It means that you can post stuff without feeling the need to keep it super polished. If you’re doing stuff without the use of a daw it is extremly hard to create super polished stuff.
You can of course post whatever you want to whatever platform you want, but I feel like I can post stuff to Bandcamp that are blemished just for the fact that I set the price to PWYW
I identify with some of what you’re saying - I’ve also made more money selling music on Bandcamp than I know I ever will on Spotify or Apple Music (or whatever other streaming platform my music is listed on - virtually all of them)
I wanted to stick to some kind of principle regarding streaming platforms as I don’t like how they work for artists but in saying that I use Apple Music so I am a hypocrite of the first order. If I like something enough I will buy it though and I will try to find it on Bandcamp first.
Let’s just say it plain and clear - ‘all streaming services are total shit’ unless you are Beyoncé or some where up in the higher echelon’s of music stardom. Even extremely well know artists are not making shit from streaming services but it’s not all about making gains financially. It is about finding way’s to be easily discovered, seen and disseminated. In a way it’s simply a process of sharing your creativity that matters.
So newcomer’s - whatever you do, you need to get your stuff out there and your first stop should be Bandcamp imho and possibly YouTube. Yes Youtube is also shit but it’s not about how shit it is - it’s about reaching and building some kind of audience and that is ultimately what you want. If you aren’t bothered then no biggie. Stick it on Bandcamp only but if you want to promote things and share more you can’t do it without Instagram or some other potentially awful social media platform full of ego’s and the most ridiculous competition. It’s truly difficult to see the wood for the trees.
There are massive pro’s and con’s with releasing music these day’s though. The main pro is that as an individual (true of the majority of electronic based artists) you get to call the shots and publish it as you see fit. The problem is that unless you are also a brilliant (social) networker regardless of quality, you will more than likely not get far.
In saying all this I am now in my 50’s - I’ve been through the old fashioned big record label and indie record label route and I can honestly say that was not for me. Things are way better now (yes I am a control freak) but you have to know how to promote yourself or get someone to do that for you and as @reeloy said earlier - be part of a community. To be honest I think this is one of the most important things in terms of getting some kind of following going.
With regards to quality - what is that exactly? I don’t agree that recording music outside of a DAW (or a pro analogue studio) means that it is of lesser quality. It may not be as ‘refined’ or ‘produced’ but I believe things could be changing. Mastering and high end production is a ‘thing’. There are also problems here because a lot of ‘highly’ produced music sounds very much ‘the same’ these days regardless of genre. In my opinion it is refreshing and possibly even more creative and challenging for a musician / producer and or consumer of music to be listening to something that could be regarded as being a ‘bit rough around the edges’.
I am a huge advocate of lo-fi stuff but you can also do that in a way that feels and sounds very special and intriguing and even new. It’s very easy to pick a diamond out of the mud if the diamond is actually there - that is ‘true quality’ and extremely difficult to define. It is ultimately very personal and subjective.
Yeah it all depends on your goals and such, I think on youtube you are far better off seeking out music curation channels as they can get some serous traction most my interactions with them have been great. Bandcamp is also likely where I will get the most money from my music by a factor of 100x but I think the younger generation really is focused on Spotify still, and there is the roulette spin tiktok viral aspect that sends people into the charts on Spotify and can essentially give someone a career overnight with out any record label involved, likely more luck than skill… if I were to guess that is probably most peoples best shot at transitioning to fulltime musician, Bandcamp I feel is a true slow and steady grind if you have the means to sustain yourself and make music you will see slow steady growth over time, but slow and steady is never easy, modern life has a way of catching up and pulling you away from creative outlets.
Burn CD’s with your cover art and social/music links on them, leave them in random yet thoughtful places around your town and city with a description of your music on the inside jacket.
#gorillamusic
If people could only play them, though.
I think it evolved to sticker bombing QR codes. Same concept.
Do you have examples? And I don’t want to blow up your spot, so if you have some generic examples.
I am not sure what this means either or how you’d go about doing that other than DM’ing the channel creator to ask if they would be prepared to add your music too?
In this day and age it makes sense if you can get someone else to showcase your music on a channel that has a ton of subscribers and views. I wouldn’t do it personally but then I am an old fart and I find it a bit embarrassing to be that forthright for my own gains which is consequently why I am shit at social networking.
Nevertheless, there are so many curated channels - one that I really like (that was taken down for a while for copyright / ownership infringement’s - if I understood correctly at the time?) is this > https://www.youtube.com/@EELFtrax
It’s not all my cup of tea by any means but I’ve really enjoyed discovering music here and I love the pseudo nostalgia of it all. 31.4k subscribers and the highest viewed track has 487k views. Many others above 50k views - I guess that’s a considerable amount of traffic / audience?
It’s just a digital storefront. I don’t think people generally regard is a place to sell unpolished stuff.
I created an account but it’s quite possibly the biggest culture shock I’ve experienced in my life - comparible possibly to visiting another planet.
Some good perspectives in here I’m definitely going to look at getting my stuff onto Bandcamp. My Patreon is essentially used like how a normal person would use Bandcamp but it’s not an intuitive way to buy my stuff - I had more Patrons when my output frequency was high. It’s a great platform though I’d highly recommend it to anyone that it appeals to. As somewhere to store HQ wavs and videos alone it’s quite useful…
Seperating the artist from the art is always an interesting topic, which I think the youtube thing is more about than anything else - which is more about the content shared than the platform. There’s a big music community on YT that has nothing to do with ‘synthtubers’. I think it can apply as much to posting in forums or sharing openly on Insta, you’re giving people an opportunity to judge you for more than just your music 
This can be a pro or a con, depending on who you are.
No probably not. Like i Said my statement was on a personal note…
Can you say more…
TikTok for music, is it synthfluencers giving their opinions on gear, producers sharing tips, or just straight up music releases or live performances? Or something else and entirely new?
I think it’s like posting short clips or w/e and hoping they blow up and go viral.
Anecdote, one dude who booked us to play in the summer kept going on and on about how we should be on Tik Tok and play the social media game, as it’s the only way to actually grow as an independent artist. Maybe he’s right, but i’ll never go down that path.
I assume within a specific bubble it becomes more focussed but it’s not a platform that seems in any way geared around sharing music to me. Maybe a quirky video about how to make music out of frying pans and shoe laces. I don’t think actual music would go viral on Tiktok though, other than as a backing track to some teenager doing a dance - or if there’s something very visually compelling or quirky about it.
The very first tiktok I was shown after registering was a timelapse of someone giving a rug a haircut. By all accounts it was a very popular video.
there’s something I didn’t imagine hearing today…
so why did this rug needed a haircut? is it… you know… alive and growing hair? 
Hmmmm doesn’t sound like a platform for sharing music, but then again…
haha this is part of the culture shock. To be honest I think they were just someone good at cutting hair using the platform to create engaging content. It’s the same with all topics, food, art etc. It’s like viewing the world through an amp that’s been turned up to somewhere past 11.
So I think music related content could do well there but it would be people like Hainbach or LMNC - people that are literally building pipe organs in cupboards.
Techno idiots like me are a yawn fest on tiktok.
Instagram on the otherhand I find really good for music and art. It doesn’t seem to suffer that problem.
This is with the caveat that I’m out of touch and there may be good ways to leverage tiktok, I was scared off too early.
Instagram is almost great, problem is you can’t customize it enough + strict community guidelines take down a lot of cool accounts.
Internet is a mall
Bandcamp: my favorite
Soundcloud: absolute crap
Too many bots
Chaotic autogenerated playlists
Limited space in free mode and premium mode is way too expensive
Inaccurate copyright algorithms: It happened to suffer the humiliation of having my original tracks unpublished (for no reason). Disputing the decision is useless: they won’t answer.
128kps audio in 2023? Really??
Youtube: the mainstream
Well, you have to publish in it, even better if the track is supported by video. If you are concerned about it decreasing sales on Bandcamp, you can just post a snippet of the track with a link to buy the full version
Otherwise you can take the commercial distribution route using Distrokid, Feyr, etc
Using those intermediary you can access the big business portals, such as Beatport, Juno, Apple Music Spotify …
https://www.youtube.com/@4AMBreaks This one is great for jungle/old school DNB… never had them post anything of mine but I have seen them help some albums get discovered. Seems like the audience that they have likes to go to bandcamp and support.
https://www.youtube.com/@losprimerosVIIVI This one has posted mine before and gotten like 1k views of people who would never see my stuff otherwise (also that is better than my personal channel does on a random song), the person running it is super nice and just went ahead and bought the thing I submitted on bandcamp before I had the chance to give him files for uploading… obviously not as big of a driving force as a channel like 4am breaks.
check the about section on some of the channels often they have an email for submissions.
I dunno on my youtube channel by far the most popular videos seem to be my user patch demos… which is fine, they just don’t translate into people actually listening to my music that often.
Yeah I think with tiktok you need some sort of viral challenge that like uses your music in some way or something… but yeah I also have no clue when it comes to going viral so it feels like a tool for the youngsters to me.
I release things through Distrokid - that gets you on Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube etc. I also put albums on Bandcamp because why not - it’s free and takes like 5 minutes to setup. SoundCloud is good for posting DJ mixes, but even that has better alternatives now.
Regardless this is all a moot point because I’m a gigantic loser who’s never had more than 8 monthly listeners (two of whom were my parents), so it’s all shouting in to a void to me. The real way to promote and distribute your music is to play as many shows as you possibly can.
Speaking of which check out my shit EP: Spotify