Musicians Respond to Bandcamp.com “Pay-for-Free” System

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

On September 9, the music-hosting service Bandcamp.com (where a lot of netlabels and electronic musicians have made their home) announced a change in its pricing policy, specifically in regard to free downloads, which had previously been unregulated (a la the Internet Archive, at archive.org). Subsequently, over a certain threshold, the musician (or label) would be required to pay for additional free downloads, ranging from three cents per download to half that amount, depending on the payment plan.

The immediate response by musicians was such that Bandcamp quickly revised its announced plan, providing monthly allotments of free downloads, rather than one initial batch.

I weighed in, after some reflection, on what Bandcamp might need to do next, and have since then checked in with musicians and label proprietors, to see how they’re responding to the change:

”¢ Thomas Park, best known for his work as Mystified: “the allotted download amounts should suffice”:

Basically, for me, the new configuration, with 200 downloads for free a month, should work out fine, as long as I keep my number of releases limited. The reason for this is that I get a lot more “plays” (streamed audio) than downloads. Unlike archive.org where a download is a click away, Bandcamp has a bit of a complex downloading utility. I think it causes some people to prefer streaming to downloading there.

So, as things stand, the allotted download amounts should suffice for my purposes.

Since I like the simplicity of the interface in general at Bandcamp, and also the ability to obtain flac as well as mp3 files, if desired, I think I will stay put.

Visit Park at mystifiedmusic.com, and listen to his retro-proto-electronica and his urban mutescape.

”¢ Leonardo Rosado of the FeedbackLoop netlabel (feedbacklooplabel.blogspot.com), who forwarded an edited version of what he’d posted at PublicSpace Lab (lab.pubspaces.com): “Bandcamp is rejecting the foundation of [Creative Commons] licensing”:

I started using Bandcamp because it offered the chance to serve FeedbackLoop Label purpose of collecting some donation / pay what you want for a release, in order to gather money to release physical editions (one of the objectives of FbL). What I think is that the main appeal of Bandcamp was the integration and offering of several different business models for artists and labels, which in this shady days of commercial music is the best idea to implement flexible systems, that can shift quickly and adapt to change. By simply “ending”the Free Downloads what will possibly happen is the loss of artists / netlabels that can in the future be using their Payed Services going after other services. And what is really interesting (from a negative perspective) is that Bandcamp is rejecting the foundation of CC licensing in music, which is their biggest mistake. When a lot of people is going for CC licenses in everything (music, writing, photos, video) Bandcamp is going the opposite way, embracing the Copyright system.

For a sense of what the FeedbackLoop label is all about, check out a recent Landrecorder EP, for which I wrote the liner notes, and the pianotronic work of Adam Williams and Rosado.

”¢ Diego Bernal, San Antonio beatmaker: “They didn’t go Napster on us”:

I have mixed feelings about it. Bandcamp is a great way to get your music out — it’s easy to use, nearly bugless (in my experience) and professional. Thus, I’m not particularly happy about it, but I think that in the context of moving to a pay model the terms are relatively reasonable, especially the monthly “recharge” and in light of the fact that downloading an album counts as one download, regardless of the number of tracks. As much as we all like the service, I don’t know that we’re entitled to it. There’s no right to Bandcamp, it’s just that no one likes to be surprised.

There is something to be said about free music. Some artists, like myself, depend on the site to distribute our records. For us, it’s just about getting the word out, not making money. For popular, high-traffic artists, this change could pose a problem. They may have to reorganize, and I don’t know of any alternatives that are better, honestly. It’s certainly not unworkable, just potentially more inconvenient. I don’t like it, but I also don’t blame Bandcamp for doing it. They didn’t go Napster on us.

Check out Bernal’s Besides… EP and his For Corners album, which I listed as one of my 10 favorite free downloads of 2009. Visit at diegobernal.net.

”¢ Aboombong (aka J.C. Thorne): “For the kind of music I make, that is a good problem to have”:

I like bandcamp and will continue to use it because it supports my “name your price with no minimum” policy. I think Bandcamp has done a good job with their new policy protecting artists with smaller audiences while putting together a business plan that will allow them to survive and (I would hope) eventually make a profit without getting taken advantage of by popular artists looking to cut corners on a large “free give away” style promotion. As currently implemented the new policy will only effect a few hundred of their more popular artists. As aboombong is one of the artists right on the cusp of the level of popularity that would be impacted, I crunched the numbers to make sure it made sense to keep using the service. For aboombong, between 6 and 7 percent of people who download music name a price above zero with a range from 1 cent for an album (all of which goes to paypal, so I am not sure what the point is) to over 20 dollars for a single track (average about 4 bucks an album paid if anything is paid). In the end, when you factor in free downloads, I make about 25 cents per download (most of which are full album downloads). Since band camp charges $20 dollars for 1000 free downloads (2 cents a pop), at my current return, about 95 paid downloads covers the cost of 1000 free downloads (factoring in the 15% profit share that goes to Bandcamp). But, of course, that only becomes an issue when free downloads exceed 200 per month. For the kind of music I make, that is a good problem to have. For those who have significantly more downloads than I do and don’t want to go with a name your price strategy, well, there is always the internet archive. The short version of all of this…much ado about not much, but I hope it will lead to Bandcamp-like distribution replacing the current big-boys in the industry. Not too many time in the past has 85% of a sale gone directly to the artist. Certainly a step in the right direction.

Check out Aboombong’s Amnemonic EP. Visit him at aboombong.bandcamp.com.

Read the Bandcamp announcement at blog.bandcamp.com.

Remixing Is a Social Network (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Confusion about the aligning of director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin on the Facebook movie, The Social Network, seems a little overstated. Sorkin, best known perhaps for his work on TV’s The West Wing, may write some of the most non-action-oriented verbiage in modern drama (“I write people talking in rooms, he told David Carr of nytimes.com), but that’s not much of a contrast with Fincher, whose best work, like Se7en and Fight Club, transforms the world into a CGI-like realm that seems more frozen in space than actually flesh and blood. Fincher’s influence is most clearly felt in the 360-degree cadaver inspections of CSI and the 2001-monolith-like typography of Fringe. There was arguably more “action” in the racing-corridor dialogue of The West Wing than there is in all of Fincher’s Zodiac. If Sorkin writes words to be spoken in enclosed spaces, then Fincher turns those spaces (people included) into architecture to be investigated from all angles.

Which is to say, the pair are a perfect match, and they’ve found their rightful aural sparring partner in Trent Reznor, of Nine Inch Nails, who along with Atticus Ross scored Social Network with a series of ambient-industrial set pieces, five of which are available for free download at nullco.com/tsn, including the siren song (quite literally, as it’s shot through with a gleaming alarm) of “Eventually We Find Our Way” and the lulling wisp that carries the superb title “The Gentle Hum of Anxiety,” the latter complete with a piano part worthy of Erik Satie, had he lived long enough to serve Alfred Hitchcock’s will. (There’s a good conversation between Fincher and Reznor at pitchfork.com, in which Fincher recalls asking Reznor about ‘doing like a Wendy Carlos version of [Edvard Grieg’s] “Hall of the Mountain King.”‘) The full album is available in a variety of formats, including (through 12:01am PT on September 30) a mere $2.99 digital edition via Amazon. There’s also a CD (just $8, which is Fugazi-style pricing), a Blu-ray audio disc, and the requisite 180-gram vinyl edition.

And the free music doesn’t end with the five-track EP sampler. The constituent parts of two of the Reznor-Ross score cues are available for free download as part of the ongoing open-source remix project at remix.nin.com. There’s “On We March,” which is included in the free five-track EP, weighing in at 10 stems (among them “bass,” “modular,” “swarm,” and “pluck) at 74 BPM, and “In Motion,” which is the second track on the full album, with 17 stems (“Korg,” “Odyssey,” “Oddity,” “Sub Loop,” “Gtr Noise”) at 124 BPM. All the remixes, which are piling up by the dozen, are available for free download. The remixing project is, in effect, a social network of its own, as participants upload their renditions and, along with casual listeners, rate them.

NB: The free download requires you to enter your email address, and is delivered as a Zip archive of MP3s, which is why it’s not available for streaming here.

Hip-Hop Forensics & Sampling Genealogy

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Kudos to Ethan Hein for an impressive act of hip-hop forensics and sampling genealogy. His excavation of DJ Premier‘s production of Nas‘ song “Nas Is Like” includes this handy flowchart of all the constituent samples:

Many of those samples, as Hein notes, had appeared in earlier Nas songs — this includes samples of Nas’ own voice — which makes Premier’s production a meta-level project, and confirms why his name is uttered alongside not only the Bomb Squad but also the likes of Teo Macero and Bill Laswell.

As Heim puts it,

Any sample-based song carries a dense web of associations, and I love the complexity that gets introduced when people sample themselves, or when they sample tracks containing samples, or best of all, both. ‘Nas Is Like’ has a complex family tree, a set of allusions to allusions to allusions. This is as it should be. Fundamentally, all music is built of reshuffled bits of other music. Hip-hop makes this fact an explicit part of the music’s message, and that’s the biggest reason why I love it.

Heim collects all his “sample maps” at flickr.com. While many have to deal with the “sample and sampled” nature of the Nas piece, some map out from ur-texts like Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks”:

And other Hein maps track various samples employed by a single musician, in the following case the rapper Common. Writes Hein in the caption for this photo on Flickr, “There are a lot of Kanye West productions here, which means a lot of samples. The map is nowhere near exhaustive for reasons of space, I limited it to songs using more than one sample”:

There are numerous resources for sampling information, notably the song-specific pages at wikipedia.org (click through for a more prosaic description of “Nas Is Like”), the rap-oriented whosampled.com, the more broadly defined secondhandsongs.com, which calls itself a “cover songs database,” and the-breaks.com. But none of that crowd-accrued data has the gravity of Hein’s post (which, of course, draws from those sources as raw material); his effort includes audio and video of various parts of the song, and commentary about the structure of the piece, as well as the nature of hip-hop and, more broadly, composition. As he writes in a related post, “What works the best in music, as in biology, is a minor mutation on an existing successful replicator.”

Read the full piece, originally posted in late August, at ethanhein.com.

The Walk as Composition (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It isn’t to privilege the visual to say that listening to field recordings is like opening a window. This isn’t about looking through glass, real or metaphorical; it’s about opening a window, and letting the sounds and their myriad associations flow in.

The Canada-based urbansoundecology.org seeks to open just such windows on Toronto and Vancouver, where people are taking recording devices with them to sound-map concisely defined physical areas. These sound maps take the form of brief audio recordings, about the length of a long pop song, annotated with information like location, weather, device, and a brief list of recognizable sonic elements (“crow, gravel, industry, road”; “crowd, march, traffic”). Here are four recent recordings, each track associated with one of the maps up above (clockwise from upper left) :

[audio:http://urbansoundecology.org/audio/download/98/160910-0935.mp3,http://urbansoundecology.org/audio/download/97/0910_221954.MP3,http://urbansoundecology.org/audio/download/96/Jericho%20Beach%20by%20T%20Goff%201.mp3,http://urbansoundecology.org/audio/download/95/090910-1136.mp3|titles=”Renfrew Ravine”,”Crows on Still Creek Drive”,”Frosh marsh”,”Jericho Beach”|artists=T. Goff,M. Ritts,T. Goff,G. Smith]

The geolocative essence of the Urban Sound Ecology project is emphasized by those rarefied maps, which look less like real life and more like the view from an early flight-control video game. They suggest the recordings as pure document, pure data, when in fact the recordings are just as messy as real life. There’s child’s adorable gibberish in “Renfrew Ravine,” followed by thunder (MP3); the ever so still white noise of “Crows on Still Creek Drive,” occasionally interrupted by the title subject, and the honking of human horns (MP3); the surf (and, late in the piece, conversation) of “Jericho Beach” (MP3); the school cheers of “Frosh march,” swallowed by traffic (MP3).

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Urban Sound Ecology interface is that tiny orange line that appears in each of the visual interfaces. That is the path walked by the recorder: a sudden reverse in the first and fourth pieces, an extended but truncated journey on the second, and what looks like a brief jaunt straight into the water in the third.

The strict orange line serves as a kind of emblem of composition; it’s the graphic marker of the human element, the decision-making that went into what is, otherwise, a matter of geography and chance encounters.

Visit the service at urbansoundecology.org.

Do Fees Rationalize/Incentivize Communal-Culture Ecommerce?

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The recent decision by bandcamp.com, the music-hosting service, to charge for free downloads has been met with understandable rancor. The site had situated itself as a constituent part of the Internet’s music ecology. Musicians and labels had made it part of their tech infrastructure, especially netlabels, which give away their music for free.

The relationship between Bandcamp and netlabels makes this development of particular concern for this website. A search on this site for “bandcamp” suggests how thoroughly the service has become part of the Creative Commons community, notably in the case of musicians like Diego Bernal and Y?arcka, and deeply non-commercial enterprises such as the multi-artist One Minute for the Sun compilation.

Bandcamp secured a certain elevation in the crowded field of music-hosting services, and then it went and changed the rules — and not one of those semi-cursory mutual-agreement notices, like when Apple changes its iTunes Store terms of services what seems like several times a week.

A September 9 post on its blog (blog.bandcamp.com) introduced a new system in which only a set number of free downloads would be available per user, this in stark contrast with what had been the case, a system that allowed unlimited downloads. The decision wasn’t surprising. Downloads require bandwidth and infrastructure, and bandwidth and infrastructure cost money.

What was a surprise was Bandcamp’s surprise. This is the opening graph of that notice:

Our hope was that free downloading might be highest amongst the artists who were also selling the most ”“ for example, a band giving away a track or two in promotion of a paid album. That way, the revenue share on the artist’s sales would naturally cover the costs associated with the streaming, support and storage of their freebies.

Given the preponderance of free on the Internet, from YouTube to the Internet Archive (aka archive.org), it seems peculiar that the people who put together Bandcamp expected free solely to be used as a kind of loss-leading promotional opportunity.

David Dufresne (of bandzoogle.com, a “band website platform” whose business is not dissimilar to that of Bandcamp) summed up the issue well in a response to a story at hypebot.com:

I think the major grudge that some people hold against their latest announcements is that they built their customer base of tens of thousands around a VC-money-fueled free service, offering little transparency as to how they would end up monetizing (probably wasn’t clear to the founders either, as they got started). Only after people had invested time and resources in building and promoting their Bandcamp page do they find out how much it will cost them.

In other words, it seems like the real loss-leader here was Bandcamp’s own: allow the free downloads for a long time, build a participatory audience, and then begin charging a fee. Before and after the Bandcamp decision, musicians host files on Bandcamp, collect them as albums, and charge what they want for downloads, along a sliding scale (a la Radiohead’s milestone release, In Rainbows) from zero to whatever the consumer’s heart desired and wallet allowed. The difference is that members now have a set number of free downloads, after which they have to pay to allow additional free downloads, pricing ranging from three cents (U.S.) to half that, depending on how many credits are purchased.

On Twitter, musician @joshwoodward noted:

WTG, BandCamp – with your new pricing, it’d only have cost me $39,000 to give my music away for free through you.

A commenter on Jason Sigal’s freemusicarchive.org writeup said:

Blaming us for using what they offered. I just thought that was unfair

The comment was in response to this section of the Bandcamp announcement:

It’s obviously unfair to burden every Bandcamp artist with the costs of a few outliers giving away hundreds of thousands of free downloads, so we’re making some changes to button that up.

And musician Phil Wilkerson over at his blog (philwilkerson.wordpress.com) wrote:

The romance with Bandcamp is over for me. I won’t be recommending Bandcamp to my friends or to other artists. In fact, I will have nothing positive to say about Bandcamp henceforth.

You have to wonder about their business acumen as well. Bandcamp has denied themselves an important way of generating site traffic and positive vibes and goodwill from the Creative Commons community. They have virtually spit in the face of the Creative Commons artists and netlabels who have driven traffic to their site.

The situation is unfortunate, to the extent that Bandcamp even revised its revision; instead of 200 free downloads, each account will get 200 free downloads per month (in addition, there are incentives).

What happens next at Bandcamp will be interesting to observe. Will pageviews and usage drop significantly? If they do, will the decrease in free-related traffic offset such drops? Will someone finally, as musician and netlabel administrator @hecanjog suggested, “[build] a front-end to archive.org as wonderful and slick as bandcamp.com”?

One of the issues with Bandcamp’s switch is how it treats all accounts equally, even though 200 free downloads for an individual artist’s page doesn’t correlate with 200 free downloads for a label’s page. There’s also no apparent easy way for users to offset an artist’s (or label’s) free-related debt. Bandcamp has, all these gripes aside, proved itself responsive to the input of its users. After capping a maximum upload size, the following addendum was posted on September 8: “Some Serious Ambient Artists have helped us realize that our thinking on this issue was very uptight, so we’ve modified our policy: once you’ve made a few sales through Bandcamp (totaling $20 USD or more), we’ll increase your upload limit to 600 megs (that’s like, one whole LaserDisc!).”

Anyhow, just as the Internet has introduced a wealth of micro-cultures in place of long-running Top 40 mono-cultures, I wonder if the same will be the case for financial interactions. Different people shop differently, consume differently, store their possessions differently. (I don’t know the background of those Serious Ambient Artists’ input, but it might have had to do with the fact that much ambient music is significantly longer than the average pop song.) Bandcamp’s system has many things to its credit, among them an easy “trade an email address for a download” interface, and the sliding-scaled, multiple-format (MP3s at various compression rates, Ogg, etc.) download system.

I wonder if the next best step for Bandcamp is to figure out how to provide a broader range of financial alternatives. For example, if I enjoy a recording, I might be inclined to, after the fact, donate a small amount of funds to allow for future listeners to themselves experience a free download of the same track or album. This is along the lines of Cory Doctorow’s manner with the free versions of his ebooks; he says that if you enjoy the book, rather than paying him after the fact, buy a copy for a library (“Cory Doctorow Aids Libraries with Donations-for-Downloads Program”).

As Wilkerson himself put it, the issue of what it costs to promote one’s music on Bandcamp is largely an issue of framing: “I will pay what amounts to a hosting fee. I am not opposed to that at all. I suppose I could look at Bandcamp’s fee as a hosting fee.”