Aly Gillani - Bandcamp
Aly Gillani is the co-founder of First Word Records - an independent UK label focusing on the intersections between Hip Hop, Jazz and Soul. He’s also the UK and Europe label rep for Bandcamp. He joined MTF Director Andrew Dubber on stage in the Jazziz Lounge at MTF Stockholm to talk about his journey in music, how Bandcamp has affected that over the 10 years of its existence, the process of online music discovery and the challenge of making independent music sustainable in an age of streaming.
AI Transcription
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
bandcamp, label, music, artists, fans, band camp, tech fest, people, streaming, ethan, records, buy, band, leeds, mtf, company, site, called, record label, speak
SPEAKERS
Andrew Dubber, Aly Gillani
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Dubber. I’m the director of Music Tech Fest. And this is the MTF podcast. I’ve had an interest in Bandcamp for over a decade now since it first started back when I was running something called New Music strategies. I’ve been an advisor to band camp and it’s early days and full disclosure, I am now a shareholder in the company. And this is because I’m not just a fan of what they do. I’m completely on board with the overall mission to make independent music sustainable in the digital age. Now it was recently bandcamps 10th birthday and that coincided more or less with Music Tech fest Stockholm so I invited Aly Gillani bandcamps UK and Europe label rep to the festival to meet up with independent artists and labels. have a chat with us about band camp itself. Talk a little about his own career in music and tech, and also his own label. First word records who put out a lot of what I can only describe as my sort of thing, including one of my favourite recording artists broken beat maestro, Kaidi Tatham, this conversation you’re going to hear took place on the interview stage in the jazz Lounge at MTF, Stockholm. It’s Aly Gillani from bandcamp and First Word Records, hope you enjoy.
Aly Gillani
First word records. I’ve been running now for 14 and a half years or so. And I used to live in a town called Leeds which is in the north of England. And I fell into managing a band, like a lot of people seem to I guess, because I had a car and a phone. So I was very, very qualified for that job. And, and then we were just in a situation where there was a great music scene in Leeds, there’s a really good College of Music that has an amazing jazz course. And so there’s always amazing musicians coming through the town. But there was no record label. So seeing how qualified I was to be a manager, I thought, well, I’m equally qualified to set up a record label. So myself and a guy who I barely met, actually, we were introduced by friends, you know, I said, I want to start a record label. And now I used to speak to Andy. So I met this guy called Andy, he was a scratch DJ from Sheffield. And we put out a 12 inch and a CD with some friends of ours on it, basically. And it was kind of hip hop with a kind of soulful, jazzy sort of leaning to it. And yeah, and then we kind of it went from being very much a kind of family thing in our town, from people in that scenario, to then kind of growing and taking in a lot of other artists from all over the world, from Japan, and from the US and France, Germany, Australia, all kinds of places. And I’m now back in my hometown of London. And we’ve now sort of reestablished a new new kind of musical family more based in London, and we are taking a lot of the kind of broken beat that Andrew mentioned, and a lot of jazz. And yeah, so that’s, that’s first word. One of the interesting things about running a record label is it’s really hard to make any money whatsoever. Hence, I also work at band camp. So I’ve been I’ve been I’ve used band camp to sell music for my label for nine years. I think it was pretty early on. So I use bandcamp. When, if you sent in a support request, Ethan, the CEO would reply because they only had four staff. So I kind of got to know Ethan and Andrew, who hosts the weekly radio show on Bandcamp. I knew him from before, because he ran a another label similar to mine, but more successful called ubiquity. And at the point, I guess, it’s four years ago, when Bandcamp introduced accounts specifically for record labels. They needed someone to spread the gospel of Bandcamp in the UK and European music industry. And that is me. So that’s kind of condensing 14 years into four minutes.
Andrew Dubber
So how would you describe or characterise what the gospel of Bandcamp is?
Aly Gillani
So the idea of band camp is a few interesting interesting things to know about band camp. First off, it’s I don’t know if it is if it’s ironic or not, but we’re at Music Tech Fest and bank comm is a music tech company. We have 55 employees now. And I am one of about six that has no technical knowledge whatsoever. So here I am. But so the reason I mentioned that is that there are actually three of us in the whole company who have any experience with wealth, yet three that have any experience of working in independent music. And what that means is that when Ethan and the guys that founded the company were getting started, they were really looking at it with very fresh eyes. One thing you find when you work in music, and you say Hey, why don’t we do this? No, you can’t do that. That’s not how that gets done, it gets done this way. Whereas with band camp, they had none of that baggage. So they could just come in and say, well, that just seems very difficult for artists. And I think there’s a better way of doing it. And so they changed it. I’m now coming in and I’ve got labels going, Hey, why don’t you do things like this way? Because that’s how it’s always done. And I might well, maybe. So I think you know, but the main sort of central point of Bandcamp is, it’s a community for fans and artists to interact with each other. And for fans to be able to support the artists that they love directly with as few middlemen as possible. And to be able to connect with those artists on a level that, you know, despite mass communication, and social media, and all of that kind of thing. Sometimes it’s actually quite difficult. So yeah, it’s it’s a very organic, interesting community. As you say, the way we say is we’re quite shy company. Other than that, we don’t go to things. But the focus has always been on making a product that’s really good for our users, which is mainly artists, some labels and and obviously, fans as well. And yeah, you know, it’s still growing, still getting on lots of amazing music. I think over 7 million people have bought something on Bandcamp, over the last 10 years, we have about one over a million fans with registered fan accounts, and we’re adding those at about 100,000 a month. So it’s really growing quite exponentially at the moment. We’re selling 36,000 Records a day, which is, I think, if one every two and a half seconds, something like that. And this is in a world and I don’t need to say this to you in the home of streaming in a world where we’re told people don’t want to buy music anymore. But we’re evidence that maybe some people still do.
Andrew Dubber
Whenever you read anything online about the state of the music industry, or you read newspaper articles about artists make no money anymore at all, to universals just had the biggest, you know, windfall in history. And and sort of the, you know, the spectacle of that as at its height. Band camps never mentioned in those conversations, because it almost seems like it’s too much of an outsider, it’s too much of an outlier. To make sense within the context of that conversation.
Aly Gillani
Yeah, it’s an interesting thing. I mean, you know, I want one thing that we always say to artists and labels on the site, we have a thing called the Bandcamp daily, which is our editorial offering, which we set up about two years ago. So we have new articles about new music on the site that go up every day. And we sometimes get artists saying, or we may get Bandcamp exclusive for a week, can we get this coverage? And we always say, Well, no, look, we might cover it anyway. But why would you not put it in a place where your fans might be put it in on Spotify, put it on Apple Music, but also put it on Bandcamp? Because some of your fans are going to be there. So yeah, we’re kind of not really that interested, you know, it’s like, it’s fine. I understand as a consumer, the convenience of streaming, I’m yet to be convinced of the business model of it, that that’s robust. This is speaking personally. But you know, for my label, I’ve got artists that do really, really well off of streaming. So it’s not like I’d say don’t do that. However, one of the things about streaming is actually if you think about it, it’s it’s almost more like radio, because the way you really make money is you get playlisted. So you have the same structures that you had in radio and the same barriers, if you’re an independent artist, what we try and do a band camp is have something that’s a bit more democratic, something that’s a bit more where you’re more in control of, of the interactions, every time you make a sale, you get a fans email address, you can then get in touch with them, tell them about new music that you’ve got coming out. You know, you you don’t know that stuff. You might know demographics from your streaming data, or, you know, what, yeah, for other DSPs. But to actually have that individual data and be able to interact your fans directly. That’s, that’s quite rare. I think.
Andrew Dubber
Ben cams changed quite a lot over the years. And it’s been running it’s in year 10. And when it started out, it was it wasn’t a community, it wasn’t a place where you could go and shop for music. It was like if you were a band, you could have a Bandcamp page Bandcamp wasn’t a supermarket. It was you go through the band to get to the band’s page, and it happened to be powered by bandcamp. And essentially, they were an e commerce platform for artists now it’s very much conversation community discovery fan thing. But the interesting thing for me is how that’s developed, you get Facebook rolls out a new Facebook every second day. At Spotify, the same as new buttons, new features, new you know, all the rest of it. bandcamp maybe once a year, we’ll go there’s a new thing. And we’ve been working on it for and it seems that really deliberate.
Aly Gillani
Yeah, I definitely so I think they’re like subtle changes that we roll out but most People wouldn’t notice like, now if you’re on a page, there’s a little search bar at the top, which never used to be there. But it’s designed as a really good and so they don’t make it really conspicuous and and what have you? Um, yeah, you know, I mean, I’m not. I like so I’ve been at the company three and a half years. I don’t quite know how that’s happened. It’s got I mean, I started at the same time as our editorial team started, which was a big change in how music discovery works on Bandcamp. But, yeah, I think it’s, you know, when we discuss new features and things I mean, Ethan will always say to us, how does it help artists? That’s still the kind of the central guiding principle, is it helpful to artists? If it isn’t, do we really need to do it? Which is really good, because it’s a really good reminder of why we’re doing this in the first place, you know, but yeah, I think, you know, yeah, when I started using it, for my label, it was just, we had an e commerce site that we built ourselves selves, and it was terrible. And here was a good platform that did it. Well. I think now with the editorial with fan accounts, as well. So I don’t know if you guys are familiar, but you can set up a fan. Like if you buy something on the site, you buy your vinyl, you get a free download in whatever format you want. You can then also if you download the app stream, that album, you know, once you bought it through the app, and you can also then set up a fan account and follow other fans and they can follow you. And you get an email once a week saying, here’s what fans that you follow have been buying. And, and you can click on stuff and buy it. If you buy something off of someone else’s recommendation, they get an email saying, hey, well done. You just help sell this record, give yourself a high five. And it’s it’s as close to the thing of being in the record shop and looking over someone’s shoulder and going, Oh, that looks interesting. I’ll check that out. And that’s kind of where we want to go with it. I
i that feature existed, and my housemates boyfriend came over said, so even on a social media thing is the creepy, boring or inconsequential? For some reason why was on YouTube that week. Really nice.
Aly Gillani
Well, I think, you know, it’s interesting, you say that, the way I always say is that someone actually described it to me once as an anti social network that we have. Because you know, you don’t have to post a photo of your breakfast, you can just buy music you like, and then people look at it, and maybe they buy it.
Andrew Dubber
Well, I was involved in those early conversations with Ethan about the discovery. And, and we talked about this looking over the shoulder thing and the rest of it. But the important thing was that it was high friction sharing. So that in order to recommend something on Bandcamp, it’s not clicking a Like button or a heart or anything like that, you part with money. When you part with money, it shows up on your stream. And I actually paid money for this. And there’s no real higher recommendation than that. And that’s why it’s kind of a powerful recommendation why it’s like looking over people’s shoulders, but I can’t so the thing I’m I guess I really want to get to is why you’re here today in this place at Music Tech Fest, because you are the sort of the advocate for bandcamp. And and there’s a reason for you to be here physically present.
Aly Gillani
Yeah, I think, you know, for us, it’s, it’s, you know, we’re kind of not going to all these conferences here. They’re in everywhere. There’s music conferences, I think in every town in England, actually now, it seems. And and we’re quite picky about that. I think, you know, there’s a certain ubiquity to a lot of these things. And you see the same people saying the same things over and over again. But for us, obviously, with the connection with yourself, and the chance to kind of speak to some people who maybe don’t normally speak to so much, is really interesting. And, you know, like, say for myself as someone from a very non tech background. But you know, I have seen that the technology behind Bandcamp has revolutionised how my label is run, like completely changed how things work. And so that’s quite an interesting meeting point for me personally and to kind of see otherwise people are doing that is
Andrew Dubber
literally a meeting you’re going to now go into this room over here, the exclusive space, see that closed room over there, we’ve put that aside. There is a 3d audio installation in there that you’re free to explore and experience and and participate in throughout the festival, but at least going to be meeting artists labels, whoever wants to go and talk to them. Yeah, have a wee chat and talk about band camp things.
Aly Gillani
Yep, please do. You know we do. Like to. Yeah, even though we’re we’re slightly in conspicuous as a company. Sometimes we do like to speak to our artists and our users. And the other thing we really love is getting feedback about how the site works. Because you know, if we can Make a little improvement that’s going to make a difference. Fantastic. You know, I mean, I have this thing as a non tech person, I’ll have a feature requests come in from label. And I’ll go and speak to our developers and say, Hey, I was just wondering about this. And I don’t know if they’ll look at me and go, Yeah, that’ll take 10 minutes or go, Are you an idiot? We’re gonna have to rewrite the whole site, because I have no concept of how it works. But you know, it is really good for us to hear people’s experiences of the site, both as a fan and as artists and labels. And hopefully, you know, perfect it and improve it.
Andrew Dubber
Great. Well, thank you so much for being here. Aly Gillani from Bandcamp and first word records. Thank you. That’s bandcamp’s, UK and Europe label rep and the founder of first word records, Aly Gillani. And that’s the MTF podcast. If you liked it, please subscribe and tell your friends. If you didn’t, then chances are, you’re not still listening and have moved on to something more in keeping with your tastes with our best wishes. Either way. Hope you have a great week and talk soon. Cheers.
