[ye-olde-sysrq]

I've posted something to this effect before but I'll post it again. I'm terrified someone is going to enshittify bandcamp.

I used to be a huge what fan, primarily for discovery. Never would've known I liked atmospheric black metal if not for them.

When they closed, I didn't really have enough "in" in the scene to know where other refugees went, so I just shopped around for anywhere else that would let me get "real" (in the what sense of real - decent encodes from raw source material that have the full spectrum and aren't just FLAC encodes of "high quality" mp3's). I don't pretend to be able to hear the difference, but I like it for archival purposes. I have plexamp transcode the audio anyway when I'm on mobile.

Turns out most people don't give a shit so most places don't offer flacs. Except bandcamp. Plus they pay artists fairly, which ended up being as important to me as the flacs as I came to support indie bands for whom selling on bandcamp was a huge lift. I like seeing CDs literally come from residential addresses in Sweden. I like supporting the random 1 dude making awesome metal out of his basement.

[brianstorms]

I also worry about enshittification of Bandcamp. And I'm an artist with music on the site. I was very nervous about the Epic deal when it happened (figured it was a way to get the founders and the A-round VCs some money in a cash-out after an incredibly long period of time, similar to what happened to Meetup).

But now? Songtradr smells like an investment bank, one that looks at music as "content" or "IP" and wants to license the hell out of it -- and ultimately, own as much of the rights as possible.

They do not strike me as aligned with artist interests, or with the spirit of Bandcamp, which, admittedly, at this late date is mostly a fantasy.

Bandcamp represents the last, best refuge for artists in a world where most companies offer you "exposure," what else would you want, stop whining about being paid, etc. Bandcamp means payment. Which means livelihoods.

I don't trust SongTraitor.

[hatsix]

Songtradr employee here, we only own a tiny amount of music (that wasn't produced in-house), it was acquired as part of another acquisition and my understanding is that we're trying to divest ourselves of it so that rights holders.

So that can be one less thing you worry about, we're not buying up music.

I joined through the https://pretzel.rocks acquisition (which is where the above mentioned music came from), and they've kept our niche-industry-best 70/30 split on that product.

We're not the bastion that Bandcamp is, but we DO focus on ensuring that youtube influencers and tiktok stars are paying their fair share for the music that they use. We make sure that cosmetic companies using indie artists are paying market rates and not taking advantage of their naiveté.

I hope (though I can't guarantee) that we're able to keep Bandcamp the way it currently is. The company has treated my previous company/brand well, and I'm hoping that carries forward to a brand that carries MUCH MUCH MUCH more gravitas.

But holy hell do I hate our name. We've got other brands that we could use as our main name, but we went with the one that sounds like "Traitor". I blame this on our founder being an Aussie and they sound clearly distinct when they're both in his accent.

[moab]

Check out https://rateyourmusic.com/ which is good for discovery, e.g., https://rateyourmusic.com/genre/atmospheric-black-metal/ and the all-time lists: https://rateyourmusic.com/charts/top/album/all-time/g:atmosp...

Users also make wonderful charts on this website. also, hello from a fellow what refugee!

[xrd]

I'm very happy you posted this, the information here is really interesting. Thank you.

[moab]

I'm glad you found it useful :-)

The other useful resource I will mention is "soulseek" (https://www.slsknet.org/news/) which is basically old-school direct downloads, and includes a lot of obscure music that you won't find on AppleMusic/Spotify.

Happy trails!

[sensanaty]

Most people from What migrated over to what is now called REDacted. Unfortunately your window for account renewal is long passed, but the large majority of What is on there at this point, so worth going through the interview if you wanna get back into it