Bandcamp Friday was yesterday and I, in accordance with my nature, bought a whole bunch of new music. I’ve taken a real shine to Bandcamp over the last few years, probably because so many other ways of buying music has gotten worse. Spotify’s ascendency has been enshrined: streaming music is the norm — the idea of ripping a CD or buying MP3s now positively archaic. iTunes, the erstwhile standard, has become Apple Music and its focus now on catching up with Spotify. The logic is fairly sound: why buy individual albums and songs when you can pay a subscription fee and get all the music?
But Spotify sucks for musicians, for all the criticism of music piracy taking money from the artists, Spotify’s minuscule payouts is nearly as bleak. This is to say nothing of its hosting of generative AI created ‘music’ which is a whole additional question.
Bandcamp, on the other hand, prides itself on being transparent with how much of the money you pay goes to the artists. In 2020 they introduced Bandcamp Fridays, where Bandcamp forgoes its cut of money entirely. Plus, those purchases let you download the song you bought (even if you decided to order the vinyl album through their storefront!) in whatever format you want, just in case you’re an audiophile who insists on lossless FLACs. And once those are downloaded to your machine, they’re there for good. No chance of them being delisted from your library or an artist pulling their catalogue because they (rightly) don’t like the website platforming Covid conspiracies.
It’s striking to me how accepted the idea of not owning your digital stuff has become over the past few years. Once upon a time, the idea that a distributor could just delete something you’d paid for and downloaded was anathema enough to warrant a news article in the Times. Now it kinda just happens. Movies and tv shows get removed from steaming services with nary a physical release (and you can’t use a VCR to tape them either). Old games get delisted when their rights expire and when game libraries like mine are mostly online, I’m an outage away from not being able to play my favorite modern games again. Frickin’ Photoshop needs a dang subscription to even use the software, not just keep it updated.
I realize I’m the Luddite railing against the future here. I know Spotify and the like are probably here to stay and the idea of digital ownership is becoming an oxymoron. But it’s weird to remember a different way of doing things, when digital distribution promised an easier way of sharing music, movies, tech, and more. Instead those avenues have ushered in new ways of controlling and limiting all that. It’s a bummer and another notch in the internet’s steady enshittification. I suppose that’s why I like Bandcamp; it feels like an older, purer version of the internet. One where I can buy music (almost) directly from artists and know that (most of) my money is going to the folks who make what I like. The fact that I can get a record on vinyl (or cassette!) is just icing on the cake.
Essays, Not Rants! 