
It's like being mad at your bank that somebody stole your credit card on the subway and made purchases with it.
FTFY.
Do not shift blame here. Spotify is actively complicit in this. Hell, they could sic a few crafty data scientists on this and build an ML model to weed these bad tracks out. It'd be great PR for them ("we're saving artists from stolen revenue and preserving the sanctity of their work") and would be a novel contribution to the field of fraud prevention. The problem is that they're not incentivized to do so.
And, by the way, card transaction fees exist to cover the exact case you're talking about. Card companies make you whole in the case of fraud.
FWIW, so does BC. Stuff gets eventually deleted, but last year there was a leaked pirated copy of an album for sale for over a week, over a month before release.
It had been there for years and hundreds of people had paid for it.
It's being mad that a store sold me a counterfeit rolex, actually. Spotify might claim to just be a "marketplace" like every other platform these days, but they're still the ones hosting that page that passes off slop as legitimate work by another artist. Spotify has a responsibility to govern what is hosted and sold on their platform.
But guess what, they fired Glenn and now the slop runs wild.
But I absolutely don't agree that Bandcamp does recommendations well. To me, it seems like they don't personalize at all. Maybe you're just lucky enough to share the taste of the (at least human) taste makers at Bandcamp. Spotify's pre-enshittification Discover Weekly was miles better than whatever they do. My experience with old brick and mortar record stores was that at best they stocked a little of the music I enjoyed, but didn't have a clue about it. Most often they didn't stock it at all.
I agree with that but I haven't yet seen a system that does recommendations well for me, so I don't see that as a differentiating point.
If I think I'm talking with a person and it turns out that I'm talking with a machine, I've been duped and will likely be angry about it.
Another way to think about it is that when it comes to art, "the ends justify the means" doesn't really work because the whole point is more the means than the ends.
Maybe if a person generated 50,000 songs, not even listening to them, you could have a point. Although, even in that case, regardless of the lack of an "artist's intention," there is the interpretation of what people will take from that thing. And that interpretation is often different from what the author originally had in mind. Hell, most people don't know the author of most movies, TV shows, and the like they watched. In other words, to me, it's more about what people take from that thing, as opposed to "Oh, what that sentient being was trying to communicate?"
And I do believe a sufficiently advanced AI model would be able to mimic or synthesize human knowledge/worries/dramas in such a profound way that, regardless of "intention to communicate," it would be able to create things that people would relate to and take deeper meaning from.
Also: the very dataset where that thing was trained wasn't trained on an alien dataset, with an alien culture and the like, all originating from poems written by real people, movies by real people, etc., etc. The model learned from human culture; therefore, whatever it produces is a reflection of that culture, which people could and most likely will relate to, and, hell, they are already doing that.
But even taking the argument at face value, "Oh, human creation," someone might have used AI, but they were still involved in all parts of the creation process, like writing the lyrics, curating the data, and the very fact of them choosing a song and saying, "Hey, I liked that, I will share it with people," would already be a communication.
Of course. My interpretation is an important part as well, but that comes from me, not the artist, so is a bit different. Well, maybe I should say that the meaning and importance of a song is in the confluence of the artist and myself. I did want to clarify something, though -- I'm not really talking about the "artist's intention" here. That's a different thing, too.
The emotional communication I'm talking about happens even if I have no idea what the artist's conscious intention was, or even if I don't know who the artist is.
> And I do believe a sufficiently advanced AI model would be able to mimic or synthesize human knowledge/worries/dramas in such a profound way that, regardless of "intention to communicate," it would be able to create things that people would relate to and take deeper meaning from.
Perhaps so! But that kind of simulacrum is something I have absolutely no interest in. In fact, I find the idea of it a bit repulsive.
> someone might have used AI, but they were still involved in all parts of the creation process, like writing the lyrics
If an artist actually created the thing, then it's not an AI generated song. It's a human created song that may have involved AI as a tool. I'm talking more about if a human just describes the song they want to an AI and the AI creates the rest.
That said, I'm particularly averse to AI vocals, because vocals are particularly intimate for me. A song that has a machine as a singer is a song I'll reject even if the rest was created by a human.
> the very fact of them choosing a song and saying, "Hey, I liked that, I will share it with people," would already be a communication.
Technically true, but that's nowhere near the kind of communication I'm talking about. That has little value to me unless the person sharing it and myself know each other very, very well. Then, it's a communication/connection between that person and me, which can make it a great thing even if the song wouldn't resonate with me on its own.
I mean, art is inherently about human experience and emotion. Each of us resonates with certain types of art and doesn't resonate with other types. All I'm trying to do here is explore and maybe explain what resonates or not with me. I am in no way saying that anybody else should share my tastes.
If a prompt returned the most perfect song, I would still not care to listen as that to me has completely divorced any human element that I would be interested in. Would not find it to be inspiring nor aspirational no matter how "good" it sounded so the models themselves could get exponentially better, but the manner in which it was created will prevent me from ever listening or caring about. It will always be hollow and lifeless.
Again, this is personal preference. If it makes others happy, that's great. In other many other mediums, I'm probably fine with that reduction in human-ness (where others may not be).
Do you run and grab your phone to id the artist before you decide to tap your foot?
Art is interesting and challenges you because you choose to have that reaction to it. Part of the reason for making that choice comes from what you believe about the origin of the art.
The concept that there is some hidden quality to human made art strikes me as the same line of thinking that lead people to try to measure the weight of the soul.
Art is someone making creative choices. It's someone putting a bit of themselves and their own lived experiences out there because they wanted to share it.
I used to enjoy Lostprophets before the news about the singer SAing children came out. You cannot disconnect your relationship with the artist from the art.
This has only happened once. The rest of the time, I will be listening to a radio playlist as I work when a song comes on that makes me go "Wait a minute." Checking the song's cover art, clearly AI. Artist page? 30 singles in 2025, every one with AI cover art. The bio reads like a Suno prompt (and probably is). The uploader then gets tossed in the proverbial bin.
The above has been happening more and more often. To the point where it's about 30% of the songs I hear on the radio playlist, as of this week. I'm in the process of migrating over to Deezer as a consequence. They label AI-generated music and do not recommend them or include them in radio playlists.
Edit: Not the exact same artist, but I searched a generic song name to find an AI slopper. This one AI-inserting himself into pictures with women for cover art is the same idea as the one putting himself in pictures with celebrities like Ariana Grande. https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kEPAFHKkMPF1...
I have this discussion all the time about written stories. At some point AI will start creating very good and possibly great written works. Do we ignore them because they are AI? I would hope not.
Of course, it's not exactly the same situation, but if I listen to a song and appreciate that the vocalist sounds cool and they're doing some technically difficult things, I am definitely less impressed to find out it's a computer program. And it also means I can't find other songs with that vocalist's same artistic sense because they don't have one, they're a computer program who can sound like anything.
If a robot ai basketball team was authentic enough to have hoodwinked me into thinking it was a real entertaining team then it has become a different question than whether or not I would knowingly participate as a spectator in an AI basketball league.
I have less than zero interest in art that isn't made by humans.
This whole discussion reminds me of Milli Vanilli from the 90s. They were hugely popular with a few songs and then people found out it wasn't actually them singing. It was a big scandal and the songs because unpopular instantly. I was always a bit confused by the crash because it's not like the song on the radio changed at all.
If you find out that the relationship is based on a lie, then the relationship can switch from "great" to "horrible" instantly.
Most of the music I like is loops pasted together in some DAW. Sure, it requires taste to make a good song but if AI figure out how to replicate that taste can crank out catchy tunes I wouldn't have a problem with it. I can only guess though that too much of a good thing will lead to be getting bored with it ... maybe.
It's not like most pop music isn't formulaic. I enjoy the currently popular songs from K-Pop Demon Hunters but they're so cliche, if they turned out to be AI generated I wouldn't be surprised :P
BUT I also recognize that is NOT how most people feel, and that's fine.
I like the idea of my money going to the artists. And, you can "buy the catalog", give an artist $150 or so to get ALL their music. I have a couple composers who I adore so that was a no-brainer. If I was going to pay them for most of their work anyway, why not give them the money now?
I still have a family AppleMusic subscription mostly because my kids use it a lot especially in the car, but I want to go back to owning creative works and compensating artists instead of renting.
*Note i am hobbyist songwriter (melody and lyrics) since a teen (few decades ago)and use Suno. It makes my songs sound just like everyone elses cookie cutter crap... it has no soul to it.. just the feel of tech billionaires getting filthy rich off destroying society/humanity!
Do make sure to back everything up, though, I remember when Google Play Music was shut down and I needed to download everything (fortunately it was announced well beforehand so there was no need to rush).
7digital is also pretty good, I've bought a bunch of Saxon and Rainbow albums on there. As awesome as Bandcamp is, many bigger artists don't have a presence there (although King Diamond's entire discography is on there, that's cool).