A sign of a new phase came early this summer. Bandcamp 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.”
A June article surveyed the current rock scene in Bangkok, with embedded musical examples of six different bands. Before, those bands had just made their records available on the site. You knew about the scene, or you randomly found your way to them, or more likely, you didn’t; Mr. Diamond told me that the company has never spent money on promotion. Now those bands are being organized, in-house, by employees with knowledge and taste, into history. My own reaction, not just as a fan of specific bands but as a fan of the weirdly oceanic Bandcamp experience, is perfectly divided: grateful and wary.
The Bangkok piece was soon followed by an interview with the young American singer-songwriter Julien Baker, in which she picked her favorite “Bandcamp bands.” (They were passionate fledglings, like her; they included Our Lady, Hodera and Ratboys, all new to me.) That piece, too, included streamable tracks. Very helpful. But: Bandcamp bands? Are there such things?
What seems like a great bazaar from a distance can become a much more focused and private experience up close, especially when you narrow down your search to a single genre. When I’m looking through the site’s pages for individual punk bands, Bandcamp suddenly becomes more like a box of punk 45s, individually sleeved and glued, at the foot of a driveway on a rural route, with a pay-what-you-wish sign and a record player. (An invisible hand replenishes the box every day.)
The extreme neutrality of the experience has been part of the attraction, and part of the reason I have spent so much time looking. Punk bands are skeptical about being objectified, categorized, rated; so am I. Looking without help was how I first found G.L.O.S.S., the trans and queer punk band from Olympia, Wash., which recently had a best seller on the site with its EP “Trans Night of Revenge.” And Torso and Replica, from Oakland, Calif.; and JJ Doll, from Brooklyn; and Good Throb, from London; and on and on. But now there are experts to guide me. I don’t see the isolated box of 45s anymore. Now I see something with a cultural weight and aura, something — I do not like this word — curated.
Bandcamp has an independent-artist identity because of practicalities: Independent artists from web-centered subcultures need it most. Punk is one of them, but some of the most consistently high-selling music on the site is video game soundtrack music, like the one for the game Undertale; or the ambient hipster kitsch of about five years ago known as vaporwave. Some indie-rock artists, like Car Seat Headrest and Sufjan Stevens, have been able to grow careers with Bandcamp.
Part of Bandcamp’s attraction has been the far-flungness of some of the do-it-yourself creators who upload music to it. The online magazine Fact, since early 2014, has been publishing monthly columns by the writers Laurent Fintoni and Miles Bowe of the best discoveries on Bandcamp, and they’ve been great: sightings in the wild, basically. (A hip-hop record by Prince Metropolis Known that included surreal takedowns of Bill O’Reilly. An album of water-themed field recordings and found sounds by a Belgian artist named Dolphins Into the Future. Et cetera, forever.)
The columns weren’t looking for influence or significance; they were looking for strangeness and surprise. Bandcamp’s own editorial framing of the music it hosts tends to be more serious, and it’s done, presumably, with some knowledge of what sells and what doesn’t.
Are my favorite punk bands now Bandcamp bands? Are they suddenly wanting to conform to a kind of Bandcamp aesthetic? I don’t think so. Not yet. But if that does happen, something might be lost — a sense of these bands defining themselves as they want to, which is sort of the Bandcamp promise in the first place. People can use help navigating the riches of Bandcamp. But its estimable editorial project opens an interesting question: When does help turn into tastemaking?
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