A great article that really carves out the different approaches as to how we support music.
"Spotify and Bandcamp could not be more opposite. Where Spotify highlights playlists, most often of its own creation, Bandcamp sticks to the album (or any other format, as determined by the artist). Where Spotify pays royalties according to little-understood formulas that can only be analyzed by reverse calculation, Bandcamp lets artists and labels choose their own prices. Where Spotify requires working through a limited number of distributors to access their services, Bandcamp is open to anyone. Where Spotify has revenue streams dependent on ads and data, Bandcamp operates on a simple revenue share with artists and collects no information on its users.
Spotify is now worth an estimated $54 billion on the stock market, despite having never shown an annual profit. Bandcamp is privately owned, has been in the black since 2012, and continues to grow... slowly. You might be tempted to say that one is a 21st-century business, and the other belongs to an earlier age. But neither could exist at any other time."
A fun little trip down memory lane.
"'It definitely started as a digital platform,' says Diamond. 'In 2007, when we started the company, streaming didn't exist in the United States and our competition essentially was piracy. And the idea in 2007 primarily was that nobody was going to pay for music anymore. And it just seemed very obvious to me that if you like some music from one of your favorite artists, you should be able to support them directly. And so we built the platform to do that. My reference point for this was blogging services. In 2007, you had Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type, services that were essentially like white label services for writers – you could set up a site within minutes and tap this direct relationship with your readers. And it seemed crazy to me that if your artistic output happened to be music instead of words, you were just out of luck.'
'And the most promising thing that happened in the early days,' Diamond continues, 'was we immediately saw people start to actually buy music, which was very exciting. I wasn't sure that was going to happen! And then, one of the fun things that happened was we started to look at the search terms people were using that brought them to a Bandcamp artist's site that led to a purchase. And several times per hour, we were seeing search terms like the name of an album or name of a track plus the word 'torrent,' or plus the word 'Limewire' or 'Kazaa.' You know, this was somebody whose intent initially was just to get the music – I don't know if they were thinking 'I'm pirating the music' – but they were trying to get it for free. But when they saw that they could make a direct purchase to the artist, they wanted to do that. And that just warmed my heart. So that's really what we were trying to do from the beginning, was just make it clear that this was a way to show your direct support for an artist.'"
While I’m definitely on team Bandcamp, I’m also a subscriber to Apple Music. For me there’s room for both, as I use Apple Music to explore new music, and Bandcamp to support the artists I like.
(Via A Tale Of Two Ecosystems: On Bandcamp, Spotify And The Wide-Open Future : NPR.)