It helps for some of us: 293 albums added last year, 130 from Bandcamp.
There is a big difference between “legal protection” and “mandated compensation”.
I buy from Bandcamp when I can, but many albums I want to buy are not on Bandcamp unfortunately. I can’t believe how difficult some artists make it to buy their music in a digital form, which makes zero sense to me.
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No kidding. I’ve over the years interacted with some relatively well-known artists who had outsourced their recorded music distribution to incompetent sidekicks. So smart in their music, so clueless with respect to their digital market. Oh well.
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No but its how artists can control the money they earn without losing it all to the record companies.
Not the place for Taylor Swift and co, but certainly the place that about 80% of what I am listening to is released and purchased and that seems to be getting higher.
It is growing and needs more people that want to spend more than £9.99 on all the Music in the world.
I have purchased 70+ albums this year from Bandcamp and consider it an investment in the bands
This thread is 39 entries long, and the definition of “fair compensation” has yet to surface.
But history has shown that trying to set “fair” compensation for any affinity group is a fool’s errand. The market does a far better job of it than any government mechanism.
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The solution isn’t Bandcamp. Most music consumers today stream. They don’t buy music. Buying the music of mostly obscure artists on Bandcamp is not a threat to the streaming services or the labels. If a musician wants to be heard, they need to be on the big streaming services.
The problem for many artists is that streaming provides literally no income. Obviously touring has been difficult which has accentuated the problem.
I agree that streaming is the future, hence the need for government intervention to improve the failings of unchecked markets. After all, that’s what happens already in many industries.
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Its a solution for some bands to get real money, but it is not the solution for the market as a whole I agree.
By using the thousand true fans idea many bands will be able to fund themselves through services like BandCamp and get to keep most of the money they generate.
I don’t really see a UK government shake up of streaming making any headway in the next few years as it will drag out.
Without having properly looked at the numbers, I don’t find streaming to actually be the issue at hand.
Let’s back up a few decades. You had artists playing on radios. Some of them made a lot of money out of royalties. The big ones. Other made jack shhhhht. The small ones. Now comeback to the present and look at streaming - it’s the same thing with one big distinction. Back then people listened to an artist on the radio and went out to buy their records, so they can listen at their own leisure. Nowadays streaming is something people can enjoy at their own leisure so a lot of them don’t buy records anymore - the balance has tipped in that an album must really be worth it to be bought.
That being said, less and less people listen to radio and less are willing to actually buy records. On the other side, you have more and more artists and everyone thinks they deserve to get rich out of it. One should stop and think if they actually deserve that. Some do, obviously, but the majority are just unimaginative me-toos.
I for one still buy physical media, but only after I’ve heard it streaming and I deem it worthy. Can’t buy every damned album that comes out.
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