My perfect imperfect addiction to Bandcamp
As some, or none of you know, I buy music on Bandcamp. A lot. So much so that last month I spend 20€ in total for an album, an ep and a single (to be honest, I overspent on the album because I liked it very much).
Today I paid another 7€ towards another single and another ep. While I'm happy that my music collection is growing and I'm even happier that I'm supporting independent creators, I could only think about how I have a bit of an addiction with owning my music and how I believe I'm overspending on stuff that I don't really need (remember, I can listen to everything on Soundcloud ad free for cheaper)
So for a bit of an insight into how Bandcamp purchases affect my balance at the end of the month here's a summary:
- After I pay my rent and food, let's say I remain with 60€
- 30€ are for other food and random purchases (let's say I go out with friends)
- 15€ is the average cost of an album and an EP on Bandcamp
- 13€ subscriptions of sorts
Total expense: 58€/month
Of course, not every day I go grab food and stuff, considering a budget of 1.3€ every day (excluding the weekends I spend home), I could reduce to 20-25€ but for the sake of simplicity, we'll keep it to the average.
After the expenses, I am left with 2€.
Let's say I stopped paying for music on Bandcamp and instead pay for Soundcloud Go or Spotify Premium: I am left wit approximately 13€. But that is also optional, leading to savings up to 18€.
Now, is it worth it to pay up on bandcamp? Well... you see... it would be worth it, if I had lossless audio equipment. I don't have that at the moment. So I don't benefit at all from downloading music in .flac . I also don't benefit from downloading music offline, as coverage is excellent in my country. On the other side, I support artists that actually make music that I like. Because soundcloud doesn't monetize ads in my country (it's weird and sad) the only way to support artists is through direct purchases.
I enjoy owning my music and in theory not depending on a service to serve me music, but after all, I still have to go to Soundcloud to discover new songs and artists. It's also not like paying for music is dropping me into the red, it's just that I wish I had a larger margin of cash left.
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