Hello Prog Archives, 

I was wondering about people's thoughts on Band Camp. Similarly to myself, I imagine many here stand as advocates of physical music. But since Digital music and streaming is flourishing more than ever before, I am curious about what services that are out there that allow artists to see more income out of it. 

I have written this recent article in my blog about Band Camp being a digital service that is moving digital music forward, making music sales digitally more beneficial for the artist as well as the fans. 

Here it is,  http://ryanelliottblog.com/2013/11/05/bandcamp-sending-the-digital-format-in-the-right-direction/" rel="nofollow - http://ryanelliottblog.com/2013/11/05/bandcamp-sending-the-digital-format-in-the-right-direction/

How many artists here use Band Camp? How many fans use it to download music? I'll be interested to see the results.

Many thanks! 

Check us out: (we play prog rock!)

http://kingsawakening.bandcamp.com/track/now-then-and-back-again" rel="nofollow - http://kingsawakening.bandcamp.com

http://www.youtube.com/kingsawakening" rel="nofollow - http://www.youtube.com/kingsawakening

http://www.facebook.com/KingsAwakening

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 don't know how to promote more effectively on bandcamp unless you already have fans and you use particular tags and you become the top seller in extremely common tags. This is kind of the beauty of bandcamp as it forces you to advertise elsewhere.

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.

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. 

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

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:

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...

 

 

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...

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.

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.

 

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.

 

 

 

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. 

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.

Actually, the story about Bandcamp is basicly a sociological story / phenomenon / perspective, so evidently related to approved in the real life and consequently timeless Marxism's strand of [  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism" rel="nofollow - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism  ]  Dialectical materialism developed by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

 

 

 

 

 

 

" 1. The determination of the concept out of itself (the thing itself must be concered in its relations and its delvopment)

Such apparantly are the elements of dialectic  "

 

Lenin, Sumary of dialectic

 

And that most certainly is a load of old boll@@ks

 

 

One day people will wake up and smell the starbucks.

In fact, they know that the capitalism is came to the wall. So, they will find way to the new renaissance, or the world will return in barbarism - an indications for that is, for example, that the millions of people believe that Kardashians are the real people.

 

 

LOL but not Cardassians, Kardashians..as same as the millions also think that the real people are "world leaders" too, and similiar freaks from big media made in the laboratories of neoliberal capitalism - which is actually over and it is in free fall now.

 

 

I dunno, I recently signed up to download Knifeworld's latest and I voluntarily paid them for the FLAC, although you can download it for free, in order to support them for the upcoming album.

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."

LOL yea he's out of order.

Well, If you like the books in that style, I recommend you this novel from 19th century.

 

 

Really great 'decandent' novel from 19th century, quite opposite of Marx' Capital and Dialectic Materialism.

Actually, it isn't. While incremental changes may or may not be the result of contradictions or opposites, they are more likely to be the result of "trial and error" - something was tried (mp3.com and Napster and to some extent, MySpace) - it did not work so something else was tried (one-clicks such as Mediafire and MegaUpload) - it did not work, so something else was tried (SoundCloud, ReverbNation, Bandcamp). None of these were a reaction to the music industry as such, they were all enterprises attempting to corner a market share that the music industry is unable to service. (Not unwilling but unable). 

 

It is a myth that all these "solutions" grew out of the malaise of the music industry. The music industry was only interested in Napster when it was pirating their product without permission, they could not give a flying fart about Napster selling music made by some kid in his bedroom with Cubase. It didn't then and it doesn't now.

 

All these attempted solutions are Vanity Publishing. The music industry cannot make money out of low-volume artists, it is simply the wrong industry for that kind of product, (or the wrong product for that industry), in much the same way that Sears or JC Penny cannot sell the handmade craft products sold at Craft Fayres, niche Boutiques and Market Stalls - this isn't a issue of scale or volume, but of the lack of sufficient potential customers for it to be economically viable - you can only sell a limited number of hand-knitted toilet roll covers, and you can only sell a limited number of ambient psychedelic experimental drone electronica albums (I know, I've tried). This is not a failing of the music industry, but a failing of artists expectation and customers perception.

There is a naivety of expectation that Bandcamp product is equal to (for want of a better description) Top 40 product, and this is at best a misconception, at worse it is disingenuous. Bandcamp is not even a rival for iTunes or Amazon at the present, though I expect that will change as more signed artists begin using it, but then so will the nature of Bandcamp - these distribution enterprises will converge at the expense of the small independent artists (and their followers) that currently champion Bandcamp.

 

Don't get me wrong, I am not anti-Bandcamp, under different circumstances I may even use it, (I have tried SoundCloud but after 13 years I grow tired of repeatedly uploading my albums to the ever-shifting sand as each venture briefly flourishes and rapidly vanishes from the internet), but I do not see it as the great music revolution.

 

Bandcamp (and their ilk) are not leftist or communist, Amanda Palmer and Pelican are not using Bandcamp for the greater good, they are not aiding any of the other artists who use Bandcamp, their sales are not funding the whole "community". There isn't even an indirect knock-on effect resulting from their use of Bandcamp. They use it to sell their products to their audience and in the process making money for themselves and the owners of Bandcamp. This is not socialism. Nor is it leftist or socialist or communist when smaller independent record labels and otherwise signed artists use Bandcamp for distribution, that is merely using it to deliver product without playing games with Pinnacle or Plastic Head (PHD) ... (or Copro or Cleopatra or Dress2Kill for the lesser known artists) ... and here I do recognise that this particular tactic is in someway connected to dialectical materialism - dealing with Disties is the least enjoyable part of the music industry and one seldom discussed.

 

The irony is that the way in which the music industry operates is far more socialist than it appears. The labels pay 100 artists to make records, a small percentage (say 5%) of those make money, the remaining 95% make a loss. The gains from the few pay for the losses of the many. The problem there is the artist that sells a million albums and grosses $10million (and netts a percentage of that) does not see that the "missing" $millions was used to fund the other 95 artists who did not sell a million albums - and they see this as "unfair" - grrr! evil fat-cats! Bandcamp redresses that perceived imbalance, now the artists makes $9million, Bandcamp's owners make $1million and all the other artists get nothing.This is not socialism.

 

Svetonio wrote: 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.

 

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 http://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=13951" rel="nofollow - pretty picture on the cover ), I want magnificence.

1) I didn't mentioned Bandcamp in the contest of socialism. I mentioned Dialectic materialism, for some other reason, but not SOCIALISM. I said at previous page that Bandcamp is based on an idea which is leftist idea and (or) progressive idea in its essence. I know that when it says *left-wing* that straight associate with socialism, but it's not. Actually, *left* indicates a progressivity in every field of human endevor; the term comes from the French Bourgois when the rich citizens who were fight against the aristocracy (what was very progressive at the time) have been called "left-wingers" just to be discerned from the rich citizens who supported aristocracy and have been called "right-wingers" for the same reason.

3) That streaming is also part of the Bandcamp's ingenious design. In my previous post I pointed out the graphical part of it, because when you came at Bandcamp pages you can not hear the music first but you see the covers.

4) Quantity makes quality. In late 60's and during whole 70s a huge lists of prog (and prog related) albums were relesed, just few are passed the test of time; it means that less albums was released, consenquently the less 70s albums will be  attracitve for the kids in 2010s.

5) I don't know how you rate the albums because I don't know you criteria, but I heard some of 3 star albums who are better than some of 5 stars rated albums.

 

 

 

 

The modern concept of left-wing is associated with socialism and that is how people will interpret any comment you make regarding Bandcamp being "leftist". If you meant something different (eg class or social based, which I also dispute btw) then you should have corrected that earlier.

Svetonio wrote: 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 in an internet record  shop called Bandcamp too) and picked an album like that, it involves an adventure; would an adventure like that woud be stupid thing for a proghead who looking for a new album that wasching all these beautiful covers ? a conservative person's answer will be 'yes, it's stupid". Quite obvuously, because conservatism and progressivity is two different worlds.

-------------
What?

 

 

p.s. Actually I don't like the pic you posted above, and I knew it's a cover of some bullsh*t music. As you know, the red balls who are come out from nowhere doesn't instantly send an artwork in the league of Hipgnosis; in Art, *how* is the most important thing, not *what*.

I've read the first couple of posts on that forum. There are some really interesting questions you bring into place. The level of professionalism that one may set themselves to will of course separate them from the mediocrity that supposedly would run amok. 

By professionalism, I mean that in every aspect. Being in terms of the quality of the product, the presentation, the attitude of the artists, the level of the engagement they can offer to the people that would be interested in hearing what they do. 

Beyond the Internets, the one thing I will always stand by is the power of the word of mouth. The artists that have the ability to touch people and tell their story that  will allow their art to naturally resonate. 

There have been some serious innovators out there, Imogen Heap being perhaps a pinnacle example and a huge inspiration for me in terms of the sheer level of ambition to create a stunning album whilst giving her all to her followers. I can't say I could do what she does myself, but I can certainly take the ideas on board.

BandCamp is another format to where your music is like water to people, it's available, albeit an opportunity for a better deal than most income wise. it gets the music out there! What makes the difference for those who are successful is their understanding of the 100 to 100,000 or whatever amount of people they are engaging with. 

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" rel="nofollow - 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.

Indeed the lone carefree retirement there would call buddhism to mind, except that a die hard buddhist would dismiss music, social sharing and money all the same, and a semi-buddhist would simply accommodate with it "on surface" like transitory things.

But of course I meant to emphasize the significance of money (linked to the importance of reaching enough people) in the creation process.

I like you are saying, we tend to forget the pleasure involved with the creation of music, the joy of being part of a jam, even if it would be a pain on record, the joy of putting some cords or tones together just because it's nice.

Too much effort is put on the marked, the money, and all that.

Music is a free ride (your own, that is). it may be a potential product too, but first of all its a way to express something.

A wonderful way indeed.

Anyway...I agree that the abundance of choice is a mixed blessing at best.  At one level, it probably makes me lazy and content to listen to a few samples and leave it at that.  I am not one who craves to listen to 300/400 new albums every year. If I get to taste a handful of masterpieces or even just excellent works, I will be more than satisfied because I'd much rather listen to those handful of albums over and over and enjoy them to the hilt than sift through hundreds without much reward.  In that sense, the internet in general - and resources like PA - help me a lot more than bandcamp.  And you are right about how the more resourceful artists probably use these resources to spread word about them to push the ultimate transaction on bandcamp.  A good example from my experience is Renaissance's Grandine Il Vento.  They did use bandcamp to make the digital download available.  The promotion meanwhile was done mainly through their facebook page, which is already visited by thousands of their loyal fans, and some other online media.  For the record, I am happy I could get the download through bandcamp because I'd have reckoned it a 'bit' of a waste if I had had to order the CD and add another $10 for the shipping on top of that; to me it wasn't THAT good an album .  

But one of the reasons why there is so much appreciation of bandcamp's model may be that perhaps the labels didn't necessarily do their job.  What kind of quality control lets Britney Spears seep through?  I like a good, well made commercial product which makes great musicianship accessible and infectious, not music that is just catchy for the sake of it and, well, nothing much else and has nothing of great value to say to me.  I understand that BS (ermmm ) would have had a target audience too but what happens to music in the midst of targeting all these demographics?  How much filtering do I need to do to find some pop that I might like?  Commercial or bandcamp, either which way I, as many others in my generation are often accused of, don't have a particularly large attention span.  The industry lost the plot in the noughties.  They already hadn't left too much scope for further lowest-common-denominatorization of music by the self-release crowd; there wasn't much further to sink to.  

I appreciate the benefits of a studio set up and a team of professionals working to make the product better.  But I question whether this was really happening.  In an alternative universe where it was, perhaps nobody would have been interested in self released products.  Industry zoomed in on the low hanging fruit and gave a wide berth to people who were a little more deeply interested in music because they are harder to please and therefore a riskier audience to target.  These were, I believe, the people who have now flocked to bandcamp and the like. If the industry did give them what they liked, they would buy it, no matter how much they professed to hate the industry.   What all this reflects is a thirst for music that delivers an authentic experience and is not overly conscious of ticking all the commercial must-have boxes.  I presume the industry does a lot of market research but much of it seems to have been a failure at the end of the day.

I agree and glad you've made the point also of people doing it for joy. It's a match of the both worlds and ultimately the choice is there for what one may want to do. 

RyanElliott wrote: ultimately the choice is there for what one may want to do.

In fact, the constantly increasing number of  the contemporary prog bands selling  their self-produced CDs & vinyl LPs (along with 'name your price' digital versions) at Bandcamp. Btw, that's often seen by the music industry dictatorship's apologists as subversive activity 

I don't know how many times I have to repeat this before it sinks in to people's heads: stop comparing prog rock with mainstream pop.