I'm going to try to get in the habit of browsing Bandcamp every paycheck and buying one album instead of using a streaming service. The reason for this is pretty simple: Until last month (May 2026 at time of writing) I was paying 8 dollars a month for Youtube Premium in yen as a side effect of setting my Google Play account to Japan to whale on Japanese gacha games, but Google kicked me off of that and wanted to charge 16 dollars a month, so I've started looking at my options and 16 dollars a month is around the same price as buying two 9 dollar albums off of Bandcamp, so I weighed the pros and cons.
On the streaming side, streaming services are going to charge whatever they want and are invariably going to raise the price over time, and there's evidence that they tweak their algorithms to prefer royalty-free slop and music that they own the rights to, and if I ever run into any economic hardship I have to hear ads in the middle of my music again. However, their overall library is very large and it is a little bit cheaper.
On the side of buying albums, it's a little bit more expensive depending on how many I buy in a month and my personal library is much smaller than Spotify's. However, there's no real algorithmic bias and I'm more likely to see a greater variety of new music when I look at what's happening on Bandcamp, and my library's size will grow over time. There's also nothing lost when times are bad and there are no ads and no chance of musical slop getting inserted in my copy of WinAmp. Additionally, buying albums removes a middleman between me and the musicians I like making money, and buying an album is likely to make me spend more time listening critically. However, limiting myself to Bandcamp cuts me off from a lot of older music I might like and forces me to engage with current trends. This annoys me a bit but it's not a downside
The benefits seem pretty clear to me, so I'm going to try and use this page to write about what I'm seeing and try to exercise my withered critical faculties a bit and try to find words to talk about music besides "it's good" or "it's neat". I have no background in music and no idea what the conventions for writing about it are so this is going to be a disaster.
Another week, another trip down to Bandcamp to find something new. I don't really know what it is to look for new music these days. I think most people just use Spotify, right? Or they have a friend tell them about it. Going through the front page of Bandcamp it never quite feels like I belong there. But I have to stop for a second. Who does? I've seen a lot of people write a lot of things from every angle of the process over the years. The artists aren't really in any position that's any different from the one I'm in as I write this. If I wanted to make music and upload it I'd probably be about as confused and baffled by the way these sites are set up as anyone else. Maybe I find some interesting effects while messing around with FL Studio or one of the trackers and make a few songs and call it an album. Then what? Shrug, I dunno, maybe I'd upload it to Bandcamp and Youtube and then get scammed by every shitty record exec and music platform out there trying to find a way to promote it. That's what I assume happens to pretty much everyone, anyway. Everyone is isolated from everyone else at every step of the process here and given the impression that putting it on a big platform will give them some kind of edge as a self-interested move. And centralization helps in a lot of cases, though I do wonder if music might be better served by getting split up a bit more with services focused more on local regional scenes. I say, as I don't use the local music resources I know exist for my city.
Anyway this week I picked up AREEL by ariiol. It's an electronic album that reminds me a lot of something like Snail's House, but it's layered in a way that brings Evergrace to mind. I don't usually notice the effects of compression too much but something seemed a little bit off when I downloaded the .ogg file (with a direct A/B comparison I think it seemed like it was cutting off part of the reverb early? Hard to say) so I think this might be the one time I actually get the FLAC version. It's detailed enough to really need the lossless version, I think.
This week I went with Green Carnation's A Dark Poem Part 1: The Shores of Melancholia, a gothic prog metal album that reminds me a bit of some of the metal operas I've heard with its symphonic flourishes. I'm terrible at analyzing lyrics but it seems like a lot of the album's kind of lamenting the lost? The people lost to the weight of public scrutiny, the people lost to your own social failings, the people's dreams lost to the need for money and the exploitation of the upper classes, before closing with a bit of wordplay seeming to conclude that with all these things that have been lost have made them as lost at land as anyone lost at sea, but with some small flame of hope remaining to push against the sea of melancholy. Maybe I'll pick up Part 2 next time, see what they're going for there.
Wandering around Bandcamp confused and dazed, I bumbled around and went with Sferro's Escapism, a retrowave album. It's got a lot of the retrowave cliches but it all seems pretty competently put together. The first track, People Come Together, opens with this kind of effect where these bassy square waves are chopped to give an effect a bit like Mongolian throat singing, and then the treble notes come in in that kind of 80s falsetto melody sort of way. But it doesn't try and stick in that style, every track's a bit different. Track 5, Movin, is a bit more disco inspired. Track 4, Crazy Luva, is more dance music built around a kind of electronic engine rev. It's neat.