Hi Tim - I’m a huge fan here from San Francisco. Your music has touched me so much this past year.
Serious question - are you conflicted about the promotion of your music in Bandcamp weekly? Why is that so different from buying more promotion for yourself from as marketplaces.
I hate targeted ad technology myself, and I work in tech (never in that area, always purposefully avoided it)
Love this question! Love serious questions and not serious questions. And thank you for your kind words about my music having an effect on you (positive one I hope haha) I'm so happy to hear about that <3
I'm going to riff here without much editing because I'm in a bit of a hurry, but want to make sure I respond and it doesn't get lost in my inbox / flurry of notifications. Bandcamp Weekly (unless something has changed drastically very recently) is very much like the radio shows I grew up listening to, and still listen to, (and used to host myself!) on community radio here in Melbourne on stations like 3RRR and PBS. It's a radio show, where a person picks the music they want to play, for their own reasons, to do with their taste or their ideas around what they think an audience wants to hear. It's a human interaction, a human experience, not mediated by money, by algorithms, by what you could call "payola" or anything like that. So yeah feels completely different. I've had the good fortune to meet and talk with Andrew Jervis from Bandcamp many times - he's the guy that mostly curates and hosts that show, and he does it from a personal perspective, reflecting his personal taste. He comes from a background in indie record labels & working at that more grassroots community level of music - a level which is almost completely incompatible with the 'must-fit-all' bland monolith of big tech / mainstream versions of what music looks like or how it operates.
No one pays to be in the Bandcamp Weekly, if my music appears there its the result of curatorial taste on the part of Andrew and/or whoever is running that radio show at the time. That to me feels very different to the idea that I need to pay money to Meta, Tiktok, Youtube, Spotify et al, in order for them to "surface" my music. I don't know, I'm sure we can unpack this much further, but they feel pretty different to me
Thanks so much for the detailed and personal response! Of course your music has had a positive effect.
I met Andrew at SXSW this year, but still did not know how Bandcamp weekly works. It’s great that Andrew has full control now. I’m wondering if he’ll be able to continue given they have been bought by an ad / promotion company
Hi Tim - I’m a huge fan here from San Francisco. Your music has touched me so much this past year.
Serious question - are you conflicted about the promotion of your music in Bandcamp weekly? Why is that so different from buying more promotion for yourself from as marketplaces.
I hate targeted ad technology myself, and I work in tech (never in that area, always purposefully avoided it)
Love this question! Love serious questions and not serious questions. And thank you for your kind words about my music having an effect on you (positive one I hope haha) I'm so happy to hear about that <3
I'm going to riff here without much editing because I'm in a bit of a hurry, but want to make sure I respond and it doesn't get lost in my inbox / flurry of notifications. Bandcamp Weekly (unless something has changed drastically very recently) is very much like the radio shows I grew up listening to, and still listen to, (and used to host myself!) on community radio here in Melbourne on stations like 3RRR and PBS. It's a radio show, where a person picks the music they want to play, for their own reasons, to do with their taste or their ideas around what they think an audience wants to hear. It's a human interaction, a human experience, not mediated by money, by algorithms, by what you could call "payola" or anything like that. So yeah feels completely different. I've had the good fortune to meet and talk with Andrew Jervis from Bandcamp many times - he's the guy that mostly curates and hosts that show, and he does it from a personal perspective, reflecting his personal taste. He comes from a background in indie record labels & working at that more grassroots community level of music - a level which is almost completely incompatible with the 'must-fit-all' bland monolith of big tech / mainstream versions of what music looks like or how it operates.
No one pays to be in the Bandcamp Weekly, if my music appears there its the result of curatorial taste on the part of Andrew and/or whoever is running that radio show at the time. That to me feels very different to the idea that I need to pay money to Meta, Tiktok, Youtube, Spotify et al, in order for them to "surface" my music. I don't know, I'm sure we can unpack this much further, but they feel pretty different to me
Thanks so much for the detailed and personal response! Of course your music has had a positive effect.
I met Andrew at SXSW this year, but still did not know how Bandcamp weekly works. It’s great that Andrew has full control now. I’m wondering if he’ll be able to continue given they have been bought by an ad / promotion company