Bandcamp
| Bandcamp | |
| |
 Music sales and free streaming website | |
| URL | https://bandcamp.com |
| Status | Online! |
| Archiving status | Not saved yet |
| Archiving type | Unknown |
| IRC channel | #bandcramp (on hackint) |
Bandcamp is a very popular site for independent musical artists to post their music, for purchase and free streaming. It was founded in 2007, and has made money since 2012. It's not in evident danger right now, but it would still be good to grab the metadata, so if/when it is in danger, we can more efficiently buy single copies of as many different tracks as possible.
The full list of artists can be found by paging thru the (currently 3,581) pages of https://bandcamp.com/artist_index . An ArchiveBot job was done to save a full copy of this (including the 100px square image for each artist) on April 15, 2021.
Each artist has a subdomain, like brigandband.bandcamp.com with up to three subpages: /music, /merch, and /community,
Every artist also has an {artistname}.bandcamp.com/sitemap.xml, which includes all of that artist's albums and singles.
Each album has a separate URL, like echoschildren.bandcamp.com/album/as-good-as-any which displays (and allows streaming of) the whole album, as well as containing metadata about the album. Each track also has a separate URL, like blacklilithrecords-12artistes.bandcamp.com/track/argent-roi-querelle which allows streaming of the individual track, and may have extra information about, including lyrics. If an artist only has one album, /music redirects to /releases, which is an alias for the artist's most recently released album.
Full size album covers are linked from the album and track pages, and hosted at, for example f4.bcbits.com/img/a3109377707_0.jpg (the number after the dash can be changed to return different sizes of the image).
Existing Archives
The Vapor Vault
The Vapor Vault is a collection on the Internet Archive that preserves Free or "Name Your Price" releases from Bandcamp that fall into the Vaporwave genre or one of its subgenres.
The collection seems to have stopped being updated on January 16, 2024.
The metadata of those items contain the release URL in the "source" field, which could be used to create a list of already archived releases.
As a possible fallback, they do have a GitHub account providing a list of labels and artists, which possibly could be used to create exception rules for likely already archived releases. It does not seem this public mirror is necessarily kept up to date all the time though.
Discography Archive
Discography Archive is a collection on the Internet Archive preserving discographies of individual artists and labels from various websites, including Bandcamp. It is actively updated as of March 2026.
The description of every upload contains links to the sites associated with the artist/label, as well as all releases contained in the item, which can also be used for a list of archived releases.
Additionally, they have a spreadsheet of all the collections in the archive.
Walnut Bob
Walnut Bob is a user on the Internet Archive that has a smaller collection of Free/NYP Bandcamp releases not preent in existing archives. They seem to still actively use the Internet Archive, but have not uploaded any discographies since April 2025.
Software
vapor_vault archiver
The vapor_vault archiver is used by the Vapor Vault, but does not seem to be made public yet. From their GitHub account: "In the future, portions of the software behind this project may be made public, and this account is the space where that will happen."
discography-archive-tools
discography-archive-tools is used by Discography Archive.
free-bandcamp-downloader
free-bandcamp-downloader is a python library and standalone script to download Free/NYP albums from Bandcamp pages as well as releases from a signed-in account's collection.