Thoughts on Band Camp (bandcamp)

mawgojzeta wrote: smartpatrol wrote: But artists can sell physical copies over Bandcamp if they have them I just discovered this today when preordering a cd from a band  I like.  I was surprised because the last time (granted, a while back) I ordered music from Bandcamp, it was digital only.

Edited by Svetonio - December 05 2013 at 02:13

All right !

Dean, I have actually read through your thread on Self-Releasing before and I do agree on many of the points made there.  When it comes to art, people feel obliged to behave like socialists or egalitarians perhaps...nevermind that in the same breath, they might trash or sneer down on pop music as a commercial product for the supposedly bereft-of-intellect-sheep.  Which is probably why some reacted rather than responded to your point.

Edited by rogerthat - November 23 2013 at 08:50

jayem wrote: RyanElliott wrote:   I struggle to articulate this, but as a young aspiring artist, I have took on board a lot of what Seth Godin has said, he's a quite the marketing futurist, and his point of view I see as a very fresh outlook that embraces a lot of what artists face today.  This 2 part video may be of interest to some.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXmcxuckvsA It may show the best possible way, as far as money's part of the equation. But music isn't only about money nor reaching people either. You can make music just like you decorate/develop your own world, and may even want to keep it for yourself unless you trust someone else's ears and way of reacting to it. It doesn't mean you should choose that way, of course, but it does change the dynamics of it all.  You may even feel well about the disappearing of anything you discovered and created without anybody having learnt about or paying notice, just because you trust that any good ideas will be made well known sooner or later, either through your own discoveries or someone else's.

^Sort of a semi Buddhist's way of approaching the music market

Edited by RyanElliott - November 19 2013 at 20:05

^ I think that nobody here is crazy that much to think that I mentioned the word *leftist* in this thread in contest of Socialism as the civil order. However, it's perfectly clear that Bandcamp is prepared an ideological soil for New Prog Revolution. The young artists are free to do what they want in Bandcamp. Also, in Bandcamp these talented young musicians are not threated as the prisoners as it is the case in many of those old-fashioned bourgeoisie's physical record labels with the target audience. Furthermore, when young bands' albums at Bandcamp are good enough, if they to play a number of live gigs and alredy have a solid fan base, then if those bands and solo artists for any reason want to deal with a physical record label, not a single old-fashioned bourgeois will be able to dictate the conditions that interfere with their artistic expressions and their artistic freedom, and that is revolutionary in this very moment.

Edited by Svetonio - November 17 2013 at 02:59

Dean wrote: Svetonio wrote: @Dean, I think that you confuse socialism with communism what is an ideal, and that society was not implemented anywhere. Something that looks like communism is the kibbutz but it's not communism. But, back to the topic. Bandcamp managed to beat the others like Myspace, Reverbnation, Soundcloud, etc., because of its ingenious design. When you go to Bandcamp pages, you may choose an album based on a cover as many of us used to do in the ancient time. For a fan, that's the most exciting and the most fun way to discover a new band or an artist. As amusing as it is that you presume to know what I confuse, I do no such thing. I am fully aware of the differences between ideology and reality, Bandcamp is none of those socio-political ideologies nor is it any socio-economic realities. Bandcamp is a self-signing record label without the finacial support for the artist and it is a distribution network without a distribution infrastructure. The ingenuity of Bandcamp is not the design because we've seen that all before, the ingenuity is getting people to promote it for free ... not promoting the bands, artists, albums and tracks themselves, but idea of Bandcamp itself ... selling the hope of the dream but not the reality.   Picking an album by its cover alone is stupid, picking an album just by reading the artists self-promoting hype is also stupid - the advantage of Bandcamp is streaming, (assuming you have hours in a day to listen to 10,000s of tracks), not the pretty pictures and the vague genre tagging.   With old skool record labels the odds are 100:1 of an artist selling big - what that means is there is a 1% chance of randomly finding a great album on that label. With Bandcamp those odds decrease by factors of thousands - you will find stuff you like, you may even still like it next week, if you remember it. But you will not find that one magnificent life-changing masterpiece album that you dream of finding by chance alone, the odds are stacked against you and against the artist.Because I don't care for the 2-star and 3-star albums I've enough of those to last me a lifetime (having bought too many of them because of the pretty picture on the cover), I want magnificence.

2) Nope. it's not stupid to pick album by album cover. When you in a records store with a lot of new albums, (as it is also in an internet record shop called Bandcamp) and picked an album on that "stupid" way, it involves an adventure; would an adventure like that be stupid thing for a proghead who's looking for a new album while watching all these beautiful covers? a conservative person's answer will be "yes, it's very stupid". Quite obviously, because conservatism and progressivity is two different worlds. About "un-reality" what Bancamp sell.. Well, with the "bandcamp bands" & "bedroom magicians" you can talk here in the forum, what wasn't / isn't that obvious thing with a number of the artist who are signed for old fashioned record labels who, in so many cases, don't allow the artist even to upload one full song at Youtube - maybe teaser only - because that kind of the labels are working as the exclusive boutiques of high fashion clothing. No problem (who cares?), but they don't sell very expensive clothes, they sell CDs and LPs, so I don't think they will survive on the market; also, not so many people will hear music of their new artists but ok it's their choice. On other side are open-minded and modern record labels who have their presence at Bandcamp (who promote bands and albums hence there), who allow music of their bands at Youtube, etc, and I salute that

Edited by Svetonio - November 16 2013 at 08:07

@Dean, I think that you confuse socialism with communism what is an ideal, and that society was not implemented anywhere. Something that looks like communism is the kibbutz but it's not communism. But, back to the topic. Bandcamp managed to beat the others like Myspace, Reverbnation, Soundcloud, etc., because of its ingenious design. When you go to Bandcamp pages, you may choose an album based on a cover as many of us used to do in the ancient time. For a fan, that's the most exciting and the most fun way to discover a new band or an artist.

Guldbamsen wrote: Svetonio wrote: Dean wrote: Svetonio wrote: Dean wrote:  You're not wrong there Steve     One day people will wake up and smell the starbucks. I growed up in that legendary Marshal Tito's self-management socialism ( where, for example, the communist party was giving all support to the progrock bands to make their music almost 100% free of "market claims" ), and I'v been learned about all these things in school. Then you should be able to recognise how wrong you are. There is nothing remotely lefty/socialist about the internet or anything on it, and that includes Bandcamp. It is not an egalitarian and nor is an Untopian idyll, once commerce gets involved all idealism evaporates, the popular artists get more popular at the expense of the lesser know and also-rans, this is as inevitable as the sun rising every morning and setting every evening. Even in the brief history of the Internet we can predict this will happen because there isn't a single enterprise or endeavour that has been launched onto the world wide web that hasn't followed this path. Because the internet (and all that is in it) is a global phenomenon it means that single powerful "clusters" rapidly dominate, so control of that cluster reduces to the few rather than the many. Bandcamp is a prime example of that, there is only one prefered music hosting site - ReverbNation and SoundCloud have lost the race, (see here: http://www.progarchives.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=91557 ), Napster, mp3.com and all the other "one-clicks" are no where to be seen - that is not the result of communism or socialism or left-wing ideology, that is survival of the fitest, that is "only one can survive". Actually, that is related to dialectical materialism. A contradictions in music industry itself made it.   EDIT: Don't make a wrong connection between "Untopian idyll" and Marxism' strand of Dialectical materialism. There's not any idealism in Dialectial meterialism because the theory is based on cycling of the historical necessity. Of course, a lot of idealism you can find in a communist's point of view, but you can not find a drop of that in Dialectic materialism where a human being is regarding as an economic unit as well. And that's why the theory is great  - and approved. There's this great Danish book called Erasmus Montanus by Ludvig Holberg you'd probably dig big time. It's about a young man who goes to college and manages to get everything wrong. One of the things he does when he returns to his homestead is to prove that his mother is a stone. " A stone cannot fly. Mother cannot fly. Ergo Mother is a stone."

Edited by Svetonio - November 14 2013 at 14:15