
Is Bandcamp the Holy Grail of Online Record Stores? - joshjkim
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/20/arts/music/bandcamp-shopping-for-music.html
======
Daiz
I love Bandcamp for the simple reason that they're one of the few very few
music stores that digital distribution right according to my standards - for
music, this means lossless & DRM-free by default, ie. the same thing physical
CDs offer (and Bandcamp makes things even more convenient by allowing you to
download in several formats, both lossy and lossless, according to your
preferences). While DRM isn't usually an issue with digital music purchases
today, way too many stores still offer lossy by default, with lossless
requiring either paying extra or - even worse - simply not being available at
all.

It really is sad how often legal digital products are inferior in quality to
their physical versions, even though with digital you could pretty much always
offer more than what the physical formats allow.

Also, another common scourge of digital distribution that Bandcamp _doesn 't_
suffer from: region locking. They don't support it and don't intend to do so
either:
[https://bandcamp.com/help/selling#region](https://bandcamp.com/help/selling#region)

~~~
dzhiurgis
CD's are not lossless. Pretty good though.

~~~
orblivion
Compared to what? Are vinyls all pressed off of an analog source? Does that
mean new vinyls can't be made after the master is degraded? I'm curious what
you mean here.

~~~
dzhiurgis
Compared to "HD audio" aka 24 bit, 192kHz.

Vinyls by definition is very lossy format (low dynamic range (although there
was obscure "HD" vinyl format once)).

~~~
LeoPanthera
You might be surprised to learn that "HD audio" often has worse sound quality
than "CD quality".

The science is here: [https://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-
young.html](https://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html)

Edit: You're being downvoted which I think is unfair. It's completely logical
that higher sample rates and higher bit depths "should" sound better, and
certainly the music industry wants you to believe that. Unfortunately it's
simply not true above a certain threshold.

"Lossless" here is defined as "stays the same once it has entered the digital
domain", and not "identical to the real-life source", and so CDs are in fact
lossless.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> "Lossless" here is defined as "stays the same once it has entered the
> digital domain", and not "identical to the real-life source", and so CDs are
> in fact lossless.

That's certainly not the usual sense of "lossless" as applied to recordings,
since it would make mp3s lossless as well. We generally say that mp3s are
lossy because the mp3 encoding process loses information that was present in
its input, not because the encoded mp3 degrades when played (it doesn't!) or
when copied (it doesn't!).

CDs, as the original source of music, cannot have this sense of "lossy" or
"lossless" usefully applied to them. (You could claim that the performance is
the original source, in which case it's still not possible to apply the lossy-
vs-lossless concept, as no lossless recording of a physical performance is
possible.)

~~~
Natanael_L
It would not apply to MP3:s, because by the time it hits the MP3 encoder it
must ALREADY be digitized, and it loses quality as it goes through the
encoder.

~~~
ubercow13
Of course it does..the digitised signal loses information as it is processed
by the MP3 encoder therefore it is lossy

------
Mizza
I really like that Bandcamp supports "pay what you want" as an option, I find
I'm always more likely to buy music when that's a possibility.

That being said, I also wrote a BandCamp scraper,
[https://github.com/Miserlou/SoundScrape](https://github.com/Miserlou/SoundScrape)
, so maybe I have weird priorities. Either way, I love BC way, way more than
SoundCloud.

In the long run, at the scale that BC-type artists operate, I think that the
merch game is actually bigger than the paying-for-music game. They've made a
few moves in that space, but I get the impression that BigCartel is actually
the sleeping giant. I think whoever can combine BigCartel, BandCamp and a
_manufacturing_ component into a single experience will be the winner.

~~~
miend
I don't know if the freedom of Bandcamp's model is the primary psychological
factor for me in this behavior, but I find myself much more liberally spendy
(paying more than what the artist usually asks, if it's an option) with this
platform than I have been on any other. From watching the front page where
they give you a live feed of people purchasing music, including how much more
than the asking price they pay, I don't think I'm alone.

~~~
reitanqild
Same here:

I feel I simultaneously

* judge authors and artists more leniently when I get to choose what to pay

* and pay more, partially just to support a good cause (I know the artist/author pockets most of it) and I guess partially to spite the big labels and make it more attractive for other artists to leave the dark side.

~~~
davidgerard
Yeah. It feels _virtuous_ to pay on Bandcamp, in a way it doesn't in other
places, because you know they're getting most of it and what the deal is.

------
orng
Bandcamp is the only place I buy music online. They just seem so honest: Fair
pay for musicians; free streaming prior to purchase; drm-free multiple
formats, including FLAC. They don't even try to make it hard to rip mp3s from
the streams, they have just focus on providing an amazing product which the
consumers (hopefully) recognize as deserving of their money.

My only complaint is poor support for finding music by bands if they have
released records with more than one publisher. For instance searching for my
favorite band Shining returns a page[1] with 4 of their albums, but their best
album: Halmstad is found is released by osmoseproductions and thus found on
their page [2].

1: [https://shiningsom.bandcamp.com/](https://shiningsom.bandcamp.com/) 2:
[https://osmoseproductions.bandcamp.com/album/v-halmstad](https://osmoseproductions.bandcamp.com/album/v-halmstad)

~~~
astronautjones
I've found a "site:bandcamp.com" google search to be much better than using
their own tools. But I have to do this so often with other websites' poor
navigational tools that it's a total afterthought. Not an excuse, though.

~~~
Obi_Juan_Kenobi
FYI

In chrome, go to settings > Search > Manage Search Engines

Add a new search engine, use this url:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=site:bandcamp.com](http://www.google.com/search?q=site:bandcamp.com)
%s

I have it set up so I can just type e.g. 'bc' and whatever I want to search
for. You can obviously also use it for any other sites, just change what goes
after the colon, but keep the %s.

------
bootload
_" The artist gets 85 percent. Always, the artist gets to know who’s buying,
without a third party in the way."_

This quote sums up why Bandcamp makes sense to artists. Listening now to music
off Bandcamp. Buy Vinyl also get .flac an the artist gets the dollars and
data. How good is that.

~~~
throwawaylalala
Do they know email andaddress and name? Exactly what data fo they get? If they
get name and email , there could be tons of money there for artists.

~~~
spbaar
They do. Every once and a while you'll get a nice thank you, especially if you
leave a note with your purchase

~~~
VelNZ
I've received several thank you's from musicians after purchasing their
discography for like $15. It really feels like you're directly supporting them
and is one of the main reasons I love Bandcamp!

------
csbubbles
Bandcamp is the best. I personally admire those guys.

Over last few years they have done for the music industry much more than
anyone else in the business. Yet avoiding a huge buzz that the other players
generate (like Spotify, Pandora, Apple, etc.).

* They seem to be the only profitable company in the online music business,

* They pay directly to the content owners (artists and labels) avoiding stupid useless institutions like RIAA and SoundExchange,

* They don't raise hundreds of millions just to squander them on advertisement,

* They are actually helping increase the income for indies,

* They provided tools to anyone to easily sell their music and merch,

* And it's still just a couple of dozen people working there.

This company is kind of the ideal example that every single startup should
follow, I believe. Instead of infinite noise and funding rounds keeping
unprofitable for years, they just did the job and continue to grow.

Kudos!

------
kderbe
Bandcamp is the first place I look to buy music from a band I like, because of
their fair revenue share. Many times, it's the only place I look: I'm
reluctant to shop at other online music stores and streaming services because
so much of the music industry is toxic, and I don't want to put money into
that system to sustain it.

------
et-al
Since we're discussing online record stores, CD Baby needs to be mentioned as
the indie music retailer back in the early 2000s. Its founder, Derek Sivers,
is one of those awesome Web 1.0 geeks that built things for love, not money:
[https://sivers.org/](https://sivers.org/)

~~~
sivers
Thanks Al!

These days I think companies like Bandcamp and Distrokid -
[https://www.distrokid.com/](https://www.distrokid.com/) \- are doing it
better than CD Baby.

This article made me beam with pride. I love that companies like Bandcamp are
still thriving.

~~~
mratzloff
I bought so many $5 CDs of unknown bands from CD Baby back in my college days
when I had the time to just page through and sample hundreds of artists in
whatever genre I was in the mood for at the time. (I was one of the weird
college kids who paid for music in the era of Napster and Kazaa, even if it
was only five bucks a pop.) I discovered a lot of bands that way. Thanks for
helping to make that possible.

(And yes, Bandcamp is great!)

~~~
sivers
Thanks!

God, that $5 sale was one of my best ideas. I should write about it some time.

The $5 price didn't kick in until you had at least 3 CDs in your cart that
were in that $5 sale.

So it was a way of encouraging people, who came to just get one album, to
browse around and get a few more.

Albums were still priced at $15 or whatever, until you had at least 3 of this
sale items, so it could take a $15 order for one CD and turn it into a $15
sale for 3 CDs.

The customers were thrilled. The musicians who got discovered because of it
were thrilled, because they opted-in to the sale. (They'd usually do it for
their older albums that weren't selling anymore.)

It was a huge win, almost doubled sales, and was one of those things I thought
of on a Tuesday, programmed on Thursday, and launched on Friday.

I miss those things. :-)

~~~
jedc
I'd LOVE to read a post about that!

------
aarmenante
Bandcamp is now my go to place to buy music. It's a welcome relief from the
bloat of iTunes, and the oversaturated wasteland of Spotify. It's a great
place to discover new music, and it plays fair with artists.

------
terinjokes
Bandcamp's support is awesome as well.

In a previous era, I would stream my library from an old Mac to my laptop via
iTunes Shared Libraries, with most of my collection being in Apple Lossless.
However, ALAC files from Bandcamp wouldn't stream.

Core Audio described the tracks from Bandcamp as "not optimized". Apple closed
the radar
([http://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=2014403](http://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=2014403))
as a duplicate without any indication of what was wrong. Bandcamp took a look
at the issue and changed their transcoding pipeline to ensure they generated
"optimized" ALAC files.

I still buy albums from Bandcamp, but with iTunes compatibility no longer a
concern, I now download the FLAC versions. To be different I then losslessly
transcode to WavPack, but that's a discussion for another forum.

------
kylestlb
Never thought I'd see an article on HN that name drops G.L.O.S.S. - awesome.

I always preferred bandcamp to soundcloud/spotify/anything else. Good to see
the recognition.

------
tomdell
This was well-written and a good read, but I found this passage - "I do not
like this word — curated." \- a little funny, coming from a music critic.

------
nxrabl
One of my favorite ways to waste time on the internet is to watch the sales
ticker on the Bandcamp homepage go by, and click on any album people pay more
than the minimum for. Found some pretty good music that way.

------
efrafa
I love bandcamp, and music I listen to (hardcore punk) can't be found anywhere
else.

------
6stringmerc
Strengths:

Bandcamp is a great model for mid-tier bands that believe recorded material is
a viable source of revenue outside of selling hard-copies at a merch table at
shows. Bandcamp is great for 1-2% of the music purchasing public. Bandcamp is
a fair, equitable platform for artists.

Weaknesses:

Other than 1-2% of the music purchasing public, Bandcamp is not a go-to source
for music. Bandcamp's espoused value is that recorded music has value, which,
other than integrity of Copyright, is a highly subjective perspective, because
very rarely do album sales - long term - provide a living wage revenue stream.
To my knowledge, releasing through Bandcamp does not provide free access to
other distribution platforms like Spotify, iTunes, Tidal, Amazon, or YouTube,
which means, if I'm right, it is a walled garden.

Editorializing:

A long time ago I made the decision to go with DistroKid instead of spend my
time on Bandcamp. I don't regret that maneuver. I appreciate Copyright
protections as an artist, and understand the compromise I've signed up for.
Bandcamp is a much more above-the-board platform than signing a deal with a
record label, and that isn't to be ignored. I just have sincere gut-based
reservations that they have significant market penetration to put it in a high
enough time investment tier.

I only claim to speak from my own experience. It offers value to others. I
simply chose a different on-ramp to the information superhighway.

~~~
csbubbles
There is no "copyright protection" really. It's just the illusion that major
players in the music biz and their affiliates are trying to deliver to the
crowd. Digital music was, is and will always be pirated, and you have no
protection from that. It's just the technology, the internet. As long as you
release audio and people can buy it and play at their homes, they can make it
digital and transfer online. The second you upload a song to any music
platform, and make it downloadable, people can find it, download, and
transfer, as you may say, "illegally" and do it any way they want. And there
is no magic behind that. If I listen online to a song, its data is being
transferred to my computer to be played eventually on my speakers. And that
means that one can easily sniff it and store separately. The only way to fix
this is to change the way people perceive music online. And Bandcamp has done
a lot in that direction. Essentially, they fight "piracy" trying to change the
mindset of the listener.

~~~
6stringmerc
Strange as it might sound, I'm really in agreement with you. Coming into music
as a second generation guitarist, I was pretty much told not to look at sound
recordings as anything other than a business card. Making money from them is a
pipe dream. What the best thing about the internet and sharing is that
listeners who actually want to listen to things can, and setting music free
into the world is supposed to be about that in my opinion - sharing and
expecting nothing but appreciation in return. I remember taping songs off the
radio so I could listen to them later because I really enjoyed the sounds. The
internet is kinda like that on steroids, and that's not a bad thing in my
opinion.

I like how Gabe Newell asserted (paraphrased) that piracy is more of a
"distribution & price point" problem than something inherent in business. The
major players in the fight against Copyright Infringement are multi-national
corporations that would sell cow shit at a 150% markup if they could get
people to buy it. There's a lot of altruism that goes into becoming a fan, to
sharing something with somebody else, and then wanting to buy a ticket to a
concert.

My newest reference point of how this can work - and work well for everybody -
is Run The Jewels. Both RTJ1 and RTJ2 were released free, and I burned them on
disc and banged them so hard I'm sure my car speakers hate me. From there
though, I saw them at a ~500 person venue in support of RTJ1, and then at a
2,000 person venue - sold out - in support of RTJ2. There are ways to make
money from fans, but I am very jaded on the model of trying to make people pay
first and then pay more later.

I love busking. I take my guitar and a little amp out on the street and play
for nothing because I love what I do and I want to share it. I think it kind
of refers to the motivation of why somebody wants to get into music.

Is it a path to be a star, or is it something to reflect just who you are?

Thanks for taking the time to share your perspective and cheers.

~~~
csbubbles
Well, I hope over next years more artists will think the way we do. You know,
people apparently can ignore the reality, but not forever. The music industry
has changed a lot over last couple of decades because of the technology, and
it will change much more and for the better, I am pretty sure.

I am 100% with you. Especially regarding the direct support from fans.
Bandcamp, Kickstarter, Patreon, and other similar online projects proved the
validity of their models pretty well. I mean it's not necessary to force
people to pay. If you are good at what you do, if you are open to directly
communicate with your audience, if you can developer your "brand"/"name"
online well, you have great chances to succeed, and to get supported by people
who love what you do. I believe in goodness of people in general. :)

------
Roritharr
While we are talking about b2c Stores, why are there no good b2b stores?

I've tried licensing a song for our Promo YouTube Ads, and its frustrating as
hell because in most cases even with small Artists your only Option is the
contact Page of their Label, which then doesnt reply for days or weeks at a
time... Until then i've cut 3 Videos with royalty free music. Why isnt there
some aggregator where i could find an estimation for my usecase and start the
process from there?

~~~
mgkimsal
It feels like that could be an avenue where bandcamp could make some good
movements - increase revenue stream/options for their members, flexible
licensing terms, etc.

------
davidgerard
tl;dr hell yes. As a listener and buyer, they just get everything right.
Including discoverability - I frequently dredge the new arrivals section for
reviews in Rocknerd [http://rocknerd.co.uk](http://rocknerd.co.uk) and it's
ridiculously easy.

I don't have direct experience as an artist, but I do know a pile of musicians
who've got back their catalogues and happily put up their complete works for a
few bucks a pop. I urge you to check out Severed Heads, an old industrial-
dance band who do pretty okay with this approach:
[https://severedheads.bandcamp.com/](https://severedheads.bandcamp.com/) They
just take a reasonable percentage and _get the hell out of the way_.

Go on - try out Bandcamp and give some deserving band a bit of cash today.

------
camillomiller
Sorry to go off topic, but what's the purpose of the New York Times paywall if
you can bypass it with the "Reader" button in Safari and read the whole
article, even with a better layout for reading?

~~~
jordanlev
To try and gently prod people into paying? Or because a lot of people don't
know about or use the reader button. Or a lot of people don't have iPhones or
are on their computer? I do have an iPhone and do use the reader feature, but
actually never thought to try it with nytimes articles before.

------
bArray
A note to the writer, I think the following section:

 _If you answered no to all these questions, ..._

Should be "yes"?

------
ddp
As long as they keep offering DRM-free ALAC/FLAC, I'm with them.

------
FungalRaincloud
I'm going to assume Betteridge's law applies here...

...And now that I've read the article, I think I'm right. This sounds like an
advertisement, to be honest. But I'm not really even sold. I feel like if the
argument is that it's more directly supporting the artists, maybe it would be
better to use something like Patreon[0]?

[0] [https://www.patreon.com/](https://www.patreon.com/)

~~~
unforswearing
Bandcamp and Patreon serve artists at different scales. As a part-time
musician who uses bandcamp for bands/solo projects, I much prefer the "single
product" model (fans paying for a single track/ep/album as they choose) rather
than an ongoing payment structure. I have zero illusions that I'm ever going
to "get big" (read: support myself) from making music, so bandcamp allows me
the opportunity to share my music and if fans choose to pay for it, great! I'd
feel very uncomfortable soliciting recurring payment for something I do a few
times per month.

~~~
6stringmerc
Very nice to read your perspective, especially as you describe yourself as
self-funded (aka part-time). Making money from sound recordings is like a
lottery - to me, unless it's being approached by an ad agency offering
industry rates for a campaign, a recording is simply like a business card. I
enjoy sharing my music creations and would rather they "be out in the wild"
than try to pile up penny fractions that won't even buy me a tank of gas. I'm
happy you like your path! Keep on doing what you do when you can.

~~~
razster
Win the tune lotto and off you go to the big boys. Seems so.

~~~
6stringmerc
Worked for CHVRCHES - always loved how one of the dudes wore his SoundCloud
ballcap as kind of an indicator of how they started. Their Guitar Center
Sessions episode is very much worth the view in my opinion.

