Bandcamp January Report: albums by my friends

Hello Friends!

​Welcome back to the newly-revived Electronic Cottage website!
The EC site has been dormant for the last three to four years, but I have kept on paying the fees to keep it alive. You can enjoy this old school blog-based website without the distractions and toxicity of social media. On EC you will find no pernicious algorithms, no AI, no politics, no blinking GIFs and winking widgets, no avatars, no memes, no emojis, no advertisements!

For my first new post on the EC website I am going to post links to the 17 albums by my friends that I downloaded from Bandcamp in the month of January 2025, plus a couple by me and collaborators. Rather than attempt to write reviews of audio artworks by peers, comrades, and dear friends, I have chosen to post below Bandcamp audio players so that you can experience the sounds firsthand without interpretations by me that might color your perception of the sounds.

I still love music and audio art on hard media, especially CD-Rs and CDs, but I like cassettes too.

In many of the same ways that cassettes in the 1980s and 1990s used to be the most affordable and accessible means to reach listeners, online music on Bandcamp is now the way to go. Anyone anywhere on Planet Earth with an Internet connection can stream hours and hours of music for free instantaneously, without the frightful, hideous postage costs to mail cassettes over national borders.

Streaming on Bandcamp, like you will do below, is a good way to get a taste, but to really savor the full richness of the music we really need to download the albums we are interested in. When I download albums from Bandcamp I always choose WAV files for optimum sound quality.

In its own way Bandcamp is something of a digital utopia, an island in a vast Internet garbage-strewn ocean. Sure, it is a corporate profit-making venture, but despite two ownership changes Bandcamp has remained true to its original mission of putting artists first:
"Bandcamp believes that music is an indispensable part of culture, and for that culture to thrive, artists must be compensated fairly and transparently for their work."
When a fan purchases a download, Bandcamp takes 15%, and PayPal gets a fee. When I get a download sale I usually end up with about $0.73 out of every dollar, which I consider quite good.
You can read about Bandcamp's Fair Trade Music Policy here:
​bandcamp.com/fair_trade_music_policy

Why don't I offer my stuff on the Internet Archive for free? Quite simply because I think that the Internet Archive is butt ugly, even fugly. Enough said about that, except that I have nothing seriously against archive.org, and I think it is useful for certain things. You can find many items by me, compilations and such, on The Internet Archive.

Some of these albums I downloaded because a friend sent me a free download code for the album.

Most of these albums I purchased. I want to urge all of you who have Bandcamp sites to consider making all of your albums available for a $1 minimum with the option to pay more if the purchaser desires. I will be willing to pay one or two bucks to support the releases of a friend and a peer. I will not pay more than that. Most of my Bandcamp releases are Buy It now with a $1 minimum. Some are $2.

In my opinion putting your albums as a Free Download is not a good thing, because I cannot add them to my Bandcamp Collection.

When I purchase a download by a friend it goes into my Bandcamp Collection, and this helps to promote the releases by my friends. Other people on Bandcamp can follow my Bandcamp Fan Collection, and learn about the cool stuff I purchase. For additional information on Bandcamp Fan Collections, go here.

Here below are the Bandcamp albums by friends that I enjoyed in January 2025, in the order I downloaded them.
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If I was forced at gunpoint to pick my favorite, I would choose Brigid Oxhorn CDX3 (Unmastered Originals).

​At the very bottom I will list two albums that I issued on my Bandcamp site in January — collaborations with Dylan Houser and Brandstifter.