It really is sad how often legal digital products are inferior in quality to their physical versions, even though with digital you could pretty much always offer more than what the physical formats allow.
Also, another common scourge of digital distribution that Bandcamp doesn't suffer from: region locking. They don't support it and don't intend to do so either: https://bandcamp.com/help/selling#region
I tried to buy a digital album on Amazon once. They offered digital downloads of MP3 files, so I figured it couldn't be so bad. It was. I bought the Interstellar soundtrack. It was 20 to 30 tracks in it. I went to download it ... Amazon told me I could use some Amazon MP3 downloader to download the album, but it wasn't available for my platform. Instead, I get brought to some music browser of the tracks I've bought. There's checkboxes next to each of the tracks, a download button, and no "select all" button, so I check each track and click download. Amazon then tells me that downloading multiple tracks at once is only supported if I use their Amazon MP3 downloader (still not available for my platform). I have to check one track at a time, and then click download. I then have to uncheck that track, then check the next track, then click download again. In what universe is that a good experience? Who the hell envisioned that as even a good backup method for obtaining whole albums? I'm lucky I only bought one album.
I just gave up and acquired the soundtrack through other means which didn't involve ridiculous rote checkbox dickery or proprietary downloader plugin nonsense. I'm pretty sure I finished before I would have finished downloading each individual track from Amazon.
Is an audio signal lossless? That question doesn't make sense. Analog audio is limited by bandwidth and signal-to-noise. Digital audio is limited by its Shannon-Nyquist parameters.
(Monty's show and tell for geeks is great if you have even the slightest interest in these things!)
If we think thoroughly, one can say that anything that comes through the cables, amplifiers and speakers is lossy. Just because it's not the direct transmission of the sound from the music instrument to a human ear through air. As we all know, our ear is a pretty complex audio sensor that consumes sound waves from multiple directions (perhaps, the unlimited number of directions) - direct and reflected waves. So if someone says that all the performances of every rock or electronic band are "lossy" just because the sound gets transmitted through a limited number of speakers (not to mention the number of sound effects getting applied - distortion, hi/lo-frequency filters, reverb, compression etc.), that guy could be onto something in actual fact. That position also has some grounds and rights to exist.
Also, I doubt one can precisely emulate the actual performance of an artist with just 2 (5, or even more) recorded channels. As every performance, from the listener perspective, also depends on the location, current place's acoustic parameters, etc. (say, if you are in a garage with metal walls, the sound is reflected differently than in an open field or mountains). As well as different people attending a music event will hear different kind of sound, simply because each of them will be located in a different position and receive different/unique sound waves from different directions. From this perspective any record of that exact concert would be "lossy" (not the same) for every single person.
Some people in the thread discussed whether the audio record keeps lossless after mastering. Well, you could say, applying any filter to a record (regardless of whether your intention is to make it sound better or not) distorts/changes the record anyway. Especially keeping in mind that it may involve eq-filters and compression for different frequency bands. I mean, do we lose something in that case? Sure. Do we call it "lossy"? I suppose most people don't.
The other guys tried to use the limitation of a human ear as an argument as well. But this is also debatable. Where would we stop that way? Exclude all the frequencies above 22KHz off the consideration while speaking of "lossless" vs. "lossy"?
I might be mistaken here, but I think applying the term "lossless" to CD quality is a convention amongst the most people simply to have some kind of a common measurement standard to refer to as a basic "unhurt" record in the digital space. Whether it is correct or not technically... Well, I am not sure it really matters now.
PS That being said, you seem to have got down-voted wrongly. While you may have an opinion which is a bit different from what the other people have regarding the use of "lossless" thingy, you don't seem to have said anything bad. I am voting you up myself just trying to negate that wrongdoing. :) BTW, I even didn't know that one can down-vote here. Every time I visit this web-site, I feel like I got back in 80s in terms of how this forum looks like (UI/UX). I wonder when YC will finally do something about that and align it to the contemporary web standards. It's super weird that the company funding most promising startups in 2016 has a forum-like kind of stuff lost 20 years behind. Sorry for the off-topic.
This quote sums up why Bandcamp makes sense to artists. Listening now to music off Bandcamp. Buy Vinyl also get .flac an the artist gets the dollars and data. How good is that.
I find it perplexing when some artists' web sites make the iTunes and Spotify links more prominent and in some cases don't even include the Bandcamp link despite having the record listed there.
Bigger market and money. There are more phones than PC's.
That being said, I also wrote a BandCamp scraper, https://github.com/Miserlou/SoundScrape , so maybe I have weird priorities. Either way, I love BC way, way more than SoundCloud.
In the long run, at the scale that BC-type artists operate, I think that the merch game is actually bigger than the paying-for-music game. They've made a few moves in that space, but I get the impression that BigCartel is actually the sleeping giant. I think whoever can combine BigCartel, BandCamp and a _manufacturing_ component into a single experience will be the winner.
I feel I simultaneously
* judge authors and artists more leniently when I get to choose what to pay
* and pay more, partially just to support a good cause (I know the artist/author pockets most of it) and I guess partially to spite the big labels and make it more attractive for other artists to leave the dark side.
Also SoundCloud front end is easily the best front end of any site I've seen before or since.
What's the use case you had in mind for it?
These days I think companies like Bandcamp and Distrokid - https://www.distrokid.com/ - are doing it better than CD Baby.
This article made me beam with pride. I love that companies like Bandcamp are still thriving.
(And yes, Bandcamp is great!)
It was a quite a different experience than I had remembered.
On the other hand I have bought quite a few albums from Bandcamp and am I big fan.
I do still have a wistful fondness for CD Baby. And they've kept their word; my little brother sent in a half dozen copies of his CD back in 2003 and it's still available for purchase!
CD Baby has never had an annual fee. See http://members.cdbaby.com/cd-baby-cost.aspx It was always just a one-time up-front cost because for every incoming album, I (and later, others) would do about 45 minutes of work: scanning album art, digitizing the CD, spell-checking the bio and song titles, listening to some of the music to include in future recommendations, and finally putting the CD on the physical shelves in preparation for sale. Even with digital distribution, this up-front cost was still needed because a new album arriving meant many gigs of uploading out to 50+ different digital retailers. So, CD Baby's main profit model was a cut per sale. 9% of digital income, or a flat $4 per physical CD sold.
Tunecore's model has always been to take 0% or almost no fee per-sale. Instead that annual fee is their main income. I think you might be thinking about Tunecore, in your comment here.
Funny thing is (and I feel like I'm saying this confidentially, but fuggit, HN comments, here we go), I always thought Tunecore's model was kinda brilliant because it tapped into the ambitious musician psychology better.
At CD Baby, we'd often get emails/calls from musicians thinking of signing up, saying, "Let's say, conservatively, that we sell 100,000 copies. You'd be making $400,000 just off of our one album!"
I'd wince and say yes, that's right. Then I'd tell them that the average artist - https://sivers.org/lines - sells under 20 copies, not over 100,000. But everyone thinks they're the exception.
So that's the kind of person that would see Tunecore's model and think, "Ha! Only an annual fee and then I get to keep 100% of my 100,000 sales? Hell yeah! I'm going to save $400,000 going with Tunecore over CD Baby."
Ideally, a company could offer both pricing models, and let the client choose their optimistic or pessimistic sales prediction.
My only complaint is poor support for finding music by bands if they have released records with more than one publisher. For instance searching for my favorite band Shining returns a page[1] with 4 of their albums, but their best album: Halmstad is found is released by osmoseproductions and thus found on their page [2].
1: https://shiningsom.bandcamp.com/ 2: https://osmoseproductions.bandcamp.com/album/v-halmstad
In chrome, go to settings > Search > Manage Search Engines
Add a new search engine, use this url:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:bandcamp.com %s
I have it set up so I can just type e.g. 'bc' and whatever I want to search for. You can obviously also use it for any other sites, just change what goes after the colon, but keep the %s.
Bandcamp is a great model for mid-tier bands that believe recorded material is a viable source of revenue outside of selling hard-copies at a merch table at shows. Bandcamp is great for 1-2% of the music purchasing public. Bandcamp is a fair, equitable platform for artists.
Weaknesses:
Other than 1-2% of the music purchasing public, Bandcamp is not a go-to source for music. Bandcamp's espoused value is that recorded music has value, which, other than integrity of Copyright, is a highly subjective perspective, because very rarely do album sales - long term - provide a living wage revenue stream. To my knowledge, releasing through Bandcamp does not provide free access to other distribution platforms like Spotify, iTunes, Tidal, Amazon, or YouTube, which means, if I'm right, it is a walled garden.
Editorializing:
A long time ago I made the decision to go with DistroKid instead of spend my time on Bandcamp. I don't regret that maneuver. I appreciate Copyright protections as an artist, and understand the compromise I've signed up for. Bandcamp is a much more above-the-board platform than signing a deal with a record label, and that isn't to be ignored. I just have sincere gut-based reservations that they have significant market penetration to put it in a high enough time investment tier.
I only claim to speak from my own experience. It offers value to others. I simply chose a different on-ramp to the information superhighway.
That makes no sense. Bandcamp is a storefront site/minisites, you can put your music on bandcamp and put it on everything else as well. In fact, the Bandcamp faq specifically redirects people looking for distributors to DistroKid and notes that you can put your music on any other store you wish.
Either you don't understand what bandcamp is, or you completely misunderstand the concept of walled garden.
I like how Gabe Newell asserted (paraphrased) that piracy is more of a "distribution & price point" problem than something inherent in business. The major players in the fight against Copyright Infringement are multi-national corporations that would sell cow shit at a 150% markup if they could get people to buy it. There's a lot of altruism that goes into becoming a fan, to sharing something with somebody else, and then wanting to buy a ticket to a concert.
My newest reference point of how this can work - and work well for everybody - is Run The Jewels. Both RTJ1 and RTJ2 were released free, and I burned them on disc and banged them so hard I'm sure my car speakers hate me. From there though, I saw them at a ~500 person venue in support of RTJ1, and then at a 2,000 person venue - sold out - in support of RTJ2. There are ways to make money from fans, but I am very jaded on the model of trying to make people pay first and then pay more later.
I love busking. I take my guitar and a little amp out on the street and play for nothing because I love what I do and I want to share it. I think it kind of refers to the motivation of why somebody wants to get into music.
Is it a path to be a star, or is it something to reflect just who you are?
Thanks for taking the time to share your perspective and cheers.
...And now that I've read the article, I think I'm right. This sounds like an advertisement, to be honest. But I'm not really even sold. I feel like if the argument is that it's more directly supporting the artists, maybe it would be better to use something like Patreon[0]?
I've tried licensing a song for our Promo YouTube Ads, and its frustrating as hell because in most cases even with small Artists your only Option is the contact Page of their Label, which then doesnt reply for days or weeks at a time... Until then i've cut 3 Videos with royalty free music. Why isnt there some aggregator where i could find an estimation for my usecase and start the process from there?
Over last few years they have done for the music industry much more than anyone else in the business. Yet avoiding a huge buzz that the other players generate (like Spotify, Pandora, Apple, etc.).
* They seem to be the only profitable company in the online music business,
* They pay directly to the content owners (artists and labels) avoiding stupid useless institutions like RIAA and SoundExchange,
* They don't raise hundreds of millions just to squander them on advertisement,
* They are actually helping increase the income for indies,
* They provided tools to anyone to easily sell their music and merch,
* And it's still just a couple of dozen people working there.
This company is kind of the ideal example that every single startup should follow, I believe. Instead of infinite noise and funding rounds keeping unprofitable for years, they just did the job and continue to grow.
Kudos!
In a previous era, I would stream my library from an old Mac to my laptop via iTunes Shared Libraries, with most of my collection being in Apple Lossless. However, ALAC files from Bandcamp wouldn't stream.
Core Audio described the tracks from Bandcamp as "not optimized". Apple closed the radar (http://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=2014403) as a duplicate without any indication of what was wrong. Bandcamp took a look at the issue and changed their transcoding pipeline to ensure they generated "optimized" ALAC files.
I still buy albums from Bandcamp, but with iTunes compatibility no longer a concern, I now download the FLAC versions. To be different I then losslessly transcode to WavPack, but that's a discussion for another forum.
I always preferred bandcamp to soundcloud/spotify/anything else. Good to see the recognition.
I don't have direct experience as an artist, but I do know a pile of musicians who've got back their catalogues and happily put up their complete works for a few bucks a pop. I urge you to check out Severed Heads, an old industrial-dance band who do pretty okay with this approach: https://severedheads.bandcamp.com/ They just take a reasonable percentage and get the hell out of the way.
Go on - try out Bandcamp and give some deserving band a bit of cash today.
If you answered no to all these questions, ...
Should be "yes"?
