This One Time at Bandcamp

Navigating Online Music Platforms

If you want to contribute to our discussion during our presentation, please do so using the hashtag #WRT235Streaming. We hope you will join us in a collaborative effort to dissect and understand the current state of online music streaming! https://twitter.com/hashtag/WRT235Streaming?src=hash

Tom Corey

I am a Communications major and a Music minor from Coventry, RI. I am involved in music programs at URI, and I have also been in a variety of bands throughout high school. I play bass guitar. My 3 favorite musical artists are Rush, Alice in Chains, and BROCKHAMPTON.
Blog Link: https://keyoflife51580511.wordpress.com/

Evan McAlice

Evan is a sophomore Writing & Rhetoric/Communications double major from Holden, MA. My experience with music is incredibly extensive! In high school, I learned how to play guitar, I sang in two honors choirs, and I participated in 4 musicals. At URI I'm in the Rhody Rhapsodies a capella group, as well as the school's Musicians Guild. My 3 favorite musical artists are Talking Heads, The Mountain Goats, and Kanye West (pre-Trump mental breakdown).
Blog link: https://perspectiveplaylist.wordpress.com

Essential Question: How do artists and musicians utilize digital platforms as means of promotion or output?

Purpose: To analyze the way artists use mediums such as Bandcamp, SoundCloud, YouTube, etc. to publish and promote their works to reach a mass audience.

Creative Brief - Evan and Tom

Napster (2001)

Napster was one of the first file-sharing websites. Created in 2001, it allowed users to upload and share MP3 files with other users. It was great for finding rare recordings of songs, and uploading original content. There was, however, a great controversy regarding the legality of its practice. The majority of files being shared had illegal pirated content. 2001 also saw the release of the Apple iPod, a portable MP3 player. The popularity of the iPod seemed to directly correlate to the popularity of Napster. Due to legal issues, Napster was shut down in 2001.

iTunes store (2003-)

Apple released the iTunes Store in 2003, to purchase music for the iPod, which released two years prior. The iTunes Store was a safe and legal way to purchase music digitally. The idea was to no longer need to purchase an entire album for one song that you want. You could purchase full albums, but could also buy single songs, for 99 cents. While this was a safe practice and a successful model, there was no way of discovering new artists; only artists that a user was already familiar with.

Pandora (2000-)

Pandora was the first "internet radio station." The idea of Pandora was to be able to listen to music that you know, but also discover new music through personalization and algorithms. Users could create and tweak their own personal radio stations. The service adopted the business model of "freemium," which is where a service offers both free and premium features. Premium features include the ability to play any song, create playlists, have unlimited skips and replays, and no advertisements.

Bandcamp (2008-) is an online service that allows artists to share their music to a wide underground audience, as well as earn money through distribution of said music and merch. It has gained a lot of attention among underground and niche music fans as a way to discover and support new music from a wide array of experimental and non-mainstream art.

Spotify (2006-) is a music streaming platform that has grown in popularity over the last few years for its access to a seemingly endless amount of music for a reasonable price. It also curates playlists specific to each user's tastes, helping them discover new music or reinforce their own music tastes, as well as lets artists directly upload their content to the platform. It had become a major source of outreach for artists big and small.

SoundCloud (2007-) is an online service where users can upload your own music, as well as listen to music others have made. It is one of the most relevant streaming services today, as there have been countless artists that have gained massive followings. There is an entire niche genre called "SoundCloud rap," in which the style of these artists evolve off of other artists that use SoundCloud.

YouTube (2005-) is an online video streaming service. It is one of the most culturally relevant websites of all time. Users can upload any video they want, as long as it falls under fair use laws. Many artists have started from humble beginnings and have since blown up from exposure on YouTube, such as Justin Bieber and Shawn Mendes. The second most subscribed channel on the website, T-Series, is a collective of a majority of music and music videos in India. There is also a prominent music community, where musicians upload unique musical content, with their own spin on it.

Arctic Monkeys

The Arctic Monkeys have often been described as one of the first big music acts to utilize the internet as a resource for promoting their music, relying on early blog usage to compensate for lack of initial radio airplay. To many, they represented a shift in the music industry into a sort of "new musical socialism", where alternative acts can be heard without sole reliance of label assistance. Now that the band has amassed millions of worldwide fans, they can be seen as pioneers in the new age of online music

Justin Bieber

Arguably the biggest artist to ever come out of YouTube, Bieber was signed by manager Scooter Braun after Braun stumbled upon a video of him singing 'So Sick' by Ne-Yo. Bieber had begun posting videos of himself singing to YouTube when he was just 12 years old, and just a few years later, he had become one of the biggest pop stars in the world. Now that YouTube has grown to become the multimedia giant it is today, Bieber's success can be seen as one of the earliest precursor to the marketability of music on YouTube.

Brockhampton

Brockhampton is a musical collective consisting of a variety of unique personalities from all around the world, spearheaded primarily by Kevin Abstract. The group gained notoriety after it was revealed that many of them met through the online forum 'KanyeToThe', eventually forming the massive supergroup just a little while later. Their current navigation of Twitter and YouTube as ways to promote their art, as well as the freedom from record labels that allowed them to release a constant stream of music lead to massive fanbase. They can be regarded as one of modern music's biggest internet success stories, using these platforms to reach an audience that they might have never found through any other means.

'Soundcloud rap'

Despite the relatively negative press surrounding it, 'SoundCloud Rap' has become the fastest growing genre in mainstream music up until this point. Characterized by an unpolished and distorted trap sound, this is a facet of hip hop's underground that has surfaced into the mainstream in a major way. Artists like Lil Peep, XXXTentacion, Lil Pump, and Trippie Redd have revolutionized the modern rap sound by using SoundCloud as an early resource for unfiltered and boundary-free expression, which is a mentality that has carried an influential amount of weight in the modern music zeitgeist.

Interview with URI's OWN Jesse Yelin

Jesse Yelin is a senior at the University of Rhode Island. Not only is he the president of URI's Musician's Guild, which puts together shows with a number of unique local artists, but he has released music himself through SoundCloud and Bandcamp. Being an artist himself, as well as his frequent contact with numerous local artists, has given him a unique perspective on the current state of online internet culture, and his art often reflects that fascination.

New Recording 13.m4a

Interview with jonah tolchin of dharmasoul

Jonah Tolchin has both a solo career and is in the New Jersey-based blues duo, Dharmasoul. Tolchin has gathered a modest following through Spotify. His solo work has an average of 168,000 monthly listeners, and his work with Dharmasoul has 35,000 monthly listeners.

Interview with guitarist Jonah Tolchin of Dharmasoul

Tom Corey- Final Reflection

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