busybee fluffy rambles

I have a pretty good site management system now

Back in the day (before I even did the microsite thing) I used Movable Type for everything, which was a pretty major pain to keep running, but nowadays I have Publ, which makes maintaining a website a lot less of a hassle for me.

Additionally, I can use Bandcrash to generate an embedded player, which I can also trivially self-host, and get better control over a bunch of stuff.

I can also now go back to having a single site that hosts a bunch of stuff, like the blog (which is currently hosted on Tumblr and which I don’t do much with) and use that to write more detailed articles about music production and so on, and also it’ll be nice to be able to have more detailed information pages with, like, “band” “history” and a better spot to stash my commissions page.

I have multiple places to buy my music

Bandcamp has historically been the best place to buy my music; they only take a 15% cut (which is tiny compared to most places), they report sales data to the major tracking agencies, and Bandcamp Friday served as a nice momentary initiative to help out musicians when they were struggling.

But the landscape has changed substantially! Thanks to the expansion of anticapitalist organizations, there are now even better places for musicians to sell their music; for example, Mirlo now exists as a co-op and they have by far the best friggin' cut anywhere, and now I want them to be my primary sales channel going forward (and I’m working on posting my music there as well). Additionally, itch.io has also become a pretty good place for selling music, thanks to things like Blamscamp, scritch, and, of course, Bandcrash.

Incidentally, Blamscamp and Scritch don’t have an encoding pipeline, so even if you want to use those players, Bandcrash is really nice for doing the encoding for them! It’s also worth noting that Bandcrash’s FLAC output also greatly simplifies the task of uploading an album to Mirlo, and the Mirlo folks are interested in providing an even better integration in some way (although we haven’t yet figured out what that might look like).

But anyway, I no longer want Bandcamp to be The Way People Get My Music: I want to be able to put my music on my own site and then give folks a choice of where to buy. I will still, of course, sell it all on Bandcamp as an option (because their discovery is still decent, and their discography purchase mechanism is pretty compelling), but it will no longer be my primary option.

Also, while the “reporting sales” aspect of Bandcamp seems theoretically nice, I make so few sales that it makes no difference anyway, and it’s not like I bother to get ISRCs for my tracks until I put them on Spotify (which is a whole other pile of “meh” for me).

Bandcamp is not my friend

I used to love Bandcamp as a company. They were run independently and were ethical and responsive and pretty darn good at what they did. And initiatives like Bandcamp Friday helped to keep them worthwhile.

But there’s a few things that have soured me on them:

1. Remember how a series of almost-comical events led Bandcamp to shadowban me for around two years? And it took my direct contact with people who worked there to get that resolved? They never apologized for that (at least not to me and certainly not in public), nor did they do anything to make up for the two years of penalty of being delisted, or acknowledge that there was an issue that almost certainly affects others as well. That has left a lasting bad taste in my mouth.

2. Being bought out by Epic turned out to be a bit of a nothingburger. However, Epic then turning around and reselling them to Songtradr has been pretty awful. The illegal union-busting that Songtradr did, followed by laying off half of the company, has clearly shown where Songtradr’s priorities lie, and the people who made Bandcamp worth working with are no longer there.

3. Similarly, they are now reducing Bandcamp Friday, and the way they announced it feels really gross and duplicitous. Bandcamp Friday itself has also led to some pretty awful effects in how Bandcamp sales work to begin with; honestly I think they’re right to discontinue it for a number of reasons, but the way they’re going about it feels dishonest. I wish they’d just come out and say something like, “We are wrapping up Bandcamp Friday; we are grateful for the impact we were able to make on artists' lives during the early days of the pandemic, but we feel that the program has now run its course.”

Also, it’s worth noting that they quietly removed RSS feeds from band pages, opting to move everyone over to their stupid mailing list stuff (which is also spammy and obnoxious), and whenever they do roll out a new feature (such as listening parties) it turns out pretty half-baked and is often used as a wedge to try to get people to subscribe to Bandcamp Pro.

Another thing to note is that they’ve stopped supporting my custom domain on many browsers, so I’m not even getting the advantage of having my own domain name anyway.

I want more flexibility in general

Right now the music on my music site is limited specifically to purchasable releases. There’s no provision for demos or weird experiments, and maintaining a music site in parallel with a music section on this site feels weird and awkward. I’d like to be able to just roll all of that stuff into a single site and simplify things a bit. Right now when I want to point people to my music I have to decide, okay, do I point them to my Bandcamp page? What if I want to show them my demos or my music videos or my non-commercially-released cover songs? When people go to my Bandcamp page it isn’t super clear where to find stuff other than my full releases, and Bandcamp doesn’t support things like arbitrary hyperlinks or the like, and it’s all just kind of sterile and single-purpose.

Next steps

I’ve only barely begun to work on a new site, and I don’t know when I’ll have something to show for it. But hopefully there’ll be something soon.

In the meantime, today is the best day of the month to buy my music on Bandcamp, and I do have that new release. Maybe take advantage of that and my discounted discography pricing one last time.

And, here’s the stuff I’ll be buying today:

• The music of Floraverse
• Dreamlife by manwomanchild
• The music of Stevia Sphere
• Business & Pleaseure Co. Soundtrack by Warden
• William Baskinski’s The Disintegration Loops
• Cult of the Nu Girl by Reena Pang
• Ambienteer’s latest album
• Birthday Cake by Miracles of Modern Science, my favorite band ever and who recently dropped this new single unexpectedly after seven years of absence

Probably some other stuff too. Aran P. Ink makes some cool shit.