12 ms·

Is Bandcamp the Holy Grail of Online Record Stores?

195 points by joshjkim 10y ago

terinjokes 10y ago
Bandcamp's support is awesome as well. In a previous era, I would stream my library from an old Mac to my laptop via iTunes Shared Libraries, with most of my collection being in Apple Lossless. However, ALAC files from Bandcamp wouldn't stream. Core Audio described the tracks from Bandcamp as "not optimized". Apple closed the radar (http://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=2014403 http://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=2014403) as a duplicate without any indication of what was wrong. Bandcamp took a look at the issue and changed their transcoding pipeline to ensure they generated "optimized" ALAC files. I still buy albums from Bandcamp, but with iTunes compatibility no longer a concern, I now download the FLAC versions. To be different I then losslessly transcode to WavPack, but that's a discussion for another forum.
gp7 10y ago
1. Not nearly just punk. What?? 2. I hate short articles
- astronautjones 10y ago
  The author is stating that they typically used it for punk, only recently noticing bigger and more mainstream acts are using the service. As a musician, I can't sing their praises enough. Especially if you aren't particularly huge (<10,000 copies are being sold) and you're part of a community, there is virtually no benefit at all to publishing on itunes/spotify/play.
  - robryan 10y ago
    Is that really the consensus for small artists on Spotify? If I get a band recommendation or stumble across someone (online or happen to see them live) the first place I am going to look for more of their stuff is Spotify. Sure a small act is going to make no money out of it but I think that they would have more chance of increasing their fan base which will pay for things in the future.
    - k-mcgrady 10y ago
      >> Is that really the consensus for small artists on Spotify? It's not. I don't think there is any consensus with this stuff and there doesn't need to be. You need to do what's best for you. If you can't spend most of the year touring then ignoring streaming and focusing on bandcamp is the way to go. If you want to tour and grow your audience Spotify is essential imo, especially if you're targeting a younger demographic. It's amazing how quickly your music spreads when it hits a playlist (even just a regular users playlist that their friends follow).
- careersuicide 10y ago
  Bandcamp has been heavily used by many hardcore punk bands for a few years now. The ability to charge a reasonable price for high quality downloads or give them away for free and also sell physical media like records and tapes is a huge deal for lots of punks. There's been several ways of digital distribution of music before Bandcamp, but few of them offered an easy means of getting up and running and monetizing the music in multiple ways (if desired, that you don't have to at all is super important here). It's really the convergence of features rather than any one in particular. I think for punk bands that might not even be on a label being able to get your music out there without a big upfront investment is more important than artists on larger labels because in that case distribution is usually at least partially handled. That's why the hardcore punk scene has been somewhat of an early adopter of Bandcamp when compared to more mainstream artists. Also, the band the article mentions in the first paragraph, Mace, is totally worth a listen. Definitely one of my favorite bands coming out of the Midwest right now. If you can get your hands on volume 2 the "No Friends" zine it comes with a flexi that has them and some other great stuff on it.
  - astronautjones 10y ago
    > Also, the band the article mentions in the first paragraph, Mace, is totally worth a listen. Definitely one of my favorite bands coming out of the Midwest right now. If you can get your hands on volume 2 the "No Friends" zine it comes with a flexi that has them and some other great stuff on it. Might just be the guitars and the logo, but getting a heavy Urban Blight vibe! Cool stuff
- sctb 10y ago
  Please comment civilly and substantively here or not at all. HN threads are intended to be conversations, not a place for drive-by one-offs. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
FungalRaincloud 10y ago
I'm going to assume Betteridge's law applies here... ...And now that I've read the article, I think I'm right. This sounds like an advertisement, to be honest. But I'm not really even sold. I feel like if the argument is that it's more directly supporting the artists, maybe it would be better to use something like Patreon[0]? [0] https://www.patreon.com/ https://www.patreon.com/
- unforswearing 10y ago
  Bandcamp and Patreon serve artists at different scales. As a part-time musician who uses bandcamp for bands/solo projects, I much prefer the "single product" model (fans paying for a single track/ep/album as they choose) rather than an ongoing payment structure. I have zero illusions that I'm ever going to "get big" (read: support myself) from making music, so bandcamp allows me the opportunity to share my music and if fans choose to pay for it, great! I'd feel very uncomfortable soliciting recurring payment for something I do a few times per month.
  - 6stringmerc 10y ago
    Very nice to read your perspective, especially as you describe yourself as self-funded (aka part-time). Making money from sound recordings is like a lottery - to me, unless it's being approached by an ad agency offering industry rates for a campaign, a recording is simply like a business card. I enjoy sharing my music creations and would rather they "be out in the wild" than try to pile up penny fractions that won't even buy me a tank of gas. I'm happy you like your path! Keep on doing what you do when you can.
    - razster 10y ago
      Win the tune lotto and off you go to the big boys. Seems so.
      - 6stringmerc 10y ago
        Worked for CHVRCHES - always loved how one of the dudes wore his SoundCloud ballcap as kind of an indicator of how they started. Their Guitar Center Sessions episode is very much worth the view in my opinion.
tomdell 10y ago
This was well-written and a good read, but I found this passage - "I do not like this word — curated." - a little funny, coming from a music critic.
kderbe 10y ago
Bandcamp is the first place I look to buy music from a band I like, because of their fair revenue share. Many times, it's the only place I look: I'm reluctant to shop at other online music stores and streaming services because so much of the music industry is toxic, and I don't want to put money into that system to sustain it.
bootload 10y ago
"The artist gets 85 percent. Always, the artist gets to know who’s buying, without a third party in the way." This quote sums up why Bandcamp makes sense to artists. Listening now to music off Bandcamp. Buy Vinyl also get .flac an the artist gets the dollars and data. How good is that.
- bisby 10y ago
  DRM free flac is one of the main reasons I go bandcamp when available. I have my own in home media server, so being able to actually have the songs is important.
  - dzhiurgis 10y ago
    What I would like to know is whether it is actual flac or if Bancamp just converts artist supplied mp3s.
    - astronautjones 10y ago
      Artists are required to upload WAV, AIF, or FLAC.
    - pmh 10y ago
      Bandcamp requires lossless audio formats (https://bandcamp.com/help/uploading#aiffwavuploadrequirement https://bandcamp.com/help/uploading#aiffwavuploadrequirement), so it's up to the artist/album whether it's a transcode.
      - dzhiurgis 10y ago
        Ok going deeper into the rabbit hole: you never know what did the artist sampled it from :-)
        mynewtb 10y ago
        If the artist made their music as Mp3 then you should accept that as the way they intended it to sound.
Mizza 10y ago
I really like that Bandcamp supports "pay what you want" as an option, I find I'm always more likely to buy music when that's a possibility. That being said, I also wrote a BandCamp scraper, https://github.com/Miserlou/SoundScrape https://github.com/Miserlou/SoundScrape , so maybe I have weird priorities. Either way, I love BC way, way more than SoundCloud. In the long run, at the scale that BC-type artists operate, I think that the merch game is actually bigger than the paying-for-music game. They've made a few moves in that space, but I get the impression that BigCartel is actually the sleeping giant. I think whoever can combine BigCartel, BandCamp and a _manufacturing_ component into a single experience will be the winner.
- sova 10y ago
  cool insight. vertical integration rockefeller style
- lqdc13 10y ago
  I think SoundCloud is better if you are not planning on buying anything and want to listen to covers of songs you like. Also SoundCloud front end is easily the best front end of any site I've seen before or since.
  - Margh 10y ago
    Beatport? Definitely a lot easier to buy large amounts of tracks at once.
    - 6stringmerc 10y ago
      The article points out that Bandcamp is trying to expand their Editorial staff. I think that's akin to "mission creep" or dangerously close to opening up "payola" avenues. Beatport turned un-profitable when it tried to do more than just being a download site. Now, they've (allegedly) returned to good profitability by chopping off the unwanted appendages that SFX had pushed downward. Personally I'm happy that they went back to doing what they did best...and coupons! Disclaimer: Happy Beatport customer for 5+ years.
    - 10y ago
aarmenante 10y ago
Bandcamp is now my go to place to buy music. It's a welcome relief from the bloat of iTunes, and the oversaturated wasteland of Spotify. It's a great place to discover new music, and it plays fair with artists.
bArray 10y ago
A note to the writer, I think the following section: If you answered no to all these questions, ... Should be "yes"?
Daiz 10y ago
I love Bandcamp for the simple reason that they're one of the few very few music stores that digital distribution right according to my standards - for music, this means lossless & DRM-free by default, ie. the same thing physical CDs offer (and Bandcamp makes things even more convenient by allowing you to download in several formats, both lossy and lossless, according to your preferences). While DRM isn't usually an issue with digital music purchases today, way too many stores still offer lossy by default, with lossless requiring either paying extra or - even worse - simply not being available at all. It really is sad how often legal digital products are inferior in quality to their physical versions, even though with digital you could pretty much always offer more than what the physical formats allow. Also, another common scourge of digital distribution that Bandcamp doesn't suffer from: region locking. They don't support it and don't intend to do so either: https://bandcamp.com/help/selling#region https://bandcamp.com/help/selling#region
- AgentME 10y ago
  I love bandcamp. Partly because they just give you the music as a single zip full of audio files. No shitty downloader utility or anything. I tried to buy a digital album on Amazon once. They offered digital downloads of MP3 files, so I figured it couldn't be so bad. It was. I bought the Interstellar soundtrack. It was 20 to 30 tracks in it. I went to download it ... Amazon told me I could use some Amazon MP3 downloader to download the album, but it wasn't available for my platform. Instead, I get brought to some music browser of the tracks I've bought. There's checkboxes next to each of the tracks, a download button, and no "select all" button, so I check each track and click download. Amazon then tells me that downloading multiple tracks at once is only supported if I use their Amazon MP3 downloader (still not available for my platform). I have to check one track at a time, and then click download. I then have to uncheck that track, then check the next track, then click download again. In what universe is that a good experience? Who the hell envisioned that as even a good backup method for obtaining whole albums? I'm lucky I only bought one album. I just gave up and acquired the soundtrack through other means which didn't involve ridiculous rote checkbox dickery or proprietary downloader plugin nonsense. I'm pretty sure I finished before I would have finished downloading each individual track from Amazon.
orng 10y ago
Bandcamp is the only place I buy music online. They just seem so honest: Fair pay for musicians; free streaming prior to purchase; drm-free multiple formats, including FLAC. They don't even try to make it hard to rip mp3s from the streams, they have just focus on providing an amazing product which the consumers (hopefully) recognize as deserving of their money. My only complaint is poor support for finding music by bands if they have released records with more than one publisher. For instance searching for my favorite band Shining returns a page[1] with 4 of their albums, but their best album: Halmstad is found is released by osmoseproductions and thus found on their page [2]. 1: https://shiningsom.bandcamp.com/ https://shiningsom.bandcamp.com/ 2: https://osmoseproductions.bandcamp.com/album/v-halmstad https://osmoseproductions.bandcamp.com/album/v-halmstad
- astronautjones 10y ago
  I've found a "site:bandcamp.com" google search to be much better than using their own tools. But I have to do this so often with other websites' poor navigational tools that it's a total afterthought. Not an excuse, though.
  - danvayn 10y ago
    For sure. I love bandcamp but it's very hard to traverse
  - Obi_Juan_Kenobi 10y ago
    FYI In chrome, go to settings > Search > Manage Search Engines Add a new search engine, use this url: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:bandcamp.com http://www.google.com/search?q=site:bandcamp.com %s I have it set up so I can just type e.g. 'bc' and whatever I want to search for. You can obviously also use it for any other sites, just change what goes after the colon, but keep the %s.
- csbubbles 10y ago
  This is actually a very good observation. Bandcamp is great as a music store (for both fans and artists), but the discovery mechanism is rather non-existent. We believe in the overall model and are trying to fix it here - http://tuneself.com http://tuneself.com – essentially providing music streaming (for free, without ads and legally) but integrating the same core model as Bandcamp has, so the fans could pay for the music only when they think it's worth it.
6stringmerc 10y ago
Strengths: Bandcamp is a great model for mid-tier bands that believe recorded material is a viable source of revenue outside of selling hard-copies at a merch table at shows. Bandcamp is great for 1-2% of the music purchasing public. Bandcamp is a fair, equitable platform for artists. Weaknesses: Other than 1-2% of the music purchasing public, Bandcamp is not a go-to source for music. Bandcamp's espoused value is that recorded music has value, which, other than integrity of Copyright, is a highly subjective perspective, because very rarely do album sales - long term - provide a living wage revenue stream. To my knowledge, releasing through Bandcamp does not provide free access to other distribution platforms like Spotify, iTunes, Tidal, Amazon, or YouTube, which means, if I'm right, it is a walled garden. Editorializing: A long time ago I made the decision to go with DistroKid instead of spend my time on Bandcamp. I don't regret that maneuver. I appreciate Copyright protections as an artist, and understand the compromise I've signed up for. Bandcamp is a much more above-the-board platform than signing a deal with a record label, and that isn't to be ignored. I just have sincere gut-based reservations that they have significant market penetration to put it in a high enough time investment tier. I only claim to speak from my own experience. It offers value to others. I simply chose a different on-ramp to the information superhighway.
- masklinn 10y ago
  > To my knowledge, releasing through Bandcamp does not provide free access to other distribution platforms like Spotify, iTunes, Tidal, Amazon, or YouTube, which means, if I'm right, it is a walled garden. That makes no sense. Bandcamp is a storefront site/minisites, you can put your music on bandcamp and put it on everything else as well. In fact, the Bandcamp faq specifically redirects people looking for distributors to DistroKid and notes that you can put your music on any other store you wish. Either you don't understand what bandcamp is, or you completely misunderstand the concept of walled garden.
- csbubbles 10y ago
  There is no "copyright protection" really. It's just the illusion that major players in the music biz and their affiliates are trying to deliver to the crowd. Digital music was, is and will always be pirated, and you have no protection from that. It's just the technology, the internet. As long as you release audio and people can buy it and play at their homes, they can make it digital and transfer online. The second you upload a song to any music platform, and make it downloadable, people can find it, download, and transfer, as you may say, "illegally" and do it any way they want. And there is no magic behind that. If I listen online to a song, its data is being transferred to my computer to be played eventually on my speakers. And that means that one can easily sniff it and store separately. The only way to fix this is to change the way people perceive music online. And Bandcamp has done a lot in that direction. Essentially, they fight "piracy" trying to change the mindset of the listener.
et-al 10y ago
Since we're discussing online record stores, CD Baby needs to be mentioned as the indie music retailer back in the early 2000s. Its founder, Derek Sivers, is one of those awesome Web 1.0 geeks that built things for love, not money: https://sivers.org/ https://sivers.org/
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  CD Baby & Tunecore have traditionally - maybe not recently - charged artists a premium for access. When I looked into CD Baby they wanted $20/yr to host each release, LP or EP, etc. To me I knew I'd never recoup that, so I felt it was kind of similar to the old industry model of making the opportunity seem too good to be true.
  - sivers 10y ago
    Mmm, sorry but have to correct for the record: CD Baby has never had an annual fee. See http://members.cdbaby.com/cd-baby-cost.aspx http://members.cdbaby.com/cd-baby-cost.aspx It was always just a one-time up-front cost because for every incoming album, I (and later, others) would do about 45 minutes of work: scanning album art, digitizing the CD, spell-checking the bio and song titles, listening to some of the music to include in future recommendations, and finally putting the CD on the physical shelves in preparation for sale. Even with digital distribution, this up-front cost was still needed because a new album arriving meant many gigs of uploading out to 50+ different digital retailers. So, CD Baby's main profit model was a cut per sale. 9% of digital income, or a flat $4 per physical CD sold. Tunecore's model has always been to take 0% or almost no fee per-sale. Instead that annual fee is their main income. I think you might be thinking about Tunecore, in your comment here. Funny thing is (and I feel like I'm saying this confidentially, but fuggit, HN comments, here we go), I always thought Tunecore's model was kinda brilliant because it tapped into the ambitious musician psychology better. At CD Baby, we'd often get emails/calls from musicians thinking of signing up, saying, "Let's say, conservatively, that we sell 100,000 copies. You'd be making $400,000 just off of our one album!" I'd wince and say yes, that's right. Then I'd tell them that the average artist - https://sivers.org/lines https://sivers.org/lines - sells under 20 copies, not over 100,000. But everyone thinks they're the exception. So that's the kind of person that would see Tunecore's model and think, "Ha! Only an annual fee and then I get to keep 100% of my 100,000 sales? Hell yeah! I'm going to save $400,000 going with Tunecore over CD Baby." Ideally, a company could offer both pricing models, and let the client choose their optimistic or pessimistic sales prediction.
camillomiller 10y ago
Sorry to go off topic, but what's the purpose of the New York Times paywall if you can bypass it with the "Reader" button in Safari and read the whole article, even with a better layout for reading?
- jordanlev 10y ago
  To try and gently prod people into paying? Or because a lot of people don't know about or use the reader button. Or a lot of people don't have iPhones or are on their computer? I do have an iPhone and do use the reader feature, but actually never thought to try it with nytimes articles before.
nxrabl 10y ago
One of my favorite ways to waste time on the internet is to watch the sales ticker on the Bandcamp homepage go by, and click on any album people pay more than the minimum for. Found some pretty good music that way.
kylestlb 10y ago
Never thought I'd see an article on HN that name drops G.L.O.S.S. - awesome. I always preferred bandcamp to soundcloud/spotify/anything else. Good to see the recognition.
efrafa 10y ago
I love bandcamp, and music I listen to (hardcore punk) can't be found anywhere else.
csbubbles 10y ago
Bandcamp is the best. I personally admire those guys. Over last few years they have done for the music industry much more than anyone else in the business. Yet avoiding a huge buzz that the other players generate (like Spotify, Pandora, Apple, etc.). * They seem to be the only profitable company in the online music business, * They pay directly to the content owners (artists and labels) avoiding stupid useless institutions like RIAA and SoundExchange, * They don't raise hundreds of millions just to squander them on advertisement, * They are actually helping increase the income for indies, * They provided tools to anyone to easily sell their music and merch, * And it's still just a couple of dozen people working there. This company is kind of the ideal example that every single startup should follow, I believe. Instead of infinite noise and funding rounds keeping unprofitable for years, they just did the job and continue to grow. Kudos!
Roritharr 10y ago
While we are talking about b2c Stores, why are there no good b2b stores? I've tried licensing a song for our Promo YouTube Ads, and its frustrating as hell because in most cases even with small Artists your only Option is the contact Page of their Label, which then doesnt reply for days or weeks at a time... Until then i've cut 3 Videos with royalty free music. Why isnt there some aggregator where i could find an estimation for my usecase and start the process from there?
- mgkimsal 10y ago
  It feels like that could be an avenue where bandcamp could make some good movements - increase revenue stream/options for their members, flexible licensing terms, etc.
- csbubbles 10y ago
  Have you tried Jamendo? https://licensing.jamendo.com/en https://licensing.jamendo.com/en
ddp 10y ago
As long as they keep offering DRM-free ALAC/FLAC, I'm with them.
davidgerard 10y ago
tl;dr hell yes. As a listener and buyer, they just get everything right. Including discoverability - I frequently dredge the new arrivals section for reviews in Rocknerd http://rocknerd.co.uk http://rocknerd.co.uk and it's ridiculously easy. I don't have direct experience as an artist, but I do know a pile of musicians who've got back their catalogues and happily put up their complete works for a few bucks a pop. I urge you to check out Severed Heads, an old industrial-dance band who do pretty okay with this approach: https://severedheads.bandcamp.com/ https://severedheads.bandcamp.com/ They just take a reasonable percentage and get the hell out of the way. Go on - try out Bandcamp and give some deserving band a bit of cash today.

195 points by joshjkim 10y ago

Bandcamp's support is awesome as well. In a previous era, I would stream my library from an old Mac to my laptop via iTunes Shared Libraries, with most of my collection being in Apple Lossless. However, ALAC files from Bandcamp wouldn't stream. Core Audio described the tracks from Bandcamp as "not optimized". Apple closed the radar (http://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=2014403 http://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=2014403) as a duplicate without any indication of what was wrong. Bandcamp took a look at the issue and changed their transcoding pipeline to ensure they generated "optimized" ALAC files. I still buy albums from Bandcamp, but with iTunes compatibility no longer a concern, I now download the FLAC versions. To be different I then losslessly transcode to WavPack, but that's a discussion for another forum.

gp7 10y ago

1. Not nearly just punk. What?? 2. I hate short articles

astronautjones 10y ago
The author is stating that they typically used it for punk, only recently noticing bigger and more mainstream acts are using the service. As a musician, I can't sing their praises enough. Especially if you aren't particularly huge (<10,000 copies are being sold) and you're part of a community, there is virtually no benefit at all to publishing on itunes/spotify/play.
- robryan 10y ago
  Is that really the consensus for small artists on Spotify? If I get a band recommendation or stumble across someone (online or happen to see them live) the first place I am going to look for more of their stuff is Spotify. Sure a small act is going to make no money out of it but I think that they would have more chance of increasing their fan base which will pay for things in the future.
  - k-mcgrady 10y ago
    >> Is that really the consensus for small artists on Spotify? It's not. I don't think there is any consensus with this stuff and there doesn't need to be. You need to do what's best for you. If you can't spend most of the year touring then ignoring streaming and focusing on bandcamp is the way to go. If you want to tour and grow your audience Spotify is essential imo, especially if you're targeting a younger demographic. It's amazing how quickly your music spreads when it hits a playlist (even just a regular users playlist that their friends follow).
careersuicide 10y ago
Bandcamp has been heavily used by many hardcore punk bands for a few years now. The ability to charge a reasonable price for high quality downloads or give them away for free and also sell physical media like records and tapes is a huge deal for lots of punks. There's been several ways of digital distribution of music before Bandcamp, but few of them offered an easy means of getting up and running and monetizing the music in multiple ways (if desired, that you don't have to at all is super important here). It's really the convergence of features rather than any one in particular. I think for punk bands that might not even be on a label being able to get your music out there without a big upfront investment is more important than artists on larger labels because in that case distribution is usually at least partially handled. That's why the hardcore punk scene has been somewhat of an early adopter of Bandcamp when compared to more mainstream artists. Also, the band the article mentions in the first paragraph, Mace, is totally worth a listen. Definitely one of my favorite bands coming out of the Midwest right now. If you can get your hands on volume 2 the "No Friends" zine it comes with a flexi that has them and some other great stuff on it.
- astronautjones 10y ago
  > Also, the band the article mentions in the first paragraph, Mace, is totally worth a listen. Definitely one of my favorite bands coming out of the Midwest right now. If you can get your hands on volume 2 the "No Friends" zine it comes with a flexi that has them and some other great stuff on it. Might just be the guitars and the logo, but getting a heavy Urban Blight vibe! Cool stuff
sctb 10y ago
Please comment civilly and substantively here or not at all. HN threads are intended to be conversations, not a place for drive-by one-offs. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

FungalRaincloud 10y ago

I'm going to assume Betteridge's law applies here... ...And now that I've read the article, I think I'm right. This sounds like an advertisement, to be honest. But I'm not really even sold. I feel like if the argument is that it's more directly supporting the artists, maybe it would be better to use something like Patreon[0]? [0] https://www.patreon.com/ https://www.patreon.com/

unforswearing 10y ago
Bandcamp and Patreon serve artists at different scales. As a part-time musician who uses bandcamp for bands/solo projects, I much prefer the "single product" model (fans paying for a single track/ep/album as they choose) rather than an ongoing payment structure. I have zero illusions that I'm ever going to "get big" (read: support myself) from making music, so bandcamp allows me the opportunity to share my music and if fans choose to pay for it, great! I'd feel very uncomfortable soliciting recurring payment for something I do a few times per month.
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  Very nice to read your perspective, especially as you describe yourself as self-funded (aka part-time). Making money from sound recordings is like a lottery - to me, unless it's being approached by an ad agency offering industry rates for a campaign, a recording is simply like a business card. I enjoy sharing my music creations and would rather they "be out in the wild" than try to pile up penny fractions that won't even buy me a tank of gas. I'm happy you like your path! Keep on doing what you do when you can.
  - razster 10y ago
    Win the tune lotto and off you go to the big boys. Seems so.
    - 6stringmerc 10y ago
      Worked for CHVRCHES - always loved how one of the dudes wore his SoundCloud ballcap as kind of an indicator of how they started. Their Guitar Center Sessions episode is very much worth the view in my opinion.

tomdell 10y ago

This was well-written and a good read, but I found this passage - "I do not like this word — curated." - a little funny, coming from a music critic.

kderbe 10y ago

Bandcamp is the first place I look to buy music from a band I like, because of their fair revenue share. Many times, it's the only place I look: I'm reluctant to shop at other online music stores and streaming services because so much of the music industry is toxic, and I don't want to put money into that system to sustain it.

bootload 10y ago

"The artist gets 85 percent. Always, the artist gets to know who’s buying, without a third party in the way." This quote sums up why Bandcamp makes sense to artists. Listening now to music off Bandcamp. Buy Vinyl also get .flac an the artist gets the dollars and data. How good is that.

bisby 10y ago
DRM free flac is one of the main reasons I go bandcamp when available. I have my own in home media server, so being able to actually have the songs is important.
- dzhiurgis 10y ago
  What I would like to know is whether it is actual flac or if Bancamp just converts artist supplied mp3s.
  - astronautjones 10y ago
    Artists are required to upload WAV, AIF, or FLAC.
  - pmh 10y ago
    Bandcamp requires lossless audio formats (https://bandcamp.com/help/uploading#aiffwavuploadrequirement https://bandcamp.com/help/uploading#aiffwavuploadrequirement), so it's up to the artist/album whether it's a transcode.
    - dzhiurgis 10y ago
      Ok going deeper into the rabbit hole: you never know what did the artist sampled it from :-)
      - mynewtb 10y ago
        If the artist made their music as Mp3 then you should accept that as the way they intended it to sound.

Mizza 10y ago

I really like that Bandcamp supports "pay what you want" as an option, I find I'm always more likely to buy music when that's a possibility. That being said, I also wrote a BandCamp scraper, https://github.com/Miserlou/SoundScrape https://github.com/Miserlou/SoundScrape , so maybe I have weird priorities. Either way, I love BC way, way more than SoundCloud. In the long run, at the scale that BC-type artists operate, I think that the merch game is actually bigger than the paying-for-music game. They've made a few moves in that space, but I get the impression that BigCartel is actually the sleeping giant. I think whoever can combine BigCartel, BandCamp and a _manufacturing_ component into a single experience will be the winner.

sova 10y ago
cool insight. vertical integration rockefeller style
lqdc13 10y ago
I think SoundCloud is better if you are not planning on buying anything and want to listen to covers of songs you like. Also SoundCloud front end is easily the best front end of any site I've seen before or since.
- Margh 10y ago
  Beatport? Definitely a lot easier to buy large amounts of tracks at once.
  - 6stringmerc 10y ago
    The article points out that Bandcamp is trying to expand their Editorial staff. I think that's akin to "mission creep" or dangerously close to opening up "payola" avenues. Beatport turned un-profitable when it tried to do more than just being a download site. Now, they've (allegedly) returned to good profitability by chopping off the unwanted appendages that SFX had pushed downward. Personally I'm happy that they went back to doing what they did best...and coupons! Disclaimer: Happy Beatport customer for 5+ years.
  - 10y ago

aarmenante 10y ago

Bandcamp is now my go to place to buy music. It's a welcome relief from the bloat of iTunes, and the oversaturated wasteland of Spotify. It's a great place to discover new music, and it plays fair with artists.

bArray 10y ago

A note to the writer, I think the following section: If you answered no to all these questions, ... Should be "yes"?

Daiz 10y ago

I love Bandcamp for the simple reason that they're one of the few very few music stores that digital distribution right according to my standards - for music, this means lossless & DRM-free by default, ie. the same thing physical CDs offer (and Bandcamp makes things even more convenient by allowing you to download in several formats, both lossy and lossless, according to your preferences). While DRM isn't usually an issue with digital music purchases today, way too many stores still offer lossy by default, with lossless requiring either paying extra or - even worse - simply not being available at all. It really is sad how often legal digital products are inferior in quality to their physical versions, even though with digital you could pretty much always offer more than what the physical formats allow. Also, another common scourge of digital distribution that Bandcamp doesn't suffer from: region locking. They don't support it and don't intend to do so either: https://bandcamp.com/help/selling#region https://bandcamp.com/help/selling#region

AgentME 10y ago
I love bandcamp. Partly because they just give you the music as a single zip full of audio files. No shitty downloader utility or anything. I tried to buy a digital album on Amazon once. They offered digital downloads of MP3 files, so I figured it couldn't be so bad. It was. I bought the Interstellar soundtrack. It was 20 to 30 tracks in it. I went to download it ... Amazon told me I could use some Amazon MP3 downloader to download the album, but it wasn't available for my platform. Instead, I get brought to some music browser of the tracks I've bought. There's checkboxes next to each of the tracks, a download button, and no "select all" button, so I check each track and click download. Amazon then tells me that downloading multiple tracks at once is only supported if I use their Amazon MP3 downloader (still not available for my platform). I have to check one track at a time, and then click download. I then have to uncheck that track, then check the next track, then click download again. In what universe is that a good experience? Who the hell envisioned that as even a good backup method for obtaining whole albums? I'm lucky I only bought one album. I just gave up and acquired the soundtrack through other means which didn't involve ridiculous rote checkbox dickery or proprietary downloader plugin nonsense. I'm pretty sure I finished before I would have finished downloading each individual track from Amazon.

orng 10y ago

Bandcamp is the only place I buy music online. They just seem so honest: Fair pay for musicians; free streaming prior to purchase; drm-free multiple formats, including FLAC. They don't even try to make it hard to rip mp3s from the streams, they have just focus on providing an amazing product which the consumers (hopefully) recognize as deserving of their money. My only complaint is poor support for finding music by bands if they have released records with more than one publisher. For instance searching for my favorite band Shining returns a page[1] with 4 of their albums, but their best album: Halmstad is found is released by osmoseproductions and thus found on their page [2]. 1: https://shiningsom.bandcamp.com/ https://shiningsom.bandcamp.com/ 2: https://osmoseproductions.bandcamp.com/album/v-halmstad https://osmoseproductions.bandcamp.com/album/v-halmstad

astronautjones 10y ago
I've found a "site:bandcamp.com" google search to be much better than using their own tools. But I have to do this so often with other websites' poor navigational tools that it's a total afterthought. Not an excuse, though.
- danvayn 10y ago
  For sure. I love bandcamp but it's very hard to traverse
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 10y ago
  FYI In chrome, go to settings > Search > Manage Search Engines Add a new search engine, use this url: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:bandcamp.com http://www.google.com/search?q=site:bandcamp.com %s I have it set up so I can just type e.g. 'bc' and whatever I want to search for. You can obviously also use it for any other sites, just change what goes after the colon, but keep the %s.
csbubbles 10y ago
This is actually a very good observation. Bandcamp is great as a music store (for both fans and artists), but the discovery mechanism is rather non-existent. We believe in the overall model and are trying to fix it here - http://tuneself.com http://tuneself.com – essentially providing music streaming (for free, without ads and legally) but integrating the same core model as Bandcamp has, so the fans could pay for the music only when they think it's worth it.

6stringmerc 10y ago

Strengths: Bandcamp is a great model for mid-tier bands that believe recorded material is a viable source of revenue outside of selling hard-copies at a merch table at shows. Bandcamp is great for 1-2% of the music purchasing public. Bandcamp is a fair, equitable platform for artists. Weaknesses: Other than 1-2% of the music purchasing public, Bandcamp is not a go-to source for music. Bandcamp's espoused value is that recorded music has value, which, other than integrity of Copyright, is a highly subjective perspective, because very rarely do album sales - long term - provide a living wage revenue stream. To my knowledge, releasing through Bandcamp does not provide free access to other distribution platforms like Spotify, iTunes, Tidal, Amazon, or YouTube, which means, if I'm right, it is a walled garden. Editorializing: A long time ago I made the decision to go with DistroKid instead of spend my time on Bandcamp. I don't regret that maneuver. I appreciate Copyright protections as an artist, and understand the compromise I've signed up for. Bandcamp is a much more above-the-board platform than signing a deal with a record label, and that isn't to be ignored. I just have sincere gut-based reservations that they have significant market penetration to put it in a high enough time investment tier. I only claim to speak from my own experience. It offers value to others. I simply chose a different on-ramp to the information superhighway.

masklinn 10y ago
> To my knowledge, releasing through Bandcamp does not provide free access to other distribution platforms like Spotify, iTunes, Tidal, Amazon, or YouTube, which means, if I'm right, it is a walled garden. That makes no sense. Bandcamp is a storefront site/minisites, you can put your music on bandcamp and put it on everything else as well. In fact, the Bandcamp faq specifically redirects people looking for distributors to DistroKid and notes that you can put your music on any other store you wish. Either you don't understand what bandcamp is, or you completely misunderstand the concept of walled garden.
csbubbles 10y ago
There is no "copyright protection" really. It's just the illusion that major players in the music biz and their affiliates are trying to deliver to the crowd. Digital music was, is and will always be pirated, and you have no protection from that. It's just the technology, the internet. As long as you release audio and people can buy it and play at their homes, they can make it digital and transfer online. The second you upload a song to any music platform, and make it downloadable, people can find it, download, and transfer, as you may say, "illegally" and do it any way they want. And there is no magic behind that. If I listen online to a song, its data is being transferred to my computer to be played eventually on my speakers. And that means that one can easily sniff it and store separately. The only way to fix this is to change the way people perceive music online. And Bandcamp has done a lot in that direction. Essentially, they fight "piracy" trying to change the mindset of the listener.

et-al 10y ago

Since we're discussing online record stores, CD Baby needs to be mentioned as the indie music retailer back in the early 2000s. Its founder, Derek Sivers, is one of those awesome Web 1.0 geeks that built things for love, not money: https://sivers.org/ https://sivers.org/

6stringmerc 10y ago
CD Baby & Tunecore have traditionally - maybe not recently - charged artists a premium for access. When I looked into CD Baby they wanted $20/yr to host each release, LP or EP, etc. To me I knew I'd never recoup that, so I felt it was kind of similar to the old industry model of making the opportunity seem too good to be true.
- sivers 10y ago
  Mmm, sorry but have to correct for the record: CD Baby has never had an annual fee. See http://members.cdbaby.com/cd-baby-cost.aspx http://members.cdbaby.com/cd-baby-cost.aspx It was always just a one-time up-front cost because for every incoming album, I (and later, others) would do about 45 minutes of work: scanning album art, digitizing the CD, spell-checking the bio and song titles, listening to some of the music to include in future recommendations, and finally putting the CD on the physical shelves in preparation for sale. Even with digital distribution, this up-front cost was still needed because a new album arriving meant many gigs of uploading out to 50+ different digital retailers. So, CD Baby's main profit model was a cut per sale. 9% of digital income, or a flat $4 per physical CD sold. Tunecore's model has always been to take 0% or almost no fee per-sale. Instead that annual fee is their main income. I think you might be thinking about Tunecore, in your comment here. Funny thing is (and I feel like I'm saying this confidentially, but fuggit, HN comments, here we go), I always thought Tunecore's model was kinda brilliant because it tapped into the ambitious musician psychology better. At CD Baby, we'd often get emails/calls from musicians thinking of signing up, saying, "Let's say, conservatively, that we sell 100,000 copies. You'd be making $400,000 just off of our one album!" I'd wince and say yes, that's right. Then I'd tell them that the average artist - https://sivers.org/lines https://sivers.org/lines - sells under 20 copies, not over 100,000. But everyone thinks they're the exception. So that's the kind of person that would see Tunecore's model and think, "Ha! Only an annual fee and then I get to keep 100% of my 100,000 sales? Hell yeah! I'm going to save $400,000 going with Tunecore over CD Baby." Ideally, a company could offer both pricing models, and let the client choose their optimistic or pessimistic sales prediction.

camillomiller 10y ago

Sorry to go off topic, but what's the purpose of the New York Times paywall if you can bypass it with the "Reader" button in Safari and read the whole article, even with a better layout for reading?

jordanlev 10y ago
To try and gently prod people into paying? Or because a lot of people don't know about or use the reader button. Or a lot of people don't have iPhones or are on their computer? I do have an iPhone and do use the reader feature, but actually never thought to try it with nytimes articles before.

nxrabl 10y ago

One of my favorite ways to waste time on the internet is to watch the sales ticker on the Bandcamp homepage go by, and click on any album people pay more than the minimum for. Found some pretty good music that way.

kylestlb 10y ago

Never thought I'd see an article on HN that name drops G.L.O.S.S. - awesome. I always preferred bandcamp to soundcloud/spotify/anything else. Good to see the recognition.

efrafa 10y ago

I love bandcamp, and music I listen to (hardcore punk) can't be found anywhere else.

csbubbles 10y ago

Bandcamp is the best. I personally admire those guys. Over last few years they have done for the music industry much more than anyone else in the business. Yet avoiding a huge buzz that the other players generate (like Spotify, Pandora, Apple, etc.). * They seem to be the only profitable company in the online music business, * They pay directly to the content owners (artists and labels) avoiding stupid useless institutions like RIAA and SoundExchange, * They don't raise hundreds of millions just to squander them on advertisement, * They are actually helping increase the income for indies, * They provided tools to anyone to easily sell their music and merch, * And it's still just a couple of dozen people working there. This company is kind of the ideal example that every single startup should follow, I believe. Instead of infinite noise and funding rounds keeping unprofitable for years, they just did the job and continue to grow. Kudos!

Roritharr 10y ago

While we are talking about b2c Stores, why are there no good b2b stores? I've tried licensing a song for our Promo YouTube Ads, and its frustrating as hell because in most cases even with small Artists your only Option is the contact Page of their Label, which then doesnt reply for days or weeks at a time... Until then i've cut 3 Videos with royalty free music. Why isnt there some aggregator where i could find an estimation for my usecase and start the process from there?

mgkimsal 10y ago
It feels like that could be an avenue where bandcamp could make some good movements - increase revenue stream/options for their members, flexible licensing terms, etc.
csbubbles 10y ago
Have you tried Jamendo? https://licensing.jamendo.com/en https://licensing.jamendo.com/en

ddp 10y ago

As long as they keep offering DRM-free ALAC/FLAC, I'm with them.

davidgerard 10y ago

tl;dr hell yes. As a listener and buyer, they just get everything right. Including discoverability - I frequently dredge the new arrivals section for reviews in Rocknerd http://rocknerd.co.uk http://rocknerd.co.uk and it's ridiculously easy. I don't have direct experience as an artist, but I do know a pile of musicians who've got back their catalogues and happily put up their complete works for a few bucks a pop. I urge you to check out Severed Heads, an old industrial-dance band who do pretty okay with this approach: https://severedheads.bandcamp.com/ https://severedheads.bandcamp.com/ They just take a reasonable percentage and get the hell out of the way. Go on - try out Bandcamp and give some deserving band a bit of cash today.