“I’m With The Band” - In Praise of Bandcamp

In the first of these “review of the year” things I got angry at the music press’s obsession with nostalgia. In the second I got angry with Spotify’s complete failure to give bands a fair deal and develop a viable business model. In this third one I’ll be getting angry about … nothing. You see, it’s not all doom and gloom, and this piece is a love letter to potentially the best thing to happen to music in my lifetime; Bandcamp.

Big words, I’ll grant you. What about Napster? What about the iPod? What about Myspace? I hear you say. Well I’m not talking about what’s had the biggest impact on music here (although I do think the increasingly popular Bandcamp service will soon be mentioned alongside those names) but what I feel has had the most positive impact. Napster paved the way for a something-for-nothing musical culture (I’m not judging – I’m just as guilty as everyone else), the iPod and iTunes have established an unhealthy dominance over our listening and buying habits, and as for the current state of Myspace, the less said the better. All three offered something which now seems inadequate, and in some cases damaging, to musicians and fans alike. Bandcamp offers something better.

Bandcamp is nothing new. It’s the bastard child of all three of the above and, I’ll warrant, a few more. It’s also genuinely nothing new in the sense that it’s been with us a few years now, and I’m sure some of you are wondering why I’m writing this in 2011 when the site has been steadily growing for quite some time. Well for me 2011 seemed to mark some kind of tipping point, a year where I spent more money on music at Bandcamp than at any other store, whether online or on the high street. And that steady growth has suddenly got a lot quicker. Of the ten acts on our compilation of the best unsigned bands of the year, nine have music available on Bandcamp.

And that’s what makes Bandcamp such an exciting prospect. Unsigned bands who want their music on iTunes have to pay to put it on there, give a hefty chunk (approx. 30%) of the money made from any music sold back to the company, are limited by the parameters of the iTunes store, and can only make their music available in the iTunes .m4a format. On Bandcamp they can sign up for free, get much more freedom to design their site as they like including putting lyrics and upcoming gigs on there, can make their music downloadable in almost any format you can think of, can set their own prices (including “free” and “pay-what-you-like”), can sell physical products such as vinyl, cds and T-shirts, and only end up giving 15% of anything sold to Bandcamp.

Simply put, Bandcamp does all the things those three big names promised but better. Napster and Myspace were about democratizing music, taking it out of the hands of the labels. In the case of Napster, those wanting something for nothing will find plenty of brilliant, free music on Bandcamp, and even those bands who have the audacity to charge for their art generally allow you to stream their entire records on the site for free. And where Myspace gave bands the chance to gain an audience without label backing, Bandcamp goes further by giving them a stall from which to sell their wares to that audience, a trick Myspace never managed to perfect. And whilst iTunes aimed to make downloading music legally easy, the fact remains that for independent acts the cost of putting music onto iTunes and the inflexibility of the service make it almost untenable. Bandcamp doesn’t take a penny off the artist until the artist starts selling, and lets bands have control over the cost at and format in which people download their music.

I’m not naïve – Bandcamp is a business first and foremost – but it’s also the best, least exploitative distribution tool yet for artists and fans. And while calling Bandcamp the “least exploitative” may sound like damning with faint praise, there’s no doubt the state of music in 2011 would be far worse without it. So this Christmas, be sure to raise a glass to Bandcamp. Cheers!

Jed. x