hey!

i have a bandcamp page (this one

) and i have been struggeling with it for a few years now.

when i started making music ~10 years ago it was simple and easy. i just made music for a release and uploaded that. my first ~5 releases were like that.

then i joined botb and suddenly i didnt do music for releases anymore, but for major battles. or for ohbs.
i first grouped them in releases per major battle, if i made a lot of songs for one of them. or i made yearly compilation releases for stuff like OHB entries or misc major entries (and the few extra songs i made outside of botb).

even if i ended up sitting down and thinking about an actual release, like a concept album, i *still* took a lot of entries from botb or submitted some of the songs to botb along the way (it was just a very good motivation to do it like that) - that resulted in releases that still felt like botb compilations rather than "actual standalone releases" if that makes sense. (( and i dont even know if this is a bad thing! ))

at some point though, i realized that grouping music by when i made them (compilations by year or battle) will just result in very chaotic listening experiences if someone ends up checking out a specific release.
so i removed most of my releases from my page and only kept a few... very old albums from before i joined botb, as well as a few "thematically consistend works".

now i am at a point where i look at my bandcamp page and realize i am not happy with it but im unsure how to fix it. it would be cool to let it reflect a little more how active i am as a composer and to have a slightly bigger variety of things on there...

so i could just create compilations with battle entries again, but that becomes chaotic very quickly and feels a little soulless to me. its not rly a release, its just a folder of random stuff.

or i go through all the things i made in the past years, select the ones that work well together or share the same theme/sound design/chipstyle etc... and turn those into compilation-releases. a little better but still not perfect maybe?

i could also pick some cool songs and actually rework them, put a lot of extra time and effort into them to give them a new life as an album release - and even though i would like this the most it takes a lot of extra time that i could also put into completely new projects and music instead.



so maybe my dilemma is clear here.

i would like to get some ideas and also some feedback from people here... whats your preferred way of dealing with bandcamp pages? do you have a page yourself? if so, do you put botb work on there and which approach do you take? feel free to share examples and links to your pages because im curious to see!!!
and as a consumer: if you stumble across a bandcamp page of someone, what do you enjoy more? compilations categorized by... year/genre/etc? or do you prefer "actual" albums with songs made for that release?


my ultimate goal would be to end up with a bandcamp page by the end of 2026 that i can look at and feel content with.

is it for u or for the listeners? if it isnt to build "one brand" or such, then u can literally just do whatever u want. just look at crazygoji's bandcamp, he releases so much that i can't even keep track! obv i cant rly say much from my own experience tho, i only have 1 release and i want everything to be symbolic and perfect for me. if u dont wanna just release anything and everything u want, but still wld like to have everything organised by year, maybe make a lil collection separately from bc?

I'm working very slowly on putting botb stuff on my page and it's formatted like this:
release 1 - short tracker ohb tunes
release 2 - compilation of major tracks and tracks on non-botb compilations like snowdrop
release 3 - experimental nes stuff (this is more of an album cause there's new tracks for this)
release 4 - all breakcore stuff

as you can see its just 1 misc. compilation and the rest are grouped with tracks of a similar sound. All the major stuff is already finished so I don't need to touch it that much but for the tracker ohb tracks I was planning on extending a bunch of them - when I actually got to trying to extend them however I had I really hard time. It's its own beast entirely separate from finishing a song you are in the process of creating. I found out for a lot of them I had nothing to add really. It's just going to be a release of short songs and thats ok. VGM soundtracks tend to have short looped tracks anyway so its on brand.

That's my approach but I would say whatever actually gets you to release the music is the right approach. Without visibility nobody can listen to the music, and then what's the point? So if you have to get over your perfectionism on some aspects to get it out its well worth it. Most people probably won't even be able to tell plus if it still bothers you after release you have a better idea of what aspects you care most about.

I think listeners like having an album of tracks exploring the same sound, as a utility thing. I like adding a whole album to a playlist without listening to all of it just cause I know the rest are similar in sound+quality. But there's certainly nothing wrong with compilations.

I fully feel your struggle here Kleeder. I've spent so much time just pondering this very issue.

I likewise plan to shape up my Bandcamp next year, as currently I have very little of my work available for listening outside of Botb (including finally making my first full length album available).
However, compilation albums being a random mesh of track generally make me feel similarly to yourself. In the past I've collected various tracks and saved them in different folders, in the hopes of slowly filling them out and creating thematically appropriate compilations, but I always get caught up in perfectionism issues.

I think Mioh makes a really good point in that you kinda have to decide who it's for.

One potential suggestion (though I'd have no idea how easy this would be to accomplish) would be creating a more organised layout of your work on your own personal Kleeder.de site. Then you could neatly order everything categorically - between compilations, EP's, full concept albums etc - and when people click on said album, it could link them to the album on Bandcamp, avoiding the messy listing page being necessary.
I feel like you probably wouldn't mind putting up compilation albums, if not for the fact that they're lumped together with your concept stuff, and therefore burying it to some extent.