That's great! I wish more bands had this level of success.

BandCamp is more-or-less an "indie" place to find music. People have to be "into" it to go there and find music.

Spotify and Pandora are far lower barriers for every-day people. Just put on some station you've created from your favorite band, and eventually it'll start playing new bands you've never heard and might love. It's amazing.

What it ends up doing is incentivizing artists to create songs like this: https://play.google.com/store/music/artist/The_Very_Very_Awe...

I read somewhere that the artist behind this discovered that the streaming songs he made the most from were songs that were apparently requested by random small child requests so he created a whole bunch of songs for just that purpose and makes the bulk of his income through that. Discovery on the streaming services is awful and the renumeration for indie artists is also awful. It's the worst of all possible worlds.

How is this bad? This artist found a niche that wouldn't exist otherwise, and is making a profit from it.

This artist has made a business out of their music. Most music isn't a business, it's a passion and hobby.

I used to be able to do reverse phone lookup by typing a number into google. People have turned that into a business and now it, to put it simply, does not work at all.

This is the music equivalent of that. It's also why there are gajillions of crappy cover songs on the streaming services. It's turned into a money extraction thing and is crowding out the, you know, music.

Once upon a time, not that long ago even, a talented musician could make a living from their music. It's depressing to read biographies of entertainers who came up in the first half of the twentieth century who needed a job so they became entertainers. We've traded our culture for a mess of pottage.

Frankly, this narrative is untrue.

Since the beginning of time, certainly modern times, artists have largely struggled to survive off their artwork. Most don't survive.

There is no time in modern history where artists, of any kind, on average made a living from their art. Even our most famous artists very often die poor.

There has always been a gross abundance of art. It's not a bad thing - but it does mean making a living off it is _hard_. Really _hard_. It's not good enough simply to be talented - there's a lot of luck involved too.

For every Taylor Swift, you'll find dozens of wannabe's with nearly as great, or sometimes as great of songwriting abilities and voice talent. Some even play instruments at the same time! Somehow, Taylor Swift was "picked" and propped up by record labels et al, and now is a household name.

How many artists can you name from the 19th century? Probably a few of the most successful ones. Do you think they were the only ones writing music, or painting? Definitely not.

Hard to say! Spotify definitely isn’t a magic music marketing machine — you need a decent amount of organic traction before you’ll get any algorithmic promotion, and even more for editorial. It took us years of releasing music, playing shows, networking with other bands, pitching to blogs and buying ads before Spotify became an effective way for us to find fans.

It might be that “listen on Spotify before you buy on Bandcamp” is the 2020 version of “download on Bittorrent before you buy the CD”. But it feels like “is this slightly better for musicians than music piracy” is a pretty low bar for a $50 billion company to shoot for.

I don't claim that Spotify is end-all-be-all of music marketing. It's one of the tools, that is part of the arsenal. It feels that middle of the spectrum - above "we have a facebook page" and below "corporate label promotion material".

>is this slightly better for musicians than music piracy

They're a music streaming and recommendation service company, not a "we kill piracy" company. Maybe they should get into more promotional business... but they're not in that business.

I would argue that Spotify is "(insert more successful band in the genre here) is looking for a warm up act for their gig in your town".

If you're in a very middle of the pack mass appeal genre - you're definitely screwed on Spotify, or anywhere, without a breakout act(corporate contract/viral video)

You can listen to the songs on bandcamp before buying it.

I didn't make it clear.

I wouldn't buy "your band's" album, even if I could listen to it right before buying it. I don't have the time to listen to 30 minutes of audio without being hooked onto it first.

One unknown song in my Google Music or Soundcloud auto-playlist may get me hooked... But you need to build a desire to buy the album beforehand.

I don't think I'm the only person like that, btw.

Artists can choose what song plays first on an album on Bandcamp.