Musical social media whatsits

February 27, 2012 12:25 PM

So who's using soundcloud or bandcamp?

just sort of curious as to who's using either of those options, and what they think about them.
posted by dubold (8 comments total) 3 users marked this as a favorite

I use both of 'em. I think of Bandcamp as my 'official' page and Soundcloud as more of a parlour where stuff gets thrown up to discuss. I don't think much of the 'community' on either of 'em to be honest but they are useful as places to embed media for posting on, for example, Facebook or on the new Songwriting forum at Gearslutz, which is kind of an interesting place to hang out now.

It's also useful to aggregate your contacts from various different contexts where you might be posting music.

Bandcamp has much better sound quality: Soundcloud downsamples everything to 128k MP3 for streaming. But Souncloud has much better commenting and interactivity.

You can use the Mefi Social Explorer to find out who's on Soundcloud and Bandcamp.
posted by unSane at 1:42 PM on February 27, 2012 [2 favorites]


ah, the Social Explorer! I figured there was probably a way to find out these things, cheers.

I should check out that songwriting forum.
posted by dubold at 2:12 PM on February 27, 2012


I use both, and pretty much agree with what unSane said. Soundcloud is good for discovering new stuff (not super great for promoting your stuff unless you get a bit spammy -- like following tons of people and adding songs to groups almost indiscriminately -- and bandcamp for the nice high quality downloads for stuff you do like.

I don't hang out in th Songwriting forum on gearslutz, but I have to say that gearslutz is probably the best place on the whole internet to learn about gear AND techniques -- for everything from super-budget recording to high luxury recording.
posted by chimaera at 3:46 PM on February 27, 2012


Well, the songwriting forum is pretty great, I must say. Just read through some topics there and was suitably impressed.

I absolutely disagree about gearslutz being the best place to learn about gear and techniques, but that's just my opinion. It is occasionally a good resource, and I did like those interviews they posted with various engineers.
posted by dubold at 3:56 PM on February 27, 2012


I'm pinkheadedbug on Gearslutz, incidentally. Named after this if ya must know.
posted by unSane at 4:11 PM on February 27, 2012


I'm on soundcloud but so far I've only used it to upload example audio snippets for blog posts, no actual songs.
posted by TwoWordReview at 4:14 PM on March 1, 2012


I"m using both Soundcloud and Bandcamp. I think of them as two different things though.

Soundcloud is more community based and more of a free-for-all. I don't mind uploading Demos and rough things - and just saying in a sense: "Hey I did this, its a bit shit.... but amusing/interesting etc.." I follow a few people - mostly its people I know personally and Its good to hear what they are up to lately.

ie I think of it more as a casual thing - like playing a song to your friends who also make music when they drop by. I dont'really think of it as being a place to interact with the General Public / Fans.


Bandcamp: well bandcamp is just an awesome, clean, straightforward, and pretty repository for "Albums". I have now uploaded pretty much my entire back catalogue of various different projects to bandcamp. It looks good. It handles all the back end for sales / downloads and streaming. AND lets you embed nice streaming players in other websites / forums / blogs / Facebook.

You kinda need to push people towards the bandcamp site though. Its more of a tool / fans won't just stumble across your music there. - but thats why they have the embeddable players and all that. It gives you are really good place to 'store' all your albums / releases that will show up in Google, and is streamable. So people can check out your music. and you might get a few sales through the site.
posted by mary8nne at 2:29 AM on March 2, 2012


I'm on both also. Soundcloud I see as more of a dumping bin for one-off things or something I want to link to from somewhere. I'm not on there a ton.
Bandcamp is all set up for selling digital/physical albums; it's dead-easy. And you can integrate your Bandcamp site pretty seemlessly into your existing website if that's what you want.

Bandcamp has much better sound quality: Soundcloud downsamples everything to 128k MP3 for streaming.
So does Bandcamp. It's the one thing that bothers me; the streaming previews sound so lousy.
posted by chococat at 12:07 PM on March 4, 2012


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