Bandcamp Friday Fatigue
Maybe a monthly incentive to promote wares isn't a bad thing since I'm so bad at it, but boy are my arms tired
(Or check out the most recent thing we put out; a pay-what-you-want tribute to the now-closed Cohost. 6 songs written for Cohost Compost songwriting competitions, each song done in less than 2 hours)
Anyway, blog post continues now
For the last few years I've gone back and forth on Bandcamp Friday.
Hell, earlier this week I wrote about looking at alternatives to the platform due to corporate ownership change - but to step back even further than that, I (and many other musicians) have experienced a bit of 'Bandcamp Friday fatigue'.
It goes like this:
👍 You have new music to release, but if you wait a few more weeks you'll have Bandcamp Friday where you can potentially make a higher percentage of sales👎 Oh but then you're suddenly up against literally every other musician on the planet using the platform to push specials, drop singles
👍 Well that's fine, because your fans or people who are interested in your work will see your notification about the new release and get to it!
👎 Oh wait, those same fans follow other artists on the platform and their email box is a literal WALL of 'Bandcamp Friday' reminders, release notifications, and updates.
This is just existing as an artist though - there's nothing inherently abnormal here, but it starts to feel like a weird dance after the first 3-4 of these...and today's addition is probably about the 15th? (I could do the math on this but I'm not going to)
What happens next is the 'aww man, I don't have anything to release on Bandcamp Friday and I feel weird about promoting old stuff' mentality. I've felt it, I've had this conversation with at least twelve other artists about it, which speaks to a larger problem with the modern music industry that isn't even explicitly Bandcamp's fault, but these monthly events are pulling it center-stage:
Early in the 2010's, I was trying to keep up with all of the digital marketing trends for music since I was running a DIY band and trying to make the most of us all having day jobs, and a through-line everyone industry-side kept hammering was that the release of something was the most important it could ever be; after it was out, there were diminishing returns on hype and sales.
When you think about songs from 5-6 (or even 20+) years ago getting sudden resurgences because of tiktok videos or soundtrack placement - that is kind of the exception, and the mentality that a record or a song put out a month, two months, a year, etc ago aren't valuable anymore has stuck with a LOT of bands. Pair this with the vile, weapons manufacturer-donating, racist-platforming human-shaped garbage that runs Spotify giving interviews about how artists have to constantly release new music all of the time in order to survive (because of a streaming system he profits off of having more content all the time), and you have an ecosystem designed to make us devalue our released materials.1
It's exhausting. You worked really hard on a record that came out a few years ago and realistically speaking, there are more music fans on the fucking planet who haven't heard it than have, so - why shouldn't you highlight it? A song from 2012 could be a kid born in 2011's favorite song in 2026. It's retro now. Cool.
Anyway, we did this record across 2018. I'm super proud of it. You may not have heard it, give it a listen?
Especially in a digital-only world where we don't transport cardboard boxes full of CDs with us every time we move. Shoutouts to everyone selling their old stock.↩