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Ahh, I love that #BandcampFriday is an established enough thing now that I wake up to a flurry of sales that happened without me having gone on about it on Social Media. Anyway, a short thread for those who've missed this most glorious of monthly rituals during pandemical times:
So #BandcampFriday is the first Friday of the month, now running for as long as the pandemic is still removing all opportunity for musicians to get out and gig and do normal stuff. It's a day when @bandcamp waive their entire revenue share, giving it back to the artists.
This is a remarkable thing for a number of reasons, not least of all because @bandcamp's revenue share is already pretty damn reasonable. I have zero problem with them taking every penny they get. So this is generosity on top of an already equitable business model, IMHO.
Recent days have revealed to a large number of people just how spectacularly out of touch Spotify & its billionaire Matt Lucas lookalike owner really are. & the rich irony is, rather than telling us how much music to make, @bandcamp has made new ways to release it possible
So I'm able to release WAY more music than I ever could before. And rather than engaging in the carpet bombing of social media, desperately trying to get 100K people to listen to it to earn me anything on Spotify, I have my @bandcamp subscribers who make it all possible.
I get to release anything that deserves to be released. I'm under no pressure to put out substandard stuff, no pressure to make it for radio, or playlists. Just an incredible group of people who make it possible to follow my muse by giving me the permission to do it.
The mechanism for all this is the Subscription service within Bandcamp. Not 'subscription in the Spotify/Apple sense where you subscribe to everything. This is subscribing to an artist, making their work possible, Lots of people are doing it in different ways. it's amazing.
Obviously, I want you to check out my Bandcamp subscription thingie, especially today, but there are some others that are brilliant too - @coreymwamba @thomastruax @julieslick all do amazing things with their subscription offers, and I'm happy I get to support their art that way
Mine is at http://stevelawson.bandcamp.com/subscribe - as soon as you sign up, you'll get over 55 albums, immediately, to stream and download in whatever format you like. Plus you'll get everything I release in the next 12 months. Being an improvisor, I tend to make a lot of release quality music
(ah! I forgot about @calamateur in my list of subscriptions! His is amazing, and a great example of how it works for songwriters as opposed to improvisors. Go check it out!)
Anyway, with Bandcamp, you can just listen to stuff for free - then you can choose to buy the things you love and can afford. All of my individual albums are ÂŁ2 so you can get them and then go get other people's music too. Nobody Wins Unless Everybody Wins, right?
Or you can buy everything that's public in one go - there's a discount bulk deal that's not the subscription, but gets you everything that's on there. Some good stuff there :)
And then there's the subscription, which I've kept as cheap as I can (perceptions of value are complex, we'll discuss that another time) because again, I want everyone to be able to subscribe to a bunch of music they dig, not just hoover up everyone's money for myself...
So, anyway, today's a great day to go and have a rummage on Bandcamp. Here's where ALL my music is: http://music.stevelawson.net (same Bandcamp page, clever custom URL) and everything I've ever bought there is at http://bandcamp.com/solobasssteve ...
that second link - http://bandcamp.com/solobasssteve - is particularly fun. It's just like coming round my house and rummaging through my record collection, only you'll have to make your own coffee.
And I don't have a record collection any more, so it's better than that...
And I don't have a record collection any more, so it's better than that...
In short, Bandcamp makes it possble for me to make music and do it without having billionaires tell me how much of it I should make. It helps me get it out to the people who love it, it makes it easy for them to share with other people, and it's where I find all the music I hear
...Bandcamp is resolutely indie (the way they do free streaming before sales doesn't fit the publishing terms of any major label thing) and has become and utterly vital part of the independent music, in exactly the same way that Spotify hasn't.
So, if you care about the people behind the music, if you want more of it with fewer corporate tie-ins and zero adverts for MatchDotCom or whatever shit is being foisted on you elsewhere. Bandcamp is where its at. It's also a massive vinyl shop, if that's your deal too :)
(oh, as always, I'll be spending 20% of anything that comes in today on other people's music - a couple of times on Bandcamp Friday that's ended up being a ridiculous amount of music. I'm very happy for you to make my music buying job difficult ;) )
