Forget Spotify Im going all-in on Bandcamp for music in 2025, heres why you should too

Date:
Tue, 31 Dec 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Description:
As a certified Spotify fanatic, Ill be making an effort to listen to and
yes, buy more music on Bandcamp in 2025.

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With Spotify Wrapped hype dying down, Ive had a chance to think about my
music consumption habits over the last year I listened to more than 48,000 minutes of music this year on Spotify alone, accounting for about 14% of my waking hours.

Thats a lot of time, and a lot of streams, but as weve all come to know that doesnt necessarily mean a lot of money making it to artists pockets. How
could it? I pay the equivalent of $14 each month for my Spotify premium membership, and at a going rate of about 800 streams per month, theres only space for a penny or two per play at the very most.

According to Ditto Music, Spotify pays out a maximum of $0.005 per stream. Im not the first person to find this a touch unfair weve seen calls for
boycotts from the likes of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell , while others like the late Prince have had their discographies pulled (though this was later restored.)

However, as lopsided as I find Spotifys payout mechanism, I cant stay mad at consumers for taking a good deal. Spotify is cheap, easy to use, and one of the most widely supported apps in modern tech history, found on smartphones, tablets, browsers, TVs, smart speakers, cars, and even fridges .

An album purchased for $10 could be worth more than weeks or even months of streams

Luckily, there is an alternative: Bandcamp .

For those not familiar, Bandcamp is an online music storefront with some streaming features that primarily serves as a way for artists to distribute their music at a fairer price. The site is owned by Songtradr, a massive
music licensing company, so its not fully independent, but nevertheless
offers artists a 85/15 revenue split in the artists favor for digital music. This means an album purchased for $10 could be worth more than weeks or even months of an individual listeners streams.

I started using Bandcamp years ago as a way to seek out independent artists and collect higher quality versions of some of my favourite underground albums, and have since switched to using it to source tracks for DJing. But
in 2025 Ill be making an effort to use Bandcamp more for casual listening and genre deep-dives, as well as a source of new material. Top tips for starting out on Bandcamp 1. Make a free account Bandcamp allows users to make free fan and artists accounts to purchase and upload music. You can also link
different accounts under one email address, meaning you can keep your collections separate by genre or era if you like. 2. Scroll down to the digging area Scrolling down through the homepage reveals a cluster of genre tags. Clicking one will take you to the search area, where you can look through best sellers and new releases alike. You can preview each release's standout track, or click on them to go to the artist's page. 3. Start your collection Once you've found some releases you're grooving to, head to the checkout to add them to your collection. You'll get instant access to unlimited streaming, the ability to download in various formats (including lossless WAV and FLAC), and the knowledge that your money has (mostly) gone straight to the artists who made the music.

Weve come to a point where digital media has a very low monetary value, which affects its perceived value too. Listening to 800 songs a month costs $14, playing 800 hours of a discounted video game costs $10, and watching 800
hours of video on YouTube costs nothing at all. This is often linked to a
lack of tangibility, of physicality. Yet speaking from experience, even
having a digital copy of an album or song in your purchased collection offers a sense of investment that is simply missing from streaming. It makes you
want to connect with the music, to find the value in your purchase.

For reference, Bandcamp's home page proudly displays that fans have paid artists $1.42 billion since the site's launch in 2007.

There are other benefits to buying on Bandcamp too the site only allows artists to upload lossless files, so you know youre getting a high-quality version of whichever tune youre downloading. Im no audiophile I previously wrote about my affinity for listening through phone speakers but if you do want to get a nice set of speakers or headphones out, an album downloaded
from Bandcamp will smoke anything on Spotify in terms of quality.

And, as my use of Bandcamp tracks for DJing implies, you can actually do what you like with the music: put it on any device, remix it with music software, stick it on a USB and play it through some decks. Spotify and apps like it relegate the listening experience to one place, but Bandcamp actively encourages you to think bigger.

If you do want to get a nice set of speakers or headphones out, an album downloaded from Bandcamp will smoke anything on Spotify in terms of quality

Theres something to be said also about escaping the algorithm apocalypse. Spotifys recommendation algorithms are so accurate and so powerful that even when I go looking for new music, I often feel like I find subtle variations
of what I already know. Bandcamps search feature has three main tabs best-selling, new releases, and surprise me, the latter seemingly combining the first two.

Ive found some truly bizarre and truly excellent music with this combo of choices especially as there are plenty of smaller and more mysterious
artists on Bandcamp that youll find nowhere else. My latest obsession is the German techno auteur Skee Mask , who pulled his discography from Spotify
years ago for political reasons.

If Id never stepped onto Bandcamp theres a chance Id never have heard Skees uniquely ethereal take on dance music, or followed him to a live show in London last month. It certainly feels like a much more organic progression than clicking a sponsored playlist on Spotifys landing page. (Image credit: Bandcamp / Future)

That all said, I probably wont be ditching Spotify any time soon. Bandcamp is still missing a lot of mainstream heavy hitters, artists like Beyonce or Kendrick Lamar who make enough from standard distribution. Spotify remains
the most cost-effective way to build daily playlists and share music with friends building a Bandcamp collection can quickly become an expensive endeavour, and theres no reselling a digital collection like you can with CDs or vinyl.

Regardless, I see Bandcamp as a champion of musics value in an era of digital overload, and I'm happy to make it the center of my 2025 tech resolution. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is worth more than $7 billion; he is richer than any musician in history. Let me say that again: no musician has ever made as much money as the CEO of Spotify. Im not calling for a wholesale boycott, as the consumer cant be blamed for taking a good deal, but I do feel that as a lover of music theres some pride to be taken in shifting money away from the
pockets of billionaires and towards the artists themselves. You might also like Spotify has been filling your recommendations with fake artists and
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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/audio/audio-streaming/forget-spotify-im-going-all-in -on-bandcamp-for-music-in-2025-heres-why-you-should-too


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