Good chance of that, also probably gotten a lot of really weird deals thrown at them by some pop twat who wants to add some hyperfinance investors to the mix and just massive pressure on turnaround.
Really hard to do the stuff you love when people need to you cram out some failed mass product to please the pop culture
Whats wrong with that?
Its music, I dont need to be visually entertained when I listen to music. I just want to see the song titles, and play button. Thats it. Sure some album art is nice. But ultimately, its the music that counts.
you’re argument sounds like “why do we need Amazon - every manufacturer could set up his own webshop”
Yes they could … but Amazon has:
I bought a few albums on BC because I browsed what supporters of an album I liked purchased as well. Without I wouldn’t even know about those artists / albums.
And when it comes to music artists … who wants to pay 3000€ or more for a visually appealing website to market an album/sale if you could click it on BC for 0€?
Yes true. I like art and have a history with that, so you’ll have to bear with me I guess. I think art and music go hand in hand tho. The screen is a visual medium. So you have audio putting itself into a visual medium, which is cool. What I’m trying to get at is, album art has always reflected the physicality of the medium. LP’s are the size of records. Tape covers fold around a tape. Cd liner notes slide into a jewel case. But the internet, or in the case of bc, is just a little square that harkens back to old formats, rather than using all that real estate. For instance Soundcloud phone implementation is very nice I think. It uses the screen as a screen.
Yeah. Different strokes and all that. I dont like the soundcloud mobile version at all.
Yeah well, i guess I think that’s an argument worth fighting. I’d rather the little guy doing his indie art thing in her own way, than just folding into the homogenous conglomerate norm
edit: anyway soz for all the off topic feels. do genuinely wish bandcamp well and am interested to see where they take it
I agree with you on that. But there’s a reason behind why there are platforms like this. It’s imho our leaky memory. I can’t remember an artists name / website for longer than a few hours … BC (or Amazon) I’ll never forget. So I’d say the probability of a “customer” remembering your website’s name is pretty low compared to BC where you already saved your album for later / followed you as an artist.
yeah it’s probably a bit old school. but I definitely felt like artists who used to do cool websites were well remembered and regarded. I still think as a project space the internet is creatively open, you don’t just have to sign up to these platforms and dump your stuff there
You’re free to have a cutting edge artsy fartsy website as well. But don’t expect that you get visitors without a lot of promotion / ads. BC does a lot of promotion on their frontpage and “album of the week”, picks etc. (of course also only if you’re lucky…)
Yeah ugh, clunky and flaky. Also really dislike the fact that other random unrelated stuff auto plays after the track I’m listening to finishes.
Soundcloud is so dead… because of Venture Capital companies… low quality without a subscription, ads, autoplay …
the list goes on.
I guess I just see a future where, if we are to live in this platform land, there’s a bit more creative control and customisation available. websites are hard to make, and the end of flash killed an easy way to make creative sites, so now you either can code or you’re basically yeah your up for tonnes of cash. or it’s this very stoic, formulaic top down scroll format that permeates these days. it should be super easy to add a bunch of tracks to a thing, choose some position, have some nice background images and maybe even full screen video and that’s your artist page. It shouldn’t have to look like the same platform no matter which artist you look at, it’s nice have a bit more unique flavour to it, along with all the things that make something like bandcamp great
there was once a platform like this 
and people abused it. What was is called? 'Ehm… Music space? Arghs … leaky memory!!
Haha. Spot on. A MySpace but a modern one is probably what I want.
A good point, although I do find that this type of thing seems to be getting worse, especially if you are looking for something not mainstream. Like if someone buys say a Legowelt album, they probably are not going to be into David Guetta or whatever.
Yeah, true … even more true when those platforms have a mechanism for sellers to pay money for getting recommended. That’s the part when hypercapitalism kicks in and “sucks the life out” of those platforms / make them in the end unusable.
Btw I changed my mind as well – it probably won’t end good with BC.
I also wish there were more tiny platforms again who are just okay with earning enough money to pay their 10-20 employees… just like the tiny cute vinylstore you loved so much in the 90s and you could be sure the recommendations from the owner are always spot-on and not because the owner gets a bigger cut for that sale.
Very sad news. NFT garbage inevitable.
Going to rethink my approach to releasing music that I had planned out…
A friend took me to one of these in South London over the weekend. It was wonderful. I spent way more money than I planned!
it’s funny you know, like, if you look at the bandcamp daily pages, and then look at any artist page, or the stream - it’s like looking at two different styled websites basically. to me the Daily pages look fresh and they’re doing something interesting there. artist pages and the stream look dated, like Bandcamp 1.0. i feel like the Daily look is whatever they do next with the rest of it - but that must be a crazy transition to make. but it’s been like this for ages. at some point they’ll have to tell their entire userbase their look is changing.
I was a big Bandcamp fan, even banging on at friends and colleagues to ditch Spotify in favour of their more artist-friendly platform. Over the years, I accumulated over 400 releases in my Bandcamp collection and buying direct from artists always gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling. A handful of my own tracks have found their way onto charity compilations in the past year. It was fun while it lasted.
I wish Bandcamp all the best but I have zero interest in contributing more of my hard earned cash to Epic Games’ bottom line. My kids have already spent a sickening amount of that on V-Bucks! I’ll be buying what I can from Bleep and Boomkat in future.