I am a proud music geek. I have interviewed everyone from James Brown to Big Sean, from Dolly Parton to Taylor Swift, and have been called a musicologist by a big-name manager. So, usually when I go into a room, I am confident I can hold my own.
However, sitting in on a Bandcamp editorial meeting, where the conversations wove skillfully from best Brazilian samba from July 6, 1971 – August 15, 1973; Russian waltzes of the 1850s; Finnish goth songs recorded in subterranean temperatures, and greatest Japanese air-guitar solos at Budokan, I felt like a newborn who’d just discovered The Beatles and Motown. Their level of music knowledge at Bandcamp is startling and insanely impressive.
They have to be. Bandcamp, which bills itself as “The premiere online record store and music community where passionate fans discover, connect with and directly support the artists they love,” patterns themselves after brick-and-mortar stores. Imagine then a record store with import, rarities and used sections that stretch for miles, the artists are constantly dropping by for meet and greets and in-stores and you can get lost in there for years.
What makes Bandcamp so essential in 2025 is their commitment to artists at a time that is so dire with streaming services. “With the majority of revenue going directly to artists, Bandcamp fosters a communal experience with music discovery, where artists and fans support each other in a vibrant ecosystem. Bandcamp artists and labels release and sell a broad range of music products, including digital and physical records, vinyl, apparel and merchandise,” Bandcamp promises on their website.
I sat in on an editorial meeting then spoke with general manager Dan Melnick and editorial director J Edward Keyes to get an inside look at Bandcamp in 2025.
Steve Baltin: Dan, have you sat in editorial meetings too? And if so, what’s your favorite story?
Dan Melnick: I’ve sat in a couple of meetings, but I’ve been at Bandcamp about two years. Before that, I worked in the music instrument industry, but I’ve been using Bandcamp since 2012. So, I’ve been a buyer and then reader of Bandcamp Daily for a long time and discovered a ton of music through it. I love the jazz column because I buy and I listen to a lot of jazz. I love especially the scene reports, where it focuses on a scene in a specific city cause they’re so global and eclectic. Part of what I love about Bandcamp is I’ve discovered so much music from all over the globe. To me that’s just really exciting when it’s some tiny up-and-coming artist in Brazil who’s not on Spotify and it’s featured in the daily, like to me that’s the best. So, I try not to pick favorites, but those are the ones that probably come top of mind as the ones I’ve found the most music through over the years.
Baltin: What’s your favorite discovery on there?
Melnick: I don’t know if I can answer that but how about a recent one for you? I’m going to look through my collection, so I don’t actually do this wrong. 2hich of these that I’ve discovered through the daily is a good question. Well, they wrote out one of my favorite records from last year, the Jeff Parker ETA Quartet, The Way Out of Easy. Truth, I might have discovered that record on my own. I’m a big fan, but that was one of my favorite records from last year. So that’s got to be up there.
Baltin: Talk about, for you guys, the importance of continuing artist development and discovery forward, because, as you say, you’ve used it as a platform for discovery.
Melnick: Absolutely, we did a partnership with Roland last year, which I think speaks to the fact that we’re all sort of in that same boat of artist development and investment in real artists making music, especially in the age of AI. Bandcamp’s obviously very invested in that because our model is about supporting artists directly and fans paying for music. And musical instrument companies want people to keep playing instruments. If you talk to Fender, you know how much effort they’ve put into play and their other initiatives to get people playing instruments. I think we are in a sort of similar corner of the music industry.
Baltin: Talking with all the instrument companies what happened was everybody went in the direction of going to natural instruments and organic sounds because things were going in the direction of AI. Are you seeing that with Bandcamp that if anything, things have gone more, because again, you look at more mainstream records like Samara Joy, Laufey, they’ve definitely gone to a more organic sound?
J Edward Keyes: I think it’s really hard because Bandcamp is so vast to really distill it down to any one musical genre. What I can say is that I have not noticed any significant uptick on records that are like created with the help of AI. So, I have not spotted that trend at all on Bandcamp, but some of the biggest is on Bandcamp or things like vaporwave and future funk and stuff. That’s all synthetic, but it’s not made by a robot. There’s a real kid in his bedroom behind that with his racks of synths making stuff, which is not using organic instruments. But what I can say definitively is I’m not all of a sudden getting tons of pitches from writers that are like, “Half of this record was made with AI, or seeing in the album notes on Bandcamp made with the assistance of AI.” That has not taken off at all.
Baltin: How do you decide who to cover?
Keyes: One of the things that we talk about a lot at the Daily, and I’m not sure if you saw this when you sat in the meeting, but one of the factors in what artists we shine a light on is well is this person going to be covered by everyone else and are they going to get a ton of ink elsewhere. We’ve got X amount of calendar spaces, we’ve got X amount of juice that we can give, let’s shine that light on an artist like Etran de L’Air this band from the Sudan who’s touring America or something like that. Let’s use our power to shine the light that way because I love Julien Baker to death. Julien Baker’s going to be good, we want to shine our light elsewhere.
Baltin: How do you handle catalog artists?
Keyes: It’s funny that you pick Ron Sexsmith because that’s kind of the perfect Bandcamp Daily example. When we do cover, let’s call it more name or legacy artist, we’re looking for people exactly like that. So, I’ll give you a recent example. We just did a guide to John Lurie and all of John Lurie’s music on Bandcamp. So, there you go. We know Fishing with John and whatever, but he’s not exactly a mainstream name. Bill Laswell is another one who we’ll do, and so will do, they’ve got all their releases on Bandcamp. So, what the Daily will do is we’ll do do a guide to Bill Laswell, or do a guide to John Lurie, because he’s somebody who’s really cool. But like Ron Sexsmith, or honestly, even a Nick Lowe to a degree, isn’t really popping in in mainstream publications for a lot of the reasons that you’re talking about. Whereas for a counter example, and again, when I’m choosing counter examples, I’m deliberately choosing artists that I love, we kicked around the idea of doing a guide to Dinosaur Jr in the most recent editorial meeting and we thought, they’re probably good at this point. But we do have a list coming up on musicians inspired by Richard Thompson. So, that’s another way that we’ll skew it. I forget which congressman, but someone asked him how he knew pornography and he says, “I know it when I see it.” That’s kind of sometimes how we feel with Bandcamp Daily. We know it when we see it because we’ve been working here for so long.
Baltin: Tell me about products and the music that you have on there. Do you ever go out of your way to bring an artist to the site if, for example, they are not on the site, and you want to cover them?
Melnick: I think the way to think of it is Bandcamp Daily or Bandcamp Radio, they’re good incentives to put your music on Bandcamp. Every artist is looking for coverage these days, something to put in their press kit. It feels really good to get featured. You can hang your hat on that, your career and touring and things like that. So, it’s a virtuous cycle. And certainly, we don’t write about music unless it’s on Bandcamp. So that’s their choice. But I don’t think it’s usually the other way around where it’s like, “Hey, go put your music on Bandcamp so that we can write about it.”
Keyes: In fact, the one liner to build on what Dan said, we have the elevator pitch for Bandcamp Daily. It’s Bandcamp Daily exists to shine a light on artists all over the world who are using Bandcamp to connect with fans. So, the starting point is the artists all over the world who are on Bandcamp we’ll shine a light there. But to Dan’s point on what Dan said, one of the things when we started Bandcamp Daily almost 10 years ago now, some of these artists were getting blocked out by your Pitchforks and your Rolling Stones of the world. They weren’t getting the coverage and so there was like come to Bandcamp and we have this cool publication. I also want to say we have a pretty great separation of church and state, and I can say that for the almost ten years that I’ve been here since I started Bandcamp Daily there’s never been any top -down like, “Oh, this artist is really important for this label and like we should really cover them to scratch their back.” People know not to ask. We don’t do it unless we’re feeling it. The guarantee that I give to everyone is no one appears on Bandcamp Daily unless one of the editors likes it and stands by it and would recommend it to you at like a bar or something like that.
Baltin: Tell me about the direction of Bandcamp for 2025. Dan, you said you’ve been there for two years. Is this a new position for you?
Melnick: Yeah. I joined running product. And now I’m the general manager. So yeah, this is relatively new. But I worked in marketplaces. I was co-founder of Reverb if you ever use Reverb .com. Different dynamic, but similar structure to the business. And like I said, huge Bandcamp fan and user. If you want to talk specifically about products, the thing about Bandcamp and part of the reason why it’s such a steady presence in the independent music world is that the direction doesn’t really change. It’s about more of the good stuff. It’s about more of the same and continuing to lean into that. We’re going to continue bringing on great music. We want to have more and more music that people want to buy for sale on Bandcamp and we do have some great new features coming. We’re going to be expanding our playlist feature which is going to be great. Bandcamp is about to launch playlist sharing, with a beta release of playlists on the web coming soon. It’s an opportunity for fans and collectors to share the music they love from the artists they’ve directly supported, and we’re really excited to add to this feature over the coming months. It’s going to allow us to have much more curation from fans. If you think about what our editorial does, it’s kind of amazing the output that we do with such a small staff and editorial. How much music we’re able to cover and it’s still a tiny fraction of what’s on Bandcamp, of course, cause there’s so much music in the world and so much being put out every day. So, we’re excited about playlisting cause then you could be saying here’s the best stuff I found on Bandcamp in February and sending it to your friends and they can check it out and buy it.