My label Qi Note Records releases music exclusively on Bandcamp now. Why? Because that's the only place where listeners can download in any format they want, and have all the liner notes, photos and video associated with the band and the album. It's important to know who all the artists are on a recording. Otherwise you're just creating a background music society, not art.
I'm working quite deep in this space and the main complaint I have is the lack of a versatile Bandcamp API. If artists and particularly the energy from builders, could implement Bandcamp connections in new experiences, which could pull in release info and importantly let 3rd parties orchestrate Bandcamp purchases, and validate fans, in exciting artist-designed environments, I think you'd see a lot less copycat marketplaces turning up.
In light of this, there's also the narrative that despite being a hell of a lot better than casual streaming, the $1 song price could be updated, as well as the lack of celebration around the "pay more if you like" mechanism. Our work with Supercollector (https://supercollector.xyz), is instead of being a copycat platform, it is a place that specifically distinguishes fans paying a higher amount. Tracks are a big step up on Supercollector at $10 a track, this seems like a lot but it's affordable for a big swathe of music fans. Again the point isn't to make another Bandcamp but to promote the idea of a whole new level, still based on transactional love for specific songs (as opposed to subscription services, which I agree are problematic, and have written about publicly), and provide truly decentralised "portable" proof of this status (what could be achieved through a Bandcamp API). Look forward to continued discussion and ideas here.
I'm definitely a bandcamp evangelist...my collection currently sits around 4,000+ albums, and my last series of posts here was over 100 album reviews all with bandcamp links included. Delighted to hear about shareable playlists coming soon!
Sharable playlists might be my favorite coming feature, too, even if I intend to use for my own discovery! Finding diamonds in the rough in . . . well, rough.
A purchase on Bandcamp provides an unprotected lossless audio file. At scale, we are right back to widespread piracy. The solution is file specific DRM and other protections that are platform agnostic.
You’re right to dismiss tokens as they are used today EXCEPT that technology allows musicians to sell files that can’t* be copied. Encryption keys tied to an identifier that is publicly verifiable. It’s so damn simple and yet…
The tech industry is obsessed with platforms but musicians/labels/erc need to champion open standards.
*preventing all copying is pretty advanced but we can get there, current state of my prototype does make it a lot harder.
It depends if you see the purchase of a file as owning something that can be distributed, or the simple act of supporting an artist. Artists are essentially giving all their music away for free now anyway via streaming. So the piracy argument only really affects majors or large catalogue owners and streaming’s convenience means ppl are unlikely to walk back to MP3s even if they were the same price, cheaper or even free.
I use Bandcamp Friday to support artists so I am sympathetic to the core of your point, but fundamentally a musician is hoping to monetize their work, not rely on what is essentially charity support. I believe a return to files as possible without turning everyone off.
Technologically, the same gating that lets artists sell and fans own, can license to streamers. streaming won’t go away BUT an industry that accepts all we can consume models is doomed to thin margins while the tech platforms gobble surplus.
There are some funky stats on vinyl ownership such as up to 50% of purchasers don’t own a turntable. (Source: Luminate)
This suggests people want to support so why not meet them part way with better digital releases and supporting material if they want to pay? Right now the music industry appears wildly uncreative at solving their business challenges.
Would you say that buying a vinyl when you don’t have a record player is charity support? Or paying more than you’re asking on bandcamp, which 25% of people do? We have to disassociate ownership of a file as an asset with wanting to support your favourite music, be part of something, feel and be seen like you’re playing a role in their careers. The file is worthless now that’s the reality, but the music obviously isn’t. That’s where unique and custom merch, community and exclusives all come in to create a sense of inclusion that will continue to drive support. I agree completely on the creativity front on bridging the gap between those who want to pay and actually being able to pay in a simple way. Which is why I wrote this substack tbh.
Anyone can resell or gift a vinyl so no, it’s not charity. It is an object that retains value and is tangible. Paying more than list price is a form of charity. They are not the same.
I could not disagree more on detaching value from digital objects. A file can be made a unique and difficult to copy object, just like a physical object. You’re talking the tech industry playbook and well, they thrive on platform lock-in.
“Files not apps” as the founder of Obsidian likes to say.
In theory yes digital files can have value thru various web3 initiatives. But in the music sense, and for 99.9% of the population they don’t. That is the reality. The file is worthless. The music within is the value. As long as we comparing the value of a file against streaming, and not the music, we will lose. You can’t compete with 100 million files for £10 a month. There’s no point in trying.
Streaming = personal radio. It’s not going away, I agreed with this at the beginning.
Who is a more valuable customer? Streaming is excellent for the same crowd that listened to radio and purchased little. Unless an artist is a mega star, streaming is terrible economics outside discovery. And discovery does not require an entire discography.
The golden goose is people like me that collect albums, attend shows, and buy merch. We are catering to people that don’t want to pay and wondering why the economics suck. 🤯
It takes differences to make a market. I look forward to building better tools and proving you wrong 😉
Are we really back to widespread piracy though, just from buying an unprotected lossless file? Widespread piracy was a thing when people had desktops/laptops to share files on. But the majority of people now access the internet through phones/tablets which is significantly more hasssle to share files on - at a large scale - when the other option is free streaming of the same thing. If you’re doing mass/widespread piracy of music purchases how is Bandcamp any different to buying and ripping tracks from a cd? Which has always existed.
If you think piracy is a hassle on a mobile device, check Anna’s Archive and let me know if you struggle to get a book you want.
I don’t believe it comes back widespread unless people get irritated by sub prices and volume of ads increasing . My point was more around, moving the system to something meaningful for the relatively small number of people willing to pay without having to worry about IP theft in the same way.
As I said in the piece, the ownership thing would righty concern indies given their reliance on the platform. The PayPal thing well, Aly does say they are working on other payment options so not sure if that means also payout options. But this article is about the bigger picture rather than critiquing individual Bandcamp features. No platform is perfect but if PayPal payments are your biggest gripe that’s probably a good thing
I've been on Bandcamp for over 15 years. It's a great thing. An almost perfect object. Like everybody on there, I'm concerned about the ownership changes. Never understood why they couldn't have added ACH payment, even with a threshold, by 2011.
agreed there's a whole bunch of individual features I'd change – especially a static frame for what's playing! I would LOVE a rekordbox streaming feature tho, it does work well in SONOS
I am a hobbyist musician, DJ and lifelong music lover and collector. I use YouTube Music for ad-free subscription streaming and Bandcamp to purchase vinyl, CD's (the custom CD-R's mentioned), merch and downloads. I refuse to support Spotify and they cannot touch YouTube for the success in finding rare and obscure songs.
I'm impressed with the number of record labels that I have supported in the past through record stores that are now on Bandcamp. I have been able to personally communicate with artists and then attend shows and meet in person.
Listening through the app and creating playlists has been clunky. It will not work until a deal is worked out to allow playlists of songs that have not been purchased by the user. If they want shareable playlists to take off (free marketing for Bandcamp and the artists) this will have to be free.
I got my first purchase ($3) from bandcamp a few days ago. the overwhelming feeling of "wow someone bought my music" was so gratifying, immediately followed by "it would take about 5k streams to match this". bandcamp is the way
I have this idea about combining blockchain tracking, streaming, and spotify and substack models. Essentially, you pay the per month in order to have “personal radio” as mentioned below, but if there is an artist that resonates so much that your listening achieves a certain metric, you are billed or at least made aware of what the monetary ask is. That metric could be total minutes, total plays, listening frequency but at a certain point it’s obvious that this song or album really matters to you and you are asked to pay your 10 dollars for that album. I have mixed feelings about this (even though it’s my own idea) because I am a veteran of the two cassette deck era as well as the napster/limewire one. The records I bought were often salvation army finds. But for people who can pay for premium ad-free streaming, a strong suggestion at the very least that they should buy the album they’ve listened to 100 times seems reasonable.
For the indie bands who manage their own pages and don’t have experience with any CMS at all? Absolutely. Ive stepped in to manage other bands’ accounts before and the things I’ve seen them needlessly hack together because they don’t have the time/patience/interest to do it properly. And then there’s language barrier.
IMO Bandcamp is just as bad as others in its own way, which is spewing false hope about egalitarian practice and discoverability to bands that have been historically drowned out by the English-speaking West.
Nice one. Personally, I think the question in the heading is a great caricature of the way the industry thinks: we often focus on what solves _our_ problems as an industry, with little regard to what the average music consumer is actually interested in***. It's consumer behaviour that got us to this point: from CDs to piracy to unbundling of albums to streaming services & playlist culture. If Bandcamp was 'the answer', then iTunes would have been the answer too. But it's streaming that created a model that could actually engage the average consumer on a mass scale. If I'd had to point my finger at the sore spot, I'd say it's that streaming platforms never enabled meaningful monetization on top of the default subscription fee.
That's where I think Bandcamp is interesting, because in a way it *is* a streaming service. In some contexts, certain features like the user collection create an additional layer of monetization that otherwise wouldn't be there: if you want a pay-what-you-want track to show up in your collection, then you need to pay at least $0.50 for it, even if you could grab it for free.
I think that's a really interesting innovation, as it monetizes a behaviour that goes beyond just music listening / music access. People will pay to have a nice collection to showcase. And in this case, that payment goes directly to the artist whose music you could be listening to / downloading for free.
I think part of the reason why the discussion around streaming is so stuck is because the desire for higher payouts isn't coupled with how more value can be created for consumers, so that they will pay more than the default sum.
It's sad, because this problem was obvious 10-15 years ago and now we're at this point and the labels and larger DSPs still haven't figured out a way to unlock new revenues on top of the base layer of music streaming. Instead, merch, tickets and downloads are somehow presented as an innovation... *shrug*
*** Just want to flag here: I'm not saying that you nor Aly are doing this, Declan. •‿•
I love Bandcamp, have had an account for years, though I've made few purchases (the fiat game is a rough-and-tumble one, that's for sure). But my favorite part of the platform is discovery, which is also the most frustrating part. While I don't want to go on a wild tangent about Bandcamp's platform features, I love LOVE that Bandcamp is coming back into the conversational fold when Spotify is being torn apart by artists suffering at the hands of poverty-generating algorithsm. Bringing art back to the people directly is the path forward. It's how movements start, culture changes, and big things happen in the world. Just this morning, actually, I chatted with my musician partner about how Substack is kind of like the Bandcamp for writers. Grassroots for the win.
It’s not perfect but it’s by far the best option!!
absolutely. I've got a whole load of more thoughts on this so might do a part 2!
Please do! Im considering bandcamp only for my new label
My label Qi Note Records releases music exclusively on Bandcamp now. Why? Because that's the only place where listeners can download in any format they want, and have all the liner notes, photos and video associated with the band and the album. It's important to know who all the artists are on a recording. Otherwise you're just creating a background music society, not art.
I'm working quite deep in this space and the main complaint I have is the lack of a versatile Bandcamp API. If artists and particularly the energy from builders, could implement Bandcamp connections in new experiences, which could pull in release info and importantly let 3rd parties orchestrate Bandcamp purchases, and validate fans, in exciting artist-designed environments, I think you'd see a lot less copycat marketplaces turning up.
In light of this, there's also the narrative that despite being a hell of a lot better than casual streaming, the $1 song price could be updated, as well as the lack of celebration around the "pay more if you like" mechanism. Our work with Supercollector (https://supercollector.xyz), is instead of being a copycat platform, it is a place that specifically distinguishes fans paying a higher amount. Tracks are a big step up on Supercollector at $10 a track, this seems like a lot but it's affordable for a big swathe of music fans. Again the point isn't to make another Bandcamp but to promote the idea of a whole new level, still based on transactional love for specific songs (as opposed to subscription services, which I agree are problematic, and have written about publicly), and provide truly decentralised "portable" proof of this status (what could be achieved through a Bandcamp API). Look forward to continued discussion and ideas here.
I'm definitely a bandcamp evangelist...my collection currently sits around 4,000+ albums, and my last series of posts here was over 100 album reviews all with bandcamp links included. Delighted to hear about shareable playlists coming soon!
https://bandcamp.com/mammalsounds
https://enjoyertimes.substack.com/p/2024-music-enjoyer-endgame-roundup
Sharable playlists might be my favorite coming feature, too, even if I intend to use for my own discovery! Finding diamonds in the rough in . . . well, rough.
A purchase on Bandcamp provides an unprotected lossless audio file. At scale, we are right back to widespread piracy. The solution is file specific DRM and other protections that are platform agnostic.
You’re right to dismiss tokens as they are used today EXCEPT that technology allows musicians to sell files that can’t* be copied. Encryption keys tied to an identifier that is publicly verifiable. It’s so damn simple and yet…
The tech industry is obsessed with platforms but musicians/labels/erc need to champion open standards.
*preventing all copying is pretty advanced but we can get there, current state of my prototype does make it a lot harder.
It depends if you see the purchase of a file as owning something that can be distributed, or the simple act of supporting an artist. Artists are essentially giving all their music away for free now anyway via streaming. So the piracy argument only really affects majors or large catalogue owners and streaming’s convenience means ppl are unlikely to walk back to MP3s even if they were the same price, cheaper or even free.
I use Bandcamp Friday to support artists so I am sympathetic to the core of your point, but fundamentally a musician is hoping to monetize their work, not rely on what is essentially charity support. I believe a return to files as possible without turning everyone off.
Technologically, the same gating that lets artists sell and fans own, can license to streamers. streaming won’t go away BUT an industry that accepts all we can consume models is doomed to thin margins while the tech platforms gobble surplus.
There are some funky stats on vinyl ownership such as up to 50% of purchasers don’t own a turntable. (Source: Luminate)
This suggests people want to support so why not meet them part way with better digital releases and supporting material if they want to pay? Right now the music industry appears wildly uncreative at solving their business challenges.
Would you say that buying a vinyl when you don’t have a record player is charity support? Or paying more than you’re asking on bandcamp, which 25% of people do? We have to disassociate ownership of a file as an asset with wanting to support your favourite music, be part of something, feel and be seen like you’re playing a role in their careers. The file is worthless now that’s the reality, but the music obviously isn’t. That’s where unique and custom merch, community and exclusives all come in to create a sense of inclusion that will continue to drive support. I agree completely on the creativity front on bridging the gap between those who want to pay and actually being able to pay in a simple way. Which is why I wrote this substack tbh.
Anyone can resell or gift a vinyl so no, it’s not charity. It is an object that retains value and is tangible. Paying more than list price is a form of charity. They are not the same.
I could not disagree more on detaching value from digital objects. A file can be made a unique and difficult to copy object, just like a physical object. You’re talking the tech industry playbook and well, they thrive on platform lock-in.
“Files not apps” as the founder of Obsidian likes to say.
In theory yes digital files can have value thru various web3 initiatives. But in the music sense, and for 99.9% of the population they don’t. That is the reality. The file is worthless. The music within is the value. As long as we comparing the value of a file against streaming, and not the music, we will lose. You can’t compete with 100 million files for £10 a month. There’s no point in trying.
Streaming = personal radio. It’s not going away, I agreed with this at the beginning.
Who is a more valuable customer? Streaming is excellent for the same crowd that listened to radio and purchased little. Unless an artist is a mega star, streaming is terrible economics outside discovery. And discovery does not require an entire discography.
The golden goose is people like me that collect albums, attend shows, and buy merch. We are catering to people that don’t want to pay and wondering why the economics suck. 🤯
It takes differences to make a market. I look forward to building better tools and proving you wrong 😉
Are we really back to widespread piracy though, just from buying an unprotected lossless file? Widespread piracy was a thing when people had desktops/laptops to share files on. But the majority of people now access the internet through phones/tablets which is significantly more hasssle to share files on - at a large scale - when the other option is free streaming of the same thing. If you’re doing mass/widespread piracy of music purchases how is Bandcamp any different to buying and ripping tracks from a cd? Which has always existed.
If you think piracy is a hassle on a mobile device, check Anna’s Archive and let me know if you struggle to get a book you want.
I don’t believe it comes back widespread unless people get irritated by sub prices and volume of ads increasing . My point was more around, moving the system to something meaningful for the relatively small number of people willing to pay without having to worry about IP theft in the same way.
Crucially, works on last.fm 😂
It's 2025, they're on their third company owning it, and they're still paying everybody in PayPal.
As I said in the piece, the ownership thing would righty concern indies given their reliance on the platform. The PayPal thing well, Aly does say they are working on other payment options so not sure if that means also payout options. But this article is about the bigger picture rather than critiquing individual Bandcamp features. No platform is perfect but if PayPal payments are your biggest gripe that’s probably a good thing
I've been on Bandcamp for over 15 years. It's a great thing. An almost perfect object. Like everybody on there, I'm concerned about the ownership changes. Never understood why they couldn't have added ACH payment, even with a threshold, by 2011.
agreed there's a whole bunch of individual features I'd change – especially a static frame for what's playing! I would LOVE a rekordbox streaming feature tho, it does work well in SONOS
I am a hobbyist musician, DJ and lifelong music lover and collector. I use YouTube Music for ad-free subscription streaming and Bandcamp to purchase vinyl, CD's (the custom CD-R's mentioned), merch and downloads. I refuse to support Spotify and they cannot touch YouTube for the success in finding rare and obscure songs.
I'm impressed with the number of record labels that I have supported in the past through record stores that are now on Bandcamp. I have been able to personally communicate with artists and then attend shows and meet in person.
Listening through the app and creating playlists has been clunky. It will not work until a deal is worked out to allow playlists of songs that have not been purchased by the user. If they want shareable playlists to take off (free marketing for Bandcamp and the artists) this will have to be free.
Long live Bandcamp and Bandcamp Friday!
This is a great read.
I got my first purchase ($3) from bandcamp a few days ago. the overwhelming feeling of "wow someone bought my music" was so gratifying, immediately followed by "it would take about 5k streams to match this". bandcamp is the way
I have this idea about combining blockchain tracking, streaming, and spotify and substack models. Essentially, you pay the per month in order to have “personal radio” as mentioned below, but if there is an artist that resonates so much that your listening achieves a certain metric, you are billed or at least made aware of what the monetary ask is. That metric could be total minutes, total plays, listening frequency but at a certain point it’s obvious that this song or album really matters to you and you are asked to pay your 10 dollars for that album. I have mixed feelings about this (even though it’s my own idea) because I am a veteran of the two cassette deck era as well as the napster/limewire one. The records I bought were often salvation army finds. But for people who can pay for premium ad-free streaming, a strong suggestion at the very least that they should buy the album they’ve listened to 100 times seems reasonable.
Knowing how janky the UI is and how easy it is for people over here to misuse it, I confidently will say, “no, Bandcamp was never the answer.”
UI is the main issue?
For the indie bands who manage their own pages and don’t have experience with any CMS at all? Absolutely. Ive stepped in to manage other bands’ accounts before and the things I’ve seen them needlessly hack together because they don’t have the time/patience/interest to do it properly. And then there’s language barrier.
IMO Bandcamp is just as bad as others in its own way, which is spewing false hope about egalitarian practice and discoverability to bands that have been historically drowned out by the English-speaking West.
For a time, yes. Calling it now: substack will be if not the answer, then a stepping stone to another one and another one.
The music industry is figment of our imagination. Not a word of a lie.
Nice one. Personally, I think the question in the heading is a great caricature of the way the industry thinks: we often focus on what solves _our_ problems as an industry, with little regard to what the average music consumer is actually interested in***. It's consumer behaviour that got us to this point: from CDs to piracy to unbundling of albums to streaming services & playlist culture. If Bandcamp was 'the answer', then iTunes would have been the answer too. But it's streaming that created a model that could actually engage the average consumer on a mass scale. If I'd had to point my finger at the sore spot, I'd say it's that streaming platforms never enabled meaningful monetization on top of the default subscription fee.
That's where I think Bandcamp is interesting, because in a way it *is* a streaming service. In some contexts, certain features like the user collection create an additional layer of monetization that otherwise wouldn't be there: if you want a pay-what-you-want track to show up in your collection, then you need to pay at least $0.50 for it, even if you could grab it for free.
I think that's a really interesting innovation, as it monetizes a behaviour that goes beyond just music listening / music access. People will pay to have a nice collection to showcase. And in this case, that payment goes directly to the artist whose music you could be listening to / downloading for free.
I think part of the reason why the discussion around streaming is so stuck is because the desire for higher payouts isn't coupled with how more value can be created for consumers, so that they will pay more than the default sum.
It's sad, because this problem was obvious 10-15 years ago and now we're at this point and the labels and larger DSPs still haven't figured out a way to unlock new revenues on top of the base layer of music streaming. Instead, merch, tickets and downloads are somehow presented as an innovation... *shrug*
*** Just want to flag here: I'm not saying that you nor Aly are doing this, Declan. •‿•
Thank you for the insightful interview. Bandcamp is such an important part of my music discovery process, there’s really nothing that comes close.
I love Bandcamp, have had an account for years, though I've made few purchases (the fiat game is a rough-and-tumble one, that's for sure). But my favorite part of the platform is discovery, which is also the most frustrating part. While I don't want to go on a wild tangent about Bandcamp's platform features, I love LOVE that Bandcamp is coming back into the conversational fold when Spotify is being torn apart by artists suffering at the hands of poverty-generating algorithsm. Bringing art back to the people directly is the path forward. It's how movements start, culture changes, and big things happen in the world. Just this morning, actually, I chatted with my musician partner about how Substack is kind of like the Bandcamp for writers. Grassroots for the win.