Bandcamp wrapped

I still use Bandcamp almost exclusively to buy music, and keep a big library of MP3s. The downside is that this marks me as a weirdo, but otherwise it’s great and has been working well for me.

Since I last wrote about it, Bandcamp was acquired by Epic games (?) and then acquired from them by Songtradr, and its employees are trying to get recognized as a union. Times are changing and Bandcamp is no longer a lovely indie company, but it’s still a heck of a lot better than Spotify.

People (who?) are sharing their ‘Spotify wrapped’ auto-generated compilations and I wanted the same, for my Bandcamp purchases, so I built it on Val Town. You can create your own! Or edit the code of the tool that generates them. Because of API limitations – really, the absence of an API – it requires you to copy & paste content from your purchases page, but isn’t copy-and-paste really a kind of API?

Anyway:

Looking back on the year, I like how I can remember a few of these albums from my first exposure to them in odd places - I heard Jessie Mae Hemphill playing in a Chipotle, and Rosie Lowe playing in my hair salon.

It was apparently a big year for instrumental, electronic, minimalist music. The only ‘rock’ album that hooked me was Wall of Eyes, and the only pop album that made an impact was Imaginal Disk - the fuzzy outro of Image is something I keep re-listening to.

MIZU has been on heavy rotation, too – the only of these artists that I learned about by seeing them live - she opened for Tim Hecker and I think made a lot of fans there with a really theatric and heavy performance.

Buy some music! Listen to it repeatedly, and put it in your MP3 player!