Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by LockAndLol 2176 days ago
If you're affiliated with bandcamp, I have a question: is there something like bandcamp radio coming out sometime? I don't know about others but I have trouble actually discovering stuff on bandcamp. Every artists page seems to be cut off from other artists and I haven't found a way to just let random or similar artists be played.

Jamendo has radios, "best of" and "trending" lists per genre, artist, tag and across their whole music selection which makes discovery really easy. For bandcamp, knowledge of who's who seems to be necessary and I don't have the time to be that into music. That's why jamendo has been getting my money lately.

4 comments

I plugged elsewhere here, but I put together https://bandhiking.isandrew.com/ because I had the same problem. It's basically a Bandcamp radio thing. (I've found a few dozen things over the last month or so using to it!)
Niiiice! Thanks a lot! That's very much more what I was looking for. And opensource too!

Good job :)

Discover on the Bandcamp homepage is good for this, and we have pretty good genre-specific tag pages now that have a combination of algorithmic and curated picks, and you can dig in real deep with your own filters if you want. Example: https://bandcamp.com/tag/electronic

I work on the discovery team, so this is great feedback to have, thank you :)

(also proper radio is a great idea)

I'll copy my response to a comment made earlier:

Hmm, I had a look at it and though I like the top layout, what's missing is automatically playing the next item. I can't just hit play, resume doing something else and when the occasional good song pops up add it to my favorites, a playlist or just open it in a new tab and play the whole album.

Maybe my way of discovering music isn't normal, but I think Soundcloud and Jamendo did it pretty well. I could have music playing for ages and keep adding to my favorites and playlists without actively having to know any artist.

---------------

The /tag/ page worked only for the highlights, but "all electronic releases" would only play one song and I couldn't play the next song (Firefox 77). In theory though, that's more of what I'm looking for, so thumbs up.

Not sure how long the discovery part has been up, but to me it seems new.

Also, Soundcloud's feature of playing similar songs from the track's page was very nice. That would also help a lot with music discovery.

The Discover section on the front page is good for this: https://bandcamp.com/#discover

You can sort by genre and a few other variables, but I leave it on the default settings and listen to anything that seems interesting, one page at a time. The Discover section is available on the android app, but it doesn't give me the same feeling that I'm rummaging through a record store.

Hmm, I had a look at it and though I like the top layout, what's missing is automatically playing the next item. I can't just hit play, resume doing something else and when the occasional good song pops up add it to my favorites, a playlist or just open it in a new tab and play the whole album.

Maybe my way of discovering music isn't normal, but I think Soundcloud and Jamendo did it pretty well. I could have music playing for ages and keep adding to my favorites and playlists without actively having to know any artist.

Thanks for the link nonetheless.

Use the feed. Follow artists/labels you like and fans whose tastes you enjoy (Bandcamp will automatically suggest some every so often inline with other feed entries). Visit the homepage and Discover every now and then to get a broader perspective and find more leads to plug into your feed. And don't be afraid to prune things that no longer spark joy from your following list.