Last week, Bandcamp released a new feature that has been anticipated for a long time: publicly sharable playlists. We still listen to a lot of our music on Bandcamp, so it's exciting so see such a useful feature that listeners there have been asking about for years finally available. But we also understand why it's been such a long time coming: like many problems facing online music software, the issues are not technical but social and legal ones.
The ability to play music as streams on Bandcamp hinges entirely on sidestepping the complex royalty systems that govern streaming platforms. As best as we understand, by limiting streams to "preview listens" of purchased music, theyâve long avoided paying performance royalties to PROs (Performance Rights Organizations) like ASCAP, BMI, or PRS. The new playlist featureârestricted to music youâve boughtâis a carefully calculated move. Once music appears in user-generated playlists, it risks being classified as a "diffusion channel," which could trigger PRO licensing requirements. Bandcampâs legal team has likely scrutinized this to ensure they donât cross the line; instead, they are dancing nimbly on the edge of a loophole.
The distinction between "promotional listens" and curated playlists is legally murky. PROs treat playlists as potential "compilation albums," meaning the musicâs context shifts from artist intent to third-party curation. By mirroring Funkwhale's approachâwhere users share digital music they ownâBandcamp uses a gray area that might shield them from PRO battles. And of course, encouraging fans to build and share mix tapes of music they've bought is a clever way of encouraging music sales while keeping fans in the Bandcamp ecosystem, rather than using existing third party Bandcamp playlists like bndcmpr.co.
Of course, as a group of people building something that's currently positions itself as a competitor to Bandcamp, and with our stab at public playlists released last week, we were also a bit surprised. This is the first major feature that Bandcamp has released since its purchase by Songtradr after what feels like a year of rewriting their terms and conditions. Before this release, we shared the sentiment of many that while Bandcamp currently works pretty great for musicians, they had also become stagnant. We'll see if these new feature releases will continue.
In the meantime, we can celebrate some of the things we've been working on ourselves.
We've also rolled out our own iteration on public playlistsâwe hope that people will take advantage of building narrative blog posts around them. Now, you can add songs to a blog post and it will all be playable on the blog post page itself. You can try it out on the this blog post's own page!
At the end of May we helped organize an event in DC that brought together musicians and the solidarity economy. The folks at KiaZii did most of the heavy lifting and the event itself was a blast, regenerative and a mini-verse of the world we'd like to see. We're really excited about doing more work with them in the future.
We've also released a whole host of new features over the past few months, from adding tracks to your list of favorites and purchasing them, the ability to upload music without letting people download it, tour dates, to the ability to set your own platform cut on subscriptions. Lastly, we are focusing our current development on label features and looking for a few brave souls to test them out. If you or your label want to participate, e-mail us at hi@mirlo.space.
Have thoughts? Join the discussion on the Social Music Network.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://mirlo.space/team/posts/302