Leaderboard

Thanks for asking, it's one of the questions I hear a lot recently and I'll be happy to give you my personal point of view regarding this matter. First of all, the audio quality between YouTube and Bandcamp isn't the same. Usually people who tend to steal music and re-upload it on other services and forums use Bandcamp. You can see the most recent trend of having a short previews on Bandcamp or even unreal prices attached to digital files. Labels do that to protect their work and work of the artists. Our approach is different mostly because we use PRO edition of Bandcamp and we can set up private streams and even go with limited / exclusive embedd from just one web-place. We tested that on previous release (Lectro Spektral Daze) and it worked like a charm. All other releases that went into release approx. in same month were ripped off, while Lectro's album stood out. Of course, we can't control 100% the music we're giving to promo prior to the release (and we do that through download codes), but in the end there will be someone who will share the files online and all of our work will be damaged, but hey, that's something we got used to. You can't fight all the time by sending take-down notices 24/7, but you can streamline the music through the right channels where it will reach real fans (and I don't consider theifs to be fans at all). Now, back on YouTube. Even we protect our music, we can't stop someone from uploading it on YouTube, but what we can do is to offer and promote our channel where you will be able to hear it before anyone else (in case you want to hear music prior to the release). It serves as a good promotion (in our case), it offers fans who aren't able to buy music a place where they can listen to it and what really matters, YouTube places your music higher on the scale when someone searches music. I believe thoose are strong pro's why we do that. Personally I spent a lot of time learning and discovering possibilities of social media and platforms dedicated to musicians and labels and after few years of testing and trying different things, this method gave a lot of results in terms of sales and direct fan-to-artist promotion. Of course, each label got it's own way of dealing with similar situations, but I'm always willing to go with uncoventional methods to give best results for my artists and for the label. - Richpa