I have to ask but how many of us pay more for the albums than the price they list in Bandcamp. I seldom go above myself only done it a few times. I should do it more but if you list a price I’ll pay that and only gone over it a few times for my favourites, not made of money so I judge what I buy a lot before I do these days and tend to buy a lot of albums in one go so tend to want the best price I can. Been skint this year so not bought anything yet but my list is long and I will when I can this is why streaming for me is essential to tide me over and find exactly what I want to own. Unlike the days where you bought and hoped for the best.
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Yes I was reading the report earlier and I thought the same.
I tend to overpay for cheaper items, but with many digital items being €8 or €10 I tend to give what is asked.
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I mostly give what’s asked. It’s difficult to assess which albums you might want to give more for before you’ve heard them in full.
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I buy most of my music from bandcamp (and to answer the earlier question, I almost always pay more than the requested price, especially for smaller bands, or bands I like. An extra couple of bucks I can afford and might help them make more music. I had one band offer to return the extra once, which was hilarious. I just want more music!)… getting bought by Epic is terrible news.
Tencent owns a serious chunk of Epic, and Epic has some seriously anti-consumer practices over the last decade or so, which gives me little to no confidence that bandcamp will continue to be where I buy music from. Hopefully someone else will start selling FLACs…
I already avoid the Epic games store to avoid giving them any money!
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Interesting points raised in this thread.
I tended to pay ‘market rate’ ($8-$10) for ‘pay what you want’ downloads in an attempt to keep my conscience relatively clear.
I was a medium term Bandcamp user and spent c. $5000 over my membership. I will not be returning after this acquisition but there are things Bandcamp need to improve for existing and future users:
- Bandcamp needs to share file information for downloads available on its platform – unless stipulated by the artist you have no idea what you’re downloading.
- Extending the above, files need to be quality-assured to a greater degree than they currently are – I have bought weird bit depth/sample rate combinations, mixed sample rate albums and files that look like upsamples or upscales. Other stores have better QA and so boast better files.
- Some ‘official’ profiles are selling things for which they do not have the proper clearances and when this happens the item is removed from your collection and its purchase record is erased. Bandcamp do this without notification and it happened to me three times last month. I would’ve closed my account regardless of the Epic announcement as a result of this situation.
I’m switching to Qobuz Sublime for the purchase discount and will continue to source downloads from places like HDtracks and HIGHRESAUDIO when they can’t be found on Qobuz.
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You can listen to whole albums (MP3 128K only) a few times before they ask you to buy via annoying pop ups.
Once purchased you can download to the app (MP3 192K I think and play offline) or download as FLAC etc and do what you want with the files.
FLAC files are a lot cheaper than Qobuz etc and the price is the same whatever format you choose
I will continue to stick with them but agree with your points made.
They need deliver on all three of these points to keep improving the service
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I have downloaded from Bandcamp as well as buying c.d and vinyl from their site.
Hopefully it won’t all go to pot.
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I am becoming more hopeful, and I would like it to continue
The plot thickens -
And then there’s this from the article -
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I think most of us download our high resolution files as soon as they are available (never yet had an mp3 from Bandcamp though).
Not sure why you would buy them and not download them as the Streaming from Bandcamp is not great quality.
I think in this situation the Fox Mulder school of thinking will work best for all customers as stated above
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Had to think about that reference.
“I want to believe”. Right?
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Close, but I was going for the ‘trust no one’
Fox’s view on dealing with any large organisation
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I have Bandcamp on my iPhone 12 Pro Max and listen to a lot of Jazz and Jazz Fusion. I can Airplay to my HomePods and Sonos Ones. Not sure what bitrate/format I’m getting but sounds pretty good. I have some purchased music but can also stream non-purchased tracks.
Just checked, and you are correct, only track 2 is available for me to stream. I guess I’ve just been lucky in the past, streaming artists who make entire albums available to stream.
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