I’m now the guy who selects and reviews Album of the Week for the Bandcamp front page.
It’s quite an exciting thing to be doing – partly because I think Bandcamp is an amazingly great platform both for artists and for fans (and for independent record labels too, as it happens), but mostly because this particular reviewing gig means that I never have to write about a mediocre or bad record.
Everything I review is absolutely awesome and 100% recommended. After all, out of all the music released across the whole of Bandcamp – this is the one that’s selected as the Album of the Week and it’s on the front page of the website.
I’ve written a blog post that talks about my rather eclectic musical taste, and my approach to reviewing. It may help to go read that.
Things to keep in mind
1) There’s only one Album of the Week per week, only 52 weeks in a year, and tens of thousands of artists on Bandcamp. I might not review your album. Sorry. But on the other hand, I might. If it’s awesome.
2) There’s a backlog. I’ve already selected at least the next two months worth of Album of the Week features. There’s a lot of awesome stuff on Bandcamp. So even if I do select your album, it might not coincide with your release schedule, touring calendar or promotional campaign.
3) This one’s completely obvious, I hope, but if I don’t write a review of your album, it’s not because it’s not good (well, it might be because it’s not good, but there’s no reason to assume that). There are lots of albums I really love that I’m not going to make Album of the Week for all sorts of reasons.
I could already fill a year with only albums I love that are from New Zealand, and I could easily do about six months worth of albums I love that fall under the genre ‘Contemporary Classical’ – but I don’t think either of those approaches would necessarily be appropriate.
How to submit your album for review
I might not already know about your awesome album, and so you should probably tell me about it.
Please email me a link to your music at dubber@bandcamp.com. Your album will need to already be on Bandcamp, obviously.
My one rule is that your message must also include recommendations (and links) to two other artists – people who are not you – on Bandcamp that you think are incredible – and make sure those are listed in the recommendations section of your profile as well. This will help me discover new gems, and hopefully provide a bit of context and filtering.
It would be super-helpful if you would include a download code for your album. Don’t feel obliged, of course, and it’s certainly not a prerequisite, but a few people have done so already and it’s been greatly appreciated. It means that I can listen to your album on the go. And I do a lot of going…
You also might want to review these tips, as I’m far more likely to feature albums making excellent use of Bandcamp’s features.
I’m looking forward to checking out your music, hearing about the music that you love, and telling you all about the music that I think is awesome.
In the meantime, go check out this week’s Album of the Week on the Bandcamp front page. It’s really brilliant.
Incidentally… it’s currently well hidden, but if you’re interested in hearing music that I really like, but which didn’t quite make it to be Album of the Week for one reason or another (almost never to do with how good the record is) then you might be interested in being one of the select few people who know about this.