Bandcamp and Spotify, Two Different Roads for the Digital Music Future
The future of digital music is wide open.
No joke, we all know that, but there's two different providers that are taking two different avenues and it's worth talking about.
So let's get to the artist of the day! This band is called Reptile Room, and they are really cool, if you're fan of ambient guitar noises and a singer that can really sing her tail off, this might be the band for you. They've been playing a lot of the local clubs here in Atlanta and around the circuit and I recently sort of found out about them, really digging them, so I think you should check them out.
We've got a lot to talk about today, so let's get to it. Bandcamp and Spotify, two different roads and a wide open in future.
Two different companies, two different ideologies of what the future might be like, and the two different public perceptions of these two companies. Couldn't be any farther apart. Spotify is all about playlists, Bandcamp is still about the album, Spotify as payment system is highly frowned upon and very cryptic; In Bandcamp, you get to choose how much you wanna get paid, Spotify requires you to work with a specific distributor network, Bandcamp is open to everyone. Spotify is revenue comes from ads and data mining, Bandcamp just simply offers a revenue share and collects no information about you at all - and by you, I mean the consumer and also the provider of art. Spotify is worth 54 billion. Bandcamp is privately owned and has been in the black on the book since 2012 as it's reported, and it continues to grow every day. So who's doing it right? Is one better than the other? Does everyone have to be a certain way? It seems like Bandcamp is doing it opposite to basically every other streaming service there is, and yet every year they seem to increase in the overall value. The perception of these two companies couldn't be any different, and it really shows in the connection between the artist and the platform.
Spotify continues to deny that artists are unhappy with their service as far as payouts are concerned, but I think if you ask any artist aside from a major one that gets a billion streams a year, you're probably gonna hear some discussion in the amount that they pay out per stream. Meanwhile on the other side of the fence, you've got somebody like Bandcamp who continues to do these artcentric Fridays to help out artists during this hard time of Covid by literally saying they're waving all of their fees for an entire day to encourage the market to come to Bandcamp and spend money and directly support musicians. <usicians on these days get 100% of the proceeds. Bandcamp waves their fee 100%. What's interesting to me is that Bandcamp doesn't really consider themselves a streaming service, and that is kind of an interesting take because most people these days that are in that type of business would consider themselves a streaming service. There's just something about Bandcamp is just so different than everybody else, and somehow they're surviving in this whole market, and it really makes me wonder, can both coexist or will eventually one be overcome by the other? Obviously, right now, Spotify has the marketing dollars, and they have the overall strength in market.
All of this to say, it seems that the game has changed for us musicians.
We used to take three years to build a piece of art to put out, it seems like the world is forcing us to put out more and more art because the medium is being squashed by the internet, and if you're not putting out things all the time, you're very easily forgotten. I think that would sort of not apply to sort of what I would call the legacy artists, which are people that have been around pre-streaming that were already massive bands that could wait two to three years to put out material, but it just seems like these days... That's where the world is. What do you think about all this? Do you like Spotify? I mean, they have a huge market share of listeners and the chance of being heard is pretty large every day, there seems to be a lot more training on how to use the platform as an artist to get yourself more listeners and to find more fans of your music, or do you prefer Bandcamp, where they seem to have a little bit slower model as it pertains to encouraging albums and also the revenue sharing with the platform is a lot more transparent. I'd be interested in knowing what you think about both of these platforms and which one you choose if you're an artist, if you're just a listener, which one do you use... I would imagine you probably use Spotify more than Bandcamp, but you might have a encountered band camp over the last several years or so, from going to check out things that your favorite artists had put out. One is more demonized than the other, but both are succeeding and it will be very, very interesting to see who kinda comes out on top in the next three to five years.