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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.
> 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.
> 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-ba...
edit: ah, unless you meant "a store for independent music" instead of "an independent store for music", english
> 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).
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.
You’ve focused in on the Bandcamp Friday thing.
When I read the original parent it was everything else that I was like “meh, Bandcamp would be perfectly fine without any of that”
Bandcamp Fridays just got lumped into the quote tbh.
I’m tired. It’s Thursday. Terraform was kicking me in the head today.
Although I can never remember which bloody Friday is Bandcamp Friday so I think I’ve managed to do like one of them.
Bandcamp was going for like 10 years before the Fridays existed. If they needed to go to keep the store online, I’d be fine with that (not that I think that’s necessary).
Oh and I used to work for a performing royalties organisation… so… yeah… I kind of do care about how much artists get paid for their work.
Yeah it would be great if making a living off music was feasible for more people.
But the magic is in the fact that’s it’s not. There’s magic in the sacrifice.
Edit — this part of your reply was annoying me.
> 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.
For me… the connection to the artist happens through the music that I buy from them.
So you know what. Yeah, I would buy off amazon. Or boomkat. Or bleep. Or redeye. Or phonica. Or honest johns. Or SOTU. Or juno.
I’m an absolute record store whore. I have no allegiances.
Because buying the actual music is the important bit I believe.
Why?
Because no one buys music anymore.
That’s why artists have to tour so much — to make that living you spoke about. Because no one buys anything these days.
Well… I do. But I’m weird.
I couldn’t care less about instagram posts or posting photos of people hanging out in the studio tho. That stuff is pure bobbins as far as I’m concerned.
> I’m an absolute record store whore.
I can't deny that.
> Because buying the actual music is the important bit I believe.
Congratulations on abstractly purchasing music without caring how much of it actually ends up in an artist's pocket and feeling proud of it! Vinyl is 15-20% for the artist on a good day, and usually worse after vendor markups. MP3s on most platforms are at least a 15+2.5% haircut for the artist.
> That’s why artists have to tour so much — to make that living you spoke about. Because no one buys anything these days.
> But the magic is in the fact that’s it’s not. There’s magic in the sacrifice.
Saying that you didn't care about workers getting paid was weird, but equating "making music" inherently with a vow of poverty is kind of beyond the pale. You're a (presumably) well-compensated person working on something far less useful to society than music, "the cloud." Plenty of countries have programs to compensate their artists fairly (like countries that force a percentage of radio play to be in their native language, or by local artists), and these countries don't have "less magic" because of it.
I don't even blame pirates, but this weird middle ground of being willing to spend money but not caring if a good deal of it goes to corporate middlemen so you can have the abstract, hipster, "At least I buy things!" experience is so bizarre.
> Although I can never remember which bloody Friday is Bandcamp Friday so I think I’ve managed to do like one of them.
Bookmark this silly site: https://isitbandcampfriday.com/
Oh I have. And I always forget anyway.
I buy physical copies. Is good enough for me.
> Any "replacement" platform that doesn't have it will mean the artists get less money, which gets in the way of the music.
This doesn't sound right, there are 8 billion people in this world, a large chunk of them potential 'artists' with sufficient motivation, and not everyone is motivated by money.
To me the strength is the ability to buy the music files directly without hurdles and without being trapped in something like iTunes
Comment was deleted :(
"Was"?
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
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".
Let's hope that it continues to be so, and that there aren't internal changes ongoing to impact this
Doesn't everyone just rip now with youtube-dl/yt-dlp?
I always thought audio quality was something for snobs, but recently my car's aux input died and I burned a few CDs with yt-dlp rips and I get it now. Youtube's 128kbps makes me wince on some of the quieter recordings, even compared to my previous setup of Spotify over a lackluster LTE connection.
It might be relevant that you're burning them at a set volume, and your only way to increase volume is by bumping up the output volume, whereas any sort of mp3 player you can bump up the volume of the source independently from the output. Maybe if you burn them at a higher volume and keep CD player's volume lower you'll have better luck?
Disclaimer: I'm far from an audiophile, I just know from personal experience that if your source is low volume and your output is cranked up you get a lot of...distortion? Interference? Artifacts? I don't know, it just sounds staticky and worse.
> if your source is low volume and your output is cranked up you get a lot of...distortion? Interference? Artifacts?
Mostly noise because you're amplifying it as well, and possibly artifacts because material converted at too low levels (which is the case of old CD rips that weren't normalized before encoding) wouldn't use all the available headroom, therefore losing one bit.
I managed to collect a rather massive digital music collection when p2p was en vogue.
I still listen to it every day because it's highly curated and has tracks unavailable on any service, but quality-wise it definitely feels like I'm plumbing the depths of a DVD collection when everyone else is watching Netflix.
Yeah, I used to do a lot of p2p too, I miss it. I used it heavily in HS but fell to the convenience of Spotify in college.
It was really a shame when what.cd went down, that was arguably the most complete archive of recorded music anywhere.
Support for artists and flac as the other comment already said (as well as clean UX)
If you want to support artists you'd be way better of just making a direct donation.
Sure, but:
* not every artist has a donation link. * I don't get the album for free otherwise
So I think it's totally ok for the service to give 10% to bandcamp (or whatever camp it will be in the future).
But I would be really happy when something like Faircamp takes off, and is easy for artists to use (or labels etc.), so they would be having more control, while providing a clean interface (unlike e.g. Qobuz)
I certainly don't, mostly because I want to pay the artists I appreciate. But also, the sound quality is awful.
can't get flacs from YouTube and some people also want to support the artists.
Can get flac from tidal or qobuz. I buy vinyls and go to concerts. That’s how I support musicians. Bandcamp is very nice imho
And buy vinyl, CDs and t-shirts etc.
No, I want to pay for my music. Otherwise why would the author continue such beautiful music?
Probably not. Bandcamp still sells albums, Amazon as well, and there are bunch of streaming services out there. If everyone was ripping from YouTube how would they stay in business?
Comment was deleted :(
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.
Literally a few minutes ago Adam Neely (Pretty famous youtuber and Jazz player) posted a video specifically about this point[1], and I fully agree with his thesis: If you take out the "music nerds" as the gatekeepers, their place will be taken by Google/Instagram/TikTok indexing and MinMax algos and whoever can influence those.
The tech to create content may have exploded in the last years, but the ability to truly connect and discover (and I mean ways to build cultural, emotional and social connections in and outside of the internet) has plummeted.
I don't agree that technology is strictly at fault here, but this side of the equation has been heavily ignored due to the less immediate monetization options. We've gone for the "intensive farming" of art and culture compared to more "sustainable" approaches, and we're experiencing the equivalent of desertification following a monocolture.
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-...
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.
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
This isn't really what you're posting about I do find curation and reviews to be valuable, if you avoid reifying them too much. I often see a bit of an anti-critic sentiment, mostly from people who disagree with a review for something they've got strong feelings about one way or another, but I don't want to spend the time to extensively search through the Sturgeon's law wasteland of indie music. Algorithmic recommendations are sometimes helpful but don't often encourage me to branch out as much as reviewers, especially when it comes to unknown unknowns. The fact that a lot of indie artists find it hard to get attention is really just the nature of the game. There are a lot of musicians and aspiring musicians out there.
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
I should say is all about. BC still does all those core most important things. Long live Bandcamp.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Same, as well as letting me stream it when I can't play from my downloaded library, such as from a work computer.
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)
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.
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.
Certainly not the tech. It's 2024 and their iOS app is still not ipad-compatible.
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?
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Keep in mind that this doesn't actually work as a webshop. It's just a static site generator - there's very little in the way of payment mechanisms, the documentation claims it's "not enforced".
I think it's neat but this isn't competition for Bandcamp. Could be cool if you just want to host some music tracks on a nicely formatted page though.
>Keep in mind that this doesn't actually work as a webshop.
Webshop is, like, the entire point of webcamp.
Talking as an indie artist here.
They could just set up their site as a wordpress install with one of the many mature payment/web shop plugins. Can be customized as needed as well.
They could just become software engineers, roll their own solution, start making more money that way, and give up music entirely.
Or they could use a platform that was explicitly designed to address their needs without any fuss.
You misunderstand me. I meant Faircamp could just set up the wordpress site for them instead of their solution that doesn't have payment integration.
My bad then. Hope they indeed do that.
It's trivial: get an FTP account, mount it locally with curlftpfs, and then use SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. A little stripe integration and you're off and running.
Oh. That's a big deal.
I guess the artist could just give a link to their external e-commerce store hosted by e.g. Lemon Squeezy or whatever.
I buy most of my music from Bandcamp in FLAC format. I'd be sad to see it go.
I've been digitising my music collection since the early 2000s in FLAC – which was pretty expensive on disk space relative to the size of hard drives back then. It's been fun but also somewhat worrying to hear my daughter ask why I don't have every song in the universe, but also why my music plays without internet connection or dedicated app. I feel her generation won't own anything anymore, and I still have to make up my mind whether that's a good or a bad thing. Without getting political, I fear art, music, software and other intangible goods might end up acquired, centralised and in the hands of lawyers at increasingly larger monopolistic corporations, and for some reason, a lot of grassroots artist initiatives seem to falter and end up going nowhere.
I will support Bandcamp, Faircamp or any place where I can get the music I like in CD quality without DRM. I want to support artists and I hope at least some of these more independent music outlets stay alive to cater to us who care about both artists and fans not to end up as vassals to a profit-extraction rental system for third parties.
> I feel her generation won't own anything anymore
I don't know if the age ranges of our children are similar or not, but once my kids discovered that I have a huge music collection that doesn't require an internet connection, they've started assembling their own.
I think that there are a lot of people who just don't understand there are options other than streaming, or that there are benefits to having your own collection that streaming can never provide. Once they learn otherwise, they may want those benefits as well.
With my children, they still stream music from commercial providers -- but they also maintain offline collections for the music they really care about.
Consider introducing her to the concept of an iPod. Music that works offline without a subscription and doesn't ebb away at your cellphone battery? Well, that's honestly pretty cool—to the point that it now sounds strangely futuristic and forward-thinking. We didn't know how good we had it.
Doesn't have to be a literal iPod, and if it is, maybe modding one would be cool to use better formats, and might get her friends interested in the concept. A lot of the generation coming up are interested in CDs, tape and vinyl too.
This was interesting too: https://www.fastcompany.com/90974412/apple-ipods-vintage-tec...
Bandcamp alternatives have existed for a while. Not just server software, but complete stores. The challenge lies in convincing people (buyers and sellers) to start using them.
It's a pretty short list for those who can offer what BC does.
That's because BC "won" and took over the indie market, so now they can afford to offer additional features and services. And, frankly, I'm not sure that this market is big enough to accommodate more players. Even BC is small compared to the likes of Spotify, Youtube or Apple.
But if you just need to easily sell your music in digital format (which is what Bandcamp started as), there are options.
> there are options.
There are, but very few of them seem to provide for downloading full albums in nonproprietary lossless formats.
Meanwhile any site with a functional search mechanism would be offering more than what Bandcamp offers.
>Meanwhile any site with a functional search mechanism would be offering more than what Bandcamp offers.
Not to the artists who put their music there.
What ever happened to Purevolume anyway? Killed by Myspace?
Can you share some of them?
This is great, I wish there was a way to see genres so I can filter by jazz.
I've found a lot of albums (lossless) that I can't find anywhere on OTOTOY the only catch is I have to use a VPN with a Japanese IP address to checkout (the don't care about the billing address so works fine otherwise)
The main pain however is that some labels (usually Sony) stubbornly don't allow lossless downloads...
"Jazz/World"
I can think of one: https://www.hdtracks.com/
>I can think of one: https://www.hdtracks.com/
Platforms like HDtracks and Qobuz are not a "Bandcamp alternative" when considering the business reasons that artists use Bandcamp.
Bandcamp lets small independent artists upload their own songs without a distributor middleman.
In contrast, HDTracks only gets music from distributors like established record labels. Example discussion when somebody asked about it: https://gearspace.com/board/career-work/1358709-how-do-i-get...
Kinda?
Looks like I can buy albums there. Check. Can I listen to a full album? It seems like you only get samples.
It also is very sparse and doesn't really give a great band presence. I'm guessing the selections are populated by labels rather than artists?
It doesn't do much at all for recommendations.
There's also https://jam.coop (aiming to be a co-operatively owned/run bandcamp alternative)
https://indiehd.com would be my go to in terms of accessibility and fair pricing/costs.
> Faircamp bills itself as “a static site generator for audio producers”, but an easier way to understand it is this: it’s a simple site that you can host yourself. Install some software on your server, point it at the folder of the music you want to sell, and your site’s pages will build themselves.
That "on your server" part is going to make is unsuited for 99.9+% of bandcamp artists, and speaking as someone who buys an awful lot of music on bandcamp, I would have some concerns as well. (Not least of which being that with bandcamp I can download purchased music years after purchase, even if artists have died or bands broken up, I wouldn't have that guarantee here).
That "on your server" part also means that discoverability takes a massive nose-dive. Most of the music I've purchased on Bandcamp was discovered by following suggestions listed on the pages of albums I liked or by trawling through everything that shared tags with albums I liked. But that doesn't seem possible on Faircamp.
There are far more important/popular sources for discoverability than BC. Their UI is not great for that in the first place.
I discover plenty through their blog posts and following labels that I like.
> Not least of which being that with bandcamp I can download purchased music years after purchase, even if artists have died or bands broken up, I wouldn't have that guarantee here
Note that this isn't guaranteed, especially for smaller bands that get picked up by a label. Most of the time the label just makes the releases hidden, so they're no longer displayed publicly, but can still be downloaded. However, some labels delete the release instead, so it's no longer downloadable from your collection.
Yeah, this is a risk.
The best approach is to take advantage of the fact that Bandcamp lets you download everything and simply download everything you buy and keep backups (as you would with any other important data)
Yep exactly, that's what I do too. Download a lossless version and then use Bandcamp if I ever wanted to stream it. However I also host Navidrome (OSS streaming with a web-app) so use that 99.9% of the time I want to stream.
Even if there aren't labels requiring artists to hide or delete music from Bandcamp, you never know if Bandcamp could just go down one day for financial reasons and then you're screwed.
This is the primary use case for Bandcamp for me -- it's one of the main ways I buy new music. I'm not interested in streaming services. Being able to buy (with most of the money going to the artist) and download lossless copies of albums is what I want.
Yep, I download the FLAC and always keep the original zip file, and back it up separately from the files I manage with beets. I playback the beets-managed files with Navidrome.
Beets doesn't maange handle the extra files that the zip often includes, such as PDFs of linear notes, the sheet music I once found included, or band photos. Maybe someday I'll figure out a good archive for everything that isn't "the literal zip file".
The irony is that for this federated network to succeed, it probably needs a large-ish "commercial" peer which works similarly to how Bandcamp did.
Also Bandcamp already has my credit card.
If only the US could ever leave the 19th century and allow instant wire transfers...
Oh, wait. They did already!
https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.h...
There are a wide array of different payment preferences depending on the country.
Bank transfer isn’t universally the most popular method of e-commerce transactions. For example, PayPal seems to be the most overwhelmingly popular online payment method in Germany. In the UK, PayPal and debit cards are the leaders. Debit cards are also generally popular globally (a debit card isn’t the same as a bank transfer).
https://blog.2checkout.com/popular-online-payment-methods-gl...
https://www.rapyd.net/blog/the-top-payment-methods-in-the-un...
This speaks more toward someone like a musician needing a solution that has many payment options to appeal to a wide breadth of customers, not some kind of dig on US e-commerce and banking because “Europe does it better and the US is stuck in the 19th century.”
Paypal is the most popular method in Europe because they operate as a bank here, and therefore customers can make wire transfers to each other.
Comment was deleted :(
Huh, interesting. Did Faircamp implement some sort of payment system that works through FedNow? That’s pretty neat if so.
It technically exists, but I haven't actually seen it "in the wild" yet. My banks certainly aren't on board at this time. Maybe it will become something useful in the future, though.
Very awesome!
Looks like with this making federation available there's just a need for someone to come in and set up a trustworthy portal that collects federated music and provides the customer (music purchaser) UX. Assuming they can find a way to federate the payments (skim a small fee for using the aggregator's payments, instead of direct linking to various musician's purchasing systems), this should make hosting the infra for a site like this manageable, based on the lower decentralized media.
That's a long way to go to get to something that, in tandem, would be a 'bandcamp alternative', but I can't help but get excited for the small steps! They do often open doors for the bigger steps!
The problems with aggregated payments go far beyond just ensuring someone can pay hosting and card processing fees. Who will take chargeback risk? Handle KYC for payouts (especially since many garage bands won’t have business entities)? Handle fraud at scale, including fraud rings using your service to validate stolen credit cards?
https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/candy-japan-hit... is an old (2015) but still relevant illustration of this.
Centralizing payments requires human monitoring and capital cushions. With services like Stripe this can be cheaper, but still requires nontrivial resources.
Also IMO it would need to handle distributing royalties correctly, global tax remittance, etc.
That stuff gets incredibly complicated, incredibly fast.
The "publisher" takes all of the financial risk. That's part of the deal. I would never use a website that said "you pay us, but if you have payment problems, you have to take that up with the product manufacturer". The aggregator has to take enough off of the payment in order to insure their business, just like they have to take enough off of the payment in order to afford any of their other capital (salaries, utilities, rent, etc).
I'm assuming you have doubts about the practical feasibility of charging "that much". But it has, historically, been one of the best cost-to-compensation models ever created, with entire industries being built around enshrining an ever-more predatory pricing structure that funnels more and more of the product profit to a small council of investors.
afaik Bandcamp as a service to artists and consumers has not changed...yet.
>With the recent sale of Bandcamp to predatory VC extractive vultures, and the main move to finalise that sale was to fire all the recently unionised staff
I suppose the next move is to squeeze the artists, then the consumers.
> was to fire all the recently unionised staff
Did they explicitly go after the unionized staff?
Or do they mean they fired people, and a subset of them also recently unionized?
They fired 50% of the staff, which included 60% of the union (including the entire union bargaining team that was pushing for Songtradr recognition).
The union filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.
Songtradr leaned heavily on keeping old-timers who were part of the core team with the most knowledge. The union was largely formed by the newest employees. You do the math.
Do you have a source for this?
It's what I'd call a computed conclusion based on personal observation, unnamed shadowy figures, and William of Ockham. Put another way: none I'd name. Put yet another way: no.
If I'm not mistaken, it's always the second option – it's illegal to fire someone for unionizing in most places
Just a few days ago I started working on a similar project, but one where you can upload via a UI.
After talking to some artists + musician friends, it was clear that a SSG was going to be a non-starter for most of them.
Currently it just supports simple track upload + playback, but plan is to add Artists, Albums + RSS feed.
Code: https://github.com/stereosteve/SHYM Demo: https://tunez.stereosteve.workers.dev/
There is no auth and everything you upload will be deleted in the coming days. But feel free to upload some tracks!
Bandcamp has always lacked a coherent vision.
They have an app but it is incredibly underpowered and lacking logical features.
Each band can list their tour dates but there is no feed where users can see all of the bands that are going to be in their area, etc.
Just very frustrating because all the primitives are in place, but there’s no product vision.
I, for one, hope that the "product vision" people stay far away from it. It works perfectly for the thing it is: an easy way for listeners to listen to and purchase DRM-free music files.
While I use bandcamp, I would not call it perfect. The UI is all over the place, the search is meh, discovery is horrible.
>Bandcamp has always lacked a coherent vision.
Hard disagree.
The coherent vision for Bandcamp is:
- Give a place for independent musicians to upload their music to showcase and sell music and merch with one click and no fuss (and a reasonable sales cut).
- When fans buy music, they get the files (no app, software, DRM, or any bullshit).
That's all. Nothing more is needed.
The "alternative" doesn't offer that. It will fail.
[dead]
"Radio Free Fedi" is mentioned in the article; if you're curious they're a community-driven Internet radio station "celebrating sound, agency and discovery supporting independent fedi artists." You can find them at https://www.radiofreefedi.net/
This is not an alternative to Bandcamp. More of a music-oriented static site generator.
It's a cool project but not really an alternative to Bandcamp. It doesn't solve payments or distribution.
Bandcamp also offers a streaming app like Spotify etc for all the music users have bought on the platform.
I know at least a dozen ways to discover, scrape, and share music. What is really needed is a relatively easy way to pay artists. I have accounts setup at Patreon, Locals, Librapay, Buy Me a Coffee, KOFI, and others. Most people don't pay out as much as I do and have this many accounts. If we have a single easy place to find and pay all artists, please tell me.
I'm a user, I use it to publish my music, and it's awesome.
If you're looking for more bandcamp alternatives, someone made a media player (https://github.com/torcado194/scritch-player) that you can add to an Itch page (example: https://keestak.itch.io/heck-deck-ost).
Cool part about Itch is that it's already got an established community around it, and that's very unlikely to change.
I mean, it's an alternative for Bandcamp's _software_. It's not an alternative for Bandcamp's _infra_, and that's a pretty significant cost-and-complexity center for a new band or solo artist that just wants their music out there for purchase.
Still, I think getting viable alternative software is a huge checkbox on the path to getting good alternatives. Now there just needs to be an affordable hosting company that'll run Faircamp for up-and-coming artists.
Perhaps a P2P model would make the infra more affordable? You know, like when Spotify launched.
Anyone else think it said Basecamp at first?
Yes, I was waiting to see a Basecamp alternative written in PHP :D
Same here. Imagine the horror of the 2 top dudes at Basecamp.
There's plenty of free Basecamp alternatives out there, but since they don't even come close to providing the same stability and polish none of them have a chance at unseating the original in the eyes of its core audience.
Their customers don't give a shit about some open source alternative.
I host a Faircamp instance for a couple of friends and I. It's lovely, we upload songs via Nextcloud and a janky script I wrote. You might wanna check out the Faircamp webring as well: https://webring.key13.uk/
I think there is too much emphasis on paying artists
For professional musicians that is a big deal
Professional musicians are a tiny proportion of musicians
For those of us who create for the love of creation payment is not the point. The main point is reach. Can I point you at my music, where you can access it without me, or you, having to be Uber geeks?
We want you to come to our shows. We would like to cover our costs, Yes, but the most important part is having an audience for our art
The cost of recording music is orders of magnitude less than it was, getting it available, with out becoming hostage tio horrid platforms (looking at you, Google) is very hard
I am hoping this will help
Very glad to see people coming up with alternatives here. Plenty of artists sell music directly on their sites in various ways and this seems like another way to do that. I still use Bandcamp for now, but I get that extra fuzzy feeling when I can buy even more directly!
So, not to hijack the thread, but just last week I've added funkwhale to the list of supported services on communick at https://communick.stream. For $29/year I'm offering 250GB of space for users to upload their own songs, but all of that would be on private libraries - i.e, people can not publicly share songs they do not own copyright.
The next step would be to let musicians put their own songs in public libraries and let them choose between two models:
- sell direct to consumer
- pay-for-access (Patreon style). The "twist" I'm thinking would be that customers could define a global fixed monthly amount, and split to the musicians according to how much they listen.
My idea would be to take a flat fee from musicians just for the service, no commission on sales, etc. Would that be a good model? Also, how does one go on about to break the network effects of these?
> Also, how does one go on about to break the network effects of these?
Curation. Bandcamp isn't what it is because of the technology, the money, the business model or whatever. It is (was?) Bandcamp because of the curators, the community and the humans behind it.
Find the best way of replicating those things and you have a chance at least :)
I get that, but your answer sounds a bit circular: "to break the network effects, first establish a community".
The idea of using the Fediverse is precisely to leverage the existing network and to let people use my service even if its own "local" community hasn't reach critical mass yet. Maybe the question is how I can reach these people now?
It was sad to see so much indie music go down with MySpace and it would be a shame to see that happen again, I wonder if there is some kind of peer-to-peer solution like mastodon and bittorrent that could work within this model
Why haven't we seen something like Bandcamp or GOG but for film/TV?
GOG made a brief effort to expand into movies almost a decade ago but stopped because the industry revolved around regional restrictions (they asked customers if they should keep going with regional restrictions and customers said no). There are some reginal restrictions on GOG and Bandcamp but nothing like would be necessary for the movie industry it sounds like. I don't know if focusing entirely on indie films would avoid this issue or if even they end up agreeing to regional restrictions.
Not sure, I would love to see it too. I bought some things on Vimeo over the years which does offer DRM-free downloads (if enabled, otherwise yt-dlp is your friend), but it's really just some indie and crowdfunded projects.
I guess the industry thinks pay-per-view platforms like Amazon, YouTube, etc. are good enough?
Movie publishers aren't interested in offering DRM-free content.
I think it's probably a meaningful alternative to the degree a musician's audience and potential audience will use it.
I mean, a friend's living room is an alternative to Madison Square Garden when a musician's ambition is noodling around for a few friends.
A WordPress plugin implementation would go a long way to this really taking off. Most artists I follow are all using WordPress already for ecommerce and news.
Looks like a fantastic alternative. The waveform in the audio is cool.
All the power to the project, but it's not an alternative until some way to make and manage sales is added.
Too bad Web3.0 crowd is all about hype and make-money-quick schemes, otherwise it's a perfect fit for the problem of selling musing directly.
Trans-border sales/transfers without crypto is a pain, thousands of musicians get locked out of their money because politicians keep playing their idiotic "big boy" games.
It looks great and all. And it probably serves one use case that Bandcamp serves.
But for me Bandcamp is primarily a collection of music I like, like other people would have a shelf with CDs or Vinyls. This doesn't really do that. "Just install it on your server" probably sounds a lot harder to an average musican than to an average techie as well (sure, there's overlap, but it's not the same).
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All I am seeing is a JSON file. Firefox on iOS.
Fixed!
I didn’t realise Bandcamp was unfair
Like the fact that there's an alternative and support that, but hate the name.
RIIR hits again - nice
Tangential question, has anyone actually noticed bandcamp get worse? We know they did big layoffs (along with uh... EVERYONE ELSE) and we know they axed a bunch of paid journalists (again, hardly uncommon), but as a frequent user I have not seen any negative change to me personally. Not saying they won't, lot's of acquisitions kill the golden goose, but so far I haven't noticed anything. Curious if others have.
I also really don't understand all the comments online as if the sale from Epic to Songtrader was a sale from the boy scouts to darth vader. Didn't Epic buy them as a pawn in a legal battle? The sale people should be grumbling about was the one to Epic... and the people they should be complaining about are the founders who sold. :-/
Have continued using it as an artist and listener, and there's no way I'd have known anything changed from the site. They updated the terms of use, but only as necessary to reflect the change in ownership. And they are still doing Bandcamp Fridays, where the company gives up its cut on the first Friday each month, even though there was no promise or other indication they'd continue before the sale. I've seen rumors that support is getting worse, but only from reporters and not users, and it's a pretty easy site to use so I wouldn't think poor support is that much of a problem.
I'd rather Bandcamp be independent and am still upset they sold out, but I like Songtradr much better than Epic as an owner. Their main business is facilitating B2B sales, which I think of as the same category as what Bandcamp does. They don't own music (except incidentally, from acquisitions) and don't have ties to RIAA and major labels like Spotify does.
Main source for Songtradr info, although I've also done some outside reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37699552
I also haven't recognized any changes as a regular user and listener. I'm not an artist so I haven't uploaded any music and I do wonder if the artist experience has changed at all. I'm definitely bracing myself for change if / when it comes, however. I plan to keep using Bandcamp until then.
When Epic bought the platform I do remember a similar reaction from folks, along with confusion because why would a gaming company buy a music platform, and what kind of dumb sweeping changes were they going to make? The Songtradr acquisition at least makes more sense from an industry standpoint. Personally, I feel better with the platform in their hands rather than Epic's
I'm still very happy with the service; it's my preferred/only vendor for paid music downloads, and although I appreciate and use the streaming available in the app, at the end of the day, that could all disappear and I'd still have my purchases.
I know that's not the same for artists who have made more of an investment in it, promoted their bandcamp.com URLs and all, but as a consumer I'm content to continue using it as long as it delivers value to me, and cease using it when it does not.
Only two things I've noticed get worse as a buyer so far:
- Virtually immediately following the Songtrader acquisition using the credit card checkout began giving 'security code mismatch' errors. This is a false positive and clicking the 'Complete purchase' button about a minute later is the workaround I've been using since. I'd never experienced the error in the years prior and this has been tried with multiple different cards.
- There's no longer a live ticker on the home page showing the latest track/album purchases around the world.
> - There's no longer a live ticker on the home page showing the latest track/album purchases around the world.
Still there for me.
Hmm, checked in a browser with no cookie restrictions and indeed it is. All JS is enabled either way but I only allow first-party domain cookies (ticker used to be fine like this but at least I know it's just a cookie thing now).
> but at least I know it's just a cookie thing now
Nope, I also have cross-site cookies blocked and no issues with the ticker
Speaking as an artist who has six albums on BC, I haven't seen anything that makes me think it's gotten worse. People are still listening and BCs terms and conditions for me are unchanged. I still like what BC is about, and it's why I moved off of Spotify/Apple.
> We know they did big layoffs
Did we ever get clarification if that was blanket layoffs including their tech talent or they were mostly targeted cutting of secondary stuff like the journalistic wings?
Which, I mean it sucks for the writers that were there, but the journalism wasn't part of Bandcamp I was using, and I assume that's the case for most others. If the tech side is still generally intact? I would assume it would stay hunky dory.
Anyhow, Epic runs an e-store and generally treats its employees well and so I was fine with them taking it - there was synergy there.
Songtradr seems to be mostly about hoarding music rights, and is buying up music e-stores left and right, and did a large downsizing first thing after they bought Bandcamp. I think pessimism there made sense.
I don't understand how a video game company can be seen as more of a synergy than Songtradr. Given that songradr is in the digital rights exploitation business, I would guess they are more likely to be helpful to artists.
Don't forget, you can only upload original tunes to bandcamp (no covers). If songtradr wants to exploit those rights further (publishing licensing, better PRO work, etc), they have to pay the artists - which most artists would love.
Before the buyouts Songtradr didn't have consumer-facing e-stores -- the company was primarily B2B. Epic is a consumer company, like Bandcamp and 7Digital (the two e-music shops bought by Songtradr).
Apple sells all types of digital goods - movies, music, and games/apps.
Google used to sell the same 3 types of digital goods, until they decided selling music instead of renting it is an anachronism.
A true merger of Epic Store and Bandcamp would give Epic a similar kind of positioning as Google and Apple. Come to our e-shop to buy and download digital goods.
Which is what Epic said at the time but never did, right? Just seemed a little fishy that it was convenient for a legal battle to look like that was a plan, but then nothing came of it.
> Don't forget, you can only upload original tunes to bandcamp (no covers).
What? Here’s a black metal cover of Hit me Baby (One more time): https://spider-god.bandcamp.com/track/baby
There are tons of covers on BC, never heard of that restriction.
I don't think it gets enforced much, but it's definitely there in the terms of service and help pages. You need to have written permission from the copyright holders. This is not the same as for a "regular" release, where one only needs explicit permission if it's the first recording of the piece. (After that you can record a cover under what's called a compulsory license). When recording a cover, the seller must pay mechanical royalties to the rights holder of the composition, which Bandcamp doesn't want to do (though maybe Songtradr has plans??) and we can assume artists won't bother. Because bandcamp is selling releases (rather than just streaming), mechanicals would apply.
Presumably they don't bother enforcing unless the rights holder makes a complaint.
See "are covers ok" here (this predated the Songtradr acquisition, FWIW) https://bandcamp.com/terms_of_use
Huh, interesting. Some quick googling suggests, this is relatively new, as a new law regarding streaming services came into effect in 2021, forcing streaming services to post, and bc didn't want the hassle. Before the law, they could require the band to have a streaming license in addition to the mechanical license.
I still buy music there regularly and there is still plenty of new stuff being released. I really hope it doesn't go down the tubes, but so far so good for me.
Perhaps people in the electronic scene are wary after the experience of Beatport selling to SFX and rapidly starting to suck. But in that case Beatport had already been trying to reinvent itself to some degree for several years ahead of the sale. Bandcamp was different because it pretty much knew what it was going to be in the beginning and still is that now, so it seems like a sustainable business, as long as the new owners are willing to just let it be.
Bandcamp has remained great for me.
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They've been gaining a reputation for banning artists/bands who are on the 'wrong side' of politics without notice or explanation.
I guess many people will cheer that on these days, though. Conformity is the new punk?
> artists/bands on the wrong side of politics
Any examples? Which side is "wrong"?
That second one is demonstrably searchable (he gets all of the top 5 results) and not banned. Maybe a bug, maybe an erroneous DMCA takedown that was reversed; who knows. Where's the political persecution?
As for the other guy, I'll just leave you his own video on the subject to help you decide on your own whether his story makes any sense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlmGvQln2Aw&t=835s (My opinion: he deleted his own tracks to generate a fake persecution controversy. The absolute lunacy of what appears to be a white guy insisting that they banned him because he's mixed-race is ... fascinating.)
Only thing I know is that they won’t allow certain black metal band covers that have swastikas in their covers.
Which is perfectly fine IMO - that stuff can stay below ground.
Communist stuff gets a pass: https://nekrochaparro.bandcamp.com/album/hells-hammer-and-th...
Well, the phrase "I think that workers should own the means of production" indeed do not sounds as bad for me as "I think some ethnical groups are inferior and we should get rid of them". I perfectly understand banning the second phrase and not the first one.
Communist imagery isn't commonly associated with genocide in the US nor is it actively being used to promote genocide in the US, so this makes sense.
Are you really comparing communists with nazis?
Where are you hearing this? I actively follow all bandcamp news to an almost obsessive degree and have not heard a whiff of this. The explanation could easily be the delusions of someone who’s soothing their own ego after getting the boot for legit TOS violations.
TIL Epic owned Bandcamp
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code