March / Early April Selections

In March I didn't quite spend my $10 target, partly because I knew there were a few albums coming out in April that I was likely to enjoy. So, now that those albums are out and I have hit my $10 threshold, here is what was added to the collection:

I was turned onto this by a March edition of Bandcamp Weekly, that focused largely on Brazilian jazz/soul. This pop tune out of Brazil incorporates some off the bossa nova/jazz feel.

Went back to pick up another of my favorite tracks from 2017. Piano-driven dream pop with a dance beat? Heck yeah.

I must admit I don't know a lot about Amen Dunes, but his newest record is an emotive affair on the somber side. The tracks all have an energy and urgency that is pretty compelling. This track in particular reminded me a bit of Cass McCombs and even a bit of good ol' David Gray.

I had pretty high hopes for the new Frankie Cosmos record and ultimately was a little let down, really enjoyed this track though!

Another find from an episode of Bandcamp Weekly. I hadn't realized Numero Group had so much available on Bandcamp. This release in particular is part of their "Eccentric Soul" series, bring lesser-known soul songs back to life. This one is a great groove.

First of a few tracks I picked up in early April. I really love Unknown Mortal Orchestra because of and despite how all over the place their albums are. I tend to most enjoy them though at their most straight-ahead dance grooves, and this track is not exception. I also picked up "Major League Chemicals" of the same album, though they aren't previewing it on Bandcamp.

Another April release, this album is really solid overall but I opted to just get my favorite 2 songs off it. I had never really listened to Wye Oak much before but they certainly have my ear now and I'll be checking out their back catalog.

If you've made it this far and are still listening, you deserve a medal! Or, a minimalist, glitchy electronic release out of Australia that I stumbled upon browsing through Bandcamp. 2 tracks that were name your price and I picked up for $1 ($1.30 AUD!)

Art of the Playlist

During last month when I focused on buying digital singles, a preconception I had about Bandcamp was really re-enforced-- they are a pretty terrible platform for playlists.

In Bandcamp’s “Collection,” the page view where you view all the music you’ve purchased, singles are put on equal hierarchy with albums. A single is handled as if you bought an album, but just have 1 track (or however many individual tracks you purchase) available.

This works great for listening for a whole album front-to-back, like Across The Multiverse. If I put on the Sondre Lerche single though, I’ll have to go back into the app/desktop after the 3 minute song is done playing to select something else. There’s no playlist nor queue functionality.

Spotify on the other hand, almost feels like it was built for making playlists. Creating and editing playlists is simply done from both desktop and app. I really enjoy the multiple privacy settings-- you’re able to have a private playlist, a public one, or even a collaborative one where your friends are able add music.

Playlist culture has led to a huge shift in music consumption. By having thousands of users subscribing, the owners and curators of some of the larger and popular playlists essentially have become tastemakers, delivering recommended tracks and blowing up otherwise lesser known artists.

Dealing with Bandcamp’s lack of playlist functionality became specifically challenging for me at a recent party at our house. Usually I would go to my current Spotify playlist of favorite songs of the moment and hit shuffle. Now that I have given up my premium subscription, if I do this I’ll have a bunch of ads intermittently throughout the night, interrupting the vibe and lead to a lot of people saying "uhhh... why don't you have Spotify premium?" Using Bandcamp I can still play individual albums, which can be fun (and I’ve also played LPs on my record player sometimes), but more often than not I want to have a playlist of several varying artists. Bandcamp as of now is not the platform for this.

The best workaround I’ve found for this, is downloading (*gasp*) the mp3s to my desktop and using iTunes, or to my phone and using Google Play. I assume iPhone users can do something similar with iTunes for iOS. This way you’re free to use play queues or make playlists to your heart’s content. Still, it is a somewhat inconvenient extra step and takes up space either on your phone memory or on you cloud storage.

I am sure Bandcamp has some reason they are not widely rolling out playlist/play queue capability and maybe someday we’ll find out. Bandcamp Weekly is a cool discovery feature which operates somewhere between a podcast, radio show, and playlist. If they can roll out this functionality to the wider user base, it would certainly be a game-changer.

Until then, I think Spotify will remain king of playlists.

February Selections - Pt 2

I am a bit overdue sharing the music I added to my collection in February, so here's what rounded out the month:

Awesome pop tune out of Nova Scotia, somehow manages to be lazy and tight at the same time. I get some Pavement vibes and Cass McCombs at his jangly-est. My only reservation was should I just buy the whole album instead? It so happens that it just came out Friday (March 9) and it's certainly worth an entire play.

A standout for sure on this great record. Super slick, wearing MJ on his sleeve and I’m not minding one bit. Throw in a little spaciness on top of the soul and consider me a new fan.

This British-based pop collective put out a pretty cool record that toed the line between sample-laden hip hop like The Avalanches and hazy dream pop. They lean into the latter on this closing track, though still driven by a typical hip hop drum beat. The groove is so catchy I can even forgive the phone alarm sample at the end of the song.

I played a show with this guy a few years back and was impressed by his ability to play the guitar and drums (at the same time) in his live show. I am now equally impressed by his solid songwriting throughout this album. The songs shift pretty seamlessly as the lead alternates between electric and acoustic, with a sound leaning pretty heavily onto 90’s alt rock. I’m all over the guitar tones. He also uses a nice 2-octave doubled vocal which serves to cement some of the Built to Spill vibes of many of the songs.  The whole album was name your price and I paid $2 which is admittedly probably short-changing him a little, but trying to stick to my $10/month. It’s given me the thought to do a future piece on “Name Your Price” ethics.

Show Me the Money!

I am admittedly a little bit of a datahead. So a big part of wanting to make this blog was to have an excuse to take a nice deep dive into the payment data and see what the numbers had to say about streaming payouts.

Let’s start with Spotify. I had read articles mentioning a rate of $0.006 to $0.008 per stream, but these were from 2015. I was able to find some more current analysis from mid-2017 that concluded the average payout had since dropped to $0.0038.

But second-hand accounts aren’t good enough for me! I pulled my own bands’ data from ~3 years of streams. My two bands together had a little over 3,500 plays averaging about 0.39 cents per stream ($0.0039). Alright second-hand accounts, you done pretty good.

Bandcamp is primarily a sales platform and not a streaming service, so it’s not a perfect comparison. We can at least see the general way they pay artists, though. Looking at their (very transparent) fee structure, they take 15% as a platform and also tack on transaction and processing fees, roughly 2.2% + $0.20. For transactions under $8 it’s 5% + $0.05. Again, looking at my bands’ sales data, this averaged out to roughly a 77% cut, upwards of 82% if your main sale items are $8+ album downloads.

Let’s try to find a way to compare these, and look at a hypothetical 12-track album.

If you were to buy this album on Bandcamp for $10, Bandcamp takes their cut (~$1.80) and leave the artist with a net payment of approximately $8.20. If you instead stream this album on Spotify, the artist makes 4.6 cents. But clearly, you’re going to listen to that album a lot more than once-- let’s level the playing field and toss it all into some charts:

These look pretty similar, right? The first graph is showing the majority takeaway for the artist, compared to Bandcamp’s cut. The second scenario with Spotify though, is actually almost the inverse. I even factored in an assumption that the user would listen to that album every single day for a month, which would yield $1.45 to that artist and the other $8.54 to Spotify (and presumably, to other artists you’ve listened to in that month).

To actually get to the point where streaming this album on Spotify would equate to the same income from a one-time album sale on Bandcamp ($8.20), you would need to listen to the album every single day for six months.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t get that obsessive.

In a more general scope, to pay out $9.99 worth of streams to artists in a month, you need to stream at least 85 songs every day. Even if you want to allow Spotify a similar platform fee to Bandcamp, to yield $8.20 in a month you still need 70 song streams every day. Certainly, this is not impossible, but I would venture it is a tough metric to meet for the average listener.

To distill it all down into a sound bite conclusion, every dollar you spend purchasing music downloads (and let’s even use the low end assumption of $0.77 yield to the artist) is equal to 197 song streams.

To me, this seems pretty cut and dry. If there is music out there that you really like, buy it. Even if you’re going to stream it, “like, totally all the time,” chances are on average you will not really do it enough times to make a net positive monetary impact for the artist.

Of course, there are other considerations to the benefits of streaming and detractions of download purchasing that I’ll continue to explore as the year goes along-- stay tuned!