Streaming music doesn’t mean you don’t also want to buy it sometimes. Music Ally has always argued that there could be more links between streaming services like Spotify and D2C platforms like Bandcamp, beyond a few items of merch on artist profiles.
Now music website Hype Machine has stepped in to create a new link called ‘Merch Table’. It’s beautifully simple: you paste in the URL to the ‘Your Top Songs 2019’ playlist created for you by Spotify as part of its annual ‘Wrapped’ promotion, and Hype Machine analyses it to provide links to the albums and EPs that those tracks come from, on Bandcamp.
It’s a welcome reminder that there are ways to directly support artists on top of streaming their music, even if many of the people visiting the site will already be converts to that principle. Imagine if Spotify had rolled a feature like this into Wrapped 2019 though…
One side-effect of Merch Table is that it hints at the number of artists using Bandcamp in 2019. For example, for one Music Ally staffer it served up 16 links for their 50 tracks of the year.
Music Ally’s next Learn Live webinar will help you understand what’s required for artists to thrive in new international markets!