For real, I use(d) bandcamp for a good chunk of my music discovery and a not insignificant amount of my album purchases. A lot of small/indie labels provide bandcamp codes with vinyl and cassettes which honestly makes me want to support those labels more as while I like to collect physical releases, I'm 9 times out of 10 going to be listening digitally.
1500+ albums and usually when there's not a $25 shipping charge I buy the vinyl too...this is bullshit. We should create campband or something and let artists have control again.
Nicklin's colleague and Die Gute Fabrik co-founder Douglas Wilson added that it was "infuriating to watch large corporations gut one of the most valuable communities/services on the internet."
We've been here before. Remember mp3.com? For those who don't, imagine if somebody bought Bandcamp and then deleted all of the music.
I remember subscribing to eMusic for some number of song downloads a month and downloading stuff from artists I'd never heard of to use up my downloads at the end of the month. All MP3s, still got them and still listen to them once in a while.
Yep. Somehow actually paying independent artists is not a profitable business model. Someone needs to suck the blood out of them for the "system" to work...
I mean... it is basically the same problem as youtube/video. Audio is orders of magnitude less storage (unless you are a FLAC sicko), but it is also played a lot more. And people generally don't want to have to plug their zune into their computer to grab mp3s before they go for a drive, so you still need a content delivery service. All of which costs money.
And then you have monetization. Just look around at all the people losing their god damned minds over youtube caring about adblockers. Hell, just look at how every single youtube video gets a bot reply that basically says "Hey, want to dick over this content creator? use this link instead". And, evil google or not, most creators (who don't get demonetized because of their content...) will point out that youtube is pretty nice in terms of revenue and that they give a very good cut of the premium ad-free subscribers.
Which gets back to music. Someone will probably pay for Tay-Tay's latest album because she is the biggest musician on the planet. But Biffy Clyro? They are great to listen to in a mix but are they REALLY worth the 15 bucks for an album? I mean, sure you listen to them every single day but...
These kinds of arguments remind me of when someone (I think it was Snoop?) was ranting about how much they hate spotify and gave what, on paper, sounded like a small number. And if you actually broke down the amount of money per listen they were asking for and then normalized against the cost of an ad on various services, it was actually REALLY expensive.
You make a fair point but in Bandcamp's case they offer a download like Steam or streamed playback if someone prefers. It's the one place where I DON'T HAVE to resort to piracy or buying massive collections of CDz if I want to be able to listen to music without restriction. I want to pay the people who did the creative work. I don't want to pay a whole bunch of people with a small fraction of it reaching the original creator.