Monday, 16 August 2010

Bandcamp is a great website for independent musicians wanting to sell digital downloads. It is free to use, full of features and sales are paid directly into the artist's PayPal account. Having said that, nothing is perfect and here are a few tweaks that, I think, could improve Bandcamp.

  • Search: Users expect to be able to visit a website and search for the content they're after, but there's no search box on the Bandcamp homepage or artist's pages. An advanced search would be good too, making possible such queries as 'show me New Age tracks from Canadian artists under $5 per album'.
  • Charts & navigation: Bandcamp have a different approach to their homepage layout to many other independent music websites, being minimal and clean, which is no bad thing. With no charts, latest releases or 'browse by' navigaton on the homepage, however, it does mean that there's no sense of community or attempt to lead the user into browsing themed areas of the website.
  • Download screen: I'm not a big fan of the pop-up style download screen used by Bandcamp. I'd rather have a separate page where I could select tracks to download. Which brings me on to the next point..
  • Shopping basket: Bandcamp is an all-or-nothing, one-at-a-time download site. There's no shopping basket. It's easy to download a particular album, but if you want to pick and choose tracks, or download multiple albums from different bands you have to go through the checkout process multiple times.
  • Volume control: The online music player has no volume control. Pretty basic omission.
  • Zip: Downloads are delivered as .zip files, which is OK, but compared to the user experience of downloading from Amazon, for example, where the track is automatically added to your music library, it's a bit basic.

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