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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, t
by 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 agoI 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.
- james4k 10y agoFWIW, you can now just download a .zip of MP3s from Amazon.
- AgentME 10y agoThat's great to hear! They're off my avoid list then. Still not as great as Bandcamp's options but sounds usable.
- r00fus 10y agoI wonder how many potential customers they lost with their downloader bullshit though. While my OS at the time did support it I couldn't be bothered to install a random binary just for a different music store. Even if the album/single was $0.
- beachstartup 10y agoprobably not many. have you noticed how people love amazon no matter how shitty they are?
- reitanqild 10y agoBooks are delivered reasonably fast and at reasonable or great prices. AWS is mostly easy and great. And they seem to take security seriously. A few annoyances here and there and weird naming, but bad? Furthermore they have been driving the ebookmarket, both pricing and technology.
- Retric 10y agoI don't know anyone that buys computer components there, so people do have minimum standards. They are simply ok for a wide range of products.
- davidgerard 10y agoThey're great for physical goods. My wife's disabled and I have a day job, so we work our Amazon Prime hard. I disapprove of their tax shenanigans in the UK, but frankly we'd be fucked without Amazon or something like it.
- dzhiurgis 10y agoCD's are not lossless. Pretty good though.
- leeoniya 10y agono recording of an analog source is lossless
- shiado 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...
- svantana 10y agoYes however to be truly lossless, each sample amplitude would need infinite precision, which is not physically possible to record. Also real world sounds are not bandlimited.
- chillingeffect 10y agoYes. Plus the implementation filters can not be ideal as it would require infinite resources and in practical implementations have several species of non-idealities.
- chiph 10y agoI get what you're saying, but the human ear has it's limits. Blind A:B testing with CDs vs the higher-resolution SACDs has had mixed results - there are a very few people who can consistently tell the difference, but everyone else might as well be coin-flipping.
- orblivion 10y agoCompared to what? Are vinyls all pressed off of an analog source? Does that mean new vinyls can't be made after the master is degraded? I'm curious what you mean here.
- masklinn 10y agoYep, Bandcamp is the one site I go to when I discover new and interesting articles. If they're on there, half the time it's an impulse-buy of the whole discography. If they're not on there, chances are I won't bother any further. I don't know how it is as an artist, but as a tech-savvy consumer the experience is tremendous.
- Springtime 10y agoI've saved rather a lot on the discography discount promos that artists will offer from time to time. When I like someone's output it's an excellent way to expand a collection/taste in one purchase as I can hit play and rather than listen to one or two albums have hours of similar content. Especially for genres I wouldn't normally think of buying it can be an attractive deal (such as recently with some superb electronic ambient/glitch and house from one artist, listened to it for weeks).
- gf263 10y agoWhat's the artist?
- Springtime 10y agoVladislav Delay [1]. He's an obscure but apparently well-regarded Finnish electronic artist that a mastering engineer whose blog I follow [2] put me onto. I started with the album Vocalcity, then Multila and after a few more knew it was my kind of thing. [1] http://vladislavdelay.bandcamp.com/ http://vladislavdelay.bandcamp.com/ [2] http://www.bassdress.com/blog/ http://www.bassdress.com/blog/
- freshflowers 10y agoI buy from Bandcamp and voluntarily pay double just out of general principle. I listen most of music via Spotify out of convenience, but I'll gladly financially support any band that offers an honest product.