8Sided Blog

a zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

Bandcamp’s Roots in Fandom

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Bandcamp’s Ethan Diamond doesn’t do a lot of podcast interviews. So his conversation with Andrew Dubber on the MTF Podcast is a good find. Recorded sometime last April, the Bandcamp CEO gives personal insight into the platform and its philosophy. He also talks about the introduction of Bandcamp Fridays to help artists struggling without tour income. The interview happened after the first one took place. 

Bandcamp

And it’s fun to hear of Diamond’s music fandom, including a story about ordering an obscure vinyl LP from a Norwegian band called Koppen — “one of my favorite records.” The creation story of Bandcamp comes out of fandom, too. Diamond was inspired when he bought a digital download directly from the site of a band he liked. The profound technical issues he experienced — this was the web of the mid-00s — put him on a mission to serve the music community by making something better. In other words, Bandcamp is a platform sparked by fandom and in service to musicians. Compare that with whatever inspired Daniel Ek’s recent remarks about Spotify’s artist community — he seems to feel artists should serve him.

But there’s no animosity or sense of competition. Diamond explains that Bandcamp can coexist with Spotify. He rightly believes the two platforms each appeal to different tiers of listeners:

The way I think about it is when I was growing up — so listening to music in the late ’70s and the early ’80s — there were lots of people who exclusively interacted with music through the radio. And then there were the people who bought tapes and bought vinyl records. Not everybody needed to do that. There were a lot of people who were totally happy listening to stuff on the radio. They like music so they turn on the radio. They have this channel that’s kind of the style of music they like. I feel like that’s exactly what’s happening now. The streaming services are a lot like radio. And playlists are a lot like radio. And then there’s this different kind of person who wants to go deep and interact with the artist and own the music. That’s a subset and I’m happy to cater to that subset.

This is spot on. We forget that, in the pre-digital era, the vast majority of people didn’t buy music. The radio or background listening in stores or on TV was sufficient.

Spotify — or any mass audience streaming service — has the goal of monetizing casual listeners’ listening habits. That’s great — there are many paying $9.99 per year who would never buy music otherwise — and the more prominent labels are certainly profiting. But the danger is in pushing listeners who qualify as ‘fans’ to passive listening habits. Labels and artists need to do the opposite: motivate listeners away from radio (Spotify) and into fandom (Bandcamp and their own websites).

Surviving Spotify’s Future Landscape

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There’s a lot of chatter about Daniel Ek’s recent interview with Musically’s Stuart Dredge. There are more than a few nuggets to dissect, but this one is getting the most attention:

“There is a narrative fallacy here, combined with the fact that, obviously, some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape, where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough,” said Ek. […] “I feel, really, that the ones that aren’t doing well in streaming are predominantly people who want to release music the way it used to be released …”

As Liz Pelly has explored on The Baffler, Spotify seems intent on influencing artists to tailor their music to benefit the platform. Yes, some point out that in past decades artists used to release 1 or 2 albums every year, so what Ek proposes is nothing new. But the difference is that artists now almost solely rely on touring for income. It’s impossible for most acts to frequently take months off to record a succession of albums without dire financial risk. No doubt you’ve heard the common refrain that bands used to tour to promote album releases, and now it’s the other way around. 

PRS’s Tom Gray illustrates this using The Beatles as an example. The Beatles stopped touring to concentrate on their studio work and, to Ek’s satisfaction, released a lot more than an album every few years. It’s doubtful a 2020 Beatles could do the same. Without touring income, they would be in the hole. Here’s Tom’s take (click here to read the full thread):

Tom’s numbers get a little fudgey — studio costs and such don’t need to be that high these days — but the point stands. The Spotify age is not kind to bands that camp out in studios. (The streaming model is even crueler to those who write songs but don’t perform, but that’s a whole other harrowing tale I’ll save for another time.)

Damon Krukowski challenges Ek’s statement by looking at current Spotify earnings from his former band, Galaxie 500. Krukowski points out that the band hasn’t released anything in over 20 years so, by Ek’s reasoning, they shouldn’t do well in ‘this future landscape.’ But they get more than one million streams a month. That’s pretty good, right? God knows I wish my catalog got half those monthly streams. 

You might think those numbers put Krukowski and Galaxie 500 in the musical middle class. Instead, those streams amount to about $1250 per band member a month. Here’s Damon (click here to read the full thread):

The concern isn’t what Ek refers to as the ‘top tier’ artists. Those are doing fine. The top artists have always done fine. And, for a variety of factors, they can (for now) live off Spotify royalties and the other compounding advantages of fame and exposure. The problem is the disruption of music’s middle class. This sector relied financially for most of this century (so far) on touring. And with COVID-19 in the air, the absence of touring and the diminished value of recorded music creates a crisis. Music’s middle class was already disappearing — in 2021, it could be gone entirely.1Be sure to put a pin on the idea that this disappearing middle class is reflective of income disparity in our society at large.

That’s what this interview — and Bob Lefsetz’s defense of Spotify — glosses over. Of course, wildly successful artists, with tens or hundreds of millions of plays a month, make good money from streaming. And it’s disingenuous to imply that artists complain because they feel entitled to the same. I can confidently speak for most artists that we just want an opportunity to earn a living through our music. Opportunity is not entitlement. Even though an artist’s ‘middle class’ was always precarious, there’s very little chance now to make it work. 

The implication from Ek is — and he’s not that far off — in the eyes of Spotify, you’re either a superstar or an unknown. The insult is Ek saying that the latter position is mostly the artist’s fault because she’s a Luddite who’s not “putting the work in.”

(I’m reminded of this insightful quote from author Nancy Baym: “It’s amazing to me to see how so many careers, in music and beyond, have shifted such that it’s no longer enough to do the work. Now you have to do the work of making sure everyone is seeing that you’ve done the work.”) 

But I’m not placing all the blame on Ek, streaming, and the Napster guys who let this genie out of the bottle. All of that became inevitable as soon as the first ones-and-zeroes were digitally encoded on a compact disc. But as listeners and recording artists, we play a part by accepting the notion that Spotify is unavoidable and necessary. Yes, I believe that Spotify is not going anywhere. And I doubt they’ll change anything except notch their monthly price up a dollar or two in a few years. What it’s essential also to understand is we’re not obligated to play along. 

As concerned recording artists, we don’t necessarily need to remove our music from Spotify (though, if you do exit the platform, good on you). The key is to treat streaming as the entrance of a marketing funnel to lead potential fans to our sites and mailing lists. Let’s look at it as if it’s radio. Radio in the US egregiously doesn’t pay a royalty to performers, but performers still allow their music on the radio as it’s an entry for new listeners. But they never say, “You should only listen to my music on the radio.” 

Or as a more musically-inclined Tyler Durden might say: “The first rule of Spotify is you do not talk about Spotify.” Only post links to your site or a store like Bandcamp. Seriously — there is no reason to send your fans to Spotify. The distant hope that the company will return the favor by adding your song to one of their big playlists is a broken motivation.

As listeners, we have a responsibility, too. I frequently write about the seductive appeal of streaming — I know I can’t resist effortlessly accessing an album or band that I just learned about. But we should also support the artists we enjoy by directly purchasing their music, ordering their merchandise, and signing up for their mailing lists. It’s not that difficult, and these gestures mean a lot to the artists. And, like musical Tyler, we should spread the word by posting to our favorite artists’ websites and Bandcamp pages, not Spotify players. 

We’ll all benefit the sooner we start thinking of Spotify as an occasional sampling tool instead of a go-to listening necessity. Let’s happily hand the platform over to the ‘top tier’ with their frequent releases and domination of playlists. It’s evident from the interview that’s who Ek has in mind for his company, anyway (besides Joe Rogan, of course). 

Cool Record Collection, Dad!

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Rolling Stone:

It may sound bizarre, but today parents and their teenage children actually attempt to hang out and listen to music together. This was not always the case. “Larry, the president of the company, likes to say how his mother thought that his rock and roll was not even music,” [Edison Research’s Megan] Lazovick says. “They could not relate at all about music. It seems generationally a lot different today. There seems to be a lot more connection over music with parents and their teenagers.” […] Edison Research found that 76 percent of parents and 60 percent of teens agree with the statement “listening to music is a bonding activity for you and your teenagers.”

I can’t even imagine. I remember my parents mildly flipping out when they found a copy of the Dead Kennedys’ Plastic Surgery Disasters in my bedroom — one of many times that I was questioned on the music I was listening to. These days it must be a lot more difficult to rebel when your parents grew up listening to Beastie Boys and Marilyn Manson (or maybe even GG Allin!). I think that’s one reason gaming videos are so popular — it’s a phenomenon that today’s parents can’t wrap their heads around.

Some more from the article:

When the two demographic groups can mingle without embarrassing and infuriating each other, osmosis occurs, and parents start to stream more often. 68 percent of the 1,909 parents surveyed agree with the statement “your teenagers assist you with new technology,” while 52 percent say they learned about a streaming service from a child.

Intuitively to me, both of those percentages seem quite low. But we can expect the way we — and the older population — listen to music to continue transforming, both as tastes simultaneously broaden and merge, and convenient (and democratized) technological solutions overtake a restricted, ad-supported FM bandwidth.

🔗→ Teenagers Are Teaching Their Parents to Stream, and Radio Is Nervous

Dark Days for College Radio

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Pitchfork:

One of the remaining bastions of the college-rock era has fallen silent, at least for now. For the second week in a row, CMJ has not published its weekly college radio charts, calling into question the fate of an institution that has tracked the music played by college stations around the country since 1978. No date has been set for when the venerable—and, once, invaluable—charts will resume.



The chart hiatus is just the latest in a series of setbacks for CMJ. The last-known remaining employee, Lisa Hresko, recently took a new job with indie-label trade group A2IM. And last year’s lack of a CMJ Music Marathon, for the first time in the event’s 35-year history, came despite {CMJ owner Adam} Klein’s assurance it “absolutely” would happen in 2016.



Also from Pitchfork:

The rise of CMJ coincided with the heyday of college radio during the late 1980s and early ’90s. Though initially used as an education tool for broadcasting lectures, by the end of the ’80s college radio had become an indispensable musical tastemaker, with trade magazines and multiple nationwide charts tracking the growing popularity of the market. Bands including U2, R.E.M., the Cure, the Smiths, Dinosaur Jr., Hüsker Dü, Minutemen, the Replacements, and more were first broadcast by enterprising students with open ears.



The influence and relevance of college radio has undoubtedly diminished since the ’90s, challenged by new outlets for musical discovery and listening that began with the rise of blogging, file sharing, and widespread broadband access around the turn of the century. The entire economy of critical and economic success for musicians has changed so rapidly in the last 25 years that exposure on college radio can seem quaint in 2017.



Starting around 2010, a growing number of colleges began transferring their FM broadcast licenses to larger conglomerates for a short-term economic windfall. While each case is informed by different circumstances and buyers, they are united by the administrative opinion that students don’t really care that much about radio anymore (and that fast cash can be made).



When licenses are sold, the process can be messy, divisive, and upsetting. Such sales can also have further consequences, cutting off exposure for nearby businesses and artistic communities. That said, administrators are not necessarily wrong in doubting terrestrial radio’s continuing relevance. College radio has always occupied a very tiny space, and most stations are so small they don’t even show up on the ratings system that measures listenership. And last year, a nationwide survey on media consumption found that only 9 percent of people in the 12-24 age bracket use AM/FM radio as their source for keeping up with music; the same demographic was more likely to use YouTube (22 percent) or streaming platforms like Pandora, Spotify, and SiriusXM (11 percent in total across the services) to find their favorite new artists.



College radio may be the only hold-over from the music industry’s fading recent past that gets me wistful and nostalgic. My time as a college radio DJ and music director is incalculably responsible for what I’m doing today. Even before that, discovering new sounds on static-filled college radio signals beaming in from faraway cities changed my young life … I grew up in the middle of nowhere and actively sought out these distant stations, often only picking them up in the middle of the night. Here in Orlando we’re lucky to still have a freeform college station, WPRK 91.5 FM – one of the oldest college stations in the USA. I really should tune in more often.

But I’m also heartened by the democratization of broadcasting, whether it’s from podcasts on Mixcloud, or shows on internet radio stations, or even meticulously crafted playlists bursting with esoterica. I know, it’s not the same, but all is not lost either. To pull another quote from the second article, “if anything, the platform’s loose mission of promoting discovery, serendipity, and community has persevered despite setbacks because the desire for those very things will continue …”. As long as there are freaks like me (and those I grew up listening to) who obsessively crave not only finding the latest sounds but also sharing them with others there will be something like college radio. Unfortunately (or not?), it just might not have anything to do with college.