That "on your server" part also means that discoverability takes a massive nose-dive. Most of the music I've purchased on Bandcamp was discovered by following suggestions listed on the pages of albums I liked or by trawling through everything that shared tags with albums I liked. But that doesn't seem possible on Faircamp.

There are far more important/popular sources for discoverability than BC. Their UI is not great for that in the first place.

I discover plenty through their blog posts and following labels that I like.

> Not least of which being that with bandcamp I can download purchased music years after purchase, even if artists have died or bands broken up, I wouldn't have that guarantee here

Note that this isn't guaranteed, especially for smaller bands that get picked up by a label. Most of the time the label just makes the releases hidden, so they're no longer displayed publicly, but can still be downloaded. However, some labels delete the release instead, so it's no longer downloadable from your collection.

Yeah, this is a risk.

The best approach is to take advantage of the fact that Bandcamp lets you download everything and simply download everything you buy and keep backups (as you would with any other important data)

Yep exactly, that's what I do too. Download a lossless version and then use Bandcamp if I ever wanted to stream it. However I also host Navidrome (OSS streaming with a web-app) so use that 99.9% of the time I want to stream.

Even if there aren't labels requiring artists to hide or delete music from Bandcamp, you never know if Bandcamp could just go down one day for financial reasons and then you're screwed.

This is the primary use case for Bandcamp for me -- it's one of the main ways I buy new music. I'm not interested in streaming services. Being able to buy (with most of the money going to the artist) and download lossless copies of albums is what I want.

Yep, I download the FLAC and always keep the original zip file, and back it up separately from the files I manage with beets. I playback the beets-managed files with Navidrome.

Beets doesn't maange handle the extra files that the zip often includes, such as PDFs of linear notes, the sheet music I once found included, or band photos. Maybe someday I'll figure out a good archive for everything that isn't "the literal zip file".

The irony is that for this federated network to succeed, it probably needs a large-ish "commercial" peer which works similarly to how Bandcamp did.

Also Bandcamp already has my credit card.

If only the US could ever leave the 19th century and allow instant wire transfers...

Oh, wait. They did already!

https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.h...

Huh, interesting. Did Faircamp implement some sort of payment system that works through FedNow? That’s pretty neat if so.

There are a wide array of different payment preferences depending on the country.

Bank transfer isn’t universally the most popular method of e-commerce transactions. For example, PayPal seems to be the most overwhelmingly popular online payment method in Germany. In the UK, PayPal and debit cards are the leaders. Debit cards are also generally popular globally (a debit card isn’t the same as a bank transfer).

https://blog.2checkout.com/popular-online-payment-methods-gl...

https://www.rapyd.net/blog/the-top-payment-methods-in-the-un...

This speaks more toward someone like a musician needing a solution that has many payment options to appeal to a wide breadth of customers, not some kind of dig on US e-commerce and banking because “Europe does it better and the US is stuck in the 19th century.”

Paypal is the most popular method in Europe because they operate as a bank here, and therefore customers can make wire transfers to each other.

It technically exists, but I haven't actually seen it "in the wild" yet. My banks certainly aren't on board at this time. Maybe it will become something useful in the future, though.