A Tale Of Two Ecosystems: On Bandcamp, Spotify And The Wide-Open Future
“In 2007, when we started the company, streaming didn’t exist in the United States and our competition essentially was piracy. And the idea in 2007 primarily was that nobody was going to pay for music anymore. And it just seemed very obvious to me that if you like some music from one of your favorite artists, you should be able to support them directly. And so we built the platform to do that. My reference point for this was blogging services. In 2007, you had Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type, services that were essentially like white label services for writers – you could set up a site within minutes and tap this direct relationship with your readers. And it seemed crazy to me that if your artistic output happened to be music instead of words, you were just out of luck.”
I'm not a music person, I don't listen to it a lot or buy a lot of it, but I found the comparison between these two companies really fascinating. To hear the founder of Bandcamp talk about their goals and what they're trying to do was really refreshing and it makes me want to buy more music from artists on that platform.