Crisis of Originality: Bandcamp and the Marketplace of Ideas

It’s been talked about time and time again. In the age of the internet, where access to music distributors is unprecedented, there are countless artists self-releasing their material on platforms such as Bandcamp and Soundcloud. More music is in circulation than ever before, and as such, one’s exposure to the various artists that websites like Bandcamp have to offer has also increased insurmountably.

In regards to experimental music, this becomes particularly interesting. The ability to upload and self-release music on an easy-to-use, user-friendly website has provided an avenue in which experimental musicians and composers can host their works for a much larger audience, an opportunity that has never existed before. However, this increased audience exposure has had other effects as well.
For one: it’s resulted in normalization. In cultivating a larger audience, experimental music has largely begun permeating the boundaries of mainstream pop culture, and becoming, in essence, less experimental. Genres like Vaporwave, largely conceptual and experimental in nature, have become household names, and have even become the subjects of popular jokes and internet humor.

Experimental music, in general, is being proliferated at an alarming rate, in many ways, supplanting more traditional or polished music genres. People are making it, sharing it, and therefore, coming into contact with it more and more often. When experimental music is part of the general, mainstream conversation – the general mainstream humor – how experimental is it, really?

The normalization isn’t just occurring in its recognition and proliferation. It’s also happening in terms of content. As more music is being made, the are fewer original ideas. Originality has taken a turn for irony and it’s become more difficult to put out something that hasn’t already been released, shared on Reddit, and made into a meme. Experimental music, therefore, has become less original, less exciting. This isn’t to say that there aren’t any fresh releases being made – there certainly are – but it creates a question which begs an answer. Bandcamp has been a boon for more conventional musical forms and genres, but has it been a hindrance for experimental genres?

Much of the point and purpose of experimental music comes as being apart from conventional music conversation. Punk was once experimental too in its anti-establishment values, and then it became mainstream. Once that happened, the music was still just as good, but it lost its original purpose. Perhaps, like punk music, the function of experimental music is expanding, shifting. But if experimentation and counter-cultural movements require a sort of otherness, then it seems as if the purpose is not shifting, but shrinking.

-Andrew Oliver