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With Spotify Wrapped hype dying down, I’ve had a chance to think about my music consumption habits over the last year – I listened to more than 48,000 minutes of music this year on Spotify alone, accounting for about 14% of my waking hours.
That’s a lot of time, and a lot of streams, but as we’ve all come to know that doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of money making it to artists’ pockets. How could it? I pay the equivalent of $14 each month for my Spotify premium membership, and at a going rate of about 800 streams per month, there’s only space for a penny or two per play at the very most.
According to Ditto Music, Spotify pays out a maximum of $0.005 per stream. I’m not the first person to find this a touch unfair – we’ve seen calls for boycotts from the likes of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, while others like the late Prince have had their discographies pulled (though this was later restored.)
However, as lopsided as I find Spotify’s payout mechanism, I can’t stay mad at consumers for taking a good deal. Spotify is cheap, easy to use, and one of the most widely supported apps in modern tech history, found on smartphones, tablets, browsers, TVs, smart speakers, cars, and even fridges.
An album purchased for $10 could be worth more than weeks or even months of streams
Luckily, there is an alternative: Bandcamp.
For those not familiar, Bandcamp is an online music storefront with some streaming features that primarily serves as a way for artists to distribute their music at a fairer price. The site is owned by Songtradr, a massive music licensing company, so it’s not fully ‘independent’, but nevertheless offers artists a 85/15 revenue split in the artist’s favor for digital music. This means an album purchased for $10 could be worth more than weeks or even months of an individual listener’s streams.
I started using Bandcamp years ago as a way to seek out independent artists and collect higher quality versions of some of my favourite underground albums, and have since switched to using it to source tracks for DJing. But in 2025 I’ll be making an effort to use Bandcamp more for casual listening and genre deep-dives, as well as a source of new material.
Top tips for starting out on Bandcamp
1. Make a free account
Bandcamp allows users to make free fan and artists accounts to purchase and upload music. You can also link different accounts under one email address, meaning you can keep your collections separate by genre or era if you like.
2. Scroll down to the digging area
Scrolling down through the homepage reveals a cluster of genre tags. Clicking one will take you to the search area, where you can look through best sellers and new releases alike. You can preview each release’s standout track, or click on them to go to the artist’s page.
3. Start your collection
Once you’ve found some releases you’re grooving to, head to the checkout to add them to your collection. You’ll get instant access to unlimited streaming, the ability to download in various formats (including lossless WAV and FLAC), and the knowledge that your money has (mostly) gone straight to the artists who made the music.
We’ve come to a point where digital media has a very low monetary value, which affects its perceived value too. Listening to 800 songs a month costs $14, playing 800 hours of a discounted video game costs $10, and watching 800 hours of video on YouTube costs nothing at all. This is often linked to a lack of tangibility, of physicality. Yet speaking from experience, even having a digital copy of an album or song in your purchased collection offers a sense of investment that is simply missing from streaming. It makes you want to connect with the music, to find the value in your purchase.
For reference, Bandcamp’s home page proudly displays that fans have paid artists $1.42 billion since the site’s launch in 2007.
There are other benefits to buying on Bandcamp too – the site only allows artists to upload lossless files, so you know you’re getting a high-quality version of whichever tune you’re downloading. I’m no audiophile – I previously wrote about my affinity for listening through phone speakers – but if you do want to get a nice set of speakers or headphones out, an album downloaded from Bandcamp will smoke anything on Spotify in terms of quality.
And, as my use of Bandcamp tracks for DJing implies, you can actually do what you like with the music: put it on any device, remix it with music software, stick it on a USB and play it through some decks. Spotify and apps like it relegate the listening experience to one place, but Bandcamp actively encourages you to think bigger.
If you do want to get a nice set of speakers or headphones out, an album downloaded from Bandcamp will smoke anything on Spotify in terms of quality
There’s something to be said also about escaping the algorithm apocalypse. Spotify’s recommendation algorithms are so accurate and so powerful that even when I go looking for new music, I often feel like I find subtle variations of what I already know. Bandcamp’s search feature has three main tabs – best-selling, new releases, and surprise me, the latter seemingly combining the first two.
I’ve found some truly bizarre and truly excellent music with this combo of choices – especially as there are plenty of smaller and more mysterious artists on Bandcamp that you’ll find nowhere else. My latest obsession is the German techno auteur Skee Mask, who pulled his discography from Spotify years ago for political reasons.
If I’d never stepped onto Bandcamp there’s a chance I’d never have heard Skee’s uniquely ethereal take on dance music, or followed him to a live show in London last month. It certainly feels like a much more organic progression than clicking a sponsored playlist on Spotify’s landing page.
That all said, I probably won’t be ditching Spotify any time soon. Bandcamp is still missing a lot of mainstream heavy hitters, artists like Beyonce or Kendrick Lamar who make enough from standard distribution. Spotify remains the most cost-effective way to build daily playlists and share music with friends – building a Bandcamp collection can quickly become an expensive endeavour, and there’s no reselling a digital collection like you can with CDs or vinyl.
Regardless, I see Bandcamp as a champion of music’s value in an era of digital overload, and I’m happy to make it the center of my 2025 tech resolution. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is worth more than $7 billion; he is richer than any musician in history. Let me say that again: no musician has ever made as much money as the CEO of Spotify. I’m not calling for a wholesale boycott, as the consumer can’t be blamed for taking a good deal, but I do feel that as a lover of music there’s some pride to be taken in shifting money away from the pockets of billionaires and towards the artists themselves.
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