They do. Bandcamp is a thing, and it's pretty much that, minus a fee for the infrastructure.

But it's not a panacea. An old classmate of mine who's a decently successful Jazz artist now (by Jazz artist standard), had scammers upload her album to Bandcamp without her knowledge. They defrauded a lot of money from her actual fans, probably more than she ever made on Spotify.

Ironically part of signing onto a label is providing protection from stuff like this.

It's maybe what it's supposed to do, but her label didn't.

* Bandcamp, now owned by Songtradr, that promptly fired half its employees.

As bad as this is...as this thread points out, more of the money needs to go to artists, and supporting fewer employees should let them do this.

As long as it remains a viable platform. Hopefully the cuts weren't a "gut because we want to run this down on life support" move.

Classic Hacker News. “Companies shouldn’t spend money, except if it’s on developers!”

Was your classmate already on Bandcamp?

Yes, through the record company.

I bought it when he released it. It was good for him but arguably he lowered his worth and took a pay cut, and it also set a bit of a price ceiling base rate for comedy specials at 5$, which if you aren’t the #1 comedian at the time like Louis was you can’t bring in the same sales volume.

Amazing, thanks for mentioning this! I had no idea. He looks to sell everything on there, not just mp3s, and they are well priced! Just bought a couple of videos of his performances, and it does indeed include DRM-free .mp4 downloads. Even includes a .srt file for subtitles!