Not only do I play in a group called Lucky Dog, I find myself in a position where I do feel lucky during the pandemic. A good job, a great wife for a partner, and a lot of magical digital friends in the world that keep following me. 2021 will not be a year of stories about the radio show because Ocooch Mountain Radio has closed it doors. I am a free agent and will be looking for a station to move my library.
My library is really the reason for this blog post. As I looked at getting $600 from the government that frankly I didn't need; I knew I couldn't just put it in a bank account. It had to be spent, so quickly I picked the first Bandcamp Friday where they waive their fees and spent half of it on music. Oh my, the library grew with some really awesome new music. (The other half was spent on remodeling a room.)
These pictures are only a start of the CD's, I sincerely welcome you to browse my collection over at
Bandcamp and go listen to them through the site. Bandcamp is my recent most favorite digital music site. Most artist let you listen to song 2-3 times before they ask you to pay for the music and then you can either stream forever in their site, or download it to your own player. I'm old school and I do the later. Bandcamp since the pandemic hit has been waiving their fees once a month to give back to the musicians too. Spotify up your game and recognize you are starving independent musicians and giving too much to the labels and large artists.
(here's a link to a great article in The Guardian)
In addition, Bandcamp is a community. You can follow me, I'll follow you. I jot a one sentence review of my favorites, and I find music in your collections. It really fosters the old days of hanging around the music store and talking to the people behind the checkout. Really think about following me here.
https://bandcamp.com/davideschipper
I can not think of an easy way to share all the music that I've been enjoying, but this is a Google blog, so how about sharing some of the songs in the day's purchase from their YouTube videos. (which is another way artists don't get paid enough, but they do use it for advertising) So here's a
playlist that I'll collect the music of some of my favorites. (I'll keep adding to this) Oh you need to listen to
Take Me In dang I was lucky to find those two.
I am not dense enough to think that a purchase of a cd or song in Bandcamp will change the musician's economic prospects, but I do believe if more people would spend money directly with Independent musicians rather than believing a Spotify subscription gets back to the musicians they are listening to; a DIFFERENCE would be made.
I did
release a cd exclusively in Bandcamp recently, I recognize whoever listened to my 4,000 streams of previous music will miss a chance to hear it. I'm fine with that because I make music for my pleasure; if I had to make a living on it; Spotify has to change to pay independent musicians a representative pay for what a real cd is worth.
