Faircamp: Like bandcamp but Free

January 25, 2024 4:18 AM

A beautiful and free platform for Musicians. In the aftermath of Epic selling Bandcamp to Songtradr, Bandcamp has found itself in a place of instability. Half of the company’s employees were laid off post-acquisition, leading many to speculate over the beloved platform’s future. Most importantly, many artists who depended on the service are left looking for alternatives.

Faircamp bills itself as “a static site generator for audio producers”, but an easier way to understand it is this: it’s a simple site that you can host yourself. Install some software on your server, point it at the folder of the music you want to sell, and your site’s pages will build themselves. You can find a great guide for getting started here.

Bandcamp Previously on Metafilter: (pertinent to this particular post)
• "I would have worked at Bandcamp until I retired, happily"
• Another Time at Bandcamp: Bandcamp Acquired by SONGRTADR
• All the other times

posted by Faintdreams (18 comments total)

I am encouraged by this but when it came up before, I checked it out and was indeed discouraged by how much set up it requires. That's what was great about bandcamp - so easy to throw your music on there.

I hope it all gets easier and more fair.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:05 AM on January 25

Yeah, I run a web server with a few sites and do IT admin for a living and I'd still rather have something like Bandcamp or Soundcloud (which I currently use) that hosts it for me. But I'm glad people are developing alternatives at least.
posted by mmoncur at 5:21 AM on January 25 [2 favorites]

This seems to be solving the wrong problems. Very few people are looking for a slightly streamlined way to self-host a music store. Musicians want a site where they can upload some files and start selling an album. Fans want one big site where all their favorite artists are available. Everyone wants recommendations to drive interest from one album to another, both algorithmic (people who liked this album also liked this one) and human (the Bandcamp blogs and roundups). The Fediverse is a good approach for freely distributing messages, but I'm not yet convinced it's right for promoting and selling music.
posted by echo target at 6:49 AM on January 25 [17 favorites]

Yeah, what I want is... almost exactly what Bandcamp has been for years, but treating their workers fairly.

So far none of the supposed alternatives to Bandcamp are that. They're some small subset of what Bandcamp does or they're something else altogether, and all of them lack the main feature: it's where listeners actually go. There's something to be said for centralization.

Also, calling it "free Bandcamp" is kind of misleading. I pay no fees to Bandcamp. I offer my music for free, and if people volunteer to pay it, they take a small cut if it doesn't happen to be Bandcamp Friday. It still pays FAR better than streaming, for an obscure independent musician.
posted by Foosnark at 7:26 AM on January 25 [11 favorites]

Very few people are looking for a slightly streamlined way to self-host a music store. Musicians want a site where they can upload some files and start selling an album. Fans want one big site where all their favorite artists are available.

True. Someone could build a bandcamp competitor, keep it private or as a co-op, never take on investors or do an IPO and not treat it like a piñata made out of money. They could. That would be amazing. But it doesn't exist today AFAIK. And if it did it would probably be more expensive than anyone wants because it wouldn't have speculative investors burning cash or plundering your privacy as a source of revenue.

It's a conflict of what people want and based on the hellscape of the enshittified modern internet what people are going to have to consider if they want to truly own their own creative labor. And I'm not saying that like it's a good thing.

Every platform is a trapdoor waiting to drop because their tech investors got a case of the vapors and as of this morning want Even More Infinite Growth Everywhere Forever. So their X% cut just doubled and they fired half the staff. Or someone like Elon Musk bought the platform as a vanity project and is now running it straight into the ground.

I know the pirate-radio-fuck-the-man aspect of this is what really appeals to me, and that the required devops skills a band would have to learn to use it is a very high bar. It's a solution for some people. It's unrealistic to think of it as a general-purpose solution, even though I want it to be.
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 7:41 AM on January 25 [2 favorites]

I feel like a replacement for Bandcamp could be built by plugging a bunch of AWS blocks together. The main Q would be "how much would it cost" which is always, always, always the issue. Because nothing is free - not the storage, not the streaming, not the virtual servers. And then there is the issue of distributing funds, and dealing with DMCA takedown requests, etc, etc. It is something that feels easy but in reality is like death by 1000 cuts. Which is why Epic bought Bandcamp instead of building their own platform, and why every one of these streaming platforms eventually goes south. People spend a lot of time and effort solving the hard problems and then someone else swoops in and purchases the results of their efforts, with none of the attachment to the work that went into it.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:47 AM on January 25

plugging a bunch of AWS blocks together

When I saw "static web" in the description my first thought ran to S3 static website hosting (cheap storage for a band with like 5-10 albums at most, basically $0). The first 100GB of outbound traffic is $0 every month. The software is $0 OSS. The domain name can be like $20/yr for something not in high demand.

But at first glance this is written in Rust and needs an OS you can install things on, so that's a bust. It looks like it runs its own webserver and is itself a real backend. Not just a static collection of javascript and css. And then there's the legal costs because it's the music industry and if you did manage to attain any success then you also needed a lawyer 10 minutes ago. Basically all the "etc etc"
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 7:59 AM on January 25 [2 favorites]

It looks like it runs its own webserver and is itself a real backend. Not just a static collection of javascript and css.

But! It offers no media management option. You can't upload or organize music. You have to do that by putting songs in specific directories and making sure their tagging is correct. I know that good administrative interfaces are hard and usually come last, but that seems like it is part and parcel of making this truly useful to things like labels, which IMO are the most likely adopters of this kind of tech.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:05 AM on January 25 [1 favorite]

Fans want one big site where all their favorite artists are available.

I have bookmarked the radio free fedi community faircamp and the Faircamp Webring Directory and will certainly be keeping an eye on those to see what turns up there. With any luck I'll discover some completely new favourite artists.
posted by flabdablet at 8:12 AM on January 25 [2 favorites]

Same as some impressions above. I need fewer barriers to sharing my music, and this is too high a bar for me, unfortunately.
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:17 AM on January 25

discouraged by how much set up it requires.

Looks like the fedi community is willing to do most of the work for you:
"All you need to do is provide some flac or wav files, cover art, artist links and release info as plain text to us and we have a process to handle all the file movement and the faircamp config. It is quite not painful."

(h/t to flabdablet for finding this.)
posted by Hardcore Poser at 9:04 AM on January 25 [2 favorites]

I've said this in another spot, but I am really flabbergasted at why none of the wealthy supposedly progressive musicians are doing this type of thing, setting up a bandcamp-like co-op for musicians. It just makes so much sense and would remove so much of the power from the record labels and give it to musicians, so why isn't it being done?

I mean, I guess the answer to that rhetorical question is because those supposedly progressive musicians aren't actually that progressive, but come ON. Someone has to be!
posted by urbanlenny at 9:11 AM on January 25 [5 favorites]

Hmmm. It sounds plausible. Maybe I'll try with one of my side projects and see how it is.
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:28 AM on January 25 [1 favorite]

“It is quite not painful.”

Flashbacks to directions for installing Linux in the aughts.

I say go for it! But the problem of consolidating around paying a dude to run your website has definitely proven to be the dudes involved, not the idea that you shouldn’t run your own server.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:56 AM on January 25 [3 favorites]

I am really flabbergasted at why none of the wealthy supposedly progressive musicians are doing this type of thing, setting up a bandcamp-like co-op for musicians. It just makes so much sense and would remove so much of the power from the record labels and give it to musicians, so why isn't it being done?

There have only ever been a handful of sites that do this - mp3.com, MySpace, Soundcloud and Bandcamp. The reason is because it is extremely costly and difficult, not to mention opening whoever runs it to lots of legal entanglements. I just clicked around radio free fedi and the second thing I found was a bunch of poorly-done mashups that are 100% in violation of the DMCA. It feels like just renting space in a mall and letting your friends hock their CDs, but it very much is not.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:30 AM on January 25 [3 favorites]

speaking of what fans want: is there a thing like criterion collection but based around studio producers or audio artists ?
posted by MonsieurPEB at 11:32 AM on January 25

monsieurPB,

Steve Hoffman was a prolific remaster of critically acclaimed albums (primary rock and roll) and the forums named after him have members that discuss the minutia of remasters, differences between releases of albums, and music in general.

There are also plenty of labels out there specifically dedicated to do re-releases of past albums but those tend to be for albums that were released at very small numbers originally and arent just about highlighting "classic" releases like criterion does.

there are also plenty of remasters out there that are subjectively worse than the original release.
posted by fizzix at 12:28 PM on January 25

Along similar lines - and on-topic for this specific discussion - several labels that reissue albums are on Bandcamp. The staff often write about recent reissues. In fact, the ability of staff to continue writing these kinds of summaries and reviews is something that many of us worry about now that the staff has been cut so significantly...
posted by ElKevbo at 12:55 PM on January 25