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.

hey aren't you the number one taggist? I'm sure out of all people you could find a way to group your songs into nice listening experiences...

ooh boy, I love this topic! I have actually written at length

about this! my writing was about creating "successful" releases and how best to present your work so that others are interested and engage with it. you may find, after some consideration, that this isn't your end goal with coming up with new releases, and that's okay! but I still think you may find some good food for thought in that post, especially since adding to your Bandcamp (and how) is a consideration.

as I mention in said post, my experience and observation has been that compilations are inherently audience-limiting to some extent. I think they are most often consumed by people who are already at least kind of familiar with your work, although it's still possible to gain new fans this way of course (I have!). it's easy to over-inundate people with too many releases as well though. when you release something new, Bandcamp sends email notifications (by default) to people who have bought from you or followed you... I feel like that situation is one where you want as many of those people as possible to be like "oh wow, cool!" rather than "oh ok, something else I don't care about". so, I favor impactful releases that are fewer in number.

none of this matters if you just want to do this for yourself. if that's the case I think you want to be thinking about what will be the most satisfying way to compile and work on and release the music, artistically and personally. you want to have fun and to determine what feels best for self-expression.

I firmly believe you can create a compelling non-"compilation" release out of mostly or even entirely botb tunes. but you may need to do some soul searching to figure out what all the tunes you group together mean, and how you can create a theme or narrative from that. tbh, most of the major battle submissions I make that I feel proud of, I am mentally setting them aside for a future album at that moment. I have several piles of songs like that. I don't know what their final forms will look like, but I will figure it out when it's time.

for example: Past Future Present Memory

(that's my latest album) started on this site in 2022 when I made my first FM songs and I decided "wow, that was really fun, I want to make an FM chiptune album". several subsequent FM tunes in a similar style later, I had most of my album. I filled in the gaps of the final release with some shorter pieces after I'd already worked out what the binding glue was, thematically and emotionally (I did a lot of journaling about each song and its inspiration and feelings, which eventually became accompanying poetry); and of course I put in some more polishing time on the existing songs. but for me this is a way of authentically "compiling" music submitted to this site in a cohesive manner. and I have this in mind basically the entire time, so I personally don't see it as a compilation at all, more like an evolution. (I also did not even really market the album as "an FM chiptune album" except in chiptune-specific spaces! I felt that it would reach more people if I focused on the sentimental, emotional aspects of the music, instead of a niche thing that only a few people, relatively speaking, know about. if you have one chance to reach somebody you want it to be impactful.)

to use an example from your music, you did a whole "series" a couple Spring Trackses ago where everything was named after the longitude and latitude of a specific place you had been traveling. I feel like that's actually awesome and would be a really cool way to frame an album... not that you have to do this specifically, that would depend on how you felt about the tracks and so on, but that's the kind of thing that I think has appeal.

I don't think I would submit much to the site at all if I didn't have other plans for a lot of my music down the line. but on the flip side I would also surely be writing less music without botb!

After just making piece by piece for my own fun over the years, lots of half baked stuff from ohbs. The music is just sitting on my drives doing nothing. Been thinking of it like there is music a majority of the world doesnt even know about. Feels like we are holding something back from the world not prompting it. there is so much in the back catalogue you can do anything you want with content wise. You already put in the work, might as well exploit it "We are our own MR.BEASTS". Personally I have 3 hours of just chip tunes I only have shown on BOTB (thats just the chiptunes). Not really sure its suited to be an album. i have been experimenting with music mixes and re arranging this year. thinking i will put them on youtube long form blendtendos and shorts and see how it goes.

I started buying albums on bandcamp over a year ago and I don't really like compilation albums. Obviously they have merit and a ton of work has gone into them, and I've bought a few compilation albums, but something about them just feels different

recently the stuff i've been doing in a given time period has mostly been somewhat similar so there's no problem for me to group stuff into a particular time period. Because the stuff I'm making is not on botb that also makes it more naturally consistent because I'm not using 10 different tools and cramming myself into ohb prompts. I also realized a while ago that nobody else fundamentally cares very much about what i throw online so I just do it in a form that I'm reasonably happy with.

I've been thinking that playlists may be a good way to release albums made of songs hosted on botb. You just have to choose the songs, add a nice cover and share the URL!

However I wonder if being redirected to botb will discourage many people (who are not botbrs), compared to posting the songs on a more well known platform like bandcamp or youtube.

i used to have a (now very old) botb compilation album on bandcamp but eventually i removed it as a self-curation thing, it felt too scattershot and unpolished compared to everything else on there. i've made and shared other compilations of my work but not as public releases, just sharing them with friends/spaces who i know are into my work already or at least into me as a person. for me that can be a way to feel closure about something that might feel like it slipped through the cracks otherwise

i think the biggest problem with sharing anything on the botb platform right now is that non-botbrs are likely to run into the robot defenses. i do want to like playlists as a solution though because it feels celebratory of the community and context that the songs were created in, instead of feeling like botb is just an incubator and Real Music should eventually grow up and live somewhere else. but yea there are practical issues,

probably the best solution if you want actual good releases is kind of like dami said, you can pick some existing things that feel like they have a common thread to them and build around that until you have something that feels significant and complete. doing that whole process on botb would probably make cohension harder though, just because of the constraints battles impose

very much in the same boat man, but I'm feeling verbose, so here's my 2c anyway

I think the best and slickest way to do it online, which I have been meaning to do for myself for years and still haven't, is to have an artist page with a prominent plaintext disccography/whateveryouwanttocallitography, which can be categorized however you want, but clearly implies that "this is what you might want to know about." That frees you to use music platforms however you want, and to resist the tyranny of the online platform a little bit. When I say tyranny, I don't necessarily mean corny, deliberate manipulation of your stuff, because I wouldn't actually change anything about bandcamp; they're good about that kind of thing. But, there's a subtle aesthetic line that crops up between "music-music" and "online-hobby-music" and I think a big part of that is observations like "this person obviously feels like they need to post to their bandcamp to get it to look a certain way"

I try to think about what I go through when I'm digging into an online artist, and I know I'm not willing to root through a lot of streaming. A bit of text with headers telling you "I've done this and that, and this is a bit more of X type of thing you might be looking for" makes me insanely more likely to try more and older music from a given person. I am definitely a "flipping through stacks at the library" kind of guy, but when I'm on a computer I can't get into that state of mind, period, full stop. My training to want the new-thing firehose has been so effective that I doubt I can ever use a computer in that really patient of a way, and from what I've seen I think most people are roughly as bad or worse, so I think clarity demands a lot of emphasis when putting stuff out on the internet.

It is my longstanding opinion as a frequent and longtime album-releaser that the cohesion of a track list is determined largely by place in time. If you curate it based on what other people may think you have zero control over the success of a collective work and it can also be a little bit like making a demo reel or something. An album should be an emotionally driven process as much as composing one song.

Some people take the "best of all that I got" approach and I think that can work, but but making the tracklist flow and making it feel like "I worked hard for this" is much easier if there is a concerted effort on your part to Create An Album. My album approach is very similar across my 21 years of releasing music: I usually write somewhat aimlessly (as in, with no defined purpose except expressing self) and over a small window of time the music starts to show what its common threads are. Then I can start to build the tracklist and see what I think it needs and decide which tracks are good enough. If there's anything older that feels relevant for whatever reason, I can bring it in and see how it fits. Sometimes, with my new mindset and skills, I can update it accordingly to build more cohesion.
For example: An upcoming album of mine has a song from 2008 on it that felt really relevant, but with 2008 me production it stuck out in a very negative way so I revamped it while keeping the core components. In 2019 I released an album I wrote in 2006 and I approached it as a collaboration with my teenage self. etc

The other approach is the "rock band with studio time" kinda thing where you set yourself with some ideas and time and Write An Album, which I think works well for people who are used to doing music in a community like this. That way the main theme is decided in advance and you don't have to worry so much about the infinite number of possibilities.

As far as me and botb stuff goes, OHBs are OHBs and maybe some day I'll release a hundreds of tracks albumand major battle stuff I pick what I like and release as compilation series. People who follow me already understand for what it is.. newcomers will have to figure it out a little, hah. I have done this for weeklybeats as well.

tl;dr I think the best album is one that was made to be an album. Anything else has to be curated with a specific theme in mind (which CAN be time and place) but may well still feel like the compilation that it is.
(Also don't fall into the demo reel trap, you can make that as a demo reel)