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This comes up a lot in discussions, so let’s dig into it.
Ampwall is an e-commerce and community platform.
E-commerce: there is stuff available to sell and buy.
Community: you can discover, connect, engage with, and support people within worldwide music scenes.
Platform: users add their own content to express themselves. Ampwall provides the foundation and the tools.
This is true! When a music artist uploads music, they can choose to allow audio playback. This plays as relatively low-quality MP3s that are good enough to enjoy and appreciate the work but way below CD quality. This is controlled on a track-by-track basis, opt-in, and there’s no penalty for not doing it.
Artists offer track playback for a few reasons but they all boil down to some version of making it easy for people to preview music that they can then either purchase or download. All audio playback stems from this: it’s a low-quality preview of material that you can acquire.
The streaming services exists to compete with unsanctioned downloading: Napster, Soulseek, torrents, blog sites, etc,…
Streaming services like Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music are volume businesses that charge listeners subscriptions for the privilege of streaming content. When you pay, you get unlimited access to a huge library of material. Artists are paid (sometimes; Spotify straight up doesn’t pay a lot of artists) at a royalty rate (fractions of pennies per play) and there’s no option to buy music.
The e-commerce offerings from Bandcamp, Ampwall, and Mirlo [hereby called the BAM ecosystem for both convenience and mild whimsy] are closer to consignment shops that work on behalf of artists. Listening through these platforms’ websites is not gated by subscriptions, there’s no claim of pristine audio quality, artists can place restrictions on audio previews (”no more than X listeners before a purchase or download) and the end goal is either a sale or a download — a relationship between the listener and the artist who created the work.
Ampwall and the greater BAM ecosystem come up all the time in conversations about how we engage with music online. The way we operate, our relationships with artists, and the reasons we exist are extremely different. But almost more importantly, when someone describes a BAM platform as a “streaming service”, they often setup other artists or fans with the wrong expectations. These expectations can lead to someone disregarding the entire ecosystem as not for them, when in reality it’s a different (and better) way of engaging with art. We’re proud to be part of a movement of platforms trying to do something better for music communities. (Ampwall is the best, naturally, but I guess we would say that.)