from Hacker News

Is Bandcamp the Holy Grail of Online Record Stores?

by joshjkim on 8/20/16, 12:02 AM with 119 comments

  • by Daiz on 8/20/16, 2:21 AM

    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

  • by Mizza on 8/20/16, 1:10 AM

    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 , 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.

  • by orng on 8/20/16, 2:22 AM

    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/ 2: https://osmoseproductions.bandcamp.com/album/v-halmstad

  • by bootload on 8/20/16, 1:08 AM

    "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.

  • by csbubbles on 8/20/16, 1:20 PM

    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!

  • by kderbe on 8/20/16, 1:07 AM

    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.

  • by et-al on 8/20/16, 2:28 AM

    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/

  • by aarmenante on 8/20/16, 1:25 AM

    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.

  • by terinjokes on 8/20/16, 7:47 AM

    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) 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.

  • by kylestlb on 8/20/16, 6:15 AM

    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.

  • by tomdell on 8/20/16, 1:03 AM

    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.

  • by nxrabl on 8/20/16, 5:47 AM

    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.

  • by efrafa on 8/20/16, 8:44 AM

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

  • by 6stringmerc on 8/20/16, 2:27 AM

    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.

  • by Roritharr on 8/20/16, 2:44 PM

    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?

  • by davidgerard on 8/21/16, 8:43 PM

    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 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/ 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.

  • by camillomiller on 8/20/16, 7:54 AM

    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?

  • by bArray on 8/20/16, 1:55 AM

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

    If you answered no to all these questions, ...

    Should be "yes"?

  • by ddp on 8/20/16, 3:20 PM

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

  • by FungalRaincloud on 8/20/16, 1:00 AM

    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/