I haven't posted in a while but figured this would be the easiest format to share some recommendations for Bandcamp Friday. Since this blog gives me room to say as many words as I want, I might as well give some quick background. If you already know what Bandcamp Friday is, you can skip a couple paragraphs.
Bandcamp is an awesome website for purchasing music. It pays a good portion of music directly to the artists and labels when compared to other sources. Pitchfork recently posted a story about the difference it can make monetarily if you support the artists you love in this way if you would like to know more specifics.
In addition to this, Bandcamp periodically has special days where they donate all of their profit to particular charitable organizations. I remember them doing one for the ACLU a couple years back, and this Juneteenth they will be donating to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. And during the COVID-19 crisis, they have been waiving all of their shares of sales to support artists directly every first Friday of the month. Which is what tomorrow is. Or "today" if I take too long putting this together.
Beyond all this awesomeness, I just love finding unique stuff on Bandcamp. If you use Bandcamp, not only do you get a download of your purchases in whatever format you want, but you can also stream your purchases from the app. And for some reason, I enjoy music a lot more when I'm listening to that app than Spotify. Buying music makes it yours. Streaming services just feel like having free samples to me. It's hollow, it's cheap, and there's just too much.
Okay, so here is what I wanted to do. Finally getting to the point. I just wanted to highlight some of my favorite black artists with music available on Bandcamp. Not going to claim to be super cool and in the know, lots of these artists are already pretty well loved on Pitchfork or whatever. But this is what I want to listen to right now. This is who I want to support to ensure these artists can continue to do what they do. Feel free to throw a comment on here with any recommendations you may have!
I thought about trying to put descriptions and/or categories on these but changed my mind. Just check the sample tracks and see what you think. If you don't have time to check them all out, just click randomly until you see something that looks interesting to you. And buy buy buy!
- Open Mike Eagle (link is for his latest stuff, also check out his older material at here and here)
- Georgia Anne Muldrow
- Oddisee
- Xenia Rubinos
- Aye Nako
- Jean Grae (maybe fairly well known and she seems to have retired from rapping but still...some interesting things are on her bandcamp, which she sometimes takes offline so get them while the gettin's good)
- SassyBlack (you may know her as half of THEESatisfaction)
- Moses Sumney (grae may be album of the year, maybe)
- serpentwithfeet (Soil was my album of 2018)
- Baby Rose (there's just one track on bandcamp but she's so awesome)
- Noname
- Duendita
- Dua Saleh
- Shabazz Palaces
There's also a big open source list here.
And if you're on bandcamp, follow me! I don't have bandcamp friends!
Here's also a list of artists/labels donating their portion and/or putting out special releases.
Beyond that, if you've got money for music you've got money for good causes so make sure to send dollars to where they are needed most. Here's a pretty good/concise link to lots of that.
