The Importance Of Downloads!

Welcome to all our new subscribers who have joined us in the last few weeks through our free/pay what you want Anthology download album. Hope you’re enjoying our music and hopefully we’ll see you at a gig sometime too.

A lot of people have asked why we have made our collection available for free/pay what you want so here’s a rather lengthy response, or you can just scroll to the last couple of paragraphs below where it’s summarised in a few lines!   

As everyone knows the folk world is a wonderful community of people committed to music and we are constantly amazed by the number of emails we get or comments on social media we see about how much they love to support artists by actually buying their music on CD’s and vinyl.

However one area that we find many people think is redundant now are downloads and we wanted to address that.  

Artists often hear that fans who only have physical copies of their music and no means to get it onto their mobile devices feel that the only way to listen to it on the move is to stream it via Spotify/Apple etc. and also fans who no longer have CD players or record decks at all feel that they have no other listening choice at all.

Well the purpose of this post is to quickly let you know that this isn’t the case and that downloads still have a very important part to play for music lovers who want to support their favourite artists.

Firstly, a wee calculation of what a £10 download album means to artists financially compared to streaming…..

* 291 listens to a ten song album from start to finish on Spotify using their standard streaming royalty rate will earn an artist £10. 

* If you listen to the whole album once a day starting on the 1st of January then it would take until the 17th of October for the artist to earn that £10.

* If you listen to the album once a week starting on the 1st of January 2024 then it would take until the 1st of June 2029 for the artist to earn that £10.

* If you buy a download then they get the £10 right now.

Secondly, and this is the one that not everyone knows about, but once you have music downloaded onto one of your devices you can integrate it into all your Spotify/Apple etc. playlists and can listen to it as you normally do on those platforms. 

Here’s how….

How to import music downloads to Spotify

How to import music downloads to Apple Music  

And finally for those of you new to downloads the game-changing resource for all artists who use it is the wonderful site Bandcamp.

If you’re a music lover and you’re not aware of it then prepare to be dazzled as Bart Simpson says as it’s a treasure trove of downloadable music from thousands of established and new artists many of whom will offer content exclusive to the site.  

Bandcamp has it’s own excellent free app player for phones/iPads where if you don’t want to integrate your music to streaming playlists or you just plain hate Spotify etc. then you can organise and listen to all your downloads wherever you go via that.

Also Bandcamp offers exceptional playback quality high above almost all streaming sites so users get a much better listening experience.

So there you go, there’s the importance of downloads.

And the quick answer – Many of you have paid for our music already so we’ve offered the chance for you to get it on download to listen on the move without paying for it again. Or if you’re just discovering us but wary of spending any money then you can listen to it before you buy and then pay something or nothing if you want to.

You can hear and buy our Anthology download album at – https://themagpiearc.bandcamp.com/

But do check out all the other amazing artists on there too.

Thanks for reading!

TMA xx