<story><title>Is Bandcamp the Holy Grail of Online Record Stores?</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/20/arts/music/bandcamp-shopping-for-music.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Daiz</author><text>I love Bandcamp for the simple reason that they&amp;#x27;re one of the few very few music stores that digital distribution right according to my standards - for music, this means lossless &amp;amp; DRM-free by default, ie. the same thing physical CDs offer (and Bandcamp makes things even more convenient by allowing you to download in several formats, both lossy and lossless, according to your preferences). While DRM isn&amp;#x27;t usually an issue with digital music purchases today, way too many stores still offer lossy by default, with lossless requiring either paying extra or - even worse - simply not being available at all.&lt;p&gt;It really is sad how often legal digital products are inferior in quality to their physical versions, even though with digital you could pretty much always offer more than what the physical formats allow.&lt;p&gt;Also, another common scourge of digital distribution that Bandcamp &lt;i&gt;doesn&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; suffer from: region locking. They don&amp;#x27;t support it and don&amp;#x27;t intend to do so either: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;bandcamp.com&amp;#x2F;help&amp;#x2F;selling#region&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;bandcamp.com&amp;#x2F;help&amp;#x2F;selling#region&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Is Bandcamp the Holy Grail of Online Record Stores?</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/20/arts/music/bandcamp-shopping-for-music.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>orng</author><text>Bandcamp is the only place I buy music online. They just seem so honest: Fair pay for musicians; free streaming prior to purchase; drm-free multiple formats, including FLAC. They don&amp;#x27;t even try to make it hard to rip mp3s from the streams, they have just focus on providing an amazing product which the consumers (hopefully) recognize as deserving of their money.&lt;p&gt;My only complaint is poor support for finding music by bands if they have released records with more than one publisher. For instance searching for my favorite band Shining returns a page[1] with 4 of their albums, but their best album: Halmstad is found is released by osmoseproductions and thus found on their page [2].&lt;p&gt;1: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;shiningsom.bandcamp.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;shiningsom.bandcamp.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;
2: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;osmoseproductions.bandcamp.com&amp;#x2F;album&amp;#x2F;v-halmstad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;osmoseproductions.bandcamp.com&amp;#x2F;album&amp;#x2F;v-halmstad&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>