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> i only go there to buy music if I have a direct link. > Bandcamp doesn't even allow YouTube video embedding for music videos, which is a huge mistake alone.

> i only go there to buy music if I have a direct link. > Bandcamp doesn't even allow YouTube video embedding for music videos, which is a huge mistake alone. > Music platforms should be heavily promoting any independent artist that pays them a monthly fee... They seem to think that monthly subscription money form hard working artists is simply for extra file storage above free accounts. You haven't really understood the value Bandcamp offers and you're criticising them for not being something they never claimed to be. You need to do your own promotion.

nomel 3y ago
This is exactly why I have Spotify rather than bandcamp. It finds music I like, regardless of musician effort. I found more new musicians in the first year of Spotify than decades before. It’s a loss for everyone if good music goes unheard.
- comprev 3y ago
  on the flip side to this, I don't have Spotify because curating music is a hobby of mine. The research from various sources - forums, FB groups, Discogs, Bandcamp mailing lists, etc. is part of the journey.
  - racked 3y ago
    Is there a place you share your playlists? Would be curious to have a listen.
- reactordev 3y ago
  It’s a loss to musicians to have a monopoly like Spotify (who likes to recreate popular songs with their own artists and label) be the gatekeeper to what is good music. From a service perspective, it’s great. I have the worlds music at my fingertips. From a music perspective it’s horrible. I have one company dictating streaming payments and terms on an entire industry and you’re f&$ked if you don’t play nice. Ask Taylor Swift.
  - winternett 3y ago
    Agreed. Spotify is a terrible alternative for the musicians. Myspace and Mp3.Com used to be the road map to how sites should be run, but venture capitalism and publicly traded companies ruined the entire ecosystem.
    - reactordev 3y ago
      I had high hopes for SoundCloud but in the end, VC’s always win.
      - dzhiurgis 3y ago
        They still pretty much same. I don't get any audio ads, some ads in my stream, but never seem to be playing. Premium offering is stuck somewhere in 2009 when offline playback was a thing. Lack of integrations with Homepod & Tesla is somewhat becoming a problem. Still no way to filter your stream or get know what bitrate you are streaming.
      - whizzter 3y ago
        (I studied with one of the founders) Soundclouds problem was always that they started out as basically a free service for a particular niche(artist to label contacts), starting to charge(pissing off people who expected free forever) and then moving out of the niche made it so they never really had a footing for something people would pay for. The problem with so many "internet unicorns" from the 2000-2010 era is that they handwaved per-customer costs as hardware/network costs and assumed that as long as they scaled then salaries would be a minor part, we as an industry are now trying to dig ourselves out of that hole with a even shittier AD experiences just as that AD market is crashing down.
        waveBidder 3y ago
        free money for VC via low interest rates was a terrible strategy for creating innovation that would last.
      - justatdotin 3y ago
- nkozyra 3y ago
  I'd say you're very much in the minority then. Spotify is notorious for its weak recommendation system.
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    Compared to what? Genuinely asking, because I like Spotify's recommendation system yet I always have the feeling that it can be better... even with the recent enhanced shuffle playlist and efforts to provide more contextual recs.
    - nkozyra 3y ago
      YouTube music, Pandora, I'm sure there are others. Spotify likes to feed you back stuff you liked even if it's only tangentially related to what you're asking for. It also repeats the same recommendations for things like radio over and over again.
      - brandensilva 3y ago
        I feel like it's been improving with them offering more ways to discover music that sounds like what you heard but not the same artists. But yeah I still feel more can be done. Their new Hi-Fi package is supposed to have more options too.
      - dminvs 3y ago
        I had the same experience you describe with Pandora for years, has it improved recently?
        disposition2 3y ago
        That is borderline tragic to hear. Pandora acquired __the__ music streaming service when it came to discovery, rdio, and did absolutely nothing with it.
      - slenk 3y ago
        You describing your experience with Spotify is my same experience with Pandora. It's awful, they have like 10 songs
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  Fuck Spotify. They've played a major role in drastically reducing any chance of significant revenue flowing to musicians, in complete contrast to Bandcamp. People hearing your music is nice and all (I like it when people hear my stuff on BC), but it is orthogonal to the revenue that used to be associated with making recorded music available. There's far, far more music out there than anyone will ever be able to listen to, and I consider the possibility of even 1 paid milkshake for a musician much more important than some random number of listeners who heard the track on Spotify. I appreciate that you may see things differently, but I think that you're wrong.
  - Applejinx 3y ago
    THANK you. Spotify is no Bandcamp substitute. Not even close. Not even remotely the same category of thing. Yikes.
  - nomel 3y ago
    > People hearing your music is nice and all As a listener, this is my entire concern, use case, and reason for paying for a streaming site: finding new music to listen to. I don't think I'm unique. Artists should get more, which is why I pay for Spotify Premium, but the use case of a listener is important. Bandcamp doesn't address that, for me.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      There is more music on Bandcamp than you could listen to in a lifetime. More comes out in a week than you could (probably) listen to in a week. So when you sayd "finding new music to listen to", there's a hidden implication in there: you want to find new music that is on Spotify (which in turn implies things like major labels, artists seeking or expecting breakout etc. Bandcamp is an amazing resource for discovering new music, but a subset of all new music, just as Spotify is. It's fine to say you prefer what you can find on Spotify, just don't make the claim that Bandcamp somehow isn't up for this general task.
      - nomel 3y ago
- tomphoolery 3y ago
  > It finds music I like, regardless of musician effort. This isn't really true...musicians must put forth a ton of effort just to be part of the songs that are recommended to you. Spotify favors and rewards those who promote their music on other platforms, since it scours the web for articles mentioning your name and people posting about you on social media in order to determine how far up in the "rankings" you should be when someone asks for a similar sounding song.
  - nomel 3y ago
    Is this assumed or is there public info about their algorithm? In the first song of my Discover Weekly, if I google the very unique artist name, I get exactly four hits: their bandcamp page, their website, their Spotify page, and their YouTube channel that hasn't been updated in a 9 months, with that last video having 120k views. The rest is unrelated to them. This doesn't refutes what you're saying, but I would have exactly 0 chance of finding them on my own, with the effort they're putting in.
    - aurnik 3y ago
      Discover Weekly specifically requires artists to "pitch" their songs to Spotify. If you're already following the artist, their new releases that have been pitched are supposedly guaranteed to show up on your Discover Weekly. Otherwise, I believe it's someone at Spotify who picked that song which then distributes it to "relevant" listeners.
      - nomel 3y ago
        Again, is this assumed, or do you have something public that can be linked to? The only explanation of the algorithm is what I would expect, rather than some silly humans in the loop: recommendation based on user activity and the analysis of the song style [1]. https://medium.com/the-sound-of-ai/spotifys-discover-weekly-explained-breaking-from-your-music-bubble-or-maybe-not-b506da144123 https://medium.com/the-sound-of-ai/spotifys-discover-weekly-...
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Can I buy music from Spotify? As in, be able to download a non-proprietary, lossless encoding of the music? If not, Spotify is worthless to me.
  - mcsniff 3y ago
    If you re-frame Spotify as a way to discover music, it's not worthless. Feel free to use Spotify to find artists and give them money however you want. Also, nobody is stopping you from spending your time finding new music and giving money as directly as possible to the artist. Spotify can be seen as a way to increase your exposure to new music, and for that it might be worth the $XX/month to many people, the ability to stream/cache it is a nice addition, but you don't have to rely on it as a way to give money (a pittance) to artists you like.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > If you re-frame Spotify as a way to discover music, it's not worthless. It is to me, though. I don't need another way to discover music. I have that well-covered. And by "buy music", I wasn't referring to a way to pay artists (that would be a followup question if I didn't already know that part). I mean, can I download the music in a high-quality, open-standard, format? I thought Spotify only did streaming, and I am not interested in a streaming service.
      - nomel 3y ago
        > have that well-covered. Could you share your secrets?
        JohnFen 3y ago
        No secrets. I get recommendations from my friends, I keep track of what musicians/producers/etc. were involved in producing music that I love, and seek out what other works they were involved in, etc. I pay attention to incidental music I come across and pursue it. I've been doing this for decades and as a result, I have a very eclectic collection that covers almost all genres. This approach may not work for everyone, but it works very well for me.
- jlarocco 3y ago
  That's interesting - I usually don't like Spotify's recommendations. Youtube was much better at that IMO, but I've tried to stop using it due to the Google connection. I don't really know where Bandcamp stands - I've bought music there that I found on YouTube, but haven't used it to find new stuff.
  - nomel 3y ago
    > I usually don't like Spotify's recommendations It requires that you like songs, and listen, of course. I have around 1600 liked songs. It knows me well enough at this point.
    - jlarocco 3y ago
      That hasn't helped any. I have almost 1100 liked songs, several dozen liked albums, and several years of near daily listening. The recommendations are still less good (for me) than what YouTube recommended without an account, just based on my listening history.
      - nomel 3y ago
        I've been satisfied, but that's good to hear. I'll give it another try. My biggest problem with the Spotify recommendation is that it seems to be a bit "sticky", recommended recent listens more than anything.
        jlarocco 3y ago
        I think that's what I don't like about it, also. It seems like it gives me recommendations too similar to what I'm already listening to.
- matt_j 3y ago
  Spotify has a catalogue that appeals to people that like pop music. Bandcamp provides an outlet for artists that aren't part of the pop music spectrum. I'm deep into electronic music and Bandcamp is the _only_ place that some artists are even listed, and it's become an amazing space for artists that want to release limited press special edition records - pre-ordered by fans to cover the manufacturing price. Prior to this I acquired a few cool records via Kickstarter, but Bandcamp is preferable. Furthermore, Spotify are well known for paying artists next to nothing. Bandcamp are well known for letting artists take the majority of the purchase price of their music. Not to mention, listening to mp3s is for chumps! Bandcamp is the best there is (for now) if you want to financially support the artists you like. I spend a lot of time in record stores (both physical and digital) but they are mostly extinct now. There's a few I still frequent: Juno, Boomkat, Hardwax among them, but the more the world turns to services like Spotify, the less room there is for real music stores. It's super annoying how the internet kills everything that was good. Bullshit for the masses over quality service for people that care.
  - justatdotin 3y ago
    yep. I use both daily but find bc more valuable. bc does little to help me find new music (so I get my leads elsewhere) but once I know what I want it is more likely to be on bc than spotify. spotify does a good job of helping me follow artists I already know, but not so great identifying new ones. I'm sure that depends on what you're looking for tho.
- COM2323 3y ago
  It probably depends on music genre, but Bandcamp hosts a ton of music that's not available anywhere else. Spotify is great for popular music, but a lot of small/niche artists have presence only on Bandcamp, both digital and physical. Pretty much all of my vaporwave/futurefunk/synthwave vinyl records are from Bandcamp.
winternett 3y ago
[flagged]
- diggan 3y ago
  > It's apparent that you work for them somehow. Because they understand what Bandcamp is charging for? The page for Bandcamp Pro lists all the feature you get (and everything that isn't listed there, is stuff you don't get): https://bandcamp.com/pro https://bandcamp.com/pro
  - winternett 3y ago
    Do you seriously think those features are worth 20 dollars a month? Again, clearly advocating for the platform and missing the entire message. A musician can easily self host a site that does exactly what bandcamp represents for them. Also, most serious artists are already distributed to platforms that do exactly what Bandcamp does and more. There is very little value in bancamp, unless you are perhaps trying to sell songs with lots of uncleared samples in them.
    - diggan 3y ago
      I don't, hence I don't pay for it. But if you signed up for Bandcamp Pro for $20/month, then clearly you either were happy with what you were getting, or you misunderstood what you were about to get. But personally I think that pricing page is pretty clear about what you get.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    And nobody needs to pay that to be on Bandcamp, have their music available, and get paid.
callalex 3y ago
Just calling someone dumb isn’t constructive. Instead tell them what you think Bandcamp had to offer.
- freeone3000 3y ago
  Bandcamp let me pay a musician for a song, regardless of how unknown or unpopular a band was. You’re three dudes in your mid-thirties playing open mic night and passing a hat around, and definitely cannot afford to get on Spotify or Youtube Music, but you can get on bandcamp and a few people can pay $5 for a song they liked when they were tipsy.
  - petre 3y ago
    Also YT Music quality is shit. I bought a new pair of headphones and though they were defective until I played some songs encoded by yours truly as opus files.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > Bandcamp let me pay a musician for a song, regardless of how unknown or unpopular a band was. This is what made me love Bandcamp. I get to pay the artists more-or-less directly, and as a person who tends not to be into the Big Music Names, Bandcamp is utterly amazing, chock full of smaller artists doing wonderful things.
  - Snild 3y ago
    > definitely cannot afford to get on Spotify How so? There aren't necessarily any upfront costs for getting on Spotify; several aggregators offer a "we take a cut of your earnings" model.
    - srg0 3y ago
      Even without a cut, there are several virtual distribution services like DistroKid and TuneCore which for a flat fee will take care of submitting whatever WAV one created to all streaming platforms. Getting it noticed is a whole other story.
  - 3y ago
winternett 3y ago
I know a lot of musicians that use it. I have been making music for over 20 years. What musicians want from sites like this is to be able to offload their marketing so that they can focus on making music, not to have boilerplate functional features (like bulk file uploads) for a fee. Sites and apps now avoid giving any real promotional value to users because they can later sell it to them incrementally. It's a tactic to keep artists primarily promoting the platform in addition to promoting their work on the platform. Very little value overall, as now there are tons of competing music and social platforms available, but all of them offer the same desperately weak promotional value to musicians.

nomel 3y ago

This is exactly why I have Spotify rather than bandcamp. It finds music I like, regardless of musician effort. I found more new musicians in the first year of Spotify than decades before. It’s a loss for everyone if good music goes unheard.

comprev 3y ago
on the flip side to this, I don't have Spotify because curating music is a hobby of mine. The research from various sources - forums, FB groups, Discogs, Bandcamp mailing lists, etc. is part of the journey.
- racked 3y ago
  Is there a place you share your playlists? Would be curious to have a listen.
reactordev 3y ago
It’s a loss to musicians to have a monopoly like Spotify (who likes to recreate popular songs with their own artists and label) be the gatekeeper to what is good music. From a service perspective, it’s great. I have the worlds music at my fingertips. From a music perspective it’s horrible. I have one company dictating streaming payments and terms on an entire industry and you’re f&$ked if you don’t play nice. Ask Taylor Swift.
- winternett 3y ago
  Agreed. Spotify is a terrible alternative for the musicians. Myspace and Mp3.Com used to be the road map to how sites should be run, but venture capitalism and publicly traded companies ruined the entire ecosystem.
  - reactordev 3y ago
    I had high hopes for SoundCloud but in the end, VC’s always win.
    - dzhiurgis 3y ago
      They still pretty much same. I don't get any audio ads, some ads in my stream, but never seem to be playing. Premium offering is stuck somewhere in 2009 when offline playback was a thing. Lack of integrations with Homepod & Tesla is somewhat becoming a problem. Still no way to filter your stream or get know what bitrate you are streaming.
    - whizzter 3y ago
      (I studied with one of the founders) Soundclouds problem was always that they started out as basically a free service for a particular niche(artist to label contacts), starting to charge(pissing off people who expected free forever) and then moving out of the niche made it so they never really had a footing for something people would pay for. The problem with so many "internet unicorns" from the 2000-2010 era is that they handwaved per-customer costs as hardware/network costs and assumed that as long as they scaled then salaries would be a minor part, we as an industry are now trying to dig ourselves out of that hole with a even shittier AD experiences just as that AD market is crashing down.
      - waveBidder 3y ago
        free money for VC via low interest rates was a terrible strategy for creating innovation that would last.
    - justatdotin 3y ago
nkozyra 3y ago
I'd say you're very much in the minority then. Spotify is notorious for its weak recommendation system.
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  Compared to what? Genuinely asking, because I like Spotify's recommendation system yet I always have the feeling that it can be better... even with the recent enhanced shuffle playlist and efforts to provide more contextual recs.
  - nkozyra 3y ago
    YouTube music, Pandora, I'm sure there are others. Spotify likes to feed you back stuff you liked even if it's only tangentially related to what you're asking for. It also repeats the same recommendations for things like radio over and over again.
    - brandensilva 3y ago
      I feel like it's been improving with them offering more ways to discover music that sounds like what you heard but not the same artists. But yeah I still feel more can be done. Their new Hi-Fi package is supposed to have more options too.
    - dminvs 3y ago
      I had the same experience you describe with Pandora for years, has it improved recently?
      - disposition2 3y ago
        That is borderline tragic to hear. Pandora acquired __the__ music streaming service when it came to discovery, rdio, and did absolutely nothing with it.
    - slenk 3y ago
      You describing your experience with Spotify is my same experience with Pandora. It's awful, they have like 10 songs
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
Fuck Spotify. They've played a major role in drastically reducing any chance of significant revenue flowing to musicians, in complete contrast to Bandcamp. People hearing your music is nice and all (I like it when people hear my stuff on BC), but it is orthogonal to the revenue that used to be associated with making recorded music available. There's far, far more music out there than anyone will ever be able to listen to, and I consider the possibility of even 1 paid milkshake for a musician much more important than some random number of listeners who heard the track on Spotify. I appreciate that you may see things differently, but I think that you're wrong.
- Applejinx 3y ago
  THANK you. Spotify is no Bandcamp substitute. Not even close. Not even remotely the same category of thing. Yikes.
- nomel 3y ago
  > People hearing your music is nice and all As a listener, this is my entire concern, use case, and reason for paying for a streaming site: finding new music to listen to. I don't think I'm unique. Artists should get more, which is why I pay for Spotify Premium, but the use case of a listener is important. Bandcamp doesn't address that, for me.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    There is more music on Bandcamp than you could listen to in a lifetime. More comes out in a week than you could (probably) listen to in a week. So when you sayd "finding new music to listen to", there's a hidden implication in there: you want to find new music that is on Spotify (which in turn implies things like major labels, artists seeking or expecting breakout etc. Bandcamp is an amazing resource for discovering new music, but a subset of all new music, just as Spotify is. It's fine to say you prefer what you can find on Spotify, just don't make the claim that Bandcamp somehow isn't up for this general task.
    - nomel 3y ago
tomphoolery 3y ago
> It finds music I like, regardless of musician effort. This isn't really true...musicians must put forth a ton of effort just to be part of the songs that are recommended to you. Spotify favors and rewards those who promote their music on other platforms, since it scours the web for articles mentioning your name and people posting about you on social media in order to determine how far up in the "rankings" you should be when someone asks for a similar sounding song.
- nomel 3y ago
  Is this assumed or is there public info about their algorithm? In the first song of my Discover Weekly, if I google the very unique artist name, I get exactly four hits: their bandcamp page, their website, their Spotify page, and their YouTube channel that hasn't been updated in a 9 months, with that last video having 120k views. The rest is unrelated to them. This doesn't refutes what you're saying, but I would have exactly 0 chance of finding them on my own, with the effort they're putting in.
  - aurnik 3y ago
    Discover Weekly specifically requires artists to "pitch" their songs to Spotify. If you're already following the artist, their new releases that have been pitched are supposedly guaranteed to show up on your Discover Weekly. Otherwise, I believe it's someone at Spotify who picked that song which then distributes it to "relevant" listeners.
    - nomel 3y ago
      Again, is this assumed, or do you have something public that can be linked to? The only explanation of the algorithm is what I would expect, rather than some silly humans in the loop: recommendation based on user activity and the analysis of the song style [1]. https://medium.com/the-sound-of-ai/spotifys-discover-weekly-explained-breaking-from-your-music-bubble-or-maybe-not-b506da144123 https://medium.com/the-sound-of-ai/spotifys-discover-weekly-...
JohnFen 3y ago
Can I buy music from Spotify? As in, be able to download a non-proprietary, lossless encoding of the music? If not, Spotify is worthless to me.
- mcsniff 3y ago
  If you re-frame Spotify as a way to discover music, it's not worthless. Feel free to use Spotify to find artists and give them money however you want. Also, nobody is stopping you from spending your time finding new music and giving money as directly as possible to the artist. Spotify can be seen as a way to increase your exposure to new music, and for that it might be worth the $XX/month to many people, the ability to stream/cache it is a nice addition, but you don't have to rely on it as a way to give money (a pittance) to artists you like.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > If you re-frame Spotify as a way to discover music, it's not worthless. It is to me, though. I don't need another way to discover music. I have that well-covered. And by "buy music", I wasn't referring to a way to pay artists (that would be a followup question if I didn't already know that part). I mean, can I download the music in a high-quality, open-standard, format? I thought Spotify only did streaming, and I am not interested in a streaming service.
    - nomel 3y ago
      > have that well-covered. Could you share your secrets?
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        No secrets. I get recommendations from my friends, I keep track of what musicians/producers/etc. were involved in producing music that I love, and seek out what other works they were involved in, etc. I pay attention to incidental music I come across and pursue it. I've been doing this for decades and as a result, I have a very eclectic collection that covers almost all genres. This approach may not work for everyone, but it works very well for me.
jlarocco 3y ago
That's interesting - I usually don't like Spotify's recommendations. Youtube was much better at that IMO, but I've tried to stop using it due to the Google connection. I don't really know where Bandcamp stands - I've bought music there that I found on YouTube, but haven't used it to find new stuff.
- nomel 3y ago
  > I usually don't like Spotify's recommendations It requires that you like songs, and listen, of course. I have around 1600 liked songs. It knows me well enough at this point.
  - jlarocco 3y ago
    That hasn't helped any. I have almost 1100 liked songs, several dozen liked albums, and several years of near daily listening. The recommendations are still less good (for me) than what YouTube recommended without an account, just based on my listening history.
    - nomel 3y ago
      I've been satisfied, but that's good to hear. I'll give it another try. My biggest problem with the Spotify recommendation is that it seems to be a bit "sticky", recommended recent listens more than anything.
      - jlarocco 3y ago
        I think that's what I don't like about it, also. It seems like it gives me recommendations too similar to what I'm already listening to.
matt_j 3y ago
Spotify has a catalogue that appeals to people that like pop music. Bandcamp provides an outlet for artists that aren't part of the pop music spectrum. I'm deep into electronic music and Bandcamp is the _only_ place that some artists are even listed, and it's become an amazing space for artists that want to release limited press special edition records - pre-ordered by fans to cover the manufacturing price. Prior to this I acquired a few cool records via Kickstarter, but Bandcamp is preferable. Furthermore, Spotify are well known for paying artists next to nothing. Bandcamp are well known for letting artists take the majority of the purchase price of their music. Not to mention, listening to mp3s is for chumps! Bandcamp is the best there is (for now) if you want to financially support the artists you like. I spend a lot of time in record stores (both physical and digital) but they are mostly extinct now. There's a few I still frequent: Juno, Boomkat, Hardwax among them, but the more the world turns to services like Spotify, the less room there is for real music stores. It's super annoying how the internet kills everything that was good. Bullshit for the masses over quality service for people that care.
- justatdotin 3y ago
  yep. I use both daily but find bc more valuable. bc does little to help me find new music (so I get my leads elsewhere) but once I know what I want it is more likely to be on bc than spotify. spotify does a good job of helping me follow artists I already know, but not so great identifying new ones. I'm sure that depends on what you're looking for tho.
COM2323 3y ago
It probably depends on music genre, but Bandcamp hosts a ton of music that's not available anywhere else. Spotify is great for popular music, but a lot of small/niche artists have presence only on Bandcamp, both digital and physical. Pretty much all of my vaporwave/futurefunk/synthwave vinyl records are from Bandcamp.

winternett 3y ago

[flagged]

diggan 3y ago
> It's apparent that you work for them somehow. Because they understand what Bandcamp is charging for? The page for Bandcamp Pro lists all the feature you get (and everything that isn't listed there, is stuff you don't get): https://bandcamp.com/pro https://bandcamp.com/pro
- winternett 3y ago
  Do you seriously think those features are worth 20 dollars a month? Again, clearly advocating for the platform and missing the entire message. A musician can easily self host a site that does exactly what bandcamp represents for them. Also, most serious artists are already distributed to platforms that do exactly what Bandcamp does and more. There is very little value in bancamp, unless you are perhaps trying to sell songs with lots of uncleared samples in them.
  - diggan 3y ago
    I don't, hence I don't pay for it. But if you signed up for Bandcamp Pro for $20/month, then clearly you either were happy with what you were getting, or you misunderstood what you were about to get. But personally I think that pricing page is pretty clear about what you get.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  And nobody needs to pay that to be on Bandcamp, have their music available, and get paid.

callalex 3y ago

Just calling someone dumb isn’t constructive. Instead tell them what you think Bandcamp had to offer.

freeone3000 3y ago
Bandcamp let me pay a musician for a song, regardless of how unknown or unpopular a band was. You’re three dudes in your mid-thirties playing open mic night and passing a hat around, and definitely cannot afford to get on Spotify or Youtube Music, but you can get on bandcamp and a few people can pay $5 for a song they liked when they were tipsy.
- petre 3y ago
  Also YT Music quality is shit. I bought a new pair of headphones and though they were defective until I played some songs encoded by yours truly as opus files.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Bandcamp let me pay a musician for a song, regardless of how unknown or unpopular a band was. This is what made me love Bandcamp. I get to pay the artists more-or-less directly, and as a person who tends not to be into the Big Music Names, Bandcamp is utterly amazing, chock full of smaller artists doing wonderful things.
- Snild 3y ago
  > definitely cannot afford to get on Spotify How so? There aren't necessarily any upfront costs for getting on Spotify; several aggregators offer a "we take a cut of your earnings" model.
  - srg0 3y ago
    Even without a cut, there are several virtual distribution services like DistroKid and TuneCore which for a flat fee will take care of submitting whatever WAV one created to all streaming platforms. Getting it noticed is a whole other story.
- 3y ago

winternett 3y ago

I know a lot of musicians that use it. I have been making music for over 20 years. What musicians want from sites like this is to be able to offload their marketing so that they can focus on making music, not to have boilerplate functional features (like bulk file uploads) for a fee. Sites and apps now avoid giving any real promotional value to users because they can later sell it to them incrementally. It's a tactic to keep artists primarily promoting the platform in addition to promoting their work on the platform. Very little value overall, as now there are tons of competing music and social platforms available, but all of them offer the same desperately weak promotional value to musicians.