Day 112: Today's Pick — Bandcamp

Bandcamp is the music store I keep telling people about, despite an ambient anxiety that one day it will not be here, because right now it is here and we should use it while we can.

For the uninitiated: Bandcamp is a website. You go to bandcamp.com. You type the name of a band or a song or a city or a genre. You find an artist's page — a clean, dignified single-page layout, with album art, a tracklist, a "play" button, a "buy" button, and usually a hand-written paragraph from the artist about what the record is and why it exists. You click play. You listen. If you like it, you buy. The price is "name your price" or a flat number, usually somewhere between $5 and $15 for a full album. You enter a credit card. You receive, by email, a link to download the album in your file format of choice — high-quality MP3, FLAC, ALAC, OGG, the whole audiophile menu. The files are yours. They live on your hard drive. They will be there in five years and ten and twenty.

Of every dollar you spend on Bandcamp, about 80 cents goes to the artist. Compare this to the roughly 0.4 cents per stream that Spotify pays out, which means the artist needs you to listen to a track approximately 200 times before they make as much as one Bandcamp purchase. The math is not subtle. The math, in fact, is the moral case for Bandcamp.

I want to recommend three specific habits.

One: Bandcamp Fridays. On the first Friday of every month, Bandcamp waives its own revenue cut, and 100% of your purchase goes to the artist (minus payment processing). The program started in 2020 as a pandemic response and has, miraculously, persisted. Pick one Friday a month. Set aside $30. Buy three albums you've been meaning to buy. The artists notice. The data on Bandcamp Fridays is real money for working musicians.

Two: Bandcamp Daily. This is Bandcamp's editorial arm — long-form essays and lists by genuinely knowledgeable music writers, focused on the kind of artists who don't get covered in mainstream publications. Subscribe to the newsletter. The articles are good. The lists are excellent. I have found at least 30 of my favorite albums of the last decade through Bandcamp Daily essays.

Three: actually buy the music. This is the part I have to talk to people about, and I am surprised every time. Streaming has trained us to think of music as a tap of warm water that comes out of the faucet for $11 a month. Bandcamp asks you to pay for individual records, the way you pay for individual books. This feels, to a 2025 brain, strange. It is not strange. It is normal. It is, in fact, what the music economy was for most of its history. The strange part is the streaming model, which most working musicians find unsustainable. You are not better off because of streaming; you are slightly worse off, and the artists are quite a lot worse off. Bandcamp is the small functioning corrective.

A few honest caveats. Discovery on Bandcamp is genuinely worse than on Spotify. The site relies on tags, genre pages, and editorial — not algorithmic recommendation. If you are the kind of listener who likes a smart algorithm to feed you new things, Bandcamp will frustrate you. The fix is to lean into editorial: read Bandcamp Daily, follow a handful of curators, and let the human-driven recommendations do the work.

The other, larger anxiety: Bandcamp's corporate ownership has wobbled. The company was sold to Epic Games in 2022, then to Songtradr in 2023; layoffs followed. As of this writing the platform is operational, the artists are paid, Bandcamp Fridays still happen, and downloads still work. But the platform is not as bulletproof as it was five years ago. This is, in my view, an argument for using it more, not less. Bandcamp's case for continued existence is the dollar volume of music sold there. You voting with your wallet is, very directly, the thing that keeps it alive.

Buy a record. Buy an EP. Buy the latest from a band whose live show you saw in 2017 and whose album you've been streaming for years on Spotify without paying them. The artist will, in many cases, see your name. The artist will, in many cases, message you. This still happens. This is still what the internet, on its best days, can do.

This has been Day 112. The pick is a website. Use it.