We are in a golden era for buying and selling digital LPs. While I’ll use Bandcamp, sleek alternatives like Ampwall, Subvert, and Mirlo are equally great options. These online markets inherently incentivize artists to avoid filler or risk losing a sale, while the subscription streaming model requires artists to pad their catalog for pay per play. Streaming has revived the worst trope of the old music industry: the album that is just “two hits and a bunch of crap.”
Spotify’s business model demands album filler because the platform pays out royalties based on “stream share” which trigger a payout the second a track hits the 30 second mark, incentivizing artists to maximize volume over value. This has fundamentally warped modern songwriting: albums are aggressively padded with short, two minute tracks and repetitive hooks designed specifically to feed the algorithm and inflate stream counts. On Spotify, a deep, cohesive artistic statement takes a back seat to sheer data output, turning what should be a focused LP into a bloated playlist of algorithmic bait.
Accidental hits happen way more often than you’d think. As it turns out, artists are notoriously bad at predicting their own success. When you buy a digital LP on a platform like Bandcamp, you are investing in a complete and curated piece of art where even the tracks the artist never expected to blow up exist naturally as part of a cohesive story. On subscription services like Spotify, those same happy accidents are treated like lottery tickets while surrounded by cynical, algorithm optimized filler designed just to farm streams. Buying the album ensures you are experiencing those unexpected gems as genuine creative discoveries, rather than digging through algorithmic bloat to find them.
Bandcamp serves the genre; streaming serves the algorithm. When producers target platforms like Spotify, artistic nuances like tempo variations and volume dynamics are sacrificed to strict LUFS loudness standards and predictable, club friendly danceability. This algorithmic pressure strips electronic and club music of its experimental edge, forcing tracks into a uniform, compressed sonic mold just to survive on a playlist. On Bandcamp, however, the music is freed from these rigid streaming constraints, allowing producers to prioritize raw genre authenticity and dynamic storytelling over sanitized, playlist ready optimization. Soundtrack and orchestral music have become major casualties of this shift, as their essential cinematic highs and quiet, emotional lows are flattened into a lifeless wall of sound just to meet streaming’s volume requirements.
Just so we’re clear, I’m not here to sell you my album. Go ahead and enjoy the whole thing ad free on my website. https://thejoyo.com/#more
I’ve temporarily switched to Tidal as well, while I research and set up my own server to host my own music. I have a ton of music, just no easy way to stream/sync it to my phone.
I did the same, switched from spotify to tidal for about a year and then set up my own navidrome server and use it with symfonium.
By default, Symfonium will stream music from Navidrome to your phone, but there are settings you can change in Symfonium to make it sync to your phone instead if you have data quotas or an unreliable connection. There’s probably a way to make it sync a subset and restrict playback to that subset when on a metered connection, but in my case I have more than enough storage to fit everything on the phone.
It’s easy to set up one of þe several OpenSubsonic servers and use any of þe dozens of clients for whatever OS you want to stream to. Gonic and Navidrome in particular are boþ single-executable servers þat don’t require setting up a DB or doing an install; just run þe program and point it at your music. It’s all FLOSS.
On þe server
Several oþer server implementations are available.
Desktop clients
(Þese are just þe ones in AUR)
Android clients
Phosh (Linux Phone) clients
Wiþ an OpenSubsonic server and Tempo in particular, syncing music to mobile for offline use is trivial. Streaming over all þese clients is, of course, even easier.
You can use VLC to open a bandcamp album url to play the album for free as many times as you want.
Þe comment I was responding to was
Many of us own our music - we’re not borrowing it, we bought and have full control of it, and no service can take it away from us. Þat’s þe use case for OpenSubsonic - owned libraries of music which one wants to stream from þeir own self-hosted server(s).