<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>Mizza</author><text>I really like that Bandcamp supports &amp;quot;pay what you want&amp;quot; as an option, I find I&amp;#x27;m always more likely to buy music when that&amp;#x27;s a possibility.&lt;p&gt;That being said, I also wrote a BandCamp scraper, &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;Miserlou&amp;#x2F;SoundScrape&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;Miserlou&amp;#x2F;SoundScrape&lt;/a&gt; , so maybe I have weird priorities. Either way, I love BC way, way more than SoundCloud.&lt;p&gt;In the long run, at the scale that BC-type artists operate, I think that the merch game is actually bigger than the paying-for-music game. They&amp;#x27;ve made a few moves in that space, but I get the impression that BigCartel is actually the sleeping giant. I think whoever can combine BigCartel, BandCamp and a _manufacturing_ component into a single experience will be the winner.</text></comment>