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Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music are great for hearing your favorite songs, but Bandcamp is for true music fans.
One of the best things about smartphones (in my opinion at least) is the ability to listen to music anywhere and everywhere. While Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, and Amazon Music are the most popular streaming services they don’t pay a whole lot to the artists for playing their music. Just a fraction of a penny goes to the artist when someone streams their song. That can amount to quite a bit of money for huge artists like Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Justin Bieber, but smaller independent artists cannot survive on streaming payments.
True music fans who want to support their favorite artists are turning to another streaming app called Bandcamp.
Bandcamp supports artists and labels through revenue sharing of sales of a band’s digital music, vinyl, t-shirt, or any other product listed on the website.
Opening the Bandcamp app or website, the user will see new and featured music and albums from mostly independent artists and bands. You can also browse the huge library of music by genre or sub-genre. For example, when I tapped on the “hip hop” genre, I could narrow it down further to “instrumental”, “rap”, “beat-tape”, and “underground hip-hop”. Browsing the country category I saw “bluegrass”, “alt-country”, “western”, “outlaw” and “honky-tonk”.
There are artists I’d never heard of and certainly wouldn’t see show up browsing the other popular streaming services. When you find an artist you like, you can follow their music and be notified whenever the band releases something new. You’ll also see recommendations and you can follow other fans to see what else they’re listening to.
Bandcamp’s homepage says listeners have paid artists directly over $21 million in just the last 30 days.
This is huge for these independent artists, bands, and labels as many haven’t been able to perform live in over a year. Not only did the pandemic shut down live performances, but it prevented artists from selling merchandise at those shows which pay the bills.
As a vinyl record collector, I especially like Bandcamp because it offers a direct link to the artist so I can purchase new releases from them rather than Amazon or other big box stores. Purchases direct from the artist put more money in the artists’ pockets. I like that.
Bandcamp has been a popular app among collectors for several years now and is finally getting discovered by other music fans.
I liken it to the days when you’d walk down a street filled with music clubs and stepping in to hear a band you’ve never heard before and probably wouldn’t have heard if you weren’t in the right place at the right time.
If you’re a huge music fan and are tired of hearing the same old favorites on your choice of streaming music app, you’ll be happy you heard about Bandcamp.