idealism (ideally)

Dear Bandcamp,

You’re killing it. You’re right on the cusp of filling a niche that’s been vacated for years. For years! But there’s a few glaring issues for me. Here’s some simple requests:

1.) Sortable albums on the homepage. I’m talking drag & drop. Some real like, 2007 kinda stuff here, you guys. The ability to sort via a selection input just flat out doesn’t cut it once you have a catalog of, say, more than five or so albums. It’d take the better part of an hour to sort all these releases in the images below — and doing that every time you add a new release?! C’mon. I know that some seriously smart people maintain this site. In it’s current form, though, this could be a lot smarter… I have given up caring about the way our Bandcamp homepage looks because of this alone.

2.) I get the quality control bit… the wanting to ensure that all tracks on your site come with high quality art and are available in high quality lossless formats with correct track info… but what gives with the one-at-a-time track upload bit? I got other stuff to do, man! Why not let users upload a zipped file and let them enter track info / album artwork after the fact… after the upload has completed? Heck, even save the audio from this upload session and let me add that info at another time! Last.fm does this. C’mon, you’re better than Last.fm.

Those are the big two. What else.

3.) (EXTRA CREDIT FOR ANYONE TO DO AND WIN AT THE INTERNET FOR A LITTLE WHILE) There is no one true, centralized place for show listings on the internet. EVERYONE IS HALF ASSING CONCERT EVENTS / GIGS / SHOWS / WHATEVER AND I DON’T GET IT, WHY??? Facebook has all the pieces but can’t put it together — they really fucking suck at it. Songkick and Bandsintown are baaaarrreeely OK at best but are mostly just scraping the web for content… no bands are going there and manually entering shows (and if they are, I’m sure they’re grumbling about it or their manager is grumbling about it). Plug this hole! Be that destination. You already have a devoted user base that manually adds their music. They will manually add their shows too, but it’s such an afterthought right now. As much as Myspace sucked (and it really did / does suck). They had the music & show listings in one place thing on lock. You’ve got the deal with Songkick — neat! Great! Build on this and make it better. Bandsintown has a neat thing going where event listings on their site automatically create event listings on Facebook. If I was able to create events for my band that would list on the same page that my band’s music is streamed from and those events would link to corresponding event pages on Facebook that I had control over (Bandsintown ones don’t give the user control) I’d be a happy band with happy fans. But instead, I have to use Google to find where bands are playing because show listings on the web are truly awful right now. So, I dunno, work on that, maybe?

Whew.

4.) Other than that, keep doing really great stuff. I’d have offed myself by now without your service.

Anyway, I’m certain this is probably the most unpersuasive and uncompelling thing ever written.

Tough love,

Kevin Duquette