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RyanElliott View Drop Down
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 07 2013 at 06:31
I completely agree with those who've mentioned Reverbnation, it's just a nightmare from an Artist's point of view, it's layout isn't that great either. 

Thank you to everyone for sharing their thoughts, it's helped me find out how people use it and I'll consider this when setting up Eden Shadow's debut album on there. 

Nice to see so many on prog archives making the most of it.


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 07 2013 at 06:45
Originally posted by stegor stegor wrote:

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.

Thank you, glad you enjoyed the blog.

I was unaware of most of that, I've certainly learnt something new. Not to say things haven't improved, I think what the image mainly outlines is the woe of artists and producers who put so much into a quality recording for it to be reduced very low. It helped me illustrate my point about BandCamp allowing other levels of quality to be realised. 

It is a really extraordinary time for music discovery, I have just come out of my teens and the platforms out there are incredible. It's a fantastic time to be an artist too in many ways. The rules have been done away with and artists can now directly engage with their fan base, again something which BandCamp encourages. 


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 07 2013 at 13:31
Originally posted by infocat infocat wrote:


Originally posted by Padraic Padraic wrote:

If every artist I cared about had a bandcamp, I would never buy a CD again.

If every artist I card about had a bandcamp, I'd buy all of their CDs from bandcamp!


Yup. Me too. Love my lossless audio quality that CDs have. Also, I like having a physical copy of all my music.
My personal hardware. :)
Gimmie my headphones now!!! 🎧🤣
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 07 2013 at 14:25
Originally posted by progbethyname progbethyname wrote:

Originally posted by infocat infocat wrote:


Originally posted by Padraic Padraic wrote:

If every artist I cared about had a bandcamp, I would never buy a CD again.

If every artist I card about had a bandcamp, I'd buy all of their CDs from bandcamp!


Yup. Me too. Love my lossless audio quality that CDs have. Also, I like having a physical copy of all my music.
My personal hardware. :)

FLAC is lossless.  But they (FLAC files) obviously don't meet your second criterion.


Edited by Padraic - November 07 2013 at 14:25
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 07 2013 at 14:34
Originally posted by Padraic Padraic wrote:



Originally posted by progbethyname progbethyname wrote:

Originally posted by infocat infocat wrote:


Originally posted by Padraic Padraic wrote:

If every artist I cared about had a bandcamp, I would never buy a CD again.

If every artist I card about had a bandcamp, I'd buy all of their CDs from bandcamp!


Yup. Me too. Love my lossless audio quality that CDs have. Also, I like having a physical copy of all my music.
My personal hardware. :)

FLAC is lossless.  But they (FLAC files) obviously don't meet your second criterion.



FLAC files are absolutely great, but yeah I like to take in the artwork, read some liner notes and feel good that I got a hard copy before I throw the album on in my iTunes. :)
I love having the physical library and seeing the stack of CDs of all my favorites. It's a great feeling and it represents a timeline for me. ;)
Gimmie my headphones now!!! 🎧🤣
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 07 2013 at 19:47
I like Bandcamp but I prefer CD's.
When he rides, my fears subside.
For darkness turns once more to light.
Through the skies, his white horse flies.
To find a land beyond the night.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 07 2013 at 19:52
Originally posted by proggman proggman wrote:

I like Bandcamp but I prefer CD's.

Why does no one understand
YOU CAN SELL CDS THRU BANDCAMP

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 07 2013 at 22:48
Originally posted by smartpatrol smartpatrol wrote:

Originally posted by proggman proggman wrote:

I like Bandcamp but I prefer CD's.

Why does no one understand
YOU CAN SELL CDS THRU BANDCAMP



Preach on brother.  Cool
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 09 2013 at 02:35
I love bandcamp. It is full of great artists and has a neat and easy to use layout.
I am currently digging:

Hawkwind, Rare Bird, Gong, Tangerine Dream, Khan, Iron Butterfly, and all things canterbury and hard-psych. I also love jazz!

Please drop me a message with album suggestions.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 09 2013 at 06:44
MELLOW RECORDS BANDCAMP

http://mellowrecords.bandcamp.com/


Enjoy!

P.S. We'll add 3/4 albums a day, our plan is to upload around 300 albums and almost all the OOP titles.

Thanks

Mauro Moroni
Mellow Records President
www.mellowrecords.com
http://www.facebook.com/mellowrecord
http://rateyourmusic.com/~Faraone
http://mellowrecords.bandcamp.com/
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 09 2013 at 12:36
Originally posted by faraone faraone wrote:

MELLOW RECORDS BANDCAMP

http://mellowrecords.bandcamp.com/


Enjoy!

P.S. We'll add 3/4 albums a day, our plan is to upload around 300 albums and almost all the OOP titles.

Thanks

Mauro Moroni
Mellow Records President
www.mellowrecords.com
http://www.facebook.com/mellowrecord
http://rateyourmusic.com/~Faraone
http://mellowrecords.bandcamp.com/
Wow!!!StarStarStar
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Dean View Drop Down
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 12 2013 at 17:39
Bandcamp is a record label, it is a different kind of record label than the old skool mega-corporations but a record label none the less.
Do not be fooled into thinking it is something different or something new, or that it is there for the benefit of the artist or the punters listeners.
 
Its purpose is to make money for owners of Bandcamp, just as EMI's purpose is to make money for EMI's owners and Sony's purpose is to make money for Sony's owners - the business model is exactly the same: they charge the artists on their roster a percentage commission for every track sold - the payment method looks different, but it is exactly the same - sell one item, the band gets a percentage and the label gets a percentage - done deal.
 
The difference is Bandcamp does not finance the artist to make the recordings or manufacture the product, the artist has to pay all that themselves. This means that all the best selling artists no longer have to pay for all the poor selling artists, it means that albums like Tubular Bells and Rubicon would never have paid for those Hatfield & The North, Slapp Happy and Tom Newman albums to be recorded. Genesis would never have survived passed Trespass without Lindisfarne and The Nice selling a tidy few albums to keep the record label going in those lean early years of Genesis. It means that if you can sell you get a bigger cut and if you don't sell it's all your fault.
 
This is a really clever business plan that I would imagine the big labels are kicking themselves for not thinking of first. The catch is they would never have gotten away with it because we distrust "the men in suits" and we would have gone into the deal with our eyes open:
"So, you pay for the recording, all the studio time, production, engineering and mastering, you then pay for the artwork design and the manufacture of the product. You then put it on our website, go out and do all the promotion and publicity for it all by yourself and when you sell some you have to parcel them up and post them to the customer one at a tiime and any sales you manage to make we take all the money and give you a percentage... no, sorry, that's not right... we *collect* all the money on your behalf and you pay us a *small, teeny-tiny, itsty-bitsy* percentage, no really it's really small, no more than 10%, promise, well maybe 15%, but that's sooo small compared to your 85% and you're going to sell millions boy, trust me, I know what I'm talking about because we've got Amanda Palmer and Pelican and they sell loads right? so give us your album for free, we'll do nothing with it and you can pay us for every one you manage to sell, 'cos you know, it could be made into a monster if we all pull together as a team..."
Every band on this planet would have run a mile if Virgin or Island records came at them with a recording contract like that. Even the stupid ones.
 
Yet somehow this has become regarded as the great "good thing", and for all those artists who in a million years would have never been signed to even a minor label back in the day then this certainly is "a good thing" because they can now reach a possible market for their music. The same market that buys all those Amanda Palmer and Pelican tracks...
 
Ah, but that's where I'm wrong you see, this isn't a virtual record label, it's a community, a nice friendly community of like-minded musicians that has built this great and marvellous and f*cking wonderful Musical Utopia of Tomorrow where everyone really is equal, even Pelican and Amanda Palmer. Right?
 
And there is the problem with this: the big boys have moved in. The physical record labels are using Bandcamp and the signed artists are using Bandcamp. Pelican have not stuck it to the man, they are signed to a physical record label that pays for their albums to be recorded, and finances the production and manufacture of their CDs, and funds all the advertising, street teams and promotion, they send out the review copies to the magazines and ezines and blogs, and they stick the album on Bandcamp for streaming alongside the album by a 14-year-old who makes funny noises in his bedroom on an iPad and thinks he can sell as many copies as Pelican because this is the Musical Utopia of Tomorrow where everyone is equal and all can sell their creations all over the world and it is great and marvellous and f*cking wonderful. And by some strange co-incidence Pelican sell truck loads of tracks and the 14-year old sells one, (...to himself because he wanted to see if the "Buy" button worked). And all this is egalitarian and wonderful because the kid has his album listed alongside Forever Becoming and that would never have happened in the old days. Never-mind that this kid will never sell a second track, let alone a whole album's worth, that's not the point, the point is he can do it and from his bedroom in the 'burbs of Backwater, Connecticut, he can reach out across the globe and be ignored by millions of Bandcamp users. And once the big boys start making serious money for the owners of Bandcamp then it will get really interesting... just not for the little guys.
 
 
Bought (into) that?
 
 
Good.
 
 
Now, I've got a tanker full of snake oil you might be interested in...
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 12 2013 at 18:46
I wish I had the time to respond to this.

I guess I'd like to know how bandcamp compares to labels we know and love here, such as Cuneiform, Altr0ck, and Soleil Zeuhl as far as the better deal for the artist.

What draws me to it is the access to high quality downloads, and not really any other considerations.  By this I mean I love the distribution mechanism.

Interesting discussion you've started Dean.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 13 2013 at 06:25
Originally posted by Padraic Padraic wrote:

I wish I had the time to respond to this.

I guess I'd like to know how bandcamp compares to labels we know and love here, such as Cuneiform, Altr0ck, and Soleil Zeuhl as far as the better deal for the artist.
That depends upon expectations and what you want from a label. Those labels are narrowband specialists labels, (just like Island, Charisma, Virgin, Harvest, Vertigo, Brain, Deram also fitted that description), you go to them and you know what to expect (to a degree). Bandcamp is broadband non-specialist, it is more like Sony or iTunes, and that's cool too, because you can still find specialist music on the broadband labels, it's just a little more difficult even with cloud tagging.

Originally posted by Padraic Padraic wrote:


What draws me to it is the access to high quality downloads, and not really any other considerations.  By this I mean I love the distribution mechanism.
I'm not that bothered. 99.999% of the time I cannot tell the difference between 192kbps mp3 and FLAC (or raw Red-book CD), not just audibly but on some tracks not even electrically (convert wav to mp3 and back again, subtract the two wav's, whatever remains are the "losses" of mp3 conversion). Anything over 160kbps and I'm happy, but then 128kbps isn't exactly horrible, unless you were actually told it was 128Kbps very few people (if any) could honestly tell the difference reliably and repeatably to make it such the big issue that many make it out to be. I am more interested in the music being mixed and mastered to a quality and professionalism that is acceptable to my ears than I am over file-formats, a poorly recorded, over-compressed mix is crap in FLAC and mp3.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 13 2013 at 06:48
Bandcamp is just one of many resources for me, it's useful in that you can listen to full tracks. I only tend to buy from bandcamp if I can't get the CD or the CD is significantly more expensive that the download.
Ian

Host of the Post-Avant Jazzcore Happy Hour on Progrock.com

https://podcasts.progrock.com/post-avant-jazzcore-happy-hour/
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 13 2013 at 07:33
Dean :"It means that albums like Tubular Bells and Rubicon would never have paid for those Hatfield & The North, Slapp Happy and Tom Newman albums to be recorded. Genesis would never have survived passed Trespass without Lindisfarne and The Nice selling a tidy few albums to keep the record label going in those lean early years of Genesis. It means that if you can sell you get a bigger cut and if you don't sell it's all your fault."
 
I totaly agree with the fact that BC is a record label, and they are only in it for the money.
But Im afraid most of those albums, would not have been able to make any record deals in 2013 anyway.
Things was very diffrent back then, compared to now, bandcamp or no bandcamp.
 
What makes bandcamp possible, is the fact, that with todays tech., anyone can make a record, with a resonable sound, within a resonable budget, if you compare to the money, you would have to come up with back in 73, to make an album, with a relatively ok sound.
So today what you need is not (as much) a recording studio, its access to the marked. Back in the day the record compagnies got that via the record shop's and radio, today a lot more is about getting the word out on the net, and getting likes on facebook, getting played a billion times on youtube ect..
So now any band can dream about making a recording, put it on bandcamp/youtube, and get luckey.
Without havin a big record compagny in the back.
Its offcourse only a dream 99,99999% of the time, but the dream may often seem more real, that sending a demo tape to 25 established labels, and hope someone will put it in the machine, and belives its the next big thing.
 
 
 


Edited by tamijo - November 13 2013 at 07:49
Prog is whatevey you want it to be. So dont diss other peoples prog, and they wont diss yours
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 13 2013 at 07:46
Originally posted by tamijo tamijo wrote:

"It means that albums like Tubular Bells and Rubicon would never have paid for those Hatfield & The North, Slapp Happy and Tom Newman albums to be recorded. Genesis would never have survived passed Trespass without Lindisfarne and The Nice selling a tidy few albums to keep the record label going in those lean early years of Genesis. It means that if you can sell you get a bigger cut and if you don't sell it's all your fault."
 
Im afraid most of those albums would not have been able to make any record deals in 2013 anyway.
Things was very diffrent back then, compared to now, bandcamp or no bandcamp.
 
 
I disagree. Rather strongly in fact. Independent specialist labels will always produced that kind of music regardless. Now is no different to then in that respect. Island, Charisma, Cuneiform and Musea were/are specialist labels - they had/have a niche market with a niche product. Nothing has changed, people still want that niche product that they cannot get from the major labels/

The difference in what we have now with bandcamp are all the bands and artist that could never get a record deal then or now. That has nothing to do with what they create or the type of music they make.

We need to get our collective heads out of our collective backsides and stop seeing "record labels" as evil mega-corporations, stop berating the major labels (which quite frankly never concerned us anyway, (except perhaps EMI and Philips for a brief period in history), and we need to stop comparing "our music" with mainstream pop, rock and metal. 




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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 13 2013 at 09:20
Of course that Bandcamp make a hard cash on their smart way.
Otherwise, the company is gonna be disappeared from the market. But that Idea is a leftist and (or) progressive idea, and that's great.
Bandcamp made that new prog revolution possible. New highway for Progressive Rock - far away from old fashioned records companies bourgeoisie - is open now. That's the essential.


Edited by Svetonio - November 13 2013 at 09:20
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 13 2013 at 09:36
That's bollocks. Wink
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 13 2013 at 10:25
Originally posted by Svetonio Svetonio wrote:

Of course that Bandcamp make a hard cash on their smart way.
Otherwise, the company is gonna be disappeared from the market. But that Idea is a leftist and (or) progressive idea, and that's great.
Bandcamp made that new prog revolution possible. New highway for Progressive Rock - far away from old fashioned records companies bourgeoisie - is open now. That's the essential.
That's not bandcamp, that's the internet in general.
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https://podcasts.progrock.com/post-avant-jazzcore-happy-hour/
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