Recommended Albums

Posted byEthan DiamondPosted inUncategorizedTags:

Our favorite part of Filter Magazine is the band interview section in the front. Not for the interviews themselves (though those are plenty good), but for the little section at the bottom, where the band tells you about three albums that they love. It’s a reliable source of new discoveries, and each band’s tweet-length blurbs about their favorite records are always interesting and fun to read:

We see artists doing more or less the same thing on Bandcamp all the time. Danny B recommended Laura Shigihara, for example, but the link was in his liner notes where it was pretty easy to miss. Amanda Palmer recommended Tristan Allen, but did it by adding his album to her own account — not really ideal either. Better would be if any artist could make recommendations in a way that wouldn’t distract from their own site, yet would be impossible for their fans to overlook.

The recently-launched download page provides the perfect space to do just that. Fans only see it when they’ve decided they love your music enough to buy/download it (which also means they now consider you a trusted source), and while fans wait for their download is just the right time to send them off to do a little exploring. The download page also happens to be hit 1.2 million times each month and climbing, so recommendations there have the potential to drive a ton of new exposure to all the artists who use Bandcamp. Here’s what it looks like:

Setup is done over on your profile page, and looks like this:

We’re pretty excited to see how you guys use this. Personally, we’d much rather get a recommendation from an artist we love than, say, view an algorithmically-generated list of suggestions for a 30 to 39 year-old male who enjoys strawberry Pop-Tarts, recently listened to Friday from start to finish, and did indeed purchase /\/\/\Y/\, but for his brother. Enjoy, hope to see you at the SxSW meetup!

UPDATE November 15th, 2011: Thanks for all the great feedback! Per the suggestions of Makell, Allen, DJ Rotten HD and Creidieki, recommendations now not only appear on the download page, but on their own dedicated page as well (linked to from the sidebar). And as Martin proposed, we now notify you whenever your music is recommended.

80 thoughts on “Recommended Albums”

  1. great idea! we’ll definitely take advantage of this… most of the bands in our area have adopted bandcamp as the main destination for their music, and we all like to help each other out and cross promote, so this will make that even easier to do.

  6. This is a great idea. Also, you should add a search function on the front page. I’ve come here several times wishing I could search for an artist by name.

    Also, if you could implement the “suggested albums” feature in more places than just AFTER someone makes a purchase that’s be cool. (like Amazon but each artist suggests it themselves)

  10. This looks like a great feature. One thing – why did you decide to limit it to 3 recommendations? I know that 3 is a good number to have *displayed*, but it might be handy for the artist to enter more than 3 albums in their profile, and maybe you just pick 3 at random to display on the download page? And then you could have a “further reading” link to see the entire list of albums that they’ve recommended.

    It just seems like, at a given time, you might want to be recommending three particular albums, and then you might change one album for another for a short period, but should you have to lose the information you entered for that album you want to swap out?

    Does that make sense?

    Anyway, keep up the good work 🙂

  11. Honestly, the innovation of this site is truly inspiring. What a great feature to add to the huge list of others. Count me in!

  12. Useful that you included the WHY field — it helps personalize the recommendation and give focus to why a listener might enjoy it. Collaboration trivia is a connection goldmine.

  13. I’m trying to set these, but whenever I do, I get an error that my band’s location isn’t real, despite it being set to San Francisco, CA. I know this is sort of the land of fictional make-believe but it’s at least not entirely fabricated. What the hell?

  17. Super great idea. I love sharing music made by my friends. Also inspires me to get more of my friends on bandcamp.

    Thanks and love,

    Pato

  18. I like the idea, anything to get people listening to music from us upcoming artists!

    I appreciate the help!

    kyleobrien.bandcamp.com

  23. This is a great idea.

    I’ve got an idea: I’ve found that I’m accumulating a lot bandcamp pages in my bookmarks. I could really use a way to keep up on these artists and their bandcamp releases. I thought it would be nice to have a way to “follow” artists on bandcamp so when they make new stuff available it would come up in some kind of newsfeed a la FB or Twitter. But then I thought that might run counter to the bandcamp concept, but I thought of a simpler way to do it: I think bandcamp has RSS feeds for albums, how about ones for artists so I know when they put new stuff up? Then I could stick a bunch of them in my Google Reader.

  24. Chuck: you’ll be pleased to know that we already have artist-level RSS feeds, and have had them for some time. Look for the “feed from this artist” link at the bottom of any album or track page, or use your browser’s RSS button.

  27. Love this idea! It’s so nice to be able to point people in the direction of some hidden treasures. It would be great to be able to expand/rotate the recommendations though.

  28. Great idea, but I also struggle with finding other Bandcamp users. It would be nice if there was a way to find people on bandcamp, but then I’d hate for the site to become bloated with “social network” type additions.

    Also, do you get any feedback if someone puts you in their recommendations? An email saying “hey Mr.So&So recommended your album on his downloads page!”?

    sadfay.bandcamp.com

    1. > do you get any feedback if someone puts you in their recommendations?

      Yep, traffic from a recommendation will show up in your buzz stats as a visit from “Bandcamp [artist subdomain].” It’d be cool to send a notification on first add as well, we’ll put on the to-do.

  33. Danny just told me about this feature today and I think it’s a great idea ^_^ Thanks for all the love towards us video game composers, it’s really great to have a place like this. Bandcamp is awesome.

  36. I think it’s a great idea and would go as far as to put in right on the main page for people who haven’t downloaded yet…right there in the right column underneath the artist’s other projects.

  38. Love that you guys keep taking the time/love to improve this site. You guys obviously care about the music and how people get to it. love & soul! -JM

  39. Wow you guys came out with this feature three days after my band scolded me for wanting to mention a friends’ band in our ‘newsletter’.

    Sweet vindication !!!

    wetyears.bandcamp.com
    netherfriends.bandcamp.com

  40. Just set this up on my page, and I’m happy to say that it wasn’t hard finding three very influential artists (for me) here on Bandcamp. It seems like everybody’s on here these days.

  41. Nice feature, thanks. Any plans to make it functional for single tracks, rather than just full albums?

    OJ

    jaisu.bandcamp.com

  42. Alright, just added my three recommendations. Let the karma begin! Wait, if I say that does it negate my positive karma? Crud…

  45. Why is this limited to albums. I just tried to recommend a band camp single and it wouldn’t let me because it wasn’t an album. It seems to me you aught to be able to recommend and album, artist, or single if that’s what floats your boat. Am I wrong or missing something here?

  50. I think this is a great way for artists to be found. I like how this opens the doors for many artists like my self. This is technology evolving in to a unique form of promotion!

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