Bandcamp Playlists, 2025

When Bandcamp was sold to Epic, people were worried. A year later when Bandcamp was sold to Songtradr, people were downright nervous. Rightfully so, I would add. Since that second acquisition in 2023, Bandcamp has been stable and even continues to embrace Bandcamp Friday, albeit a little less frequently. But what of the other features? As a tech company, there is a constant need to be announcing new stuff and in Bandcamp's case, a dash of good news would go a long way to quell the concerns around the ownership.

They very recently announced Bandcamp Playlists - a native way to showcase your favorite songs from a variety of artists. The staff powered sample playlists are great. The feature is smart about how it places limits on the user if you don't own the music - you can't add a song to a playlist unless you own it and you can't listen to a song you don't own more than 3 times. This encourages purchasing music, not an easy task in 2025! All and all, great to see them adding some functionality that encourages discovery and some (potential) social presence through playlist sharing.

The thing about the new feature that sorta bugs me is that they already announced it in 2023 - slightly after the Epic purchase but before the Songtradr acquisition. When it launched, you couldn't add songs to a playlist from the web, only the mobile app. This is still true. The only thing that seems to have changed since the initial launch is that there is a web component for listening to playlists. That's great but still a bit underwhelming given the progress of the feature over the last few years.

To be fair, Bandcamp was acquired by Songtradr after the initial feature was announced and many people were laid off. Progress is going to be slower.

This is a lot of text just to say "Hey, Bandcamp moved this feature from the app to the web - sort of" but I'm a big fan of Bandcamp. I want them to survive. I'm critical because I'm rooting for them. I am also rooting for others in the same space because I think it's one of the only paths for an artist to be financial supported in this modern era. Let's hope it all works out!