This is so depressing. Bandcamp was the last bastion of what once made the Internet great. I could do without everything else, really. It's all greed now.
I could not agree more.
If Bandcamp actually implodes I would have no idea where to buy music.
I want to buy directly fron the artists; everything else feels tainted.
Buy a vinyl album from artists who sell such things, which will get them far more, per album sold, than just about anything else. Your ability to play vinyl is irrelevant here, and all I'll ask is that you store it reasonably (upright, in a cool place, sealed if you're not going to play it) for future use, since they last "about forever" when well taken care of.
Then obtain the music in some lossless form. FLAC download from the usual sources, used CD on eBay into the ripper, etc.
Though I've also debated just starting to mail checks in envelopes to artists I want to directly support.
It's certainly more annoying than something like BandCamp. But given how "literally everything useful on the internet" either turns into a behavioral surplus vampire or dies (gets killed off), I don't have any better ideas either.
The issue of course is Bandcamp is the method most artists use to sell vinyl to fans who can’t make it to their live shows. I assume the pandemic led many to support their favorite artists through Bandcamp, but Bandcamp planned for a new reality that was really just pandemic-induced. The issue is Bandcamp enables smaller artists to sell like bigger artists and anything like your “mail a check” solution is so far from the kind of support Bandcamp could provide. I’m more interested in thinking about what “sustainable business model Bandcamp is” than going back to 1990s music industry.
There's nothing unsustainable about bandcamp, it was bought by a company that immediately sold it to another company that was a competitor. It being run into the ground after such a transaction is quite unsurprising.
> The following year, after massively bigging up the business, they sold it to Songtradr
Does 'bigging up the business' here mean loading it up with technical debt and real debt? Enquiring minds would like to know etc.
I want a comprehensive directory of all indie/underground music where I can buy physical or digital copies of the music directly from the artist.
I need to know that 80%+ of the money goes to the artist.
Is there any other platform than bandcamp that offers this?
Vinyl won't get the most to the artist per dollar spent though. Most of the revenue from vinyl goes to people involved in the production and distribution of the physical record.
Most of the CDs I've bought online in the last few years have been through Bandcamp. It was convenient to get the FLAC immediately after ordering, and the CD soon after.
Usually, if you buy a vinyl, the artist will include a download link for digital files of your choice - I like buying music this way because the vinyl helps the artist, and in turn the artist usually will give you lossless compressed files direct from mastering.
There is no universe in which I "mail checks" (sic) to anyone. I wouldn't even know how to obtain a chequebook, I doubt my bank issues them. It's not 1995 anymore.
I write checks a couple times monthly to a housekeeper and other service people and my bank writes a few more. Writing a check is higher friction than other payment schemes but it’s pretty routine in the US.
I dunno... I mean, a lot of things decrease but don't go completely extinct, like writing with fountain pens.
But check-writing requires institutions to support it. At some point they're going to pull the plug. Kind of how analog broadcast TV ended in 2009.
2030 is certainly too soon, as the decrease will slow at some point, but I'd absolutely bet money that physical writing of personal checks is no longer supported in the US by 2040. With a decline of usage, the costs of fraud are going to outweigh their benefits. (And we can finally go back to sidewalk mailboxes with normal-size openings that you can drop small packages in, since mailbox-fishing won't have a target anymore.)
Cashier's checks will stick around though, since they fulfill a different purpose. And printed business checks for things like account refunds will persist as well. But printed checks like these aren't subject to the levels of fraud personal ones are, and can easily be made even more secure.
In general, the first paycheck from a new employer is usually an actual paper check, because they want you to get your 1st payment before the direct deposit is set up.
I've even been given a pro-rated paper check from the accounting department on the first day (as part of onboarding), for 1st day wages, as soon as I get into the office and shown to my desk/work area.
It's an act of good will because they are paying you for work you did on your first day (instead of cheating you to say "we'll pay you when everything gets set up", they are upfront with the "day worked deserves fair wage" principle)
Your spelling of the word “chequebook” makes me think you aren’t American, so it could be a cultural thing but checks are readily available and still somewhat commonly used for large purchases and rent payments in my experience.
Qobuz has a good web store full of full-res releases, but it's more oriented towards label releases. Bandcamp is still superior when it comes to brand new indie releases. Hopefully someone will fill the vacuum if Bandcamp goes away.
The terms of services only say that "The offer to Download is currently unavailable in Latin American countries and in Portugal." It doesn’t give more details.
The store is confusing though. You can buy a "CD quality" album for $10 but there also is a "hi-fi 192" version for $20 without explaining what hi-fi is.
> Proxies and VPNs not allowed
No Qobuz for me it seems. They don’t want my money for some reason.
They also fairly recently changed things so you need to install a downloader app in order to download more than one album track at once. That's quite aggravating. I'm not installing some shitty app but there isn't a Linux version either, FWIW.
I have historically bought a lot of music, don't like MP3s, and don't want to collect CDs anymore that I just rip to digital. Qobuz and Bandcamp age the only services I know that offer FLAC.
I've mostly stuck to Bandcamp but Qobuz has quite a few releases that don't appear on Bandcamp (probably because of certain labels).
Also they spam you (daily) even if you ask them not to. Might be the thing where you have to unsubscribe from the email even though your account settings told them not to send you email (I think it stopped after I did that, although who knows if it will start up again at some point).
7digital was the other one but of course they are also now owned by the same company that owns Bandcamp (and have the annoying regional restrictions, possibly Qobuz does as well). Hopefully they will get their act together. The lack of regional restrictions (at least in most cases) is one of the best parts of Bandcamp.
If you happen to be interested in classical music there are several that sell FLAC (not sure how good they are). I think there are some DJ focused stores that sell FLAC as well, although with limited selection I think.
I think Itch.io has a decent chance of picking up where Bandcamp left off. Out of the box it doesn't have a media player to preview singles on an album, but someone created a media player that you can add to an itch page to provide said support
I bought a CD from an artist (The Burning Leaves) through Bandcamp. Even though the artist lives, like 500m from me and I could have just asked her. Just to give Bandcamp my business and their cut to help them along (also it would have been weird).
I've discovered so much through Bandcamp that I would have otherwise not known about, and bought so much I otherwise would have pirated.
I think it's the help the platform help the artist thing that gets me. It means nothing in the end.
I tend to go digging through the artist you might like list on pages of music I’ve purchased. It’s not guaranteed I’ll stumble across something, but I do tend to find other artists I end up purchasing from.
Lots of indie musicians are on small labels and often multiple small labels so looking at the other artists on the same labels is often a good method (link usually pops up in the upper left corner).
I'm building that functionality into https://giraf.app, and will set the fees as low as possible (aiming for a flat 4%, compared to Bandcamp's 15% on digital items and 10% on physical items). My goal is for Giraf to help artists by maximizing how much they take home, and by giving them a platform for building a unique kind of relationship with their fans, around their interests in music, film, books, visual art, and other forms of culture.
they are good true.
but I always wondered if they pay artist as well as Bandcamp does.
There is probably some info online but it seemed to me that artists do prefer bandcamp, so I figured they get a better deal there
I think people who are looking for an alternative are not looking for piracy as an answer (many are aware that this is an option). Bandcamp is/was great because you could support the artist directly, with the site taking a modest cut, and you get DRM-free downloads in FLAC or MP3. I understand piracy exists, but Bandcamp is such a nice model that it actually decreased my desire to pirate. I would love for an alternative to pop up if it does crash.
Paradoxically, I was lucky enough to work with something I love, music, for 7 years.
Just as the internet and social media helped me gain enough exposure to make a living DJing and producing music, providing a decent life for my family, the intense competition for attention on social media, exacerbated by the pandemic, made continuing in this profession unfeasible, largely due to my somewhat introverted personality. Bandcamp wasn't really my thing but I had some friends that made a decent money out of it.
Anyway, I wish the best of luck to those still trying to make a living from music in this new era.
I'm unhappy with my current job, but at least I can pay the bills.
Why does everything ultimately have to get sold to big greedy corps? OK the answer is probably simply money as it always is. I guess I just don't want to understand, when it comes to products where it is safe to assume they were a labor of love, born out of passion. You don't build Bandcamp to make money, you build it because you love music.
Friend of a friend built and ran a very successful restaurant for a decade give or take. Staff was treated and paid well and everyone was happy. Eventually they sold the place because they just didn't want to run it any more and the new owners drove it to shit in all the ways you would expect. They felt bad but what else were they suppose to do if they just didn't want to run it any more? Sometimes the answer isn't money, sometimes the answer is the owner is just tired and wants out.
That answer is still basically money, though. Did they consider selling it to an employee or group of employees? Did they consider giving it to an employee or group of employees?
And even if none of those happened, if the new owners ran it to shit. . . was that because those new owners were in it for the money? If so, that's still money. It's certainly possible to imagine a situation where everyone (old owners, employees, customers) thought that the new owners would carry the torch well but they didn't, and I agree that's an unfortunate and largely unavoidable possibility. But I feel like it's more likely the causal chain leads to someone trying to make more money instead of doing a better job at a better thing.
The best option may be to sell the business to one or more of the employees. Of course this is contingent on you paying your employees well enough for this to be viable, as well as your employees believing in the business, but I've seen it work well once before. A diner near me was sold to a waitress who worked there for 20 years, who's now been running it successfully for about 10 years. Obviously she knew the business inside and out, understood the customers and the business side as well.
If the plan was literally just "leave the role" they could just pick a capable successor and hand it off. Or set up a co-op (or some other non-faceless-investment-firm ownership/operation structure) and sell to that, if at a lower price than they'd get from someone who plans to "drive it to shit in all the ways you would expect".
But if the owner's retirement plan is to sell it at the "drive it to shit" price, isn't that just money?
Not that you’re using it this way, but I find it incredibly disheartening that the HN crowd almost uses “idealist” like a pejorative. It was pretty rampant during the openAI stuff, where the majority opinion seemed to be bemoaning the “idealists won.”
You can stick to your ideals while still making money. You can even make really good money without selling your soul. You just cant make “all the money” without being evil.
> Why does everything ultimately have to get sold to big greedy corps?
Because they're the ones that have ties to banks and therefore access to infinite capital, which they can fundamentally print out of thin air and you can't.
The real tragedy was the original founders deciding to unnecessarily sell out to Epic. A company like Epic cutting an acquisition like a line item on a balance sheet is not a surprise.
Bit confusing.... support for Bandcamp isn't faltering, Bandcamp Support, the dept staff, teams etc, is faltering.
For time being it's all we've really got and I think most labels and artists will stick around until it shuts down as there isn't really decent alternatives yet
The first thing I did when I heard Bandcamp was being sold again was put all my albums into a Ko-fi shop thing for free and let everyone who ever bought one know.
Bandcamp was handy for me for years because it sold downloads, all the indie musicians were on it and a surprising amount of stuff from bigger media was there too. It also felt nice supporting "the little guy" compared to iTunes or whatever.
It's rather disappointing if it closes then, but at least I've always used it as a download store so have copies of the music I bought there rather than using their app.
When Bandcamp was sold a few weeks back I built this to download my somewhat extensive music library without having to manually download and unzip hundreds of ZIP files:
Serial, single download at a time. Even for large libraries though it doesn't really matter, just let it run for a few hours. My personal use case is via the container which runs every 24 hours, roughly.
Here's my idea for an indie music service. No idea if the numbers would work out viable but I'm sure with a bit of tweaking they could.
The customer pays £11/month. The service keeps £1 for operating costs. The customer then gets 1,000 credits. Every time a customer streams a song, the artist gets 1p. If the customer listens to the song 100 times, the customer now owns the song and is free to download the song on to their devices. The customer doesn't spend any more credits any time they listen to that song and the artist doesn't get any more money from that customer for any further streams of that song. Alternatively the customer can purchase a song at any time for 100 credits - x, with x being however many times they've streamed it.
If the customer burns through their 1000 credit limit they're free to purchase another 1000 credits by topping up another £10. Unused credits get passed on to the next month. Prices of credits are increased in line with inflation every year to ensure the work of the artist and the music service isn't being devalued. 1000 credits should work out at 115 minutes a day of music listening, if we're assuming the average song length is 3 mins 30 seconds.
Really surprised something like this hasn't been implemented already. Seems like the sweet spot for both consumer convenience and artist renumeration. In my opinion Bandcamp was/is ok but has always been hamstrung in growing to its full potential by trying to shoehorn the old EP/LP model into the web rather than finding a way to make streaming better.
You'd still be able to purchase and download the songs but you can also stream for discovery and the artist would still get paid fairly for it. It's basically a store but with the option to pay outright or to use a micro installment payment plan with no time limits.
I'd say most millenials and older have had the experience of buying an album only to realise they only really like one song and then having buyers remorse.
Can this community tell me what alternatives exist? What I really want is for a business to let me pay an amount of my choosing, and send my money to artists based on my engagement.
100%
all i care about is that the mlney actually ends up in the pockets of artists.
if bandcamp disappears there needs to be some alternative to pay artists.
Spotify and the like are predators IMO.
Yeah, I'm serious. Lots of people were happy throwing money directly at the people who were making the music they enjoyed, either through live jigs or Bandcamp.
Something current: all the albums I bought this weekend have "(pre-order)" in the file name even though it's apparently the complete album.
the headline sounds wrong: If you don't save and archive paid bandcamp downloads, you've lost either way, no matter how the company is doing.
The good thing about bandcamp is that you have the option to do so.
More importantly you have the possibility to get lossless music files.
If you download from bandcamp then currently only in flac and backup the results with programs like restic [1] just as you should back up all other data.
You should always make a second copy fo any further changes if you rewrite tags or encode to other formats like mp3.
Users should also be aware that artists can remove their music from Bandcamp at any time for any reason with no warning. I found that out the hard way after a purchase was just mysteriously missing from my Bandcamp collection. I contacted BC support and that was the gist of their response.
Fortunately the missing item was just a single and I had already downloaded it in WAV format to burn to a CD. However, downloading from BC again would have saved me the trouble of converting and tagging that track.
I had that, but found the archive.org page and pulled the links to the mp3s from it which were actually still live. I won't say who it was because they likely cleaned it from the internet to clean up their image. It was glorifying the confederate flag and stereotypical redneck culture, which I see as a hilarious meme "Billy's mom gave him a shotgun when he was 3 that's why we call him shotgun Bil-leeeeee" :D
But on Bandcamp, downloading the music you bought was put front-and-center, and DRM-free. I always downloaded the music straight away in a lossless format. I only used the streaming capability once in a blue moon when my NAS was down and I didn't have access to my Subsonic server.
I'm always uncertain what formats to use if I were to download my digital library from Bandcamp. It seems like at least FLAC, OGG, AAC versions of everything would be pretty mandatory, given how different music players' support is, plus the for archiving. During the day I need to switch between MacOS, Linux, Android, and that's an ethernal technical sudoku...
Any other versions one should take themselves (say one of the MP3 variants), that have any tangible benefits?
I usually download the FLAC just because space is cheap but I would be fine with just 320kbps MP3, I can’t tell a difference between them and MP3 is basically universal.
I know that I shouldn’t do this but I download the FLAC version and compress it to Opus 192kbps. It’s very high quality with the size of an MP3. I won’t be able to change the format and recompress it later, but I don’t really mind.
I'd like to avoid having to convert it all the time (e.g. MacOS' music player doesn't seem to support that? But gonna have to check it). And the sizes are just enormous.
But yeah, as storage space & bandwidth are less and less an issue, if FLAC is fully supported across the board, the scale should be tipped. My worry comes from we not quite being there yet.
There’s a handy app called XLD (X Lossless Decoder) that will convert from FLAC to ALAC (and probably back) in a couple clicks if you need it. Lossless means I don’t really need to care whether my music is in an equivalent format, but I will admit it’s a bit silly.
Music.app not supporting FLAC is kinda weird, because the rest of the OS has been able to handle it for a while now. Quicklook (spacebar preview), Quicktime Player, etc all handle it fine, but Music doesn’t despite using the same decoding and playback facilities.
There are plenty of desktop music players on Mac that support flac, audacious, Cog, colibri, vox, Plexamp come to mind and there are others including commercial offerings. That is not the issue. People that wish to use the Apple official music ecosystem are SOL.
On the second point, ALAC works just as well as FLAC in that regard.
While I am personally not happy with any of the offerings on MacOS, alternatives don’t help those interested in wanting to use Apple Music with any lossless archive other than ALAC.
If you must support Apple Music there is ALAC. I’m not sure of any major use case that would support FLAC but not ALAC, ie consumer AVRs support both, but would be interested to know of counterexamples.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Personal attacks are particularly unwelcome and will get you banned here, so please don't do that.
Not GP, but nothing about ML engineer demands knowing nuances of audio file formats for future proofing.
I just downloaded from Bandcamp for the first time. I've heard FLAC is sort of the go-to format for good quality, but when presented with ALAC, WAV, and AIFF which all had larger filesizes, I paused and asked a friend.
It just seemed to me like an odd question to ask into the public domain from someone who's in the technical sector. It's kinda basic that you'd want to take the smallest lossless file alone and perform all the other conversions either on demand or as needed. It's also - at least, to me - relatively 'polite' not to overwhelm a service which is apparently struggling by overloading the shit out of it with redundant downloads.
Your rudeness is entirely unnecessary and unworthy of this site. Not everyone knows the details of audio formats. That's OK.
OP – the reason they state this is that FLAC is lossless so offers limited compression but preserves input audio exactly. AAC is a lossy compression format and will discard input audio data that it thinks you don't need – converting it to other formats may produce artifacts. OGG is a container that supports both lossless and lossy internal formats, but I believe it's typically used with a lossy internal format (called Vorbis).
knowledge.bandcamp.com put me onto bandcamp a decade ago for buying digital music and actually owning it. Spotify is good for discovery but it can disappear at any moment
This was the nudge I needed to finally buy (and promptly download) some albums from a local band I saw live over a decade ago. Their domain is expired, Facebook page is blank, and they haven't tweeted in a handful of years. There is very little about the band online anymore, and I don't know of any other source to find their music (including a quick search on the high seas).
So, as a musician who recently released a record via both decentralized and legacy services:
I'm seeing so many people in this thread ask why this is happening, eg - is it just greed?
And it seems to me that the answer is very simple: the silly state-propped notion of "intellectual property" has caused an almost unfathomable cottage industry to rent-seek around it.
Have you been to Nashville lately? I'm headed there Monday. And I love a lot of things about Nashville - especially the lovely collaborative bluegrass vibes of East Nashville and Madison. But as much as it's a music town, it's a finance town, and it's depressing how palpable this is. Much of the skyline are bank skyscrapers - literal artifacts of decades of vampiring music profits away from struggling musicians.
The system of copyright is basically, "if you acquire my music through any means other than the legitimate one, I can call the cops to stop you, violently." And believe me when I tell you: none of us have that view of our music or our fans.
Make all bits copyable. No such thing as an illegal number. And watch as the crony systems of UPC/ISRC/CdBaby/Streaming retreat, while massive archives of stellar music, available for free everywhere, bloom. In such an environment, it will be much easier from musicians to make a living, not only from direct contributions from fans, but from our live shows, merch, etc. Obviously something also needs to be done about ticketmaster also, but that's another discussion (that is still unresolved decades after Pearl Jam gave such eloquent and spot-on testimony in congress).
> it will be much easier from musicians to make a living
Do you really believe this? My fear: if I can get an AI, personally reactive, front-seat simulated concert in my living room (with my friends), what value does supporting the artist provide beyond personal connection? The latter is a real market. But it reduces artists to something closer to baristas than what they are now.
Well, obviously the overarching concern here is a bottoming-out of nearly every market for labor related to cognitive or creative tasks.
And I think you're right: that's coming.
And with it, perhaps the most obvious impetus for rethinking the entire economic configuration of things.
The only way that AI is a doomsday is if, in your imagination, you drag along 20th-century monetary and economic paradigms with it.
People seem to like to be the presence of vibrating strings. I don't think that's subject to deprecation just because people can also have meaningful relationships with AI as a creator of art. In fact, the rapid growth of AI as a provider of passionate musical experiences seems to me likely to grow the palette and appetite for such things, not to shrink it.
I don't understand: you think that people are coming to my shows, to be in the presence of vibrating strings, as I say, because of some abstract reflex created by the possibility of violence visited upon them as a result of their listening to other musicians?
Am I reading this correctly?
And I don't think there is evidence that the "economic link between the art and its creator" is strongly correlated to the license used to release the art.
Though as for myself, I'm still running Squeezebox - nothing like being able to SSH into your smart speaker and mess around with the Perl system that's running it.
Billionaire buys rights to thousands of popular records. Releases all to public domain.
Or
Start service and stream all for anyone without authentication.
I only stream. Lost all my mp3s. Own zero CDs.
Seems silly that I'm still paying for what I "purchased " a dozen years ago.
