Bandcamp remains a very good way to find new music, for anyone else reading kbs comments. Kind of cool to search by region using tags on that site.
I don't know that I agree. To make Bandcamp work you need to set yourself up to follow every label or artist that's interesting, and often the labels worth following are 70-90% garbage. Bandcamp does have "ratings" but they appear to consist of "top downloads, of the past few hours, within our narrowly-defined genres." I have a buddy who "topped the charts" last week on Bandcamp. LAST WEEK. This week, if you search for his name and spell it exactly, you are on the second page of results - not on the charts, within general search. If you look up the album that "topped the charts" (and I mean, he was between #5 and #1 for a week) for his genre, it has 40 downloads. On the other hand, I can go "discover - best selling - any format" and today, the second thing it throws up at me is a single released two days ago with twelve downloads. Last week, the first thing it threw up at me was an album from nineteen-fucking-ninety-TWO. Meanwhile, the whole "scene" if you will is trying really hard to like that shit new VNV nation album and it's nowhere on the charts. Yeah you can buy it on Bandcamp - and it's got 1200 purchases. And that doesn't include every DJ who got it free whether they like it or not; it's been fairly compulsory to play a couple spins whether you like it or not, because it's VNV Nation (unless you're lucky enough to live in a locale that hates VNV nation on sight). I'm probably a thousand dollars into Bandcamp because I think artists should eat, and I'm $20 a month into Tidal for five years because I think artists should eat, and I'm a seedbox into torrenting because I do discovery my way, and the fuckin' torrenters actually use taxonomy. I know a guy who was in the room when Jerry Yang turned down Larry and Sergei when they tried to sell Google to Yahoo for one.milllllllion dollars (pinkie ring). Guy confirmed what I already knew: Yahoo, at the time, was a hand-tuned hand-selected hand-curated list of useful links while Google was "here's an algorithm." Yang couldn't see automating his life-blood so he passed. He shouldn't have? But if your whole business is around hand-fit non-scalable curation, the bots are never going to do it the same way. You wanna see how an algorithm picks a hit song?
To me, the discovery from Bandcamp is in the followers feed and nothing else. I add people I know, or who have already bought an album I love and sometimes they'll have something interesting. Certainly a lot of noise to signal, I'm sure your torrent system is better. But what I like about it most is that it is definitely not an algorithm.