Bandcamp rules. Not only can you buy music but many artists also sell merch, sheet music, art and more. It’s a great, one-stop-shop to support your favourite artists.

And if you keep a look out, Bandcamp regularly email about “Bandcamp Friday” which are defined Fridays where they waive their share of the sale meaning the artist gets the whole cut!

Today is a Bandcamp Friday!

Lots of artists also do special things for Bandcamp Friday, like put up signed vinyls for sale.

I have been enjoying Qobuz, since quitting Spotify a couple of years ago. Everything’s better quality, they have proper credits and PDF CD booklets, the classical music metadata is much better, it encourages you to listen more deliberately to music you choose, and I don’t feel dirty for funding scumbags.

Qobuz is great! I’ve been using it for over 2 years now.

I’ve been using Qobuz for about a year and generally like it. There are a couple of things that are making me want to switch though. 1) Artists often have albums associated with them that don’t belong. Check out the Australian band Jet as an example. 2) Some artists I like have albums on both Spotify and Tidal that they don’t have on Qobuz for some reason

1. This is annoying, I agree. Join Qobuz Club and upvote suggestions to prioritise cleaning it up.

2. Contact the acts management to pressure the label to release on Qobuz too. It should be in their interest.

I am part of the club and upvote any comments I see about catalogue clean ups. I’ve also posted a few on my own, but haven’t gotten any acknowledgement on them from the Qobuz team.

Edit: I know a lot of people have issues with AI, but this is a case where AI could scan their entire catalogue and provide a clean up list they would just have to confirm/deny and it would be way faster than their team going through it.

I have emailed the label to request the missing albums also be uploaded to Qobuz, but did not receive any response on that. I have also submitted the request through Qobuz for the albums to be added to and received the automated reply email, but who knows if anything will happen with that.

Yeah, me too. It’s annoying how Qobuz encourage user feedback with a special app and then just go stone wall about it. There are several threads about common problems in their services and they don’t give any response at all. I hope it gives some pressure anyway with the updoots for common annoyances that can no longer be ignored.

AI is overkill. All that is needed is matching acts and albums to one of the free or proprietary datasets online. Some API integration and maybe licensing and it’s done. It’s just a decision that somebody up the organisation needs to make that they don’t for whatever reason.

Yeah I switched over to Tidal and I like it so far. The music quality is good and there’s just a simple toggle in settings to turn off anything to do with AI.

The recommendations aren’t as good as Spotify’s but I’d rather deal with that than a barrage of AI bullshit.

I’ve found the recommendations in Tidal to be more hit or miss but overall better than Spotify since I switched almost a year ago. I felt that Spotify was pushing the same songs over and over, and I’d only find 1-3 new songs I liked a month. On Tidal it seems like the Daily Discovery playlist focuses on a genre I’ve been listening to, and while often none of the songs stick out, when it hits I’ll find 1-3 new songs that day, and it hits multiple times per month. It took a few months to get to that point though.

That’s good to know! It could also be because I just switched over, so it doesn’t have enough reference yet for what I’m listening to.

Sadly for much of what I listen to outside of band camp none of those Services have what I want typically. It’s been a few years. Maybe I need to reassess it. But there is a reason I ended up on YouTube music. Just the breadth of the content. And the fact that you get regular YouTube ad free with it also isn’t a bad deal. That’s probably why I watch Mostly YouTube anymore these days.

But I found myself having to skip more and more past AI artist that pop up randomly in the queue. Something I wouldn’t mind not doing. If any of these other services actually catered to the niches that I enjoy. Which is very hit or miss unfortunately. Last time I checked even Pandora and Spotify didn’t have a lot of what I listen to.

@Eldritch @FallenWalnut diy getting better these days

There are many ways but I've got rpi+beets+navidrome+tailscale at the moment and have recently added audiomuse-ai which is a game changer for spoon feeding me back my own library.

Oh I have about 6000 albums shared via NFS across my home network. And a fully automated icecast / shoutcast station with liquid soap on the back end controlling bumpers advertisements playlists Etc Over The Wider internet. I need to get that part set back up again eventually. But bandcamp and YouTube are just great for discovery. At least for what I listen to.

Also today is Bandcamp Friday, Bandcamp does not take fees on purchases today.

I love bandcamp