Stop listening to artists who don’t make music available as downloads?
Not to mention the resurgence of vinyl (not that I have any interest in that personally).
Not to mention the resurgence of vinyl (not that I have any interest in that personally).
They insisted that "80% to the artist" is a lie and those special Friday promos are somehow even worse. However they said they get almost all money from physical goods sales on Bandcamp so merch is a good way to support them.
Any professional artist (aka music sales is your income) can confirm?
And I’d be interested in a link to their Bandcamp if possible!
Fun fact, Deezer started off as a piracy website that grew big enough to turn legitimate when sued :)
Could be that Bandcamp is ripe to be disrupted by someone more friendly to artists.
Edit: good to know, I'll have to take a look at it.
And I love piracy-turned-legitimacy stories. For instance, Crunchyroll, originally an anime piracy streaming site, turned legit and eventually overtook a monolith in the US anime industry with Funimation. Funimation and Crunchyroll were both bought by Sony, and Funimation’s brand identity was deemed weaker (something unthinkable back during their 90s/00s peak) and had everything renamed to Crunchyroll.
Unfortunately though I can’t recommend Crunchyroll, as last I was aware they heavily underpaid their subtitler staff.
I'm fairly confident that selling via BC gives artists a significantly higher % per item than selling through a label or physical media through bricks & mortar. The artist gets to keep 100% of copyright this way, too. The artist probably has less reach and lower volume of sales this way unless they're great with self promo or can get in with DJs/tastemakers in a scene.
Happy to be schooled if I'm in error, but "scummy" isn't a word I'd use for BC.
Physical media is probably rounding error these days right? But from what I heard BC is good for selling physical merch including CDs and stuff, apparently it's transparent and most money goes to the artist.
But surprisingly not with digital tracks. So I stopped promoting BC as a place to buy music to friends for now.
The band I know now use some "distributor". From what I understood, distributor does a bunch of stuff mainly including promotion. What their distributor does, it seemed like a label to me but they say it's not a label... Again I have no idea but perhaps pros will know the difference.
Until relatively recently you could only buy whole albums not single songs. I don't want to buy the whole album if it only contains 1 or 2 songs that I actually like.
Uh?
Singles have always been a thing, and most if not all digital platforms allow buying by the track. You’d need a very specific artist demand to avoid this unbundling.
Of course, it's OK not to want to own the music you listen to. Personally, after 8 years of trying to use Spotify (and lately YouTube Music), the amount of graveyard playlists I now "posses" made it so I basically had to revert to buying music again as I want to be able to listen to the playlists I create years in the future too.
Quick look (~20% of my total playlists), around 10% of my playlists contain more than half songs that are no longer available. That's just unacceptable in my personal case.
On the CDs those bits had been mastered as part of the pre-gap (i.e. the bit between tracks where a CD player will show a negative time counting upwards), so it almost feels as if they simply ripped their own discs for digital distribution and managed to accidentally configure the ripping program to discard the pre-gap material instead of appending/prepending it to the adjacent track.
Unfortunately that means that all official music services are affected, both for streaming and downloading, and buying the CD version is the only way of getting a proper version (buying the CD is also the only way of getting the liner notes – unless you're lucky and somebody uploaded them to Discogs or so – though that is a separate problem).
What is "relatively recently" here? The iTunes store had a per-song price since, like, 2003 or so. And I'm pretty sure I recall Amazon selling mp3s individually since at least 2005 - I listen to grindcore, and I was amused at the per-song offering when Nasum's Grind Finale came out with 152 tracks. At £0.79 a track... no sale.
The artist will still have fans, the label will still get paid, but you will miss out on the art.
I would argue the only option is to acquire and store the music using technology not officially supported by the industry (stream downloaders, then torrents, etc)