You know what Glenn Jones (American guitarist), Talisk (Scottish folk), Tonbruket (Swedish jazz), Daniel Herskedal (Norwegian jazz, tuba), The Books (New York, sound collage), Yom (French klezmer clarinetist), Kongero (Swedish folk a cappella), and Naragonia (Belgian accordion folk) have in common?
That 1. I supported them on Bandcamp 2. I would never have found them if it wasn't for Spotify's discover weekly.
I could list a lot more artists for which this is true. It's not even counting the ones I found indirectly.
This is maybe something artists should be aware of when they think they get such a good deal from Bandcamp and such a bad deal from Spotify. It's not as simple as that. I'm sure it's true that most people who promise you "exposure" are trying to exploit you, but that doesn't mean you can ignore how you actually got in front of the audience you have.
The problem with this angle is that Bandcamp also has discovery features through which you may have found a different (or maybe an overlapping) 8 artists too. There's a good chance they would not be the same, and there's a argument that it might feel more difficult (Spotify appears to work VERY hard at getting better at prediction, Bandcamp is more like human curation, which is to say less reliable but also occasionally more serendipitous).
I see that indirectly, Spotify likes to recommend me stuff that has gotten attention from a few specific human curators: NPR desk concerts, the Mark Radcliffe Folk sessions (a BBC program I believe), and A Prairie Home Companion. So it's not an either-or, I would not even have heard of those curators without Spotify.
But some of the best stuff Spotify has found for me, has had ridiculously few plays and no obvious human curator connection.
Bandcamp just isn't in the same league, and I'd say Spotify is far better on serendipity too. It's far from predictable what it will recommend, there's not many human curators you can say that about (including the three I mentioned).
That 1. I supported them on Bandcamp 2. I would never have found them if it wasn't for Spotify's discover weekly.
I could list a lot more artists for which this is true. It's not even counting the ones I found indirectly.
This is maybe something artists should be aware of when they think they get such a good deal from Bandcamp and such a bad deal from Spotify. It's not as simple as that. I'm sure it's true that most people who promise you "exposure" are trying to exploit you, but that doesn't mean you can ignore how you actually got in front of the audience you have.