Times 2 - UK (2020-08-05)

(Antfer) #1

8 1GT Wednesday August 5 2020 | the times


arts


The great Spotify


backlash: why


musicians like me


have move d on


Times journalist and singer-songwriter


Jade Cuttle, right, on how artists and fans


are flocking to the music site Bandcamp


N


ever mind a hard
day’s night, it has
been a brutal few
months for
musicians. With
tours and shows
cancelled for the
foreseeable future
and releases postponed, many
performers are scraping by. Hope
that indoor performances would
resume on August 1 was snuffed out
on Friday when the prime minister
announced that the further easing of
coronavirus restrictions in England
will be delayed.
As a singer-songwriter, I have felt
that punch of disappointment. This
summer, alongside doing my day
job on the arts desk at The
Times, I would have been
touring my debut album,
Algal Bloom, during
weekends and holidays,
building on the buzz of
last year’s pre-release tour
and performing again at
festivals such as Latitude
and Cambridge Folk Festival.
I would be singing around
a campfire with flowers in
my hair, not fiddling with a
facemask and firing out
Zoom invitations.
One thing that has stopped me
and my peers from becoming totally
dispirited is Bandcamp, an ethical
streaming service that has provided
a pay stream and a morale boost.
It’s hard to convey the joy that
accompanies the ping of the
company’s little blue diamond logo in
my inbox, announcing a new fan and
their generous transfer of funds as
they download one of my songs.
Bandcamp, based in Oakland,
California, was set up in 2008
by Shawn Grunberger and Ethan
Diamond. Unlike the better-known
streaming service Spotify, famously
accused of being stingy towards
artists, it has a reputation for
generosity.
On Bandcamp it’s the artist, not a
corporate behemoth, who sets the
prices. For digital albums, most artists
charge about £5; fans have the option
to pay more and, extraordinarily, 40
per cent of the time they do, with
some uberfans paying as much as
£200 for albums priced far lower.
People can listen to your music,
decide if they like it and, if they do,
pay you directly for a download,
record or CD. They then get
unlimited streaming access via the

free Bandcamp app, plus an
optional high-quality download.
In March the site launched
Bandcamp Fridays, which
waive the company’s revenue
shares for 24 hours on the
first Friday of every month.
On a normal day Bandcamp
takes a 15 per cent revenue
share on digital music
downloads and 10 per cent on
products such as records and
merchandise, compared with the
30 per cent share on music taken
by Amazon and iTunes.
Bandcamp Fridays may sound like
publicity-seeking small fare, but after
just four days of Fridays, through
Bandcamp, customers placed more
than $20 million directly into artists’
and labels’ bank accounts. More than
$75 million worth of music and
merchandise has been bought through
the service since March, raising the
total bounty paid to Bandcamp artists
to half a billion dollars.
While artists may long to bask in
the spotlight of Spotify — the world’s
biggest music streaming platform, with
299 million subscribers — if they do
they can pocket less than £0.
per play of a song. Spotify recently
introduced a “tip jar” on artist profiles
to encourage donations, but they
generally amount to a pittance.
Hether Fortune, the former leader of
the Oakland post-punk band Wax
Idols who now records as a solo artist,
told the American online magazine
Pitchfork: “This last Bandcamp day
I made $1,500, which is a shitload of
money for me. Maybe I’ve roughly
gotten that much over the last five
years in total from Spotify. Maybe.
But that’s being generous.”
Sitting in front of me, via Zoom,
is Ethan Diamond, 48, the chief
executive of Bandcamp, showing off a

Ethan Diamond, the
boss of Bandcamp.
Top: Jade Cuttle

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