PBS - Don't Forget Bandcamp!

A short bit ago, PBS NewsHour had an article about streaming payments. You should give it a watch!

One really cool thing was they interviewed Damon Krukowski, a founding member of one of my favorite bands, Galaxie 500!! I would play it for my kids when I would get them ready for bed and my oldest used to call them "Blue Band", because I had their box set. Those were good times and think it put them on a good music path.

Note that he and Naomi, the bass player in Galaxie 500 are no slouches. Damon & Naomi have since made so many more albums than their old band. 

Anyway, back to the PBS article. I was surprised that many of the large streaming services were mentioned in the article, but interestingly not YouTube Music. Last I checked, they were one of the top royalties payers with Spotify paying about the lowest per stream. I recall doing these calculations for streaming before and that was exactly why I picked YouTube. Add onto that, there was some person out there that would do a vinyl rip of some obscure album and post it there...which was an additional bonus.

However, I still think Bandcamp should have been mentioned and how their pay structure is. TL;DR - if you buy a digital album, the artist or label (usually independent labels) gets all of that sans a 10-20% cut from Bandcamp. No one person is going to reasonably stream a favored artist 10s of thousands of times to help give them a living wage, but one purchase goes a long way over there. Even moreso when you wait for Bandcamp Fridays where they waive that 10-20% cut. 

Now I know Bandcamp has been passed around and bought up a couple times. So far they are still a-kicking. I wish PBS covered these other options to at least get the public aware of the other options out there. I'm sure there were editing decisions made in the interest of time, so that's why I'm a posting here.

Got any good bands that have a space on Bandcamp that's worth a listen? Let me know!