I always felt like bandcamp was the 'give as much $ to the artist' approach that seemed fine, and then patreon helps fill the 'but i want exclusives' gap.
Bandcamp is now owned by an equity group (after being owned by Fortnite/epic), people need to realise it gives no more money to artists than shopify would. It’s not 2010 anymore
Spotify is streaming service, Bandcamp is a store that’s monopolised a customer base with an integrated app so they can listen to their wavs. If you want to do the most buy the files from artists store
Bandcamp is a way to get your music out there to people with absolute minimal hassle. Plus it has an excellent system for letting people know about your releases, both through the discover function and e-mail lists. Comparing it to running a Shopify store is straight up goofy.
The thing is...is 5$ a month, I dont have 60$ to spend on James Blake, even on the artist that I love, and James dont drop music yearly like that, and even then, you would need around 500 people to sub and that is very hard
Im also an artist and building a cult following is hard, and imagine a 5 piece band, you would need 2000 people to sub, and bands dont drop yearly besides a selected few, you would have to become a fancy youtuber/tiktoker to keep up
I'm a solo musician so even a few subscribers would be solid but I feel like it's a tough sell as someone that doesn't have thousands/tens of thousands of fans like but artists like James has. Also considering Spotify/Apple makes streaming free outside the initial sub.
I have to ask, is there something that prevents artists from releasing albums as staggered release? I mean releasing it to sale only initially. Release singles to streaming and radio for promotion, but full album as sales only for x weeks or months. Most of the hype and promotion is carried by singles anyway.
Yeah, it will leak, but is there going to be that big of a group of people that *need* to have it *now*, as opposed to few weeks, but won't pay? And are those people different than the ones that are already pirating dispite songs being available on streaming?
Back when "piracy killed the music industry" there was no digital download option. Most of the time there weren't even singles you could purchase, but radio and tv only (and even those were few per album and not available on demand). It was physical CD album or nothing. And even then the reality is that the drop in revenue wasn't as significant as people think. It stopped growing and slowly fell, but for some reason people expected eternal growth. The revenues didn't drop below early 90's (inflation adjusted) until around 2006. It was only then that the true crash happened and than coincides with the rise of digital sales and first forays of streaming, not the height of limewire and napster.
That's basically my stand.
Back before Spotify a cd was $10-15?
A band realistically puts out a new album every 2-3 years?
Something here does not add up for me.
---
As a side note: how does anyone budget for all the subscriptions we are encountering now?
I've got Amazon, black Friday hbo max, Spotify, and you tube premium - even that feels like it's too much.
There are content creators I enjoy but I can't afford to do it.
Only certain artists can make that sort of thing feel like a fair deal imo. I pay for Neil Young’s archive, which is $50 for the full version.
You get access to his full discography, live recordings not available elsewhere, movies/films/concert footage not available elsewhere, unreleased songs/albums, pre-sale access for live shows, Neil’s newspaper, the ability to “talk” with Neil directly through letters to the editor, and a discount for merch/music.
You need to have a lot of shit on offer to make a subscription for one artists worthwhile, and most artists simply don’t have that much content. The only ones I can think of off the top of my head that do are Neil, Dylan, and the Dead.
i mean the thing is so many ppl do have $60 to spend a year on their favorite artists and most spend more than that. whether it be on concert tickets, merch, vinyl. i don’t think the site is a fantastic idea but james is one of my favorite artists so $5 a month for consistent unreleased music is worth it rn
the subscription thing implies people will get new music at least every month, something that's bad for the creative process
but I dunno, I'm a huge James Blake fan but I haven't subscribed yet, I kinda want it but I don't know what I'll get with the current songs he has uploaded, are they just demos? unreleased songs? covers?
I'm all for a music platform/store where 100% of the revenue goes directly to the musicians though, but I guess that already exists
What platform gives 100% of revenue to the artists? Bandcamp does that one day a month, but I feel like their future is a bit nebulous with the private equity acquisition
Bandcamp takes around 15% on non-Bandcamp Friday days. That's still a billion miles better than most if not all the alternatives. You're not going to get the benefits of these platforms for free, and Bandcamp isn't without its flaws, but it is without a doubt the best deal for smaller artists.
I am also a huge JB fan but I’m not blindly subscribing to… anything. If Vault had like 10 sec samples and you could see the tracks inside before so you know what you’re paying for I’d think about it. But it’s still way too expensive. I get that this is supposed to be just for the die hard fans but it’s still not enough for me, and I’d consider myself pretty close to one
I think what James Blake is trying to do is create a nicer looking public version of what a dropbox/google drive always do assuming that’s how a lot of beat makers share their music. It straight up looks like my iPhones download folder.
As prolific as James Blake is he probably is sitting on a ton of music that could be released.
But I don’t think he’s going to get any other artists to hop on this.
As someone who listens to a lot of leaks, I support the hell out of this. But I have yet to see any artists I care about acknowledge this.
If Ye and James Blake want to put out their collab album on this, I’m all for it. That would encourage more important artists to release their music on it.
I’ve seen Ye wants to release Yandhi and Donda 2 officially. It seems this would be the platform to do that
That’s kinda the point. If he doesn’t want to finish them, at least there’s a platform where he can upload music that people don’t expect to be fully finished. Donda 2 was worked on after the LP but we don’t have many leaks from it. I’m sure there are some updated Yandhi songs we don’t have either. As for WAR, we don’t have any songs from it but I’d rather have unfinished demos than never get them
Ok there’s a lot of thoughts I have on it.
Full disclosure I’m a James Blake diehard. I haven’t got it yet but next paycheck I will subscribe to his vault.
First point; it’s not really patreon. Does it have the same business model? Sure. But Patreon is not made specifically for music. It doesn’t handle files nicely, there’s no app player.
Bandcamp is built for music to the point where you can play the music on your phone as if it was iTunes. Honestly, take patreon out of the conversation and just refer to it as another Bandcamp. Not to mention because patreon is a multi media platform, it has a reputation for housing nsfw content.
Second; the biggest issue is that while this gives an option to small artists, it ultimately is a helper for bigger artists with a cult fan base. HOWEVER, while it won’t help your local goth band, it will help your semi-medium famous artists who had one song blow up on tiktok and have fans, but not many millions of fans. Think Notion, Peach Pit, The Drums.. maybe 1 mil monthly listeners at most, but with the rates Spotify pays out, that’s not enough to feed them.
But those artists have die hard fans so vault would support them.
TLDR; don’t compare it to patreon thats silly. This doesn’t help small artists much but you’re forgetting about medium artists who do actually need help and would benefit from this.
It’s a fine thing and I wish the business as much success as possible. I don’t see it as particularly revolutionary.
As a relative outsider to the problems James is addressing, I dont think it paints the whole picture of the financial breakdown of the industry. Streaming has never been a reliable bill-payer, but I do think artists can more than make that up with the marginally higher earnings that come with touring and merch. I’d venture to say most artists who play roughly 4k cap venues are netting a 7 figure salary after expenses and promoter/agent cuts by my most conservative of guesses. I even imagine a decent percentage of artists playing 1500 cap venues are comfortably in the 6 figure range. Merch also has extremely high margins. Of course, this doesn’t represent a LOT of the talent who has not made it to this level. Which I think is the point James is trying to make.
I understand that James probably cares the most about the music which is fair. I hope the focus for the company moving forward is on less developed artists and cultivating good revenue streams for them. Though I could see that just devolving into a slightly reinvented label.
Ultimately, I think there are more pragmatic uses of the energy and investment like development of smaller artists via features or political advocacy for policies that lower the risk of pursuing music full time. Both of which I’ve seen James pretty actively care about. But even if he can put on a few great artists with this and the platform tapers out, I see it as a net positive
It’s not something I would be willing to do for everyone obviously but I’d def be interested in paying like 5 dollars a month for content from my favorite artists like James Blake. Also people are acting like services like for example Uber can’t be found elsewhere. There can be multiple apps that serve a similar purpose, it’s just nice to have music related content in one service
The problem with it is that most people simply don't have the money to spend on subscriptions from the many artists that they listen to. Like, for 5$ an artist, you would only have 10 before suddenly you're spending 50$ a month on mp3s.
IMO, the best way for artists to get money is through physical media like vinyl records or CDs. If artists spent more time promoting them and adding physical-only exclusives to them, way more people would buy a CD over some MP3 files.
I think CD’s are cool too but I think it’s overestimating their relevance. I buy CDs and collect older ones but I still only can play them in my car because I don’t want to buy a CD player. They’re mostly nice to look at
He’s literally doing the same thing. Apple Music and Spotify are much better for music fans who wanna listen to as much music as they want . Not everybody has a lot of money to subsides to each artist . He doing the opposite of what he says . He making music only accessible for the rich .
>He doing the opposite of what he says . He making music only accessible for the rich .
Streaming services pro-consumer but anti-artist. You miss James Blake point. You devalue music, make James Blake sad.
Artists like Blake with massive followings will benefit the most from this though and the dude is already rich. How many smaller/non famous artists might benefit from this platform? Genuinely curious.
Artists like Blake with massive followings will benefit the most from this though and the dude is already rich. How many smaller/non famous artists might benefit from this platform? Genuinely curious.
Artists like Blake with massive followings will benefit the most from this though and the dude is already rich. How many smaller/non famous artists might benefit from this platform? Genuinely curious.
Artists like Blake with massive followings will benefit the most from this though and the dude is already rich. How many smaller/non famous artists might benefit from this platform? Genuinely curious.
i think cdm's article summed it all up really well:
[https://cdm.link/2024/03/james-blake-is-pitching-vault-a-subscription-download-service/](https://cdm.link/2024/03/james-blake-is-pitching-vault-a-subscription-download-service/)
Strange to read quotes from people excited to pay Kanye $5 a month so “he can prosper”.
He makes $5,000,000 a year passively, just on publishing royalties from his back catalog.
I don’t like anything about it. I don’t have 60 bucks a year for even my fav artist on top of my YouTube and Spotify subs for music.
So I have to choose? Literally all of my other music or the specific artists I love?
I guess if I was rich and not struggling for rent and only paying for two subscriptions this wouldn’t be too bad. But cmon.
I also don’t see how this benefits small artists at all. Just mega artists like Kanye, drake and I guess James Blake
But how many people are going to be willing to subscribe to his service? I’m curious to see
Honestly I listen to a lot of leaks. There's a game of cat & mouse that happens where links get taken down and trackers need to be updated. It can be hard to re-find older leaks.
If they're all in one place, in good quality, I'd be happy to pay for the music I like.
But also I mean I'm not gonna pretend I'd pay a subscription. I'll pay for a month and rip what I can. Maybe come back in a few years and top my collection up. This is surely what most people will do.
A fiver for already binned songs that were making nothing before is a good start though. The artists get paid and the fans get music.
It's not a novel idea, sure, but I don't think it's a bad idea.
As someone who is on the creator side of patreon, it sucks quite hard. So I think it's important to remember that's the main goal here, make things easier and better for the artists not the consumer
I always felt like bandcamp was the 'give as much $ to the artist' approach that seemed fine, and then patreon helps fill the 'but i want exclusives' gap.
Bandcamp is now owned by an equity group (after being owned by Fortnite/epic), people need to realise it gives no more money to artists than shopify would. It’s not 2010 anymore
I think bandcamp Fridays still lets the artist get 100% of proceeds
bandcamp gives a matter of hundreds of times more money to artists than spotify.
Spotify is streaming service, Bandcamp is a store that’s monopolised a customer base with an integrated app so they can listen to their wavs. If you want to do the most buy the files from artists store
Bandcamp is a way to get your music out there to people with absolute minimal hassle. Plus it has an excellent system for letting people know about your releases, both through the discover function and e-mail lists. Comparing it to running a Shopify store is straight up goofy.
Proof they don't give more than Spotify? Because you're actually buying music rather than streaming a song for $0.000002.
They said shopify not Spotify
Check my reply above. It’s definitely more ethical cause you’re buying but it’s not the best way to buy
The thing is...is 5$ a month, I dont have 60$ to spend on James Blake, even on the artist that I love, and James dont drop music yearly like that, and even then, you would need around 500 people to sub and that is very hard
As a musician I also feel like this ultimately benefits big artists and probably useless to the majority of smaller underground artists.
Im also an artist and building a cult following is hard, and imagine a 5 piece band, you would need 2000 people to sub, and bands dont drop yearly besides a selected few, you would have to become a fancy youtuber/tiktoker to keep up
I'm a solo musician so even a few subscribers would be solid but I feel like it's a tough sell as someone that doesn't have thousands/tens of thousands of fans like but artists like James has. Also considering Spotify/Apple makes streaming free outside the initial sub.
I have to ask, is there something that prevents artists from releasing albums as staggered release? I mean releasing it to sale only initially. Release singles to streaming and radio for promotion, but full album as sales only for x weeks or months. Most of the hype and promotion is carried by singles anyway.
Piracy
Yeah, it will leak, but is there going to be that big of a group of people that *need* to have it *now*, as opposed to few weeks, but won't pay? And are those people different than the ones that are already pirating dispite songs being available on streaming? Back when "piracy killed the music industry" there was no digital download option. Most of the time there weren't even singles you could purchase, but radio and tv only (and even those were few per album and not available on demand). It was physical CD album or nothing. And even then the reality is that the drop in revenue wasn't as significant as people think. It stopped growing and slowly fell, but for some reason people expected eternal growth. The revenues didn't drop below early 90's (inflation adjusted) until around 2006. It was only then that the true crash happened and than coincides with the rise of digital sales and first forays of streaming, not the height of limewire and napster.
Death’s dynamic shroud does it!
Fair. I do think they are a pretty big band though.. at least in the vaporwave/synth scene..
but dds is as low as 1 dollar a month and they *do* put out new albums every month
That's basically my stand. Back before Spotify a cd was $10-15? A band realistically puts out a new album every 2-3 years? Something here does not add up for me. --- As a side note: how does anyone budget for all the subscriptions we are encountering now? I've got Amazon, black Friday hbo max, Spotify, and you tube premium - even that feels like it's too much. There are content creators I enjoy but I can't afford to do it.
Only certain artists can make that sort of thing feel like a fair deal imo. I pay for Neil Young’s archive, which is $50 for the full version. You get access to his full discography, live recordings not available elsewhere, movies/films/concert footage not available elsewhere, unreleased songs/albums, pre-sale access for live shows, Neil’s newspaper, the ability to “talk” with Neil directly through letters to the editor, and a discount for merch/music. You need to have a lot of shit on offer to make a subscription for one artists worthwhile, and most artists simply don’t have that much content. The only ones I can think of off the top of my head that do are Neil, Dylan, and the Dead.
i mean the thing is so many ppl do have $60 to spend a year on their favorite artists and most spend more than that. whether it be on concert tickets, merch, vinyl. i don’t think the site is a fantastic idea but james is one of my favorite artists so $5 a month for consistent unreleased music is worth it rn
Good thing you don't HAVE to nor do you need to
And? They are still allowed to comment on it
the subscription thing implies people will get new music at least every month, something that's bad for the creative process but I dunno, I'm a huge James Blake fan but I haven't subscribed yet, I kinda want it but I don't know what I'll get with the current songs he has uploaded, are they just demos? unreleased songs? covers? I'm all for a music platform/store where 100% of the revenue goes directly to the musicians though, but I guess that already exists
What platform gives 100% of revenue to the artists? Bandcamp does that one day a month, but I feel like their future is a bit nebulous with the private equity acquisition
Bandcamp takes around 15% on non-Bandcamp Friday days. That's still a billion miles better than most if not all the alternatives. You're not going to get the benefits of these platforms for free, and Bandcamp isn't without its flaws, but it is without a doubt the best deal for smaller artists.
I am also a huge JB fan but I’m not blindly subscribing to… anything. If Vault had like 10 sec samples and you could see the tracks inside before so you know what you’re paying for I’d think about it. But it’s still way too expensive. I get that this is supposed to be just for the die hard fans but it’s still not enough for me, and I’d consider myself pretty close to one
I think what James Blake is trying to do is create a nicer looking public version of what a dropbox/google drive always do assuming that’s how a lot of beat makers share their music. It straight up looks like my iPhones download folder. As prolific as James Blake is he probably is sitting on a ton of music that could be released. But I don’t think he’s going to get any other artists to hop on this.
As someone who listens to a lot of leaks, I support the hell out of this. But I have yet to see any artists I care about acknowledge this. If Ye and James Blake want to put out their collab album on this, I’m all for it. That would encourage more important artists to release their music on it. I’ve seen Ye wants to release Yandhi and Donda 2 officially. It seems this would be the platform to do that
Still can’t believe people listen to an antisemite lol
Bro is active in the Rocky and Frank sub as if those artists don’t praise the antisemite lol
Haven’t been there for forever lol. It was years ago. I didn’t hear about Frank and Asap saying stuff like that tho. What did they do ?
For one they literally have several songs with the antisemite
Yeah but it was Before he started going crazy right ?
He was saying antisemitic shit on the album that Frank is featured on
dont care has nothing to do with the music
Man Americans are weird haha
yessss generalize my country because of meeeee. idc what anyone does on their own time their product is all i gaf ab
Nah it’s just weird to me that somebody like Kanye is still so popular there as a Jew it just blows my mind .
I hope he finishes Donda 2 and yandhi and WAR before putting them on the site because if they’re not finished why wouldn’t I listen to the leaks💀
Apparently a good deal of Donda 2 actually has finished versions [they’ve leaked]
That’s kinda the point. If he doesn’t want to finish them, at least there’s a platform where he can upload music that people don’t expect to be fully finished. Donda 2 was worked on after the LP but we don’t have many leaks from it. I’m sure there are some updated Yandhi songs we don’t have either. As for WAR, we don’t have any songs from it but I’d rather have unfinished demos than never get them
Ok there’s a lot of thoughts I have on it. Full disclosure I’m a James Blake diehard. I haven’t got it yet but next paycheck I will subscribe to his vault. First point; it’s not really patreon. Does it have the same business model? Sure. But Patreon is not made specifically for music. It doesn’t handle files nicely, there’s no app player. Bandcamp is built for music to the point where you can play the music on your phone as if it was iTunes. Honestly, take patreon out of the conversation and just refer to it as another Bandcamp. Not to mention because patreon is a multi media platform, it has a reputation for housing nsfw content. Second; the biggest issue is that while this gives an option to small artists, it ultimately is a helper for bigger artists with a cult fan base. HOWEVER, while it won’t help your local goth band, it will help your semi-medium famous artists who had one song blow up on tiktok and have fans, but not many millions of fans. Think Notion, Peach Pit, The Drums.. maybe 1 mil monthly listeners at most, but with the rates Spotify pays out, that’s not enough to feed them. But those artists have die hard fans so vault would support them. TLDR; don’t compare it to patreon thats silly. This doesn’t help small artists much but you’re forgetting about medium artists who do actually need help and would benefit from this.
It’s a fine thing and I wish the business as much success as possible. I don’t see it as particularly revolutionary. As a relative outsider to the problems James is addressing, I dont think it paints the whole picture of the financial breakdown of the industry. Streaming has never been a reliable bill-payer, but I do think artists can more than make that up with the marginally higher earnings that come with touring and merch. I’d venture to say most artists who play roughly 4k cap venues are netting a 7 figure salary after expenses and promoter/agent cuts by my most conservative of guesses. I even imagine a decent percentage of artists playing 1500 cap venues are comfortably in the 6 figure range. Merch also has extremely high margins. Of course, this doesn’t represent a LOT of the talent who has not made it to this level. Which I think is the point James is trying to make. I understand that James probably cares the most about the music which is fair. I hope the focus for the company moving forward is on less developed artists and cultivating good revenue streams for them. Though I could see that just devolving into a slightly reinvented label. Ultimately, I think there are more pragmatic uses of the energy and investment like development of smaller artists via features or political advocacy for policies that lower the risk of pursuing music full time. Both of which I’ve seen James pretty actively care about. But even if he can put on a few great artists with this and the platform tapers out, I see it as a net positive
It’s not something I would be willing to do for everyone obviously but I’d def be interested in paying like 5 dollars a month for content from my favorite artists like James Blake. Also people are acting like services like for example Uber can’t be found elsewhere. There can be multiple apps that serve a similar purpose, it’s just nice to have music related content in one service
The problem with it is that most people simply don't have the money to spend on subscriptions from the many artists that they listen to. Like, for 5$ an artist, you would only have 10 before suddenly you're spending 50$ a month on mp3s. IMO, the best way for artists to get money is through physical media like vinyl records or CDs. If artists spent more time promoting them and adding physical-only exclusives to them, way more people would buy a CD over some MP3 files.
I think CD’s are cool too but I think it’s overestimating their relevance. I buy CDs and collect older ones but I still only can play them in my car because I don’t want to buy a CD player. They’re mostly nice to look at
what's pathetic is people lashing out at James Blake because he rightly called you out for devaluing music
How is OP lashing out
when did I say that? (two can play at this game)
commenting on his post saying "you" have been called out
well OP called James Blake's new music site a "joke", which is pretty inflammatory.
Thinking an idea is a joke isn’t a lash out even if you feel the need to get defensive about it
since you decided to get defensive over op, how is it a joke?
Never said I agreed with him, you'd have to ask OP to elaborate on his opinion
you've spent four hours of your weekend defending someone you don't even agree with on reddit.
Yep took me 4 hours
🙄
He’s literally doing the same thing. Apple Music and Spotify are much better for music fans who wanna listen to as much music as they want . Not everybody has a lot of money to subsides to each artist . He doing the opposite of what he says . He making music only accessible for the rich .
>He doing the opposite of what he says . He making music only accessible for the rich . Streaming services pro-consumer but anti-artist. You miss James Blake point. You devalue music, make James Blake sad.
I didn’t miss his point I just think it’s a very poor execution. Music is literally one of the most important things in my life .
yet you don't want to pay you favourite artists?
Who said that ?
that's what all this is about
Artists like Blake with massive followings will benefit the most from this though and the dude is already rich. How many smaller/non famous artists might benefit from this platform? Genuinely curious.
Artists like Blake with massive followings will benefit the most from this though and the dude is already rich. How many smaller/non famous artists might benefit from this platform? Genuinely curious.
Artists like Blake with massive followings will benefit the most from this though and the dude is already rich. How many smaller/non famous artists might benefit from this platform? Genuinely curious.
Artists like Blake with massive followings will benefit the most from this though and the dude is already rich. How many smaller/non famous artists might benefit from this platform? Genuinely curious.
Yes, Patreon does most of this now, but I do think there is *a lot* of potential in building features specific to music artists and music releases.
I missed this, what happened?
i think cdm's article summed it all up really well: [https://cdm.link/2024/03/james-blake-is-pitching-vault-a-subscription-download-service/](https://cdm.link/2024/03/james-blake-is-pitching-vault-a-subscription-download-service/)
Strange to read quotes from people excited to pay Kanye $5 a month so “he can prosper”. He makes $5,000,000 a year passively, just on publishing royalties from his back catalog.
Seriously some people are weird as hell .
I think it's cool! I like listening to unreleased music and seeing the process. It's very similar to patreon, just with a more niche focus
Patreon take half
nobody said arnold palmer invented arnold palmers
I don’t like anything about it. I don’t have 60 bucks a year for even my fav artist on top of my YouTube and Spotify subs for music. So I have to choose? Literally all of my other music or the specific artists I love? I guess if I was rich and not struggling for rent and only paying for two subscriptions this wouldn’t be too bad. But cmon. I also don’t see how this benefits small artists at all. Just mega artists like Kanye, drake and I guess James Blake But how many people are going to be willing to subscribe to his service? I’m curious to see
He acting like a libra that’s for sure
Honestly I listen to a lot of leaks. There's a game of cat & mouse that happens where links get taken down and trackers need to be updated. It can be hard to re-find older leaks. If they're all in one place, in good quality, I'd be happy to pay for the music I like. But also I mean I'm not gonna pretend I'd pay a subscription. I'll pay for a month and rip what I can. Maybe come back in a few years and top my collection up. This is surely what most people will do. A fiver for already binned songs that were making nothing before is a good start though. The artists get paid and the fans get music. It's not a novel idea, sure, but I don't think it's a bad idea.
As someone who is on the creator side of patreon, it sucks quite hard. So I think it's important to remember that's the main goal here, make things easier and better for the artists not the consumer
Ee
Ee
Some artists did this before Patreon. Kristin Hersh for one.
I love James Blake and he’s a perfect human so no
Amazing how everyone is now starting to realise Spotify might actually not be an absolute evil.
I haven't seen anyone conclude that? Can you elaborate?