It's my first!

This is my first blog entry. Here it is, 2010, and I've never blogged before!

The way I see it, there's no point in blogging unless there's value in it for both yourself and for people who read your blog, because let's face it, in all probability nobody's going to read your blog. Blogs started out, literally speaking, as "web logs" - places for people to comment on pages they'd visited, because if you visit a lot of pages you often forget what you've seen and why you thought it was interesting. (Browser histories and search engines obviously help, but not always.) They weren't necessarily supposed to be exercises in narcissism, though they did get that way for a lot of bloggers.

Bandcamp.com is one of those cases where browser histories and search engines (not to mention narcissism) help very little. There's no internal search engine on Bandcamp - the search box on their home page is just a "search within" link to Google; album/track genre-tagging is determined completely by the artists, making it almost totally useless. Most of the artists are utterly obscure at best, and have little or no outside marketing support. Nothing is "curated," which is to say there's nobody on the site promoting the new releases. Promotion is all in the hands of the artists themselves, who are often not very good at it. If they were, they might be signed to labels already.

But the labels are dinosaurs, and they may eventually become extinct as more artists move to Bandcamp and similar means of online distribution. That's both good and bad. Typically, a label takes 60 percent of an artist's sales, or more in some cases - I've heard of contracts where they actually take 90 percent, and that's not a percentage of retail, it's a percentage of raw licensing, which can be as little as half of the retail price of a download. Since downloads don't actually cost anything to produce once the recording and artwork is completed, this means the signed artist ends up with about 20 cents on the dollar, if they're lucky. What's more, that's only after the artist "recoups" - which is to say, the costs of recording, marketing, and distribution are taken off the top.

Many labels now (especially the majors) also demand a cut of merchandising revenue and ticket sales, which used to be the only way an artist could actually make money. Some labels even charge "digital distribution fees" - in other words, since they're not spending any money on production and shipping of physical product, they simply make up a number and charge it to the artist's account, as if they were. It's little more than stealing, but they do it anyway, apparently without any shame whatsoever. And these are just some of the ways labels exploit recording artists; the rise in online music piracy seems to have only made their behavior that much worse.

On the other hand, without a label, most artists don't have the money, the connections, or the marketing know-how to allow for physical production and distribution at all, much less promote themselves effectively on a national or global scale. Occasionally someone will get lucky and put up a Youtube video that "goes viral" and helps drive sales in substantial numbers. Another way to get lucky is to sign up with Jingle Punks and have a TV or movie producer choose one of your tracks for a major production. It's a one-time payout, but the amount paid for licensing one song is often far more than artists typically make from all the CD's and downloads they sell via labels during their entire careers.

Anyway, the purpose of this blog is to help you find stuff on Bandcamp that's worth actual money, or if it happens to be free, at least the time it takes to download it.

Because someone has to.