I think Bandcamp does a great job bringing artists closer to the audience without any of those things like interviews, curation, IRL presence. Honestly, those things always rubbed me the wrong way since they felt like the kind of marketing that we get through traditional means (e.g., Rolling Stone articles), except with an indie flavor: some music nerd picked a winner and put them forward, and artists who didn't make the cut by the Bandcamp tastemakers take more effort to find.
I think the absence of that sort of "pick-a-winner-and-interview-them" does a lot for making things flat and fair for all. The primary people who get grumpy about getting rid of that are the people whose job it is to be curator/interviewer/etc. I'm not terribly sad if they go away.
Literally a few minutes ago Adam Neely (Pretty famous youtuber and Jazz player) posted a video specifically about this point[1], and I fully agree with his thesis: If you take out the "music nerds" as the gatekeepers, their place will be taken by Google/Instagram/TikTok indexing and MinMax algos and whoever can influence those.
The tech to create content may have exploded in the last years, but the ability to truly connect and discover (and I mean ways to build cultural, emotional and social connections in and outside of the internet) has plummeted.
I don't agree that technology is strictly at fault here, but this side of the equation has been heavily ignored due to the less immediate monetization options. We've gone for the "intensive farming" of art and culture compared to more "sustainable" approaches, and we're experiencing the equivalent of desertification following a monocolture.
And I thought the bandcamp did a good job with the best of the month lists because it wasn;t just what sold best. I frequently started my morning listening to the bands from one of the articles on the homepage while I drank coffee and got caught up. For categories like hip hop, ambient, or folk I don't follow enough to have a grasp of who or what I might like, so I treated the articles like a radio show, a chance to stumble on something interesting. The posts focused on a specific region and genre were usually worth the read, and I appreciated how sometimes there were links to some artists side projects in a different genre.
I suppose it seemed valuable to me that the various writers or editors could focus on niches, not the best of the month and this month it is written by a metalhead.
If anything I thought the suggested albums at the bottom iss a bit too skewed toward certain bands. I'm not sure if that's targeting by user, or if there are too many connections in people's purchases to avoid making the links. On the other hand, the artist suggested albums at the bottom are almost always worth a listen if they have taken the time to add any.
they were pretty consistent about picking good artists though, which was great for scenes i dont follow myself
no one person can sift through every scene and genre to find the good shit, and there's plenty of bad shit. i can do that for like, one scene
bandcamp articles generally delivered me more quality finds with more variety than automated "you may also like..." curation systems a la spotify or last.fm.
it's not like the latter are truly democratizing anything either--once getting big on spotify (or nowadays, tiktok) became important commercially, you got a whole ecosystem of influencers behind the scenes offering promotion in those systems. getting boosted via a faceless "chill sunday morning coffee music" playlist is still curation
This isn't really what you're posting about I do find curation and reviews to be valuable, if you avoid reifying them too much. I often see a bit of an anti-critic sentiment, mostly from people who disagree with a review for something they've got strong feelings about one way or another, but I don't want to spend the time to extensively search through the Sturgeon's law wasteland of indie music. Algorithmic recommendations are sometimes helpful but don't often encourage me to branch out as much as reviewers, especially when it comes to unknown unknowns. The fact that a lot of indie artists find it hard to get attention is really just the nature of the game. There are a lot of musicians and aspiring musicians out there.
I think the absence of that sort of "pick-a-winner-and-interview-them" does a lot for making things flat and fair for all. The primary people who get grumpy about getting rid of that are the people whose job it is to be curator/interviewer/etc. I'm not terribly sad if they go away.