A month ago, I started recommending music I found on Bandcamp here on my blog. I also started a sort of metalabel at my own Bandcamp page. I called it Bandcamp du jour. You may have seen some of it already.
I profiled some music by friends of mine, some music that was thematically linked with what I was doing or thinking about, and some that I just happened to discover that was a complete, unexpected revelation.
And this all proved to me how great Bandcamp is as a platform for musicians, and as an interface for music fans. It does all the things I’m always telling musicians about: let people hear your music, let people share your music – and give them a way to give you money that’s easy, painless and an appropriate response for how much they like what they find.
It’s not rocket surgery.
Some days, perhaps – but not every day
The daily recommendation thing has become a little all-consuming as a self-assigned mandatory task, especially while I’m doing a fair bit of travelling – and it occurred to me that this blog was never really meant to be a music blog.
So since I’ve just hit the 30 mark – that is, 30 daily Bandcamp recommendations – I’d give it a rest here and retrospectively call it one of my 2010 30-day projects. I can tick that one off as an easy win, and I’ll be due to start another 30-day project pretty soon.
From here on out, I’ll do the odd Bandcamp du jour – but it won’t be chaque jour, if you see what I mean. I’m not going to start recommending stuff just to fill a space.
And I’ll use other tools to recommend music too. That new Spotify version’s pretty nifty, and I’ll keep doing the Sunday Jazz show using Spotify playlists.
In fact, I was talking to Simon, who runs Brownswood Recordings with Gilles Peterson, and he thought that the Sunday Jazz playlist thing was a pretty cool idea. He’s going to suggest that Gilles does his own weekly Spotify playlist along the same lines. Hope he does it – I’d certainly subscribe to that!
Anyway – for reference, here’s my last month of awesome listening on Bandcamp. Go browse the tags for more. There’s so much amazing stuff.
30 days of Bandcamp du jour
Thank you Andrew. The music you have chosen has often been a real revelation, inspiring and thought proving. It may only have lasted 30 days but I discovered a whole load of stuff I never new existed. I particularly liked the Sola Rosa stuff. Bit sad it’s all over but a chef recommending a new dish every day on top of the day job is asking a bit too much.
Thanks so much for this awesome mini-metalabel Andrew.
I could go about the music I newly-discovered, but instead I’ll just say that I’ve spend more money on music in that last 30 days than in the last 6 months.
Keep up the 30 days projects!
I’m glad you guys found something in there you liked. I’ll still probably find the odd interesting thing on Bandcamp, but I’m not going hunting for a while. There’s more than enough music there to keep me listening for quite some time – and I already had some other music I like too… :)