8 ms·

More choices are always welcome, but the strength of Bandcamp primarily was the zeitgeist and the culture around it, not the tech. The Bandcamp fridays, the cu

More choices are always welcome, but the strength of Bandcamp primarily was the zeitgeist and the culture around it, not the tech. The Bandcamp fridays, the curation, the interviews, the selectors, the IRL presence at Record Fairs or at events like Record Store Day...Considering the strong communal experience it was, the idea of federating (and further distancing) the space between the artists and the audience sounds more like a downgrade.

jzb 3y ago
Yep. Just as anybody can stand up a social media platform clone - the value is in the network effect and content on the platform. Because of the content and discovery features on Bandcamp, I've discovered several bands I'd never have heard of otherwise. If you're leaving hosting and promotion entirely as an exercise to the band/artist, you're not meeting the actual need. Bandcamp (mostly) met the need of artists and music enthusiasts. Unfortunately it's now in the hands of an entity that seems to care about neither.
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  and that network effect is what allows for enshittification to proceed unabated. We're watching that start right now with AI. which is probably the real danger of AI: locked in work flows, exploited by capitalism to leverage shitty outcomes as a way to drive up profits and downgrade outcomes.
  - nusl 3y ago
    Well, you need the network effect but I don’t think the effect itself causes enshittification. The constant need for massive growth and big numbers to sate investors causes companies to drift from their original mission and morph into something soulless and purely driven by profit, despite sometimes already being wildly profitable. There is irony in me saying this on HN but the longer-term effects of VC money really really ruins good things.
    - cyanydeez 3y ago
      the network effect _allows_ enshittification, to the point that it's almost entirely why enshittification is allowed. The momentum into a ecosystem is much different than coming out. Once the Business realizes they've hit that "event horizon" enshittification necessarily flows from pure capitalism. Sure, we could redefine the physical basis of this blackhole of the internet metaphor via regulations, but corporations are not governments and do not need to follow any specific multifaceted approach to long term vision.
      - nusl 3y ago
        How could the network effect reasonably not occur for any decently popular [socially-inclined] service? Whether or not the company does anything to encourage it, with enough users it happens regardless. Sure, it enables it. Without it, you probably haven't got enough users to survive anyway. So, the choice is on the company. Money breeds bullshit and companies want money, so they leverage their leverage, which happens to be their users. Then the shit just gets worse. TXitter is "living" proof that people don't give a shit as long as they can get their endorphins from likes. So, to some extent it's also people feeding on the validation that likes from strangers gives them and not even people they know or care about. I'm not sure that even without corporate greed the network effect would not turn toxic. Picture a perfectly ethical company with 2m users logging in daily and interacting across different planes. The company can do everything it can to preserve its integrity and user rights but the users themselves will enshittify eventually. People love validation and likes are basically crack. It's changing too with short-form content sucking peoples' lives away 30 seconds at a time. Clickbait is also becoming more nefarious and AI is being leveraged to further worsen it. IMO, the modern internet is turning into a swamp of fast-validation, instant-grattification, and endless competition for that 0.5s you have to grab a user's eyes. It's all going to shit. Good luck watching YouTube in any sane capacity without significant effort. Also, good luck using websites that call themselves "for the real web" but morph into Medium, Substack, Reddit, and pretty much anything else. That's me being jaded I guess. But the internet is falling in a way that most people don't care about. Same as Reddit. Same as Twitter. Nobody gives a shit about integrity as long as they can get their dopamine hits one tap at a time.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Because of the content and discovery features on Bandcamp, I've discovered several bands I'd never have heard of otherwise. That's awesome. Bandcamp is my primary go-to for music, but I have to admit that I've never found much value in their discovery features, articles, etc. It's pretty great that Bandcamp can serve both of us what we need.
rdn 3y ago
To me the strength is the ability to buy the music files directly without hurdles and without being trapped in something like iTunes
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jjulius 3y ago
  "Was"?
  - nusl 3y ago
    Still possible but the company itself is being sold and resold, now in the hands of an actor that seems to conflict with its mission, unless I am mistaken
    - jjulius 3y ago
      Hardcore Bandcamp user here - it's been sold, but other than layoffs, the user experience has remained essentially exactly the same. Especially with regards to OP's point about buying the files directly without hurdles. Songtradr has yet to announce any future changes to the platform as well. For all intents and purposes, it's the same as it ever was. Hence my confusion over the use of the word "was".
      - nusl 3y ago
        Let's hope that it continues to be so, and that there aren't internal changes ongoing to impact this
  - de_nied 3y ago
    Doesn't everyone just rip now with youtube-dl/yt-dlp?
    - httpsterio 3y ago
dijksterhuis 3y ago
> The Bandcamp fridays, the curation, the interviews, the selectors, the IRL presence at Record Fairs or at events like Record Store Day... I have a completely different experience. Bandcamp will survive because it's primarily an independent online music / record / merch store. All that other stuff is just .... it's bloat and fluff that gets in the way of the music tbh.
- pickledish 3y ago
  > Bandcamp will survive because it's primarily an independent online music / record / merch store Since it seems like you might have not heard, as of last year bandcamp is no longer independent (which I assume is the impetus for projects like the OP): https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/epic-games-acquires-bandcamp-1235194180/ https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/epic-games-acquires-ba... edit: ah, unless you meant "a store for independent music" instead of "an independent store for music", english
  - dijksterhuis 3y ago
    > ah, unless you meant "a store for independent music" instead of "an independent store for music", english yeah, the first one. (it's late on a thursday and terraform is being difficult, limited spare brainpower).
- caslon 3y ago
  Bandcamp Fridays gave (and presently, still give) 100% of Bandcamp's cut to the artists. Any "replacement" platform that doesn't have it will mean the artists get less money, which gets in the way of the music. As somebody who obviously didn't pay attention to any artist on the platform, of course anything beyond a quick, one-click, Amazon-style storefront will be "getting in the way of the music," for you. There's already a solution for that, though: Go shop on Amazon, if you don't care about what percentage of the profits the artist gets. They have the patented "Buy now with 1-Click®" experience, and it'll likely be faster for you to purchase using it. Personally, I want a world where people can afford to make music for a living, and Bandcamp was great at doing everything it could to try and make that happen for as many people as possible.
elevaet 3y ago
For me it was all about: - a very generous cut for the artist - how well the site functions - it does just enough, very practical. Clean UX and UI - flac
- elevaet 3y ago
  I should say is all about. BC still does all those core most important things. Long live Bandcamp.
porcoda 3y ago
I think Bandcamp does a great job bringing artists closer to the audience without any of those things like interviews, curation, IRL presence. Honestly, those things always rubbed me the wrong way since they felt like the kind of marketing that we get through traditional means (e.g., Rolling Stone articles), except with an indie flavor: some music nerd picked a winner and put them forward, and artists who didn't make the cut by the Bandcamp tastemakers take more effort to find. I think the absence of that sort of "pick-a-winner-and-interview-them" does a lot for making things flat and fair for all. The primary people who get grumpy about getting rid of that are the people whose job it is to be curator/interviewer/etc. I'm not terribly sad if they go away.
- fivre 3y ago
  they were pretty consistent about picking good artists though, which was great for scenes i dont follow myself no one person can sift through every scene and genre to find the good shit, and there's plenty of bad shit. i can do that for like, one scene bandcamp articles generally delivered me more quality finds with more variety than automated "you may also like..." curation systems a la spotify or last.fm. it's not like the latter are truly democratizing anything either--once getting big on spotify (or nowadays, tiktok) became important commercially, you got a whole ecosystem of influencers behind the scenes offering promotion in those systems. getting boosted via a faceless "chill sunday morning coffee music" playlist is still curation
- dendrite9 3y ago
  And I thought the bandcamp did a good job with the best of the month lists because it wasn;t just what sold best. I frequently started my morning listening to the bands from one of the articles on the homepage while I drank coffee and got caught up. For categories like hip hop, ambient, or folk I don't follow enough to have a grasp of who or what I might like, so I treated the articles like a radio show, a chance to stumble on something interesting. The posts focused on a specific region and genre were usually worth the read, and I appreciated how sometimes there were links to some artists side projects in a different genre. Today's album of the day post was about Japanese Acid Folk, not something I care about at all. But it wasn't a bad way to start the day with something new. https://daily.bandcamp.com/album-of-the-day/various-artists-nippon-acid-folk-1970-1980-review https://daily.bandcamp.com/album-of-the-day/various-artists-... I suppose it seemed valuable to me that the various writers or editors could focus on niches, not the best of the month and this month it is written by a metalhead. If anything I thought the suggested albums at the bottom iss a bit too skewed toward certain bands. I'm not sure if that's targeting by user, or if there are too many connections in people's purchases to avoid making the links. On the other hand, the artist suggested albums at the bottom are almost always worth a listen if they have taken the time to add any.
com2kid 3y ago
> The Bandcamp fridays, the curation, the interviews, the selectors, the IRL presence at Record Fairs or at events like Record Store Day I am a pretty regular listener to music on Bandcamp, and I have never heard of any of these things. To me Bandcamp is a minimalist distribution medium and simple media player for independent artists.
- zeekaran 3y ago
  Same, as well as letting me stream it when I can't play from my downloaded library, such as from a work computer.
TylerE 3y ago
Certainly not the tech. It's 2024 and their iOS app is still not ipad-compatible.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I thought I used it years ago on an iPad. It was just a scaled up iPhone app so the resolution was bad but, then again, how many pixels do you really want in a music player?
bee_rider 3y ago
I typically use Pandora for my discovery and then buy on Bandcamp first (if available), then Amazon (eww, I know, but this is the catch all failure-path). The Bandcamp curation stuff seemed… interesting I guess? I’m glad they were able to employ some music experts. But it is hard to beat system that is tailored to your taste.
emptyfile 3y ago
[dead]
riedel 3y ago
Actual the thing is that I can buy and own music pretty hassle free. I haven' t really figured how this freecamp sitegenertor helps selling/buying music (including hard copies)
j_french 3y ago
The big draw for me is the curation, articles, scene reports, bandcamp weekly, all nicely and simply integrated with a way to listen to what you're reading about on the platform. Recommendations from humans as opposed to the Spotify algorithms. There's a lot of music on the internet, Bandcamp's offering for me is helping me to find some of it that I can connect with.

jzb 3y ago

Yep. Just as anybody can stand up a social media platform clone - the value is in the network effect and content on the platform. Because of the content and discovery features on Bandcamp, I've discovered several bands I'd never have heard of otherwise. If you're leaving hosting and promotion entirely as an exercise to the band/artist, you're not meeting the actual need. Bandcamp (mostly) met the need of artists and music enthusiasts. Unfortunately it's now in the hands of an entity that seems to care about neither.

cyanydeez 3y ago
and that network effect is what allows for enshittification to proceed unabated. We're watching that start right now with AI. which is probably the real danger of AI: locked in work flows, exploited by capitalism to leverage shitty outcomes as a way to drive up profits and downgrade outcomes.
- nusl 3y ago
  Well, you need the network effect but I don’t think the effect itself causes enshittification. The constant need for massive growth and big numbers to sate investors causes companies to drift from their original mission and morph into something soulless and purely driven by profit, despite sometimes already being wildly profitable. There is irony in me saying this on HN but the longer-term effects of VC money really really ruins good things.
  - cyanydeez 3y ago
    the network effect _allows_ enshittification, to the point that it's almost entirely why enshittification is allowed. The momentum into a ecosystem is much different than coming out. Once the Business realizes they've hit that "event horizon" enshittification necessarily flows from pure capitalism. Sure, we could redefine the physical basis of this blackhole of the internet metaphor via regulations, but corporations are not governments and do not need to follow any specific multifaceted approach to long term vision.
    - nusl 3y ago
      How could the network effect reasonably not occur for any decently popular [socially-inclined] service? Whether or not the company does anything to encourage it, with enough users it happens regardless. Sure, it enables it. Without it, you probably haven't got enough users to survive anyway. So, the choice is on the company. Money breeds bullshit and companies want money, so they leverage their leverage, which happens to be their users. Then the shit just gets worse. TXitter is "living" proof that people don't give a shit as long as they can get their endorphins from likes. So, to some extent it's also people feeding on the validation that likes from strangers gives them and not even people they know or care about. I'm not sure that even without corporate greed the network effect would not turn toxic. Picture a perfectly ethical company with 2m users logging in daily and interacting across different planes. The company can do everything it can to preserve its integrity and user rights but the users themselves will enshittify eventually. People love validation and likes are basically crack. It's changing too with short-form content sucking peoples' lives away 30 seconds at a time. Clickbait is also becoming more nefarious and AI is being leveraged to further worsen it. IMO, the modern internet is turning into a swamp of fast-validation, instant-grattification, and endless competition for that 0.5s you have to grab a user's eyes. It's all going to shit. Good luck watching YouTube in any sane capacity without significant effort. Also, good luck using websites that call themselves "for the real web" but morph into Medium, Substack, Reddit, and pretty much anything else. That's me being jaded I guess. But the internet is falling in a way that most people don't care about. Same as Reddit. Same as Twitter. Nobody gives a shit about integrity as long as they can get their dopamine hits one tap at a time.
JohnFen 3y ago
> Because of the content and discovery features on Bandcamp, I've discovered several bands I'd never have heard of otherwise. That's awesome. Bandcamp is my primary go-to for music, but I have to admit that I've never found much value in their discovery features, articles, etc. It's pretty great that Bandcamp can serve both of us what we need.

rdn 3y ago

To me the strength is the ability to buy the music files directly without hurdles and without being trapped in something like iTunes

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jjulius 3y ago
"Was"?
- nusl 3y ago
  Still possible but the company itself is being sold and resold, now in the hands of an actor that seems to conflict with its mission, unless I am mistaken
  - jjulius 3y ago
    Hardcore Bandcamp user here - it's been sold, but other than layoffs, the user experience has remained essentially exactly the same. Especially with regards to OP's point about buying the files directly without hurdles. Songtradr has yet to announce any future changes to the platform as well. For all intents and purposes, it's the same as it ever was. Hence my confusion over the use of the word "was".
    - nusl 3y ago
      Let's hope that it continues to be so, and that there aren't internal changes ongoing to impact this
- de_nied 3y ago
  Doesn't everyone just rip now with youtube-dl/yt-dlp?
  - httpsterio 3y ago

dijksterhuis 3y ago

> The Bandcamp fridays, the curation, the interviews, the selectors, the IRL presence at Record Fairs or at events like Record Store Day... I have a completely different experience. Bandcamp will survive because it's primarily an independent online music / record / merch store. All that other stuff is just .... it's bloat and fluff that gets in the way of the music tbh.

pickledish 3y ago
> Bandcamp will survive because it's primarily an independent online music / record / merch store Since it seems like you might have not heard, as of last year bandcamp is no longer independent (which I assume is the impetus for projects like the OP): https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/epic-games-acquires-bandcamp-1235194180/ https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/epic-games-acquires-ba... edit: ah, unless you meant "a store for independent music" instead of "an independent store for music", english
- dijksterhuis 3y ago
  > ah, unless you meant "a store for independent music" instead of "an independent store for music", english yeah, the first one. (it's late on a thursday and terraform is being difficult, limited spare brainpower).
caslon 3y ago
Bandcamp Fridays gave (and presently, still give) 100% of Bandcamp's cut to the artists. Any "replacement" platform that doesn't have it will mean the artists get less money, which gets in the way of the music. As somebody who obviously didn't pay attention to any artist on the platform, of course anything beyond a quick, one-click, Amazon-style storefront will be "getting in the way of the music," for you. There's already a solution for that, though: Go shop on Amazon, if you don't care about what percentage of the profits the artist gets. They have the patented "Buy now with 1-Click®" experience, and it'll likely be faster for you to purchase using it. Personally, I want a world where people can afford to make music for a living, and Bandcamp was great at doing everything it could to try and make that happen for as many people as possible.

elevaet 3y ago

For me it was all about: - a very generous cut for the artist - how well the site functions - it does just enough, very practical. Clean UX and UI - flac

elevaet 3y ago
I should say is all about. BC still does all those core most important things. Long live Bandcamp.

porcoda 3y ago

I think Bandcamp does a great job bringing artists closer to the audience without any of those things like interviews, curation, IRL presence. Honestly, those things always rubbed me the wrong way since they felt like the kind of marketing that we get through traditional means (e.g., Rolling Stone articles), except with an indie flavor: some music nerd picked a winner and put them forward, and artists who didn't make the cut by the Bandcamp tastemakers take more effort to find. I think the absence of that sort of "pick-a-winner-and-interview-them" does a lot for making things flat and fair for all. The primary people who get grumpy about getting rid of that are the people whose job it is to be curator/interviewer/etc. I'm not terribly sad if they go away.

fivre 3y ago
they were pretty consistent about picking good artists though, which was great for scenes i dont follow myself no one person can sift through every scene and genre to find the good shit, and there's plenty of bad shit. i can do that for like, one scene bandcamp articles generally delivered me more quality finds with more variety than automated "you may also like..." curation systems a la spotify or last.fm. it's not like the latter are truly democratizing anything either--once getting big on spotify (or nowadays, tiktok) became important commercially, you got a whole ecosystem of influencers behind the scenes offering promotion in those systems. getting boosted via a faceless "chill sunday morning coffee music" playlist is still curation
dendrite9 3y ago
And I thought the bandcamp did a good job with the best of the month lists because it wasn;t just what sold best. I frequently started my morning listening to the bands from one of the articles on the homepage while I drank coffee and got caught up. For categories like hip hop, ambient, or folk I don't follow enough to have a grasp of who or what I might like, so I treated the articles like a radio show, a chance to stumble on something interesting. The posts focused on a specific region and genre were usually worth the read, and I appreciated how sometimes there were links to some artists side projects in a different genre. Today's album of the day post was about Japanese Acid Folk, not something I care about at all. But it wasn't a bad way to start the day with something new. https://daily.bandcamp.com/album-of-the-day/various-artists-nippon-acid-folk-1970-1980-review https://daily.bandcamp.com/album-of-the-day/various-artists-... I suppose it seemed valuable to me that the various writers or editors could focus on niches, not the best of the month and this month it is written by a metalhead. If anything I thought the suggested albums at the bottom iss a bit too skewed toward certain bands. I'm not sure if that's targeting by user, or if there are too many connections in people's purchases to avoid making the links. On the other hand, the artist suggested albums at the bottom are almost always worth a listen if they have taken the time to add any.

com2kid 3y ago

> The Bandcamp fridays, the curation, the interviews, the selectors, the IRL presence at Record Fairs or at events like Record Store Day I am a pretty regular listener to music on Bandcamp, and I have never heard of any of these things. To me Bandcamp is a minimalist distribution medium and simple media player for independent artists.

zeekaran 3y ago
Same, as well as letting me stream it when I can't play from my downloaded library, such as from a work computer.

TylerE 3y ago

Certainly not the tech. It's 2024 and their iOS app is still not ipad-compatible.

bee_rider 3y ago
I thought I used it years ago on an iPad. It was just a scaled up iPhone app so the resolution was bad but, then again, how many pixels do you really want in a music player?

bee_rider 3y ago

I typically use Pandora for my discovery and then buy on Bandcamp first (if available), then Amazon (eww, I know, but this is the catch all failure-path). The Bandcamp curation stuff seemed… interesting I guess? I’m glad they were able to employ some music experts. But it is hard to beat system that is tailored to your taste.

emptyfile 3y ago

[dead]

riedel 3y ago

Actual the thing is that I can buy and own music pretty hassle free. I haven' t really figured how this freecamp sitegenertor helps selling/buying music (including hard copies)

j_french 3y ago

The big draw for me is the curation, articles, scene reports, bandcamp weekly, all nicely and simply integrated with a way to listen to what you're reading about on the platform. Recommendations from humans as opposed to the Spotify algorithms. There's a lot of music on the internet, Bandcamp's offering for me is helping me to find some of it that I can connect with.