Thoughts on Band Camp (bandcamp)

Edited by RyanElliott - November 05 2013 at 15:17

Absolutely love love love bandcamp.

Some of my yearly Top 10 albums come from this amazing website. Great website. Anyone who hasn't tried to use it, I suggest devoting an hour or two and end up with a dozen albums or bands you're in love with.

RyanElliott wrote: TheGreatSopko wrote: I love bandcamp! It gives my band their own website and lets us sell our music on there site without a monthly charge. They will take some out of each purchase of the song but its better than paying iTunes $90 and get less than half out of every purchase. Plus i can customize my page and it can show up on the bandcamp homepage if enough people buy our music! Plus its the best possible way to get our music out without a record deal.   That's great to see you utilising it so well! A question I however may wish to ask is how to do you encourage your fans to pay via bandcamp instead of somewhere else, say Itunes? Writing the aforementioned blog on my part my help but any ideas on how to promote your music via that page more effectively?

For me, the main selling point is FLAC.

It's a good service. Always a plus to have band sanctioned samples to listen to (If not whole albums). Certainly can't replace physical media, but it's probably the best alternative to it out there.

Edited by Man With Hat - November 05 2013 at 18:52

RyanElliott wrote: TheGreatSopko wrote: I love bandcamp! It gives my band their own website and lets us sell our music on there site without a monthly charge. They will take some out of each purchase of the song but its better than paying iTunes $90 and get less than half out of every purchase. Plus i can customize my page and it can show up on the bandcamp homepage if enough people buy our music! Plus its the best possible way to get our music out without a record deal.   That's great to see you utilising it so well! A question I however may wish to ask is how to do you encourage your fans to pay via bandcamp instead of somewhere else, say Itunes? Writing the aforementioned blog on my part my help but any ideas on how to promote your music via that page more effectively?

I luvs da bandcamp.
I purchase CDs from there whenever available.
However I never purchase digital.  I needs my seedeez!

Ryan - I just read the blog you linked here - very good. I've never seen that nifty "Modern Recording" illustration, despite its viral status. I know it's a popular opinion but personally I think it's a misconception. There was true audiophile equipment back in the day, but nobody I knew had it. It was astronomically expensive.

Really smart scientists tried to silence tape hiss with Dolby A B and C, followed by DBX 1 and DBX 2, none of which were compatible with each other and all of which sucked the life out of any good recording. For the most part I had crappy cheap stereos with rumbly turntables tethered to cassette decks with misaligned heads. I remember listening to tapes in my car, wedging a comb under the tape forcing it to align with the head. If I was lucky it would play all the way through without getting eaten. There's precision for ya. So anyone honest coming from that world will tell you that a 256kbps mp3 played through decent mid-priced headphones, even cheap headphones, sounds a hell of a lot better than that.

Back to the topic of Bandcamp - I gave my opinion of it as a DIY artist. I can't really say much about it as a listener. I was blessed to be born in 1960, so my age of discovery landed in the heyday of Prog. If I was in my early teens now I can only imagine what it would be like to have the discovery tools at my fingertips. I'd probably be searching every corner of Bandcamp for mysterious treasures. In the '70's we had some late night TV and radio shows and a few magazines and the Prog they presented was sparsely dispersed along with Helen Reddy and The Carpenters.

I don't really aim to make money from my recordings, though it's awful swell when someone pays a little money for the download. It's a good place to finalise the finished product, I find. 

Bandcamp is great. I love the way they leave it up to you and don't pester you about anything, like reverberation does. You get to decide how much to charge and it's easy to embed their player on your web site!