I didn't know Bandcamp but a few days ago I wanted to buy the Bastion soundtrack. The Bandcamp link was the first hit on Google and it was linked from the game's official page so I went there.<p>I could listen to all the songs without restriction, pick from a variety of reasonable formats (including ogg) and download the same album to my computer at work the next day without any trouble.<p>This is how you do it. They treated me like a customer not a criminal and it was actually <i>easier</i> than using BitTorrent. I was happy to give these folks my money.
Another interesting point: bandcamp does not in any way prevent users from downloading songs from them for free. A quick "view source" makes it trivial to determine the actual URLs for all the songs in an album, as do any number of standard tools for downloading files referenced by a page. Despite that, they make it easy for people to actually purchase songs and albums rather than just downloading them, and thus people do purchase them rather than just downloading them. They explicitly point out this approach in their FAQ: <a href="http://bandcamp.com/faq#steal" rel="nofollow">http://bandcamp.com/faq#steal</a> .
For example, just this morning someone paid $10 for an album after Googling lelia broussard torrent.
A bit later, a fan plunked down $17 after searching for murder by death, skeletons in the closet, mediafire.<p>Where do they get this data?
I use Bandcamp from the other side, and it is a fantastic service. They not only know the music industry from the inside out (read "Bandcamp for Drummers"), but I've literally never had any problem with their site's functionality.
This can work for some special interest bands that are arty and hip and young and sexy. It will not work for conservative musical genres and pop music.