I'm really glad Bandcamp exists as a place where I can buy high-quality, DRM-free music, with a reasonable revenue share and no-bullshit experience. This makes me like them even more!
If something isn't on Bandcamp these days, I often don't even bother messing around with the alternatives and just pirate it.
Bleep still does this thing where they skip to the next track after a minute of preview. This was and still is the real great thing about Bandcamp: They treat you like an adult and let you preview in OK quality for as long and often as you like. And if people only listen to previews and never buy - fine, those people would never buy anyway, whether the preview is skipped after a minute or not.
I wish HDTracks hadn't gone entirely over to their "music downloader application." Bandcamp is far preferable to me in that they spit out a FLAC link at the conclusion of the transaction.
Well, HDTracks' target audience is middle-aged audiophiles and dadrock enthusiasts, so it's natural that their price point will be higher than on the indie end of the spectrum (aka Bandcamp). Also, there will be more middlemen chipping off their share when you buy from HDtracks.
Nothing? Do you imply that every app that you can talk about with your friends should implement messaging? From my point of view this is absurd.
By the way, I was not aware you're talking about the app in particular. I don't see much point in having an app for every store I use. What features are implemented in the Bandcamp app which their site doesn't have (and can't have)?
> It's not a music service. It's a service for artists to sell their stuff. Period.
Well, not really. As per their About Us section, “Bandcamp’s mission is to create the best possible service for artists and labels to share and earn money from their music, and for fans to discover and enjoy it.” Discovering works nicely, but as for enjoying, they really have issues with volume control and even the basic loudness level. Also their mobile app does not let you download music to listen to later offline (or without taxing your mobile connection), which is a shame.
The discover part takes place on Bandcamp, but Bandcamp's involvement ends after you've bought and downloaded the music. The enjoyment part that comes afterwards happens on your device, using whatever music player you prefer to play the files you just downloaded. It's enjoyable because you get a bunch of zipped, DRM-free .flac files you can play on any device, instead of being bound to some specific app or in-browser player.
At least that's what I think the intended use case for Bandcamp is. That's how I've always used it.
He wants a player to be given to him as part of the package. Which is nice. I think the most efficient market would incentivize a holistic package where you pay for someone to make the hard decisions for you while letting the experts take the core content and use it however they like.
And Bandcamp's target audience prefers to own their music and knowing that it will be on their device of choice tomorrow or in 30 years without the fear of losing it due ending licensing deals. Not to mention all the obscure and rare music that never made it to streaming services in the first place.
Your preference is well served with Spotify & Co. No need for Bandcamp to use the same streaming approach.
https://buymusic.club/ sources bandcamp for user generated playlists. Also, youre able to follow fans and labels do actively message and talk to fans. Its very minor but I think its a sufficient level of interaction.
No, actually. Why do these "preview" pages have songs that unlock after I buy if they're just previews? Why does the collection page (heart icon) open a player when I play an album directly from there?
"Today" was 1st May, so it is gone now (until next time I guess, it was the second such promotion since the lockdowns). But yeah, been buying some music, especially releases from my favorites, who seem to have concerts cancelled. The frontpage of Bandcamp was crazy, the feed of items people bought went much faster than usual. I think a lot of people participated.
Great stuff from the best music platform out there, hands down. You get mp3, flac, cd, vinyl, merch and no bullshit attached. Best deals for artists also. This is the only place I buy music these days :)
"But the pandemic and its impact on the music community aren’t over, so today, as well as on June 5, and July 3 (the first Friday of each month), we’re waiving our revenue share for all sales on Bandcamp, from midnight to midnight PDT on each day."
You'll have to wait for next month but do consider it!
Conversely, I tried Spotify for a while, and I won't go back to a catalogue that I have no control over, with curation that is spotty at best and non-existent at worst, and where albums can just disappear for nebulous licensing reasons.
I have a catalogue of music that belongs to me, which I can sort and curate and manage exactly to my whims and desires. It's a matter of quality over quantity.
I don’t understand why this got voted down. The parent echos my feelings on the matter well.
Streaming is convenient for some use cases, and dreadful for others. e.g. DJing.
Even Spotify fails in some of its aims: I can no longer share to, or follow now new friends IN Spotify, because I joined pre-facebook accounts and I don’t use facebook. I have to share from it via IM/email, which is exactly like if the music was on webpages/ftp/etc. So just as I have no control over the catalog, I also have no control over sharing/following friends. It is however brilliant for discovery (within the admittedly huge catalog).
From the amount of late 90s early 00s indie rap of my teens I've found there that has never been available on Spotify, Apple Music may have the bigger catalog.
I found Apple Music worse than Spotify: the catalog changes more often, so you can’t guarantee music you tried to “keep” (with likes or downloading) will stay where you left it. Apple will delete music from your device (or otherwise lock you out of it), if you move to a geographic region they don’t have a licence agreement covering that music in that place. It’s also got terrible UX for those times when you want music but don’t know what you want. It’s playlists are rubbish and the way it promotes them gets in the way of real discovery.
Gentle Return released his new album on May 1st, so the timing was perfect. I've heard from musician buddies that even with the normal fees, Bandcamp gives them a much larger cut of song/album sales than iTunes, and apparently streaming revenues from Spotify, Apple Music, etc are a joke.
If something isn't on Bandcamp these days, I often don't even bother messing around with the alternatives and just pirate it.