#bandcamp app

[saturns-slog]

Just found a fucking great fucking band, get the name of it.... the psychedelic squirrel. They have some motherfucking great motherfucking music. Jus Go on to the bandcamp app and look the fuckers up. You will e blown away by their music motherfucker!!! To me it’s a PTSD buster. I highly recommend the psychedelic squirrel as great music.

[songbyrddc-blog]

It shouldn’t be news to anyone that we at Songbyrd are big supporters of independent music. One of the best tools for empowering independent artists and listeners alike is Bandcamp. Plenty has been written about Bandcamp (check this NYTimes feature), so we won’t bore you with the details. That said, they debuted a new app this week, that we highly recommend. As with their emerging publication, the new Bandcamp app is geared toward music appreciation. In just less than an hour of use, I’ve already found a few new albums that I missed that are creeping up my year-end list.

This is how I came across YUSSEF KAMAAL, and their November 2016 release BLACK FOCUS. Here’s what their Bandcamp description says about their music:

Taking inspiration from the anything-goes spirit of ‘70s jazz-funk, on albums by Herbie Hancock or the Mahavishnu Orchestra, it’s a loose template with plenty of room to experiment. The pair, made up of Yussef Dayes and Kamaal Williams (aka Henry Wu), have had little in the way of formal training. Instead, their musical tastes – and approach to playing – are indebted to Thelonious Monk’s piano as much as the drum programming of Kaidi Tatham. “It's all about the drums and the keys,” Williams says. “Not to take anything from anyone else, but that's where it all originates from: the chords, the rhythm of the chords and the drums.” Born out of a one-off live session to perform Williams’ solo material for Boiler Room, it soon became a project in its own right. Coming together as Yussef Kamaal, they played a series of live shows where little more than a chord progression would be planned before taking to the stage 

The album is excellent music for any time of day, really. It’s funky, expressive, relaxed and alive all at once. A highly-recommended release from a year of great music. Check it out here.

-Peter Lillis, Media Director

[mossandjones]

Woo hoo! The Bandcamp app for iOS and Android has arrived. This first version gives anyone with a fan account instant, unlimited mobile access to their Bandcamp music collection. No more download-a...

Yes, it's quite good. It isn't, however, quite the amazing it seems to have been touted as. 

What are the pros? 

Basically, the bandcamp app gives you offline access to any of the music you've bought from bandcamp, thus removing the need to fiddle around too much on your android phone, or fiddle around even more with your iPhone and computer and iTunes and all that palaver. So that's good. 

It means you can buy an album from an artist you like (say, for example, Moss & Jones), as you're on your way out of the door and then listen to it on headphones as you walk to your destination. So far so good. It's certainly useful. 

What are the cons? 

Well, for a start, you'll need a bandcamp fan account. Now we've been banging on about these for ages and ages because we think these are a fantastic idea (if slightly addictive; you'll end up buying lots of music that you quite possibly can't afford). Definitely get one. It allows you to have all of your bandcamp purchases in one place, allows you to add music to a wishlist, and allows you to look at other people's music collections where you will doubtless find lots of music you'll love.

So, that's not that much of a negative, but it is a bit of a faff. Worth it - absolutely - if you plan on getting quite a bit of music from bandcamp, but if not? Hmm. 

The second thing though is for us as artists the biggest negative. In order to have a fan account - and therefore use the bandcamp app - you have to have bought your music. Now, we'd be lying if we said we didn't love it when people pay us money for what we've done. We do; it enables us to do things like this, or to buy new music (we've just bought 100 Carols for Christmas, a book full of sheet music). But we also absolutely want people to be able to download our music for free if they can't afford it. Now, if we ever decide to stop doing home recordings and instead to pay to record in a studio, we might change our stance on this, but while we're not shelling out lots of money to record our music, we want it to remain available on a Pay What You Like basis. 

We suppose bandcamp's reasoning behind making fan pages (and therefore app usage) only available to paying customers is that it encourages people to pay at least a minimal amount for the music (we think that the least you can pay for PWYL music on bandcamp - apart from zero - is 50p; at least, someone once told us they tried to pay a little less than that for one of our albums and that didn't work so they downloaded for free instead). That's a nice thought - probably - but we'd like it more if people who'd downloaded our music for free could still hear it on the app. Else why not just livestream it? 

The last negative is the same as with any music that you're not adding to an iTunes or similar library; you can't 'shuffle' it with the rest of your collections or use it in playlists. 

To sum up, we're pleased bandcamp has made this app... it's a good start. We're not going to stop downloading purchases to our computer any time soon though and doubt that others will either. Good app; needs a bit more work. But if there's anything that bandcamp is good at, it's ironing out creases...