“Why Bandcamp is Hot Shit”....................Rossi

The internet has been awesome for listening to music. Over the past 20 years, the spread and dissemination of music online has helped scenes and styles explode in popularity and output, and created an outlet for anyone to make and share music. That much is evident. What has become increasingly the question is: How are we gonna listen to music on the internet in a way that makes sense for producers and consumers? In the mid-tolate 2000s, YouTube was, essentially, the holy grail of streaming music online. Throw a song and some album art into a video, bam. Tons of views. Everyone looking for that song could search it, click it, and then hit up the related videos for more. I can’t begin to tell you how much music I discovered just browsing YouTube. Online radio services like last.fm allowed people to feel smug and superior by showing off their tastes to anyone who cared (which was nobody), and things were overall almost completely out there unregulated. As actual artists, record labels, and corporations began to assert control over the internet and the digital sphere at large, this model became less and less viable as these groups were like, “Hey we should be making money off this.” Lots of Youtube music got taken down. In addition, Youtube has become such a shitty site that even when albums get uploaded in full (which seems to be a bit of a trend these days) using Youttube is far from the ideal music listening experience. After that, you’re left with other uploading/streaming services like Soundcloud (which has obnoxious policies and is just generally a clusterfuck of a site) and larger streaming platforms. Services like Spotify have become super popular but have also been coming under fire a bit lately for hardly giving artists any actual money which is fucking true and pretty shitty. (Spotify themselves don’t really make money off the service so it’s kind of a shitfest all around.) I’m also personally not a fan of just booting up another (often clunky) program/app to listen to music, and ads can really get in the way of a cohesive album experience. Enter Bandcamp. Bandcamp is . Pretty much any artist can get a Bandcamp page and put their music on there with a convenient and productive option to buy their releases in addition to having free unlimited streaming without ads. Every time a reviewer includes a Bandcamp link to an album at the bottom of the page, I’m pretty sure they increase the likelihood of people actually listening to the album by like 50% (actual real statistics that I totally researched). Every time I search for an album and a Bandcamp link pops up, I breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that there’s any easy way for me to hear the release, either track-by-track or in full album form on a clean, simple site, without a dumb interface getting in the way. You can download stuff in FLAC if you’re into that shit and they even make it easy to do name-yourprice downloads. (There is some awesome free music on the site.) Artist pages look cool- they can link to merch, put their entire discographies up, and you can find great stuff just by browsing Bandcamp genre pages. Oh yeah and artists actually get paid decently for their work. In essence, Bandcamp maintains the openness and ease of use essential to a healthy internet music culture while still giving artists their due. It’s not perfect (make sure to buy when you can and go see artists live, that’s where the $$$ is at), and it makes a lot of sense to still be wary of the impact that free streaming has on artists and on music as a whole. But if Bandcamp can be successful doing what it does and we keep progressing in the direction that sites like this are pointing, I have a lot of faith that music can still survive and thrive on the internet.

“a clean, simple site without a dumb interface getting in the way”