Bandcamp: Streaming's Secret Savior
If you’ve ever thought to yourself wow, Bandcamp has looked basically the same forever, you were entirely correct – now for a tenth of the century, at least – and you’ll be hard-pressed to find another Silicon Valley technology company toting a venture-funded origin story with such casual, yet robust long-standing user relationships underneath an unwavering, bullshit-free commitment to their product. Even under the most ludicrous scrutiny, the company’s rudder is flawless and its course true. What at first glance you’d swear to be an unsolicited conclusion to an obscure examination could very reasonably be described as cheesy, stubborn, dweebish, pious, or just generally boring, indeed, yet the respective accuracy of each of these adjectives are no more than the byproducts of the very same operational ethics which we’ve suggested, requested, demanded, and begged the rest of the world’s computing capitol to re-adopt, enforce, or at least ponder for a beat. The volume of the masses’ exponentially-increasing attendance of late is only overcome by its hysterical shouting match, so let us pipe down for a while, now so that we may be precise as we dig deeper into the methodology which has finally led to a profitable, drama-free outlying technology organization without the need for a single drop of analogous sweat over its brand upkeep. By arranging the company in its infancy to so precisely and elementally align with the needs of its customers, the original troupe of Bandcamp Bums ensured profound and lasting simplicity in the single overarching priority for those in every single role behind the quiet perpetuation of Bandcamp dot com: selling good music.
The platform indiscriminately provides both individual artists and labels with a clean, cozy, charming, smartly-designed and technically competent storefront with a wide-open storage allocation, optimal search engine optimization and a widely-trusted point of sale experience in exchange for 15% of any sales that should come in – significantly less than other channels; half what Apple Music will take. In examining Bandcamp’s history, its impact on independent music, and its viability as an alternative streaming service, we shall excavate the truth behind the derisive cynicism directed its way by the titans of the tech and music press. Over the course of this super link-laden journey, we’d consider the alarmingly hypocritical possibility that it’s been overlooked by mainstream conversations only because it has so long operated in the precise manner we claim is so hopelessly absent from its neighbors in its deliberate, principled, and innovative journey towards a transparent, progressive vision.
To catch our starting gun, we must first travel to Face The Music 2016 in Melbourne – as far as one can possibly get from The Valley – alongside Bandcamp’s super-worldly Chief Curator, Andrew Jervis to observe his interview for a live audience.
Bandcamp has always grown extremely organically. There’s never actually been any advertising that we’ve done; there’s never any advertising on the site, and there never will be. We haven’t really tooted our horn very hard.
In fact, just about everything from the shrewd idealism of those who beget its conception to the on-the-nose care in their person-to-person customer service is so adamantly inverse of the tech industry archetype which the global End User community at large are presently discovering at twice the speed of sound there should at least be some conspiratorializing going around. Where I come from, launching a desolate business to little mainstream success with persistence and dignified determination is (or should be) regarded as a telltale sign that one is running a front (according to the television, anyway,) but exploration of this plausibility yielded nothing in Bandcamp’s case, even after I took the risk of incrimination and begged a certain Boston-based future funk producer to accept my ginormous bribe and include any sort of pharmacological substance with his summer beat tape. He wouldn’t even send antihistamines.
As uncomfortably as it lands on the soul, no moniker describes Bandcamp more comprehensively than “an online record store.” As far as Ethans go, Bandcamp’s CEO and founders’ public attaché Ethan Diamond is as good as they come: it’s quite telling that he is the only Silicon Valley CEO who’s remained intellectually grounded enough with the rest of us in order to retain any skills in nuanced forms of verbal communication like… humor. The closest the company has ever come to promotion? His awkward, sub-20-minute presentation at the XOXO Festival 2014 offered an impressively succinct introduction to their greater mission considering the unmistakable agony in his body language.
“We worked out of the public library for the first four years of the company's existence,” he admits. Impressively, Bandcamp was operated entirely as a “virtual company” until 2015.
Either Bandcamp just happens to be the single Silicon Valley company where the executives are unanimously so fucking fulfilled by their work without exception that they aren’t compelled to leave it long enough to stumble upon the inevitable coastal colleague with a connection to something like The Internet History Podcast, or technology journalism has definitively lost all reverence for actual innovation in favor of the emotionally-charged Innovation Myth, now relinquished almost entirely to the narrative control of its own protagonists. Perhaps it was inevitable that Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos would become immortalized as “those who make things happen,” but our ability to quantify value as consumers tends to scurry rapidly away behind our backs when they’re turned by the constant distraction of these mostly inert figureheads. As their personalities have stolen the story, the people in industry with their hands on real product have all but completely disappeared from the frame, and all of the work remaining at the End User’s eye level was abandoned by aspiration long ago and replaced with the unfulfilling mechanism of A Quick Buck. Though now we are proceeding into a similar frame – only because our subject cares more about their mission than claiming recognition for it and might just be the first such company run by a cast who become sincerely defensive at the suggestion of a cash-out.
“Bandcamp’s philosophy has always been very different [from] a lot of the companies we’re surrounded by,” reflects Jervis. “We are not a ‘let’s-raise-money-and-burn-through-it’ type of company.”
I know that your mind has been trained by years of engagement with the digital media of a rapidly-globalizing, venture capital-obsessed society to block the passage of this sort of language across your conscious threshold at risk of life-threatening overexposure to the Medium Dialect and its churnalising neoliberal cyberchode scholars of the Personal Brand; I know you’ve read the exact same quote from how many entrepreneurs in how many worthless, masturbatory business magazine profiles, but I swear on my one-of-a-kind Estonian Hilary Duff pullout that Jervis speaks without irony or deception. how many fucking churnicles have abandoned you, but this time, it’s actually sincere.
Though Bandcamp was technically the first comprehensive library-modeled music streaming service in existence, the topical conversations between both technology and music journalists and industry executives flooding both podcast and news feeds at the moment orbiting the “Cord-Cutting” phenomena as it’s washed over television, cinema, and music are rooted in the same building blocks as the core technology behind the delivery of all of these conversations as well as their subjects, funny enough. As long as my subgeneration has known it, The Web has been a source of sound in some manifestation, but the example with the most perplexing history was also the first. Today, one of five tabs in the main menu of my iPhone’s native music app contains the text “Radio” beneath an “antenna with waves” graphic which opens a service once called iTunes Radio that was absorbed into – and restricted to subscribers of – Apple Music as of 2016, confusingly. However, both “iTunes Radio” and “Apple Music Radio(?)” – along with any and all audio streaming services (mentioned and not) – are fundamentally nothing more than different UX design interpretations of the “simple” practice of streaming an audio file, which made its debut at the turn of the century in the form of “Internet Radio.” Astonishingly, the protocol – still referred to by at least one person on Earth as “Webcasting,” no doubt – has survived nearly 20 years, and even the youngest of us have likely encountered it in unusual situations.
Ironically, the majority of Internet Radio broadcasts remaining on the air are nothing more than live duplicates of the traditional radio wave-bound products from the physical stations your car’s head unit receives. Even the current desktop version of iTunes maintains support for streaming “audio files over the internet,” though a glance at Apple’s dated support page for the process suggests it hasn’t crossed anybody’s mind for at least half of that history. In 1994, the publicly-funded radio network Voice of America became the “First [radio] on the Internet” when it began – after an introduction by Al Gore, no less – “offering digitized audio versions of selected newscasts and other program segments in 15 languages on its public internet server on Monday, Aug. 15,” according to former engineer Chris Kern. However – since we’re already this deep into internet history – a distinction must be established between streaming static files and streaming live audio. The first relies on pre-recorded audio files uploaded to a publicly-accessible server – in Kern’s original case, “via anonymous FTP and the Internet Gopher protocol,” which continues to be the elemental process behind every audio file streamed across the Web (including those on Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify, etc.) more or less because it ain’t broke.
Semantically, “live” digital audio streaming in its aforementioned “purest” form is more or less exclusive to Internet Radio. Obscured aside from the traditional station simulcast, Web-only Internet Radio stations have their own of “the Internet’s quiet success stories,” filled with quaint experiences and an endless cycle of death proclamations which continue to be disproven, anywise.
On June 27th, 1999, The Seattle Times ran an especially worthwhile introduction to the concept that likely represents the only major newspaper’s mention of SHOUTcast (the first and likely last name in DIY Web DJing) in the history of the printed word within a work of truly phenomenal tech reporting on Mark Mataassa’s part. From the past, one will find his chillingly spot-on foresight and well-considered observations are bestrewed with mind-boggling hilarity when they look.
Dialing in to the Net through a 56 kilobit-per-second modem, as I am, this seems like a ridiculous waste – or at least misallocation – of resources. I'm using a $3,000 machine, tying up a phone line and seriously compromising my computing power for an experience that in sound quality, simplicity and dependability can't compare, truthfully, with the $9 Emerson clock radio an arm's length away. And yet Web radio is one of the hottest ideas going in the ever-hot world of Internet startups and acquisitions: In the past few months, America Online and Yahoo! each have purchased fast-growing Web music sites, rock-music trendsetters like Rolling Stone and MTV have gotten into the business, and technological improvements – from Microsoft's newest browser and Real Networks' newest player to the latest MP3 enhancements – are closing the quality and accessibility gaps. The combination of developments is not only changing how computers (and radios) are used, but offering a glimpse of a future when audience demographics are sliced ultra-thin – to the person – and everybody has the potential to be a radio broadcaster as well as listener.
I only have a few experiences with Internet Radio of my own, but they’re all rampantly more memorable than one would expect. The now in-stasis NWIRE project was by the most relevantly intriguing and savvily-curated home for a diverse host of electronic musicians I’ve ever come across – it was my second default browser tab for most of 2017, when I’d even listen to the odd-hour broadcasts overseen by just the automated library-perusing bot for hours. On episode 16 of Drycast, I recounted the absurd tale of my surprise morning encounter with a Norwegian station’s live broadcast from some European breakcore club, which was likely responsible for the most fun I’ve ever had working in retail.
Extratone’s former Tech Editor is partial to a station called Radio Swiss Jazz, which appears to be thriving in comparison with most visible broadcasters, and unapologetically emits a bizarre amalgamation of tunes both chart-topping and Seriously Obscure across every conceivable genre (including Marching Music,) and continent of origin. Between every few charts, the brief commentary and station identification has provided our own private mystery: Was that one pre-recorded? This guy was on yesterday, but has since shed his accent? However, these tiny temporary mysteries are Internet Radio’s only remaining value for us, and I suspect the same is true for all but the most laggard laggards. For as long as I’ve been coherent enough to disseminate between much of anything, very few of its visible offerings have offered anything groundbreaking or fresh, perhaps out of negligence (one can very easily arrange leave a machine running SHOUTcast to shuffle through a given library of music and/or podcasts indefinitely,) frustration, or economic necessity.