if you illegally download all of your music and then buy like 2 albums from smaller or independent…

iffeelscouldkill:

ralfmaximus:

riseofthecommonwoodpile:

if you illegally download all of your music and then buy like 2 albums from smaller or independent bands you’ve likely already done more to pay musicians than a year of spotify streaming. just pirate everything and send some walking around money to a couple artists you like. they’re probably on bandcamp, wait till a bandcamp friday. spotify hates you anyways.

Next Bandcamp Friday is May 1st, 2026!

Even buying from Bandcamp in-between Bandcamp Fridays yields more profits to the artist than Spotify. Bandcamp charges artists 10% to 15% to host their music, compared to $0.003 and $0.005 per stream on Spotify.

That’s right, you’d have to play the same song 200 times minimum to earn the artist $1, and 30% of that $1 earned goes to Spotify. Worse, Spotify pays the rights holder these royalties, not the artist. So if your band has a contract with a label, the LABEL gets paid, then the artist gets a percentage of that.

This article is from 2020 but illustrates the issue with an example. The spotlighted artist earned $4200 from Bandcamp via 700 customers in two days. The same artist earned $100 from roughly six years of streaming.

Also, while you can stream from Bandcamp, you can keep your music! Download the mp3 and it’s yours forever.

Also also, there’s no ads!

Also also also, there’s no AI!

WHY are you giving money to Spotify??

Psst, here’s a tool that will scan your Spotify playlists for tracks that you can buy on Bandcamp.

It will throw up a few false matches but it’s genuinely been fantastic for me in finding artists I never knew were on Bandcamp so I could support them directly there.