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226 points cloudfudge | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.199s | source
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freedomben ◴[] No.41882074[source]
I think this is great, but I do hope thought is being put into solving the hardest problem of all IMHO: Music Discovery

I have bought a lot on Bandcamp, but would have bought 10x more if I could just find stuff I liked. The existing system makes discovery nearly impossible unless you happen to like the stuff being mainly bought and curated or are in a lucky genre.

Discoverability is especially hard because 99% of the music people create sucks. This may not seem true if you mainly listen to "radio" and playlists, but if you ever get access to a large catalog of independent music, try picking stuff at pseudo-random and take notes. As much as I love good art (and I do), most art is not good art. You can't go on popularity because some of the great artists (especially on Bandcamp) are relatively unknown and therefore are not popular. For example, Thousand Needles in Red is a phenomenal band with great albums, and almost completely unknown. These Four Walls is similar (but at least they are on Youtube Music/Spotify/etc). I'd buy the crap out of similar albums, but discovering them is very challenging. I mainly found those two out of random luck.

Anyway I'm rambling, but I do hope you can figure out a good means for discovery. I think finding and grouping people with similar tastes is among the best ways, and also having artists that a person likes recommend other artists can be super valuable.

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1. l72 ◴[] No.41882664[source]
Discoverability of anything outside of the main stream is always difficult.

I listen to a sub-sub-genre of an already niche sub-genre (raw black metal) where it takes A LOT of work to pick out the small amount of good from the large amount of bad. Many of these bands are NOT on any major platforms except for bandcamp.

There are a few review blogs that highlight some of the top stuff (although, most of the reviews are at the black metal level, not the sub-sub-genre), but I find my main source of discovery is bandcamp.

What I do is: 1) Follow LABELS on bandcamp that specialize solely in the music from bands I like, 2) follow other users that have a similar purchase history, 3) and of course follow your favorite bands for updates.

My biggest issue with bandcamp is that I find their notification system and wishlist to be quite lacking.

For notifications and discoverability, I take all the notification emails I get, filter them based on type (new release, new items [gear,stickers,vinyl], and general message updates) and move them into my RSS system (FreshRSS)[0]. I get new music updates every day of things I probably want to at least check out.

For wishlist management, I wrote a simple desktop app[1] that lets me rate, tag, comment, and listen to my albums from my bandcamp wishlist quickly. Anything I _might_ be interested in, I put in my wishlist, then use my app to keep track of if I like it or not. Stuff I don't like stays in my wishlist, but gets a low rating and filters to the bottom while stuff I want to purchase filters up to the top.

Don't get me wrong, you are still going to need to spend time exploring, as you aren't getting your weekly curated playlists.

   [0] https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email-updates-to-an-rss-feed/
   [1] https://line72.net/software/camp-counselor/