We are in a golden era for buying and selling digital LPs. While I’ll use Bandcamp, sleek alternatives like Ampwall, Subvert, and Mirlo are equally great options. These online markets inherently incentivize artists to avoid filler or risk losing a sale, while the subscription streaming model requires artists to pad their catalog for pay per play. Streaming has revived the worst trope of the old music industry: the album that is just “two hits and a bunch of crap.”
Spotify’s business model demands album filler because the platform pays out royalties based on “stream share” which trigger a payout the second a track hits the 30 second mark, incentivizing artists to maximize volume over value. This has fundamentally warped modern songwriting: albums are aggressively padded with short, two minute tracks and repetitive hooks designed specifically to feed the algorithm and inflate stream counts. On Spotify, a deep, cohesive artistic statement takes a back seat to sheer data output, turning what should be a focused LP into a bloated playlist of algorithmic bait.
Accidental hits happen way more often than you’d think. As it turns out, artists are notoriously bad at predicting their own success. When you buy a digital LP on a platform like Bandcamp, you are investing in a complete and curated piece of art where even the tracks the artist never expected to blow up exist naturally as part of a cohesive story. On subscription services like Spotify, those same happy accidents are treated like lottery tickets while surrounded by cynical, algorithm optimized filler designed just to farm streams. Buying the album ensures you are experiencing those unexpected gems as genuine creative discoveries, rather than digging through algorithmic bloat to find them.
Bandcamp serves the genre; streaming serves the algorithm. When producers target platforms like Spotify, artistic nuances like tempo variations and volume dynamics are sacrificed to strict LUFS loudness standards and predictable, club friendly danceability. This algorithmic pressure strips electronic and club music of its experimental edge, forcing tracks into a uniform, compressed sonic mold just to survive on a playlist. On Bandcamp, however, the music is freed from these rigid streaming constraints, allowing producers to prioritize raw genre authenticity and dynamic storytelling over sanitized, playlist ready optimization. Soundtrack and orchestral music have become major casualties of this shift, as their essential cinematic highs and quiet, emotional lows are flattened into a lifeless wall of sound just to meet streaming’s volume requirements.
Just so we’re clear, I’m not here to sell you my album. Go ahead and enjoy the whole thing ad free on my website. https://thejoyo.com/#more
Good and ethical depends on what you want. You should probably abandon both of those qualifiers though.
There was a good article in one of those counter culture handbills in the 90s equating the peripheral or colonial labor required to get expensive raw materials & the core labor required to turn them into carbide blades or microchips or whatever and production & djing.
It was pretty stupid though because once a dj gets a little success or time they start to make their own songs to play out (often before they start to get some success). So it’s not like one type of labor has less value and is engaged in a race to the bottom or pushed to the colonial areas while another type of labor has more value and exists under different conditions in the core.
Their inverse is also true. Electronic musicians who produce music often get invited to dj at venues. How could someone make a song that fits well in a djs set if they themselves didn’t get some hands on time behind decks? It’s like expecting a person to be able to design a car but never drive one.
They’re the same labor. They’re making the same thing.
It’s maybe worth investigating what you mean when you say “having value”.