The Internet Enables: Music

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Hi again, everybody! After a decent break, a soul-blood pact has brought me back here, and this time I'm bringing some Bandcamp with me. It holds a special place in my heart for a wide variety of reasons, and I wanted to talk about not only why I enjoy it on a personal level, but also about why it's an interesting property of the Internet. No lists this time around, though; you'll have to read through (and also click the links!) to get what's up.

Before I can get into the nitty gritty, you need to know what it is first. Bandcamp is a musical distribution hub that pretends it's a website. Pop open this link right now. There's a white square with a black triangle, which is also a play button, and you should press it. When you do, music by Cloudkicker will begin streaming to your computer from somewhere out on the Internet, and it'll exit your speakers. The particular sound you're listening to right now is the seventh song in the album, "Push It Way Up!".

While that's playing (hope you enjoy prog metal/rock!), here's what makes this amazing: Cloudkicker is a one-man band that has no label, no production studio, and no advertising budget. It's actually just the name some guy (Ben Sharp, from Colombus OH if you must know) picked out to represent the music he'd be sharing with folks. From start to finish, he authored, recorded, mixed, and produced it all himself using a combination of drum-authoring software and guitars. After he had the tracks put together (and the album art, and so on and so forth), he signed up for an account on Bandcamp, configured the album's landing page to his liking, and loosed it upon the world.

Essentially, this is the first portion of why I like Bandcamp: you don't need to be signed to a label or independently wealthy to spread your music. You don't even need fancy, expensive software or instruments or even a super-powerful computer (although those help!). Right now, at this very moment, you could do the very same thing. All you'd have to do is go grab a copy of Audacity for whatever OS you're using to read this, create some samples from Youtube clips, loop them into a nice 4/4 beat, and throw it up on Bandcamp.

The point goes much further than this, though. Traditionally, to make an actual living off of your music, you used to need to know a guy who knows some dude who has a studio-like environment for mastering (or god forbid purchase the hardware yourself), and then produce cassettes or vinyls or CDs, and then figure out how to get people to pay money for them. This, as one might imagine, was outrageously expensive. Labels originally existed to essentially find a high-potential (read: guaranteed money-making) band, front them money to get an album or four made, and then profit from the investment.

The problem with labels in general is that they want to make money. A fair amount of it. All the time, from everything. They're a business, so that's what they're supposed to do! Unfortunately, making money means minimizing your risks and maximizing your profit, so new bands should have a sound that is known to widely appeal to audiences already, or makes only a few changes to known formulas. Bands that are already well-known are expected to continually produce music that is easily recognized as matching their previous style, even though there are exceptions (and rebels like Mastodon). Additionally, since getting a band's name out further than the street corners and venues of your home town is very expensive, labels are essentially who choose what music gets heard, and where, and how often across the country.

This assertion leads me right into point number two: the Internet goes pretty much everywhere. If you type the URL for Bandcamp, you get there (from most countries, anyways). If someone in the United Kingdom makes a ton of pony-themed mixes, I can listen to them without a plane trip. Talent from all over the globe now has a matching platform upon which they can share whatever madness or beauty they can create. This is actually quite similar to OCRemix, but it's original or themed music instead of video-game music. There's another, more critical difference, though, and it's a doozy.

The final point I'd like to make is actually the biggest one: Artists set the price for each track and for whole albums, and Bandcamp helps them collect. If Bandcamp operators were to hear an album and say to themselves, "this is the second coming of music, and we could be billionaires overnight if we charged oodles for it," but the artist just wants folks to have it, then the most that album is going to cost people is a dollar. Full album downloads can even be free, provided a couple of cases are met (artist pays at most $0.03 per free album, or the album is selling at a good rate... it's complicated but in an awesome way). In fact, all the albums that I've linked in this article are, at the time of writing, available for $0. Big 'ol nothing. Free as in beer. That dime you found on the sidewalk? Keep it, because you won't need to spend any portion of it on these!

Of course, if you like what you hear, you should definitely pay money. Brace yourself for the warm-and-fuzzies, though; Bandcamp is very different from essentially every other music provider today, online or otherwise. When you decide to pay for an album, the biggest cut Bandcamp will take is 15%. Mind you, they have to use payment collection services like any other internet-based store, which nibbles out another 4-6%, but in essence if you fork over $10 (which is less than you'll pay for ANY good album at a brick-and-mortar store!) at least $7.50 is going to the artist. If this does not blow your mind, here's a kick-ass chart you need to see.

That money's not going to advertising, or fancy parties for the recording studio, or shareholders, or distribution rights, or airtime, or any of that nonsense. It's going right to the people who made the music. Not only are you making sure that artists you like are more likely to make more music, you're also rewarding someone for their talent and hard effort. Even more: if you've never sold something you've made with your own two hands, it's the best feeling in the world to know that someone else will pay for something you made.

Okay, if you've made it this far, here's the take-away: click here, find something you really like, and give the person who just made your day better in FLAC/MP3/WAV/OGG/whatever format a thank-you.

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Since this is a blog or something, here's a bunch of stuff I like:
Cloudkicker (prog metal/rock)
Dan Dankmeyer (super-progressive metal)
Gradient Audio (dubstep, wub-wub!)
Jackle App (bit of everything electronic)

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