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.
Paradoxically, I was lucky enough to work with something I love, music, for 7 years.<p>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.<p>Anyway, I wish the best of luck to those still trying to make a living from music in this new era.<p>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.
Bit confusing.... support <i>for</i> Bandcamp isn't faltering, Bandcamp Support, the dept staff, teams etc, is faltering.<p>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.<p><a href="https://ko-fi.com/s/7e9f22c63b" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://ko-fi.com/s/7e9f22c63b</a><p>I figured I could at least make sure the people who supported my music all these years were taken care of.
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.<p>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:<p><a href="https://github.com/meeb/bandcampsync">https://github.com/meeb/bandcampsync</a><p>May be useful to anyone else in this thread who wants to do the same.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Anyone know how to actually download all the albums you have access to?<p>There's not like a "download all" button...<p>EDIT: Whoops, missed the extension suggestion in the actual article. RTFL...
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.
Something current: all the albums I bought this weekend have "(pre-order)" in the file name even though it's apparently the complete album.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>You should always make a second copy fo any further changes if you rewrite tags or encode to other formats like mp3.<p>[1] <a href="https://restic.net" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://restic.net</a>
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.<p>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'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...<p>Any other versions one should take themselves (say one of the MP3 variants), that have any tangible benefits?
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:<p>I'm seeing so many people in this thread ask why this is happening, eg - is it just greed?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).
Probably a good time to give a shout out to Mopidy: <a href="https://mopidy.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://mopidy.com/</a><p>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.<p>I only stream. Lost all my mp3s. Own zero CDs.<p>Seems silly that I'm still paying for what I "purchased " a dozen years ago.