Bandcamp as an alternative: What does King Gizzard’s success mean for the future of streaming?
It’s pretty obvious by now that, for better or for worse, the digital age unleashed on the world won’t ever be going away again. As far as what that means as a music fan – well, you probably won’t like the answer, but it’s streaming or nothing.
Of course, there are caveats to every situation – vinyl and cassettes have had a resurgence, for one, and some people genuinely do prefer things in the old-fashioned way. That’s obviously a great thing to champion, but the reality of the rest of the world, whether you’re a casual listener or a devoted connoisseur, is that now music libraries have landed in our pockets, no matter where we go, it would be nonsense to ever get rid of them.
Yet even though streaming platforms undeniably rule supreme, we are slowly beginning to cotton on to the ultimate dangers they pose. The use of AI, unethical investments, and unfair artist compensation are all subjects which have been discussed at length over the course of recent weeks and months due to the issues at Spotify, but naturally, consequences for these actions only really come into effect if someone takes a stand. Step forward, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.
Since the prolific Australian rockers took the principled stand of leaving the shackles of Spotify and instead transferring all their music over to a pioneering streaming model on Bandcamp, it has certainly provoked a lot of heated discussion. They have spearheaded a new ‘name your price’ model on the platform, where fans can pay as little or as much as they want to access King Gizzard’s back catalogue.
There is no shadow of a doubt that this is an innovative approach to the streaming age, but it remains to be seen what the long-term effects of the Bandcamp switch will be, and whether it will truly revolutionise the streaming age when big players like Spotify still have more than enough skin in the game.
The supposed positive buzz around King Gizzard’s storming success on Bandcamp is somewhat skewered by an obvious fact: it was already written in the stars for them. While not exactly considered mainstream, they’re a popular band who have been around for long enough to know how to pull off a stunt like this and garner themselves attention. Not only this, but their ravenously devoted fanbase were always bound to devour whatever leap they made as a group next, so inviting this same legion to try something new was never going to be met with distaste.
For the part of Bandcamp, their operating of the ‘name your price’ model is nothing new, but King Gizzard adopting it has invariably given it an injection of curiosity and publicity that it may never have had before. The effects of this could be twofold – it has raised the profile of the platform hugely, and thus provides food for thought for other artists considering the Spotify exodus, and also offers some confidence to artists who have already been plugging away on the platform for years.
However, there are also many potential traps. Is it really viable, or ethical, for artists to command a price from their fans, no matter how low, in order to access their individual catalogues? For all its pitfalls, you can either have free but limited access, or pay one fee a month for full reign of everything on Spotify. That model may work out more cost-effectively in the long run, as casual listeners may be put off by paying money to listen to music that they don’t ultimately enjoy.
The other glaring issue with Bandcamp, as things stand, is its current very narrow selection of artists using the platform. That’s hardly giving it a Sherlock Holmes level of interrogation, but the harsh reality is that you can’t listen to any of your favourite classic or well-established artists on there, because they have not yet bought into the model. Until a true competition to the likes of Spotify is created, no one will ever fully move across.
Is it likely that The Beatles, Stevie Wonder, or even Taylor Swift will ever take the same stand as King Gizzard and make the switch to Bandcamp? Never say never, of course, but it does seem unlikely. At this point, platforms like Spotify and Apple Music are just far too embedded into the fabric of society to ever be completely eradicated, no matter how much that angers the more ethical consumers.
It would require a gargantuan effort – and, frankly, a significant societal shift in the way we treat culture as a whole – for Bandcamp to ever become the default platform of choice, but this is not to say that this is completely impossible. Things are definitely changing in the music streaming realm, and Bandcamp certainly has more of a grip on the industry currently than it has at any other point.
Despite this, although the boulder has begun to finally move, it’s not going to immediately become a runaway sensation. It will take years, possibly even decades, to change what has ultimately been set in stone with the dominance of Spotify over the past 15 years or so. The streamer is just too much of a titan to take down alone. The process of the Bandcamp uprising will take a lot of chipping away at what seems like an unbreakable rock – but we can only hope that King Gizzard has been the first in what will transform into a landslide effect.
