Oh No, Not Another Music Community!

Posted byEthan DiamondPosted inUncategorizedTags:

Back when we first started working on Bandcamp, we had no desire to create another online music community. Like many fans, we were turned off by the way the noise in those communities often drowned out the thing that matters most: the music. So we decided instead to focus on being the best possible home for that music, setting aside many of the social features that seemed mandatory for any consumer internet startup at the time.

Apparently a lot of you were also suffering from thanks-for-the-add fatigue, because over the past year and a half, artist signups have steadily accelerated, and today we host a large and diverse pool of music. But every Bandcamp-powered site is still an island, and not surprisingly, one of the most frequent questions we now get is “How do I find out about other [industrial mariachi | new-age horrorcore | death ragtime | etc] artists on Bandcamp?”

When there were just a few hundred artists using the system, our answer was “Why on earth do you care?” When there were a few thousand, it was, “Uh, use Google?” But by the time there were tens of thousands, it was clear we were neglecting a big opportunity: the opportunity to leverage the power of every individual artist’s site to help fans discover new music — your music.

So we sat down and pondered whether there was a way to seize that opportunity without completely screwing up the good thing we had going. Could we somehow activate this large, dormant community while keeping the integrity of every Bandcamp site intact? We think the answer is an emphatic YES, but we’ll describe how it works, and then you can decide for yourself and let us know.

Starting today, you can specify your genre and location, and tag up your tracks and albums with relevant keywords, and fans can browse all the music on Bandcamp by those attributes. You set genre and location in the Account Details section of your Profile page, right here:

Note that location is geocoded, meaning every artist on Bandcamp will have a real location. Stuff like “Mars,” “stepdad’s garage,” “back of beyond,” and “the ionosphere” is fun and all, but only puts you at a disadvantage in terms of fan discovery. So here you enter your city, state, province or country (even misspellings are AOK), and we map that to a discrete, browsable location.

Tags are set on the individual edit pages for both tracks and albums, here:

and finally those tags are displayed on your track and album pages, just below your cover art, here:

When a fan clicks one of those tags, they’re taken to its page, where we show other music by you with that tag, as well as a sortable list of music across the system with that tag:

By clicking the “browse all tags” link, fans can browse by popular tags and locations, like this:

And that’s about it. Pretty simple and obvious really, but we think it has the potential to build a community in the best possible sense of the word, where every individual contributes to its strength. It won’t, of course, be built overnight. At the time of this writing, there are exactly zero tags in the system, but with your help (and the help of the screaming yellow nag-bar that you’ll see next time you log in), it shouldn’t be long before the solitary goal of these new features is realized: make every artist on Bandcamp more successful, by making it easier for fans to find you.

P.S. Search is coming soon.

P.P.S. If you’re one of the many generous artists who have recently released Haiti relief fundraising records, please tag your album with “Haiti relief” and we’ll promote the centralized tag page for it shortly.

62 thoughts on “Oh No, Not Another Music Community!”

  1. Already having a few issues with my tags doubling up, for some reason…?

    and, I know it’s purely an aesthetic concern, but any chance they could appear entirely in lowercase or entirely in caps?

  2. The double tag issue is now fixed, thanks for the report Robin.

    Case doesn’t matter in tags currently, but whoever enters the tag first gets to decide how it’s capitalized. It occurs to us that that’s kind of weird, too, so we’re working on fixing that.

    ~Neal (a Bandcamp guy)

  4. sounds great! good idea! for my music it will be a challenge because my stuff doesn’t fall neatly into established genres. and that leads me to some questions. are the tags fields validated against a list of set genres? Or can people put anything they want? I wonder if people will put in other artists in their tags. You know… things like “Beatles” and “Stevie Wonder”. If you like such-and-such artist, then you’ll like us. great work. You guys are awesome. Looking forward to the search function too.

    best
    Reuben

  6. From the point of view of someone who is very involved in a local music community (both fan and musician), the addition of location tags is incredibly helpful. Thanks a lot guys! I’m excited for the search as well.

  8. Great update! I was days away from asking about genres, however, I’d sure love to be able to set genre at the track level, instead of the artist level.

    Rather, I think the ability to edit both might be best.

    Just speaking freely here, but if you’re going to wipe out ID3 data completely, it seems you should also support the ability to edit it in its entirety.

    Anyway, the Bandcamp platform is fantastic and I’m looking forward to seeing it evolve.

  10. Sounds like a sensible plan – a nod to connecting bands without add frenzy.

    However, I’m bitterly disappointed that Heino doesn’t really have a bandcamp page. I think the internet is crying out for a website where you can stream all his music. Total legend.

  12. The tag concept is a super idea!! Especially if it can be used for googling songs. One quick observation, tags seem to be case-sensitive at the moment. I think it will be less anarchical to make them case-insensitive.

  16. My friend Paul and I had emailed you guys online yesterday. Preemptive email replies, you guys rock.

  18. So one thing that bugs about tags in general is I make drum and bass so should I tag it:
    drumandbass
    drumnbass
    drum&bass
    drum and bass
    dnb
    d&b
    d&b

    Ideas anyone?

  19. Rupert, regarding the old “drum and bass or drum-n-bass or drummondbase” issue, we added auto-complete of tags as you type in hopes that people would see what others have already used and go along with that. The list that you get as you type is sorted by popularity, so for example, right now I can see that “Drum & Bass” is the most popular variation on your tag by just typing “dru” into the tag editing field.

    We didn’t want to be too constraining about what you could enter, but we also wanted to encourage people to use existing tags when appropriate.

    ~Neal (a Bandcamp guy)

  20. Thanks for this! It’s also great that when I google my band’s name, it appears third on google search, and I’ve been on bandcamp only a few months.

    The thanks-for-the-add thing has become really annoying. Hope you keep things this way.

    regards,
    moonlight horses

  21. thanks a lot – and also thanks for ur great site, i love bandcamp, even more than myspace etc.

    bandcamp rocks !!

    thanks for ur work !!

  23. i don’t like it. i think people should have to browse the good ol’ fashioned way, by the album cover art. Hot chicks in bathing suits always get me. Seriously though, i liked it being almost secret and some time & effort having to be put in to search. i think it’s going to clutter up the sleek/streamlined graphic design that i love you for.
    i’ll cave in and participate but i won’t be happy about it.

  27. I do have one issue that I hope one of you would answer: What if an artist is a group whose members live in different places around the country, or even the world? For example, what if the guitarist is from Essex, England, and the bassist is from New York City, and the Drummer is from Japan and the singer lives in Calgary? How will you geocode the location if the band is not in one location? I think the “location” should be user-entered, or at the very least, not limited to one location.

  28. Thanks so much BC! It is such a pleasure interacting with your platform, and I just wanted to pass along how sincerely appreciated it is in so many different ways.

    Keep tuning in to the highest hopes of our music making “community” and we’ll keep on making kick ass music.

    Peace.

  30. hi,

    though i agree that these tags are a wonderful way to be found and so indeed can and will be very helpful, i am not so fond however of their integration in the site design…imho they really spoil the very slick site u guys presented me…it would be very thoughtful to somehow make them less ‘in ur face’, more subtle, somewhere at the bottom for example and/or smaller,…

    dunno, just a big BC fan being honest here…

  31. this new development is super! and someone may have already mentioned this, but it’d be cool if there was a ‘radio player’ page of sorts where we could listen to random tracks from artists of a selected genre… perhaps each artist could submit a track or two from their library (their best tracks hopefully 😉 to be apart of the radio queue… just thinkn’…

  32. I second what Offthesky is saying. Some top lists would be cool. Geological and by tag and/ or genre. … and how about user profiles ? Be the last.fm of independent music!! 🙂

  34. Pingback: Music Data Confessions of a Tagaholic

  37. This is great news!

    I see opportunity in Bandcamp becoming the “source” for musicians and fans. This is such a great site, and I hope this will lead to the end of MySpace controlling streaming music by artist.

    Great work guys, keep pushing the product, but don’t lose the ease of functionality and UI.

    Andy

  38. Tags is a great idea, but you’re right we don’t need another Myspace/Facebook-type community and the thing that attracts me most about Bandcamp is how all the features are centered around the most important thing which is the music.

    Even with suggestions like the radio – there’s already last.fm, which is already very good.

    Keep up the good work with Bandcamp. Very impressed with it.

  39. This is great, and I think it makes a lot of sense. I will echo what someone up above noted, which is that I would love to be able to tag at both the artist level and the album level (probably not at the track level). I work in a number of different genres, so one album might not be the same genre as another. I hope you’ll consider it so that I could tag more broadly at the artist level and then more specifically for the albums. I realize it complicates things, but otherwise I’ll have to include quite a number of tags at the artist level, and people who are browsing may end up trying an album they’re not looking for, instead of the one they might like.

    Hope those thoughts make sense. Thanks for the continued great work!

  42. Damn, you guys are ON TOP of it! This was exactly the latest thing I was wondering about. I was recently browsing through some bandcamp artists (alphabetically) and seeing all this awesome music (which is mostly available for FREE). Seemed sort of like a waste not to give people an avenue to browse it (more easily). But then I realized that bandcamp is clearly aimed at bands (as a tool) and not aimed at “fans”. I’m glad you’re taking it slow with testing. Turning this into a ‘myspace music’ could be deadly. Just look at myspace now.

  44. Hey guys – great work with the service.

    Just a quick thought though – If you add your location as London, UK it automatically sets it as Westminster, London, UK.

    I doubt there will be many bands from Westminster… London is the city you mean.

  45. Tim,
    Thanks for the heads-up; that must be an oddity in the location lookup code. I’ll check into it. Rest assured that we are slightly more intelligent about how it’s displayed on your music pages, though, and it correctly shows “London.”

  47. Great new features! Bandcamp is actually a big reason I want to record my material. I already recommend it to every fellow musician that asks me about band promotion / music hosting.

    Congratulations on the outstanding service.

  48. The auto-complete feature is good for creating a genre taxonomy, but it’s a little overzealous. I was the first person to identify as simply ‘country’, but the auto-complete really, really wanted to change that to ‘country rap’. Not exactly the same thing.

  49. I just really like country rap and am trying to encourage bands to go in that direction.

    j/k seth. It was actually a really stupid bug in my code, which is now fixed. Thanks for pointing it out.

  50. fantastic and innovative use of tags. goes beyond the old/stole id3 world and into the modern world of tagging.

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