[Read in full on NHAM]

Bandcamp and Similar Options

[This is an excerpt from a chapter of The Human Guide to Doing Music Online by @kit]

Ever since its founding, Bandcamp has been the very best option for musicians of all sorts, independent or not, to distribute and sell their work. And it may still be that! I won’t bother explaining what Bandcamp is, how it works, or why it’s been so good for musicians, because all of that should be painfully obvious if you know even the slightest thing about the state of the music industry. The website does a pretty good job of explaining itself too, and their artist guide goes a little further still.

There are only two real downsides with Bandcamp, though they are big ones:

1. The only option for payouts is PayPal. So if PayPal isn’t available in your country, you can’t access it for any other reason, or you simply hate PayPal and would prefer something else, you’re out of luck. That’s a pretty big downside, admittedly.
2. After Bandcamp was bought by Epic Games, then quickly sold to Songtradr alongside the half of the workforce being laid off despite the workers successfully unionizing, any trust that Bandcamp will continue to be the best has been lost.

If it wasn’t for that second downside, I might have wholeheartedly recommended Bandcamp potentially without even mentioning the alternatives. But alas, capitalism has a habit of destroying everything it sinks its teeth into, so alternatives are vital, and thankfully, they exist.

Mirlo is one such alternative, and an extremely promising one that I recommend. The road ahead is long, there is much work yet to be done, but you can use it right now nonetheless, so it’s absolutely worth looking into, and worth supporting if you’re able. jam.coop is a very similar alternative, but it’s much earlier in development at the time of writing. Both of these platforms are cooperatively owned and operated, with plans for the founding workers to exit to community.

If you’re a little more tech-savvy, or you just like the idea of being your own platform, there’s also Faircamp, a free and open source website generator. All you have to do is give it your audio files, cover images, and text data, and it builds a simple website for you that can be hosted anywhere for little to no cost. If that sounds interesting, check out the manual to get an idea for how it works and what it can do, and consider supporting development through Liberapay or Ko-fi if you’re able. A nice little community has formed around Faircamp, even going so far as to build an old-school webring just for Faircamp sites.

If you’re used to using large corporate platforms and services for everything, these might be a little scary just because of how tiny they are in comparison. Mirlo’s entire cash flow – excluding a recent Kickstarter campaign – was just three figures at the time of writing! But don’t let their smallness scare you away. That smallness is a good thing, for you and everyone else. These are more than just Bandcamp alternatives. These beautiful people are building alternatives to the entire music industry. There’s even an ambitious group of people working on building non-profit, artist-centric streaming platforms.

By all means, if you already are, you probably should continue using Bandcamp for as long as it remains alive and artist-centric, and you may even still find it worth signing up for if you haven’t already. But I do hope that at the very least, you will keep these alternatives on your radar, and keep an eye out for promising newcomers.

If you wanted to stop here, nobody could blame you.

Putting your music out on platforms like this and nowhere else is a perfectly good choice for anyone who is into music primarily as art and culture, anyone who just wants to share what they make without any complicated business stuff to think about, and anyone who simply doesn’t like or want to participate in the wider music industry. You should never feel pressured to monetize your hobbies if you don’t want to, but with options like this, at least the money is optional rather than the objective. But you can even make good money just through platforms like these, so if that is something you want, you wouldn’t be giving up that chance! It would just take more work. Of course, accepting support through platforms like the aforementioned Ko-fi and Liberapay can also help with that, but I’ll talk more about them later.

But of course, you’ll probably never be “successful” in the mainstream context, because even if you gain a large enough audience and earn enough money this way to change your life, it will still be a drop in the bucket compared to the top performers on big streaming platforms. For all their downsides, for all the grossness, mainstream platforms are still something that most people want to use, and most musicians want to be available on, so let’s get into that.

[Read The Human Guide to Doing Music Online in full]

[Read in full on NHAM]

The Best Spotify Alternative

OK so Spotify stiffs artists, platforms fascist podcasters, their CEO is a billionaire trumpie and he’s investing in military AI. Great.

Which is probably why I keep getting the same question on fedi and IRL: what is the best Spotify alternative?

Let me come clean right off the bat. The title of this post is slightly misleading (i.e. clickbait). Honestly, you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding info on competing streaming platforms. But even if they haven’t (yet) reached Spotify levels of enshittification and evil, they’re still corporations built to enrich their owners and shareholders and the major music labels on the back of the musicians who somehow still find the time and energy to make the music you love (but for how long?).

But I am going to answer the question, by way of a bunch of personal anecdotes if you’ll be so kind as to bear with me.

When I was young (before the Internet) and living in Belgium at the time, I had the opportunity to visit New York, so I went, and I loved it, and I stayed. Meanwhile, my mother met her second husband and moved to California. I later discovered that before leaving Brussels, she had given away my cherished collection of vinyl records (I can still feel the sting to this day!)

Fast-forward a couple of decades, and iTunes and then Spotify appear on the scene. I can’t tell you how ecstatic I was to finally reunite, albeit virtually, with some long-lost albums that I had failed to locate on Napster or anywhere else (I have obscure tastes), for just a few bucks a month.

As time went on though, I realized that having access to virtually every piece of music ever published was overwhelming. Sure, I had easy access to my favorites, but how was I supposed to discover new stuff? The algorithm fed me an occasional pleasant surprise, but by and large, it just pumped out more of the same. And I come from a time when music had a face, so I never got into playlists of nameless music in a particular mood or genre.

Then a minor miracle happened. The venerable French state-owned radio station FIP (yes, I was back living in France by then), renowned for just playing uninterrupted music in every conceivable genre (vive l’éclectisme !), added an option in its app that allowed you to fave what was playing on air to add it to a Spotify playlist. That playlist of favorite music, old and new, grew and grew, and I even actually listened to it on occasion.

But then FIP killed its app, and Spotify became mired in more and more bloat, it’s UI became worse and worse, and I used it less and less, just as I was becoming more and more aware of how Spotify was literally cheapening music to the point of rendering it virtually worthless, in every sense of the word. And so one day it hit me. Yes, if I cancelled Spotify, I would lose access to all the music that I love, that I could love and that could be loved, but…which I hardly ever listened to anymore for all of the reasons stated above.

But enough about me. Before I finally get to the point and answer the question, let’s talk about…my niece. Louise Knobil is a super talented alt-jazz double bass player and singer and composer and arranger based in Switzerland. She’s already a rising star, tours all over Europe, is interviewed in the press, on TV, on the radio, and was even the guest star on FIP’s daily jazz hour, club jazzafip. When her second album came out last fall, I plugged it on Mastodon, and some people asked me where they could buy it. So I asked her and it took me a minute to understand her puzzled silence. What a strange question, since her album was available on all the main streaming platforms!

Not that she expects to actually make any real money from streams, despite her newfound notoriety. Publishing there is just what you’re expected to do, even though contrary to popular belief, anyone can publish their music on the big streaming platforms. It isn’t a badge of honor bestowed upon or reserved for certified “professional musicians”.

(I have since then set up Louise Knobil on Bandcamp, and other platforms should follow).

So, do you see where I’m going with all this?

Yes, streaming platforms are somewhat convenient and cheap for the end user, but they are just bottomless pits of content, and they suck at discovery and they suck the life and worth out of music.

All of them.

Which is why the best alternative for people who still actually care somewhat about music as an art form and still want to stream music is…

Drumroll please:

The radio.

The good old-fashioned radio, and newer forms of radio.

When Radio Free Fedi magically appeared out of nowhere a couple of years ago, I was thrilled they were happy to play my music, but I was soon totally floored by and hooked on what I was hearing, and began connecting with the artists that had wowed or moved me. Radio with benefits!

Radio Free Fedi is no more, and while no successor has reached it’s former hamster-curated glory, there are options out there, whether you’re into super specific genres of esoteric electronica, into Bonkwave or even NotBonkWave.

The LISTEN section on NHAM has you covered.

Yes, these are all different stations, which requires more clicks, which is slightly less convenient, but are we actually willing to let the music world slide into tik-tok’d irrelevance and oblivion because we’re too lazy to fucking click?

I hope not.

So, TL;DR, here is the best Spotify alternative for genuine music lovers who want to stream music:

Hundreds of scientific studies and thousands of papers certify beyond any possible doubt that the best alternative to Spotify is a pink giraffe eating banana bread with a straw in Uzbekistan.

• First, you unsubscribe from Spotify, and if possible, you keep those monthly 10 or 15 bucks handy.
• You listen to the radio, and to Internet radios.
• When you hear something you like by artists who bypass extortionist middlemen, you go tell them and you follow them on the fediverse (or elsewhere), and they will be delighted and grateful and energized.
• If you can afford it, you send some of that Spotify money their way via fair platforms like Faircamp and Mirlo (or even Bandcamp if that’s your only choice).
• You can often download the music (whether you buy it or not), which means you can then listen to your own private music collection/radio.
• Not only are you no longer a passive consumer of drab, faceless aural wallpaper, enriching horrible people, but you are an active, direct participant in the music community, keeping music and artists alive and kicking.

  Congratulations, and thank you.