Update 2025-09-24: I edited this down to make all the same points without listing literally almost all the music I bought on Bandcamp last year š
In this post Iām sharing music I bought on Bandcamp in 2024. Iāll also say a little bit about the interaction of music and the tech industry in general: apps like Spotify, Bandcamp, and YouTube; how they affect artists and how they affect our listening habits. Iāve working on a couple follow-up posts. Those are about how I feel like weāre getting close to having the tools for musicians and listeners to reclaim ownership of their music. So consider this post a prelude to those.
Every December, Spotify rewards us for submitting to their algorithm by giving us our Spotify Wrapped. Their Wrapped tells us which artist we spent the most time with, what song topped our playlists, how many minutes we listened.
I barely use Spotify. My Wrapped was basically āYou listened to Tame Impala Radio 10 times in Augustā.
I just got into Tame Impala, donāt judge me. You can see my fifth most listened-to song was a song that I listened to maybe twice, from a French Canadian artist that my friend Alex introduced me to (thatās foreshadowing for later).
But I love to see people share their Wrapped on Bluesky and Twitter, especially if ironic. āYes, I am in the top 0.01% of Gwar fans.ā
I want my own Wrapped! I want to tell a story about what I did this year, kind of like a tech blogger making a listicle of their annual achievements. But I want to receive it passively from the app I listen to music on, instead of me writing a blog post. (Wait a second.)
Thankfully, my good friend Alex Chabot-Leclerc knows that I buy a lot of music through Bandcamp.
And thatās why he shared this cool blog post with me from Tom MacWright, on how to generate a Bandcamp Wrapped, with an app that MacWright has on val.town:
https://macwright.com/2024/12/06/bandcamp-wrapped.html.
The actual app on val.town is here: https://tmcw-bandcampwrapped.web.val.run/
I think Alex is a big fan of MacWrightās work. And like me, Alex is really into music, and posts about it weekly on his blog: https://alexchabot.net/categories/music/
He shares Spotify links and playlists, and that works great (I will begrudgingly admit that there are some good things about tech).
But for those of us that buy a lot of music on Bandcamp, we can now generate our own Wrapped, thanks to Mac.
Is Bandcamp Itself Wrapped?
In his Bandcamp Wrapped blog post, MacWright links to his own previous writing about his āprepper-style music hoardingā. To quote him, āI donāt believe that any technology company in the music industry will survive in the long term.ā You should read what he has to say, but let me tell why I buy a lot of music on Bandcamp, since Iām here writing a whole post about it.
I am a huge music fan. I wanted to be a musician, once. So I am painfully aware that the tech industry I now work in has really changed how musicians make money. It used to be that record companies could support a relatively broad base of musicians, as long as those musicians helped them sell enough sounds etched into highly processed dinosaur bones (i.e., records). Now we have replaced that system with a new one, where tech overlords support a much narrower base of musicians, almost by accident, since they pay only thousandths of a penny every time a song gets streamed. I think somebody wrote a pretty good song about it once.
(You canāt read the rest of this blog post until you sit through the whole song. My blog, my rules š)
Of course the right fix for this is to not actually change the system, but instead to make each person feel like they alone are personally responsible for fixing everything. And that is why, whenever I can, I pay for music through Bandcamp. Individualism! Exceptionalism! Americanism! The Bandcamp business model lets me put my money where my mouth is, because it gives artists and labels a lot of control over how they sell music: what prices they set, what merchandise they sell, and so on. This seemed like a good way to vote with my dollars for an alternative to streaming platforms like Spotify. Until Bandcamp was acquired by Epic Games, and then by Songtradr, who layed off half the staff. Perhaps not surprisingly, this was around the same time that Bandcamp workers were trying to unionize. So much for āchampioning independent artistsā. So much for me personally fixing everything.
Ok, the angry tech bros of the broligarchy are telling themselves Iām just virtue-signaling with this whole little section about how I basically deserve a Nobel prize for the amount of money Iāve given to artists through Bandcamp. The last thing Iāll say, before I actually write about music, is that I have seen a couple of attempts to build worker-owned platforms. In principle, I am totally in favor of this. We do not need our feudal tech overlords, and the sooner we realize it the better. But in practice, thereās some complicated economics game theory going on when you have multiple companies, each running on a shoelace budget, all trying to replace the platform run by the tech barons, who have infinite money to fend them off. Still itās worth knowing about these efforts. Someone who is smarter than me made this great website that sums up whatās been done: https://bandcampalternative.com/
More like Youtube Wrapped 2020-2024
I will mostly shut up about tech now, and mainly write about music.
I did as MacWrightās tool instructs, copying and pasting my Bandcamp purchases from 2024. That gave me a big list in HTML. Instead of just dumping the output here, I decided to write about the music Iāve been into over the last year, and how I found it. But it turns out this blog post will be way too long if I write about all the music I bought on Bandcamp this year ([virtue signaling intensifies]). So Iāll talk about something more interesting: how do I replace Spotifyās recommendations? I can pay artists directly, I can make my own Spotify wrapped, but how do I find new music? It turns out, mostly YouTube, but also recommendations from friends. Letās talk about each in turn.
I was radicalized by YouTube ambient playlists
I have been into ambient for a while. Like a lot of people, I was unwittingly turned on to Japanese ambient during the pandemic, thanks to the YouTube algorithm. See this article on ars technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/11/how-old-ambient-japanese-music-became-a-smash-hit-on-youtube/ (I like a lot of the related music namechecked in this article, that was also mysteriously promoted by the YouTube algorithm, like 1979 from Deru, Mort Garsonās Plantasia, and An Empty Bliss Beyond this World by the Caretaker)
Looking back over this year, The Algorithm has continued to turn me on to a lot of other ambient, but more into the genre of Space Music. Somehow this sci-fi ambient fits with the rest of my media diet: I played a lot of post-apocalpytic roguelike Caves of Qud this year and I re-read the first book of the post-apocalpytic Southern Reach Trilogy.
UK ambient
Both Steve Brenner and Tim Stebbing I think are UK artists who got their start in the ~70s. I found them through YouTube channels like Sounds of the Dawn, here and here. Side note: Brenner has directly sent me a (brief!) email every time Iāve purchased from him. This is the kind of personal touch you donāt get when you stream music through a Platform.
American Primitive ambient
Ok, thereās only one group in this category, the Nightcrawlers, but I love them, and I wish I could pay them more for all of their music. I donāt know if they already have their own microgenre but Iām going to call it āAmerican Primitive ambientā.
I found them through this channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkmsWKKPVvo But as that person kindly pointed out, thereās actually another channel with a whole playlist of just the Nightcrawlers.
What I really love about their albums are the art, clearly made on some 80s graphic design software like Printshop, but somehow managing to have a mysticisim at the same time.
They have a mysticisim in the same way that I think Robert Pollardās lyrics about UFOs and his collage album covers are, at their best, mystical.
(I know, as of that last sentence Iām really blurring the line between tech blog and annoying album review guys on YouTube. Bro, I contain multitudes.)
Modular?
One last bit of ambient music, two groups that I will lump into another totally-made up microgenre Iāll call ā80s american ambientā, since thereās no overt themes of space per se.
Young Scientist
The first group is named Young Scientist, and with a name like that of course I have to like them. Iām no longer so young, but I do feel like they really have made scientist soundtrack music, that conjures up late hours in the lab. Yes, I found them through YouTube.
Sines of Exquisite Pleasure
The second group is Sines of Modular Pleasure. Again, yes, I found them through YouTube.
Thereās some question of whether they are even ārealā, in the sense of really old, or whether itās more of a tribute group making music in the present day. Check out this maniacās blog post: https://ivandsm.github.io/2022/12/04/on-sines-of-exquisite-pleasure.html (Maniac in a good way, thank you for your work, whoever you are.) Based on their latest release, I think they are indeed more of an homage. It still works for me, and I would still lump it into this category of sounding like āAmerican suburban guys who wanted to be Brian Eno or Tangerine Dream but had to re-invent the genre from scratchā.
Home
Ok, so we are definitely at the point where, if I list all the music I bought on Bandcamp this year, this blog post would put you to sleep, if itās not already.
But I canāt resist sharing one more artist I found through YouTube this year, this time as the first song on this random āmixā video that features a mecha-Bart Simpson as the image with a trippy bad VR background.
Youāre telling me that you do not feel goosebumps all over your body, as if a your soul became a laser beam shooting out of Godās forehead, at the very moment you hear that first song, with the mecha-Bart and the cyberpunk background undulating behind? You, sir, have no soul. (Or madam. Or ma-them. However you prefer to be addressed.)
Turns out all their other shit is really good too.
My Alex Chabot-Leclerc Wrapped 2024
The other way I find music is through friends of course. Since my friend Alex inspired this post, I would be remiss if I didnāt include the music I bought from his home of Canada this year. I promise I have at least one other friend, but I also promised I was trying to keep this post somewhat short. So, letās just talk about what Alex recommended to me.
He introduced me to Bleu Jeans Bleu a couple of years ago. Primo quality rock/pop with a distinctly Quebecois flair. Alex told me one of their songs perfectly captures the feeling of being in Quebec for him. You might mistake them for a novelty group, ironically parodying
See for example,
The Lāappartment album I found while in Maine for the NMAC 2024 conference. I was sitting in the parking lot of the hotel the conference was at, and this song came on the radio, on this French Canadian station I had managed to pick up. It was just a very nice vibe, made even more nice by the slight patina of static from the almost out of range station. I loved the song so much I ran inside to google and try and figure out what station it must be, so I could see if they had a playlist. Like a total weirdo, I was even asking people at the conference I knew who happend to be from Canada if they knew of the stations. No, what is wrong with you. I found the station anyway, and they did have a playlist.
I liked the band so much I had to ask Alex if he knew of them; he did not, but the name rang a bell, and in fact this musician is the son of another musician Alex is familiar with. Not surprisingly, Alex suggested some other musicians in the same vein, like Amelie Fortin. And then later in the year he happened to recommend Galaxie, that definitely hit that alternative rock spot in a way I havenāt heard in a while.
Next time
If you made it through all this music, thank you for your attention. As soon as I add those other posts about reclaiming ownership of music, I will link them here.