[port11]

Okay, a bit of devil’s advocate but how much of that network effect was caused by being young?

I’m making an assumption, true, but a lot of us that grew up with ripped CDs were teenagers or young adults back then. Sharing music was inherently part of what we did because we were young and that was an activity we shared.

And as to Spotify: why do we keep complaining about these platforms but also keep patronising them? They deleted my account when I moved countries, so I deleted their app. We’re done. Years ago. Now I get music from the library when my kid goes there to pick up books. There’s Bandcamp, Qobuz, what have you. Look at local festivals with weird bands (how I discovered Constantinople and Huun-Huur-Tu). iPod hacks have never been easier! Let’s shake it up a bit :)

[dbspin]

To counter this - if you were around in the blog music era, being young had little to do with the network effect. Shitty pop music was in the ascendent culturally at the time, and the huge indie revival of the late 2000s and early 2010s happened primarily online. Hypemachine and the hundreds of mp3 blogs pushed novelty, obscurity, cross genre experiments, lost records etc. I'd finished college by this point, but dove right back into music and broadened my tastes considerably.

Discoverability and usability in general is godawful on bandcamp. Always has been, and shows no signs of improving. Never heard of Qobuz. What made the mp3 blog era so unique was exactly the network effect referenced above. The curators had audiences, they were aggregated from larger platforms and both deeply specific and hyper erudite. There was a whole culture around this online, and waves of excitement around certain artists, which would spill into 'in the know' circles offline.

Googling who's playing at local festivals or using some random app isn't and can't remotely be the same thing. I could see a music based social network taking off in the future. Currently there's nothing with the buy in, and the existing platforms are way too financially invested in pushing major labels, AI etc to become real recommendation and sharing engines.

[PaulHoule]

Music is tough. People like music which is a lot like what they're familiar with but just a little bit different. Musicians are always suing each other because it's hard to write a song which doesn't sound dangerously like an existing song, which is why Taylor Swift is generous with writing credits. It's a big problem for LLM generated music, regardless of the training data.

Myself I have gone through phases in my adult life where I tried hard to expand my musical interests. Like around the time my son was born I was really into obscure psychedelia, both vintage and contemporary and also prog rock and other rock B-sides from the 1970s. Then later I got into the british 1980s music I missed. Then it was Ingsoc and then the Super Furry Animals, lately Tyler the Creator. One thing that's driven it is that I make these cards

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/115939341268444811

and don't want them to show my age!

[properbrew]

The card idea is absolutely great. I'm totally going to do the same. There's a number of songs in my playlist that I _really_ enjoy that I would make cards for.

Thank you for the inspiration for a weekend project!

[port11]

It’s true I didn’t grow up with that at all. When music blog were popular I’d have been in university exclusively listening to what I already liked.

Bandcamp is indeed really bad at suggesting things you’ll like…

To your last point: it’s weird how Bandsintown or Last.fm didn’t figure this out. Last.fm has so much potential but just isn’t… interested?

One advantage of the offline scene is that I see a lot more local artists, all knowing each other and playing together. There seems to be some camaraderie/support for each other going on.

[dbspin]

Agreed. Last FM is one of the great lost opportunities of web 2.0 (up there with the early location based social networks). The website still exists, and I still use it (despite painfully poor integration into iOS, requiring the third party paid client Marvis to synch). They offer unclear value subscription to access all your data, and at this point, most dedicated music geeks have probably moved to OSS / local solutions integrating musicbrainz datasets.

There is a world in which lastfm is the one of the most popular social networks, tiktok before tiktok (which started as music.ly) if you like. There's another in which it developed into a Tidal like successful boutique streaming platform. Instead it's a half forgotten not really working nonsense.

My favourite lastfm story, is that back when it was somewhat popular (at least indie popular), someone commented on my lastfm profile to say they'd been in Tokyo and been approached by the members of a hyper niche Swedish band (Strip Squad) because one of the members had heard their music being played in a park. The guy playing them had found them because of my lastfm. Lastfm at the time actively suggested connecting with other users who had similar psychographic taste.

I'm all in favour of supporting local music scenes. Just personally I don't enjoy gigs, never have really. Sound is bad, always too loud, vibes are too alcohol based (at least here in Ireland), they're pricey etc. I'd actually love it if there was more of a 'listening cafe' Japanese style venue / scene here. There's a popular bar that poses as one, but it has a terrible, wildly over loud sound system in a box room with a loud open bar next door.

[runarberg]

Does Bandcamp still do their Bandcamp weekly and their regular article? Personally I never signed up for any streaming service (apart from Bandcamp; but I don‘t use their suggestion algorithm) so I can’t judge what is good or bad about it. But I feel like their regular articles and their Bandcamp weekly show was excellent at music discovery. I stopped listening and reading it a while ago, as I get plenty good music discovery on my local radio station (KEXP) as well as the national radio of where I grew up (RÚV in Iceland).

[kylestratis]

They actually do a lot for discovery. Bandcamp weekly, notifications when labels you've bought from release something from another artist, playlists, and they have genre-focused blogs as well.

People just like saying something doesn't exist when they just didn't bother to look at their emails.

[dbspin]

So I've been a bandcamp user since close to the dawn of the service. The issues I commented on above don't relate to their curation emails but the poverty of the interface itself. Bandcamp has been widely and roundly, not to mention accurately criticised for it's technical / UX failures for a long time. It also has no social features whatsoever. Unfortunately a curated email isn't a replacement for proper recommendations based on similar users listening (as lastfm used to to, see above anecdote), content based recommendations, or genuine social recommendations. Not to mention the fact that half the writing staff were fired several years ago, and the quality of their curation fell off a cliff after that point.

The app and site are awful, and even finding stuff you've bought to play or download can be a nightmare if you own a lot of material. To site a specific example - I bought a back catalogue of sound effects records for work reasons. They have many dozens of individual releases - which makes navigating my other purchased records much more difficult.

Bandcamp also only allow you to 'uncover' the download links for tracks or albums one at a time, presumably to save bandwidth costs. I could go on and on.

It's a hypothetically great service that's absolutely crippled by not having been improved for a decade.

[runarberg]

I think me and you use Bandcamp in totally different ways, and this is why you see a problem where I don‘t. I am not judging btw (unlike your parent) just pointing out the differences.

My primary (and now only) use case of Bandcamp is as a marketplace between me and the artist/label. I use it as a super convenient record store. And like a good record store, bandcamp also has the equivalent of music magazine which you can read in the store, and helpful staff willing to point you to new releases. and just like in a record store, the staff won‘t play what they recommended for you, you have to take the sample CD to the listening station, put on the headphones, and hit play your self. I see their streaming feature as basically a super convenient listening station at the record store. I usually stream an album before I decide whether or not to buy it.

After purchasing I never listen to it again in app, but rather download the files and upload to my MP3 player, or wait for the physical media to arrive and listen to it in my living room’s stereo system.

Bandcamp also has the equivalent of a radio station’s music oriented talk show with their podcasts, this is more then your average record store. E.g. I think Easy Street in Seattle nor Lucky Records in Reykjavík have a regular podcast, although I can see it could be amazing if they did.

[hylaride]

The problem with subscription music is that the streaming platforms have no incentive to get you to discover new music - you're already paying either way.

Before Apple Music, when it was just the iTunes Store, Apple introduced iTunes Genius and it was scary good at recommending music; it worked so well I shudder to think what I spent in total buying $1 songs off of it.

But apple's music "play similar songs" just seems to take the same artists and pump their other album filler songs.

[port11]

My counterpoint is that if you’re always listening to the same stuff, your collection feels stale and you’re less likely to listen to more music.

Maybe that’s actually advantageous to the streaming services, but one big reason I cancelled them was that I wasn’t getting anything new.

(Instead, Radar FM in Portugal is where I started tuning into to learn about new stuff.)

[desecratedbody]

I forget why exactly I did this, but years ago I deleted Spotify for something related to offline playlists. I kept my music offline, and I'm guessing they messed that up. Plus, they would randomly re/move songs or whole albums, which I know isn't entirely their fault, but the poor UX surrounding these occurrences was annoying enough to help drive me away.

I've tried going back a few times, but it just isn't worth the money.