Bandcamp Daily

August 24, 2016 6:29 AM

According to the NYT, Bandcamp has "hired a smart staff to create about 20 times the amount of editorial content that had been there previously, writing about music that had just been posted as well as parts of its deep and woolly catalog, in a feature called “Bandcamp Daily.”"

Many articles read like a decent metafilter FPP, exploring the roots of movements and tieing divergent ideas together:

Music of the Spectacle: Alienation, Irony and the Politics of Vaporwave

9 Artists to Check Out at the 2016 Afropunk Festival

The Enduring Influence of H.P. Lovecraft on Extreme Music

There are also scores of album reviews, artist spotlights, and label profiles

posted by rebent (24 comments total)

bancamp, where mods go to learn how to use the hammer...
posted by ennui.bz at 6:45 AM on August 24, 2016 [5 favorites]

haha whoops - where's the edit for FPPs?
posted by rebent at 6:48 AM on August 24, 2016

There's a really great article to be written about Lovecraft's influence on metal, but that's not it. I realize the point is to drive traffic and attention to bands on Bandcamp (and I'm not knocking Bandcamp. I use it a lot, and I like it.), but not at least mentioning bands like Morbid Angel or High on Fire (Their last album was called Luminiferous for God's sake. Where do you think Matt Pike got that ridiculous word?) seems kinda lazy.
posted by dortmunder at 6:51 AM on August 24, 2016

I'm really curious how this is going to play out. Fundamentally bandcamp is a music delivery service, so their editorial voice is going to have to be very careful with real or perceived criticism to avoid angering their community. They'll have to stay relentlessly positive for this to work. (Which might be a good thing; one of the reasons I've never been able to read music press is the constant hateposing.)
posted by phooky at 6:58 AM on August 24, 2016

Mod note: One time, at bancamp, I...fixed your typo.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:14 AM on August 24, 2016 [16 favorites]

There are very, very good people at Bandcamp Daily. J. Edward Keyes used to run the consistently excellent, longform-focused Wondering Sound. Jes Skolnik has been on my radar for the past few years as a brilliant writer on music, culture, and feminism (also just a swell person all around). This is something you're going to want to read.
posted by naju at 7:58 AM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

I don't think they so much have to be relentlessly positive as much as effectively descriptive and acknowledging differences of perspective. Easy enough to avoid trying to write about the very worst stuff since they have so much material on hand. If they focus more on interesting music, or music that has some hook they can write about, thematic or sonic similarities to other more well known songs for example, then the site and the listeners could benefit without having to hedge on their opinions.
posted by gusottertrout at 8:01 AM on August 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

Was into the "What's Your Day Job?" piece yesterday on Terence Hannum of Locrian. A guy who has a wife and 2 kids, multiple notable bands, a novella he just published, a full time academic position, and is an accomplished visual artist and manages to handle all of it without any trade-offs.
posted by naju at 8:01 AM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

Or in other words, don't tell people what to like, just tell them what it is. That's the real skill in criticism anyway.
posted by gusottertrout at 8:04 AM on August 24, 2016 [6 favorites]

not at least mentioning bands like Morbid Angel or High on Fire (Their last album was called Luminiferous for God's sake. Where do you think Matt Pike got that ridiculous word?) seems kinda lazy.

They found and spoke to 13 interesting bands influenced by Lovecraft for this piece, many of whom seem fairly under the radar. It sounds like you wanted something different from what the article actually was.
posted by naju at 8:12 AM on August 24, 2016 [4 favorites]

This one time, on MetaFilter...
posted by dances with hamsters at 8:14 AM on August 24, 2016

Their last album was called Luminiferous for God's sake. Where do you think Matt Pike got that ridiculous word?

Usage of the word luminiferous peaked the year HP Lovecraft was born so quite likely a lot of places that were not his writing
posted by beerperson at 8:26 AM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yeah, most likely that HoF reference is to the cosmological theory of Luminiferous Aether. That's the main thing that popped in my head at least...
posted by FatherDagon at 9:14 AM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

inspired
posted by judson at 9:58 AM on August 24, 2016

I don't think it's going to be possible to decide where the luminiferous reference came from. The eponymous song's lyrics employ a variety of obtuse imagery, mostly apparently revolving around concepts of celestial judgement and punishment, and ending

"Block the pineal essence
Seeing luminiferous
Hammer, anvil, judge of torment
Six billion humans doomed
Luminiferous, souls of stardust
Reverence four hundred and thirty two
Evolution virus, once inside us
Injection chip so new
If we relied on reptoid kindness
I think we're all just screwed"

But I am not skilled in metal lyric analysis, so there could be coded references to 19th century physics in there.
posted by Devonian at 10:05 AM on August 24, 2016

Or in other words, don't tell people what to like, just tell them what it is. That's the real skill in criticism anyway.

And yet, this is so damn far away from what, say, Pitchfork does that one wonders if the real skill in criticism is what will make an acclaimed source of it.
posted by wildblueyonder at 11:06 AM on August 24, 2016

Carl Wilson (music critic & author of Let’s Talk About Love) had a good article on Toronto’s noise-rock scene
posted by Going To Maine at 12:08 PM on August 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

I love Bandcamp so very much, for a whole host of reasons. Easy to set up for fan and artist, beautiful clean design, well-integrated (yet unobtrusive) social media elements, no need to register or deal with ads to listen or buy music, creative control remains entirely with the artist, they take only 15%...I could go on and on. I spent years trying to convince all my favorite dark ambient musicians to sign up - and finally, many have done so. When Bandcamp originally put out the call for freelance writers this summer, I applied to write about dark ambient music for them, but received no response to my pitch. Nonetheless, my love for Bandcamp remains unsullied - I'm still a die-hard Bandcamp "evangelist" in the dark ambient scene - and that NYT article does a good job of explaining why.
posted by velvet winter at 3:33 PM on August 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

And yet, this is so damn far away from what, say, Pitchfork does that one wonders if the real skill in criticism is what will make an acclaimed source of it.

No, you're right, it isn't really. Description and elucidation are what makes criticism valuable, what makes reviewers popular are entertainment value and authorial attitude.

People like reading reviews that are more fun than useful, snarky or combative say, where they can get a chuckle or get indignant at the reviewers writing or point of view. It isn't to deny that there is some functional utility in using ratings as a purchasing or listening guide, that can be quick and easy if you tend to agree with the reviewer's taste, but that isn't the only way to influence taste, and isn't necessarily the best way either if there are good critics around who can go into the history of the piece and the experience it invokes. Less immediate pleasure, but more long term benefit.
posted by gusottertrout at 5:03 PM on August 24, 2016

I really want to like this as I'm a huge fan of bandcamp, but the blog-like layout is shitting me to tears. It presupposes that I want to read every entry, chronologically. But what if, say, I'm mostly interested in electronic music, and I only want to read entries pertaining to that? Great idea, but unfortunately:

1) The tags are absolute ad hoc shite - what is the point of having just a band name if I've never heard of the band before?? It tells me nothing. Some posts have genre added and lots of tags. Some are garbage with like three tags. I can't believe this has been written by journalists who have allegedly existed online for some time.

2) Doesn't matter - no one would be dumb enough to have post titles that don't actually give any information, like "Band of the day: Calliope" would they? Oh. They totally do for about half the posts.

3) Nevermind, surely the sidebar menus wouldn't just be a hard-limited, chronological list of posts such that you might have seen on Blogger in 2004? Oh they totally are! And guess what, if you attempt to expand it, it just takes you back to the motherf@#$ing blog home page.

4) What about Bandcamp's homepage itself? It's usually more information dense? Ahhhh sweet sweet tiles. The titles still are of course, mostly rubbish, but at least I can read a lot quickly, and there's even a click-to-expand post. THANK YOU. Oh. Oh wait. If you click to expand more than once I end up back at the goddamn stupid blog homepage again.

Far out. Some basic online communication skills would make this about a zillion times more useable. The content is almost irrelevant when it's so hard to get to the content I want - a perennial issue with bandcamp when it's filled with a lot of bad music unfortunately.
posted by smoke at 5:22 PM on August 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

I like bandcamp, it's introduced me to a good bit of good music. But I really didn't need this. On the other hand, who else is doing criticism well these days? Pitchfork? Rolling Stone?
posted by eclectist at 12:01 PM on August 25, 2016

Oddly enough, MTV News has assembled a really damn good team of critics.
posted by naju at 1:41 PM on August 25, 2016

What sort of criticism do you want? FACT, DiS, and Resident Advisor all review new music coming from different groups, and certainly cater to different styles. Heck, I like the Ongakubaka blog just because it recommends good psych rock stuff that I can check out on Bandcamp for cheap. But if you’re looking for criticism that will give you deep insight into the particular cultural relevance of different types of music and/or help you stay on trend with the Billboard Hot 100, I have no idea. Pitchfork still provides some of that, but it exists in a weird parallel with the reviews. So they’ll say, cover the grammies in their news section but evince no desire in actually reviewing the artists who are either nominated or performing
posted by Going To Maine at 3:54 PM on August 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

Oh cool, there's a profile on Japanese indie label flau, an absolule favorite of mine.
posted by naju at 9:37 PM on August 25, 2016