We could all use some heroes these days. For many struggling musicians, the kicks to the shins have been fast and furious in a world with no touring or employment prospects. And those streaming platforms that promised payouts to artists for annual streams? The decimal point on those checks are as emphatically placed in the wrong direction as the dripping face on the animatronic Donald Trump robot in Disney World. But while few have been willing to stand up for those in need, Bandcamp has been sticking to their game plan and putting their money where their mouth is.
Around this time last year, the artist-first music platform introduced the now recurring “Bandcamp Fridays.” It’s the first day of every month, when the site gives artists 100 percent of the sales made on the site for 24 hours. This new holiday has incentivized artists and labels to offer special deals and releases to fans and, in turn, has created an outpouring of support from fans looking to do their part. As of March 5, Bandcamp has raised $44 million dollars for artists on their platform with more dates planned through 2021.
Not only has this allowed fans to support artists they already cherish, but it also helped people gain new musical obsessions in the process. This has always been Bandcamp’s goal, and with its editorial site, Bandcamp Daily, it continued to shine a light on some of the most exciting music from all over the world.
Ears to Feed recently caught up with the site’s editorial director, J. Edward Keyes, to discuss how Bandcamp keeps an eye out for musicians of all sizes and the joys of musical discovery.
When did you realize you weren’t just a casual music listener?
There is actually a specific moment. I was a teenager in the ‘80s and I grew up in an evangelical Christian household, which meant the only music you could listen to was Christian music you bought from a Christian bookstore. So, my regimen of listening for most of my teenage years was really, really terrible Christian arena rock. If you can imagine REO Speedwagon or Whitesnake but with lyrics about Jesus, that’s what I was listening to.
I remember when I got to be 16 or 17, just having this internal knowledge that even within this tiny realm of Christian music that I was allowed to listen to, I remember having this thought: “There’s got to be more than this. There’s got to be more bands than these popular ones that are being shoved down my throat.”
I just weirdly made it my mission to find those bands, which I did through a magazine called Noteboard. This magazine led me into non-Christian music and the cooler end of that, too. Ever since then, I would say the things that continue to excite me are unearthing a new label, a new subgenre or a new artist from a different part of the world I hadn’t been familiar with before. This still just fills me with total joy and excitement.
I grew up in a pretty rural town, and I remember having to drive an hour to buy used CDs on the weekends. It was a weird dedication to the search. Do you think having that hurdle really helped your appetite for discovery?
Yeah, it did for sure. I took such a weird path even to get to the music I ended up listening to. I did have this hurdle, right? The hurdle from age 13 to age 17 was you could only buy stuff you could find in a Christian bookstore. But, then when I started getting that feeling at 16 and 17, I mounted the hurdle by finding a lot of legitimately cool bands, which I still love today. I was still able to be within this limitation my parents set for me, but still somehow found a way around it to find cool shit.
It was the same thing getting older. Once I started listening to “normal music” it wasn’t enough to get the stuff that was on the radio. Maybe some of that was driven by that initial hurdle I faced.
Was there a specific album you can point to now that really cracked things wide open for you?
I’ll give you two so we’re not talking about Christian music the whole time. One record that actually changed my life — and I’m convinced I wouldn’t be who I am today If I never heard this record — is by Daniel Amos and the album is called Darn Floor-Big Bite. It came out in 1987 and I remember going to this Christian bookstore when I was on my mission to find cool shit, and buying the record. I remember pressing play on it, and it was like Carman was never going to sound good to me again. It completely changed my concept of what music could sound like. I still think it’s a fucking amazing, amazing record.
After I listened to all of this Christian stuff, eventually when I got to be 18 or 19, I started buying normal records. I was watching MTV late at night and I saw the live video for REM’s “Turn You Inside-Out.” It was Green-era and they were kind of big but not world-beating-big like they became later. Just seeing Michael Stipe onstage, especially for me as someone who never identified with conventional tropes of masculinity or couldn’t relate to Motley Crüe’s “Girls, Girls, Girls.” Seeing him up there with that vibe of gender-queerness and seeing somebody who defied all of those male stereotypes and yet here he was behind a microphone in an arena was life changing for me. It was like, “Okay, maybe I’m going to be okay after all?”
He’s out there and he’s proud of who he is and not taking any bullshit. That totally changed my life. It also helped that the song fucking kicked ass, too. They eventually became my favorite rock band.
In a time before algorithms, people depended on artists and small publications to highlight music that wasn’t being played on the radio or MTV. It seems like Bandcamp is doing a wonderful job of digging up artists and labels from all over the world. You’re carrying on the tradition of bands citing other bands in their acknowledgements and in their liner notes. How do you decide on what artists and labels get coverage for the Bandcamp Daily site?
First of all, thank you very much for saying that, I really appreciate it. When we launched the Daily in June of 2016, I had a couple of key objectives. One of them was this is definitely going to be international. People from all over the world use Bandcamp and our coverage on a week to week basis needs to reflect that fact. So, we’re going to showcase artists from all over the world.
The second one was this is not going to be an “indie-rock publication” (laughs). Because I felt in 2016 — as much as we just talked about alt-rock and everything — as I’m sure yours have as well, my tastes have broadened and changed. So when I got the job in 2016, anytime I’d say I just got a job at Bandcamp people would say “I buy all of my punk records there” or “I buy all of my indie records there.” That’s awesome, but we want to let people know we have got great jazz, techno, hip-hop, ambient music and all of this other stuff as well.
So that was the goal from the jump. It has to be diverse genre-wise and it has to be diverse country-wise. It can’t just be American rock bands. That was the edict we set from the beginning. The path since then has just been following that as best as we possibly can. The decisions on what gets covered, first of all, we run a very democratic editorial team, or we at least try to. There’s five of us; I’m the editorial director and Jes Skolnik and Mariana Timony are senior editors. Zoe Camp and Diamond Sharp are editors as well, and then we have Marcus J. Moore as a contributing editor.
We meet twice a week and bring all the pitches writers have sent us and cool stuff we’ve all found on the site ourselves. We go through the list of ideas and ask, “is this music interesting to us?” Is it new, exciting and is it pushing the conversation forward? Then we ask what the general narrative is. What is the story we are trying to tell?
Then there is a host of other questions. “This is the fifteenth ambient related feature we’ve done this month, maybe we don’t need a sixteenth?” We try to weigh all that out.
The stuff that goes up on the site is the result of five people collectively discussing it. The one thing I can say to you, since we kicked this off talking about algorithms, is the guideline for what goes up on Bandcamp Daily is one person on the team genuinely loves it. So you’re never going to see something on the Daily that’s a favor to someone. We don’t do, “Oh this artist is really popular and none of us really like them but we are somehow magically obligated to cover them purely because they are big.” We don’t do that all. If one person doesn’t like them, they don’t make the site.
The lasting legacy of Bandcamp is it really reduced the gapped exchange between artists and listeners. Getting in the way of organic experience would go against that ethos.
Yeah. 100 percent. Over the course of every week, I probably get between 50 and 60 emails from artists who don’t have a label, don’t have a publicist, don’t have any infrastructure. But they use Bandcamp and they just want me to check out their album. Every Friday night, I will listen to all 50 or 60 of those and it’s something I look forward to every week.
Some of it’s great, some of it’s not great. I’m not gonna lie to you, some Fridays I’m tired and I don’t feel like doing it but I do it anyway because if artists lose the ability to get to me directly, it fundamentally weakens what Bandcamp is all about. I always want there to be a lane for artists who don’t have infrastructure to know they can still get their music to someone on the editorial team and we will consider it. If we like it, it will get the same consideration as whatever XYZ mega indie star.
Bandcamp leveled the playing field between artists and listeners. Is there a reason bands need record labels anymore, and what is the draw for a record label to embrace Bandcamp?
I love record labels. I still am the kind of person who will listen to something purely because it’s on a certain record label. You can set your watch by every 10 years there will be a new version of the “Are Record Labels Irrelevant?” thinkpiece. They never are! They’re still here and they serve a purpose. One of them is they do a lot of work that artists left to their own devices wouldn’t know how to do. The other thing, just from a consumer perspective, is you build a reputation. I know anything on the label AD 93 I’m probably going to like because they’re so awesome. Anything on the Doom Trip label or the PAN label. Anytime they add something to Bandcamp I’m like, “Shit, I’m going to check this out because Doom Trip has never put out a bad record and I’m sure this will be good.”
They help to bestow that level of personality on artists who may need it because they are just starting out. If a semi-anonymous artist gets signed to a label like Houndstooth in the UK, automatically I’m like, “I’ve never heard these guys, but they’re on Houndstooth. I trust those guys.” So they serve that function as well.
So yeah, I’m not on board with the “record labels are irrelevant” philosophy. But give it 10 years, someone will write that thinkpiece again.
Bandcamp Fridays were really one of the first online efforts that made a lot of artists feel great about the support of music communities during the pandemic. Were you in the room when this idea was being born?
I was and I’m happy to talk about it. Basically, we have a bottomline at Bandcamp and there’s a couple of rounding principles for everything we do. The first thing is that every project starts with the question “How does this help artists?” If we can’t answer that question, then we question why we’re doing this thing.
The second one is we don’t make money unless those artists make more money. So when things happen in the real world, those two principles are so instilled in the company’s culture. You just kind of start looking for ways to answer those questions. That was a very philosophical version. Now I’ll give you what actually happened …
I remember it was March of last year, by this point we had already done the fundraiser for the ACLU and for the Transgender Law Center. Bandcamp Fridays came about much the same way. I think it was the Monday after the lockdown when we all realized, “oh, this isn’t going to be over by May.” There was a meeting called with myself and a bunch of other folks at Bandcamp, including Ethan Diamond, the CEO. The way the meeting started genuinely was with the question, “What can we do to help?”
It originated from that discussion very organically. We had done a couple of these revenue free days before and we started talking doing another revenue free day to help artists. “How would that look?” “When would we do it?” “Would it be once, more than once?” All of it came out of this — honest to goodness — pure discussion of “how can we help here?” That’s how it started.
Will Bandcamp Fridays continue and expand into different areas further down the line?
I can’t really say, and I’m not being dodgy. We just haven’t decided yet. We’ve announced all of the dates for the next few Bandcamp Fridays we’re doing. Beyond that, we just haven’t made a decision yet.
I can tell you other areas where we’re looking to expand. We launched a live streaming platform we hope more folks will take advantage of. That’s another situation where we’re not taking any revenue from ticket sales of live stream stuff through the pandemic. Obviously, we just opened vinyl crowdfunding. There’s going to be a few more product enhancements coming down the line that can help with that.
I think we’re just always open to trying everything we can to make the world a friendlier place for artists. It’s more than that. We want to help artists get their music into the world, and to help them find fans who truly love it. That is always going to be the guiding directive of everything we do and every expansion we make.
With all of the music you listen to on a daily basis, it’s safe to say it’s really opened you up as a listener. Are you able to go back and listen to some of the evangelical music you grew up listening to with fresh ears?
Straight up, true story. There’s a whole clutch of bands I used to listen to back then that I still listen to today and think are great. They’re doing vinyl reissues of all of those albums as well. There’s a group called the 77s that were my favorite band when I was 18 or 19. I still listen to them. The Choir and Daniel Amos are others. I still listen to all of those bands because of their lyrics and now when I listen to them it’s funny I’m like, “Man, these guys were secretly sending me coded messages about how to live my life while I was trapped in this evangelical world!” (laughs)
So, yeah. I can listen to them and I don’t cringe at all because the music is great and lyrically it’s still very much in line with my beliefs. But then I’ve gone even further into Christian black metal bands and thrash metal bands… To give you a little more context, I am a Christian. I identify as a Christian, but I’m a far lefty progressive. I go to a LGBTQIA-affirming church. We’re super lefty, hippie Christians, so I’m a little more receptive to this stuff in general. I still listen to this stuff, but I don’t believe people are going to hell anymore (laughs).
This interview has been edited for clarity.