If you care about music, at all, please consider spending as much at Bandcamp (or another equitable music platform) today as you do on streaming services
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If you care about music, at all, please consider spending as much at Bandcamp (or another equitable music platform) today as you do on streaming services
Your streaming dollars only support streaming executives and big record companies. Bandcamp $$$ go into artists' pockets
Support art, not tech
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And artist friends, consider pulling your music from streaming services altogether. Ask yourself honestly, what benefit do you gain from being on there vs what benefits you give away (actually, you pay for!) to the platform owners. Who's getting the better deal, here?
Your music being there lends legitimacy to the platform and makes it easy for your work to be devalued by casual fans who might hear you in a playlist here and there but otherwise don't give a fuck.
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You might have fewer listeners overall by pulling your work, but I promise the listeners you do have will be 100x more engaged!
For me, I would rather have 50 fans that actually value my work and engage with it than 500 who hear a track maybe once a month in some random playlist and don't even know the name of my musical project. Your mileage may vary, of course, but it's something to think about.
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Music fan friends, I know the convenience of streaming services is incredible! I get it. But consider: if they pull your favorite band at some point, every dollar you spent goes down the drain.
And almost none of those dollars get to that act, unless you *only* listen to the top 5% of artists (think the Taylor Swifts, Bob Dylans and One Directions of the world).
Not to mention, your dollars go to support terrible tech like AI and military BS. (Look at what Spotify is invested in...)
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By contrast, if you spend $10 today at Bandcamp or @mirlo or another equitable platform, you put nearly *all* of that money directly in the artists' pockets! They *will* notice and it will probably make their day. Hell, you might make their week! You might buy their meal for the day! Isn't that a better use of your purchasing power?
Not to mention, you get DRM free files that are yours FOREVER. Even if that artist decides to stop making music and pull their work, you'll still have it.
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The bottom line is that if you want new, unique art to exist, you have to support it. And the best way to do that is with direct payments to those artists.
The streaming economy is a lie. Support the art you love by putting money in the pockets of the artists who create it.