The “Having said that, brothers should pull up their pants” Release

Artist Index

You can now browse through all the artist sites powered by Bandcamp right here (we also link to that index from the home page). Before you start thinking we’re on our way to becoming yet-another-music-fan-portal, please let us ‘splain. As we’ve stated elsewhere, one of Bandcamp’s objectives is to optimize your site for search engine discovery. And simply creating your site isn’t enough to make Google discover it — someone, somewhere, has to link to it. For many, the logical place from which to do that is MySpace. However, MySpace mangles all of its outbound links, meaning from Google’s perspective, those links don’t exist (if you’ve ever clicked an outbound link on a MySpace page and seen Tom’s dire warning about how doing so may very well kill a puppy, you’ve witnessed the um…need for said mangling). At any rate, rather than push that problem onto you, we go ahead and link to your Bandcamp-powered site ourselves now, from a page we know Google will be frequently Google-izing. And while we could have accomplished that with a simple and boring list of links (a so-called “site map” to those who know about that sorta thing), we decided to gussy it up with cover art and some basic sorting. Not because we want to make it easy for fans to browse through all nerdcore acts in 94114 who happen to use Bandcamp, but because we want you to see that yes, there really are loads of artists out there who have entrusted us with their music, and we hope you will too.

Toughening Upload

We recognize that all our efforts are kinda for naught if you can’t get your tracks uploaded, so we gave that whole experience a bit of love over the past few weeks. In addition to knocking out a few upload-related bugs (a minority would fail with a “this isn’t audio” message, and .wav’s were missing their AAC and Apple Lossless encodings), we overhauled the basic flow to move the processing of each track into the background. This means you no longer have to wait for a track to be converted into the many formats we offer before you can save it, and it also means that a whole class of timeout errors are now fixed. We also now show processing progress, and, in the unlikely event that something goes wrong, we do a better job at telling you what exactly, thereby accelerating our movement towards total upload awesomeness. And yes, a batch uploader is still in the works.

Salmagundi

You can now edit your band name and optional non-Bandcamp web address from the Edit Profile page. This means you, Figth Like Apes! (Note that editing your band name does not also edit your domain. We’ll soon provide domain mapping to deal with that issue.)

Our code for sharing an embedded player on WordPress only worked for WordPress.com blogs. We hope all is forgiven now that there is a separate menu item for WordPress.org (meaning self-hosted, not-dot-com) blogs.

We fixed the bug where uploading or deleting a custom header from the stats pages would fail.

We fixed the bug where track or album titles containing a “/” and certain other punctuation would cause problems during download (nutty, a slash in a track name created unintended nested directories in album zip files).

You can now share a track or album to Twitter, because some of your crazy fans use it and copy/pasting the url out of the address bar is totally exhausting.