You know, Bandcamp is amazing. With a few more features it could be even more so.

I’ve been an avid Bandcamp fan since it pretty much launched. After keeping an eye on it for a while we (MINIONTV) decided it was the perfect place to have our very first release back in 2010. Now having used it as both an artist and a music fan, I’ve been thinking of update ideas that I’d love to see in the future.

#1 – View History

From time to time I fall into a Bandcamp rabbit hole where I’m going from page to page, listening to tracks either from artist recommendations, embedded players or from fan pages. I would love a history page that showed what I played and when, just to be able to track down music I forgot to wishlist. Maybe limit it to plays more than 30 seconds long as it shows I was invested.

#2 – Local Downloads

The Bandcamp mobile app is brilliant but it’s missing one killer feature which lets it down in comparison to say Spotify or iTunes and that’s an offline mode. Without wifi or a data connection you’re pretty much screwed. So it’d be nice to be able to select music within the app I can download to the device I’m using.

#3 – Playlists

Playlists are everywhere right now, even I’ve started making them! I’d love to be able to compile shareable playlists of tracks from Bandcamp. It’d be great for discoverability and a good way to group your music on your fan page.

#4 – Gig Discovery

How about incorporating gigs into our music feeds? I’d love to see a column of shows that are coming up based on the artists I’m following, maybe with a toggle option to show local to me or to show all.

#5 – Play Everything From Your Fan Page

OK this is a bugbear more than anything. We have this fan page and as awesome as it is, it’s kind of pointless. You choose something to play and it’ll just play that single track! Not only that, it won’t jump onto the next release afterwards. I’d love to be able to play ALL tracks from this hub instead of having to go from page to page.

#6 – A Radio

To further help with discovery I’d like to see some kind of ‘Radio’ option where you might pick a genre such as ‘Ambient’ and then hear tracks pulled from releases with that tag. We do have the front page playlist podcast thing (which is ace) but something like this would be a little more bespoke to the listener.

#7 – Mailing List Integration

Now and again we have to go through the arduous task of exporting the addresses file from the tools menu and importing it into your email service. I like many of you, use services such as MailChimp and would love to see some kind of automated system where addresses instantly get imported to lists.

As I said, I do love Bandcamp and appreciate the obvious stance it has with its ‘musician first’ mentality but I want to see more functionality. What do you think? Thoughts below!