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”

  2. Love this. Hope there will be more of a push towards encouraging discovery on here in the future too, there’s a lot of potential but I’ve never discovered a new band on bandcamp – each band’s page is very separated from anything else.

    Also agree it’d be good if you could link to singles / artists rather than just albums. Great start though. 🙂

    Dave

  5. Awesome idea guys! It’s a very tasteful way of doing it. Please don’t get too into the whole “social networking” aspect, we have facebook and myspace and a ton of other websites for that, but this is a good subtle addition.

  6. Not sure it’s the best place to put the recommendation, I’m afraid people will think it’s kind of generated, no matter how hard we try to put personal messages. It’s a great idea though, and connections is what most lacked to bandcamp.

  7. “I’m afraid people will think it’s kind of generated, no matter how hard we try to put personal messages.”

    Which is why mine now says “This is what I listen to in my own time (not autogenerated, I swear)”.

    😛

  13. This is awesome, is there some way that we could put more than one header?

    I understand the desire to keep it simple, but i would like to be able say a bit about each recommendation (i.e. i mastered this album, i am also in this band, these guys and i toured, etc.)

  16. Great feature! Social networking and independent artists need to embrace their communities more rather than feel like they are facing competition! This is a perfect feature.

  17. This is a prime example of why I’m coming to love BandCamp so much. It’s an awesome community. Not only can fans get music from their favorite artists, but the artists are given a legit chance to become fans of one another, and not only be fans, but to also support each other in a logical and viable manner. The only thing I think is missing from BandCamp right now is a forum of sorts, where the artists can interact, fans can interact, and fans and artists interact.

    Either way, I’m glad I found BandCamp and I’m loving the community around here!

  20. `I like the idea of this because I am an artist that works way too much to get out to promote my work. Thank you band camp.

  21. Supremely ingenious!Well, going by this i’m really enthused to know that yu guys are on yo toes tryin out ways to make it better for us artists and bands.
    OK,tha feature is gr8 but i’d like to reach out to other artists and/or bands to holla @me and lets see how we can merge and form a formidable network using this insanely awesome tool.
    cheers mates! Holla!!!

  22. I totally second MT’s remark about the number limitation. It would be great to recommend more than 3 albums, given one or another way for the site to display only 3 at a time.

    Cheers ! I’m new on Bandcamp and still find hard to believe it is true 🙂

  23. … and, while we’re at it, while recommending numerous albums, it would be even greater to group them in different groups, with one heading per group.

    (Like: “Check out other projects i’m involved in”, “Check out other artists i revere”, “This is what I truly hate” ;-), etc.)

  24. So if I’ve already bought all of an artist’s albums, is there an easy way to see their recommendations?

Comments are closed.

Discover more from Bandcamp Updates

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading