Bandcamp may hold some of the best underground music that no one has heard, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the music streaming website is user-friendly for those trying to find underground music.

Bandcamp is a website that features the ability to purchase music or to stream music. Additionally, Bandcamp gives users the capability to purchase physical copies of their favorite music or even apparel related to their favorite artists. There is also the addition of feature stories on the Bandcamp home page showing stories or album reviews relating to Bandcamp music artists.

So what’s the issue with Bandcamp if it has all of these capabilities just from the website or app? The structure and inability to easily navigate the platform is the issue. There is too much content not related to music. While there is the ability to search for only music, there is not the ability to search for apparel or stories, not even related to the music you’re searching for.

The biggest frustration while using Bandcamp is when attempting to discover new music to listen to. The filters that you can enable when trying to discover new music is useful with the capability of searching by genre, subgenre, time, location and format. However, you are always stuck searching for the most popular band within your filters rather than be given results based upon your own music listening. This may not appear as such an issue to the average, easily pleasured music listener, but can be highly frustrating to those searching for very niche listeners.

The worst feature of Bandcamp is the reminder to buy music appearing nearly every minute when you’re streaming music. This persistent pop-up reminder to buy music is off-putting to the average music streamer. Even worse, you can’t stream an album more than a couple of times if you don’t buy it, or else that album is particular won’t stream until you have purchased it.

Bandcamp may be a good platform to release your music on if you can’t promote your album anywhere else, but I still wouldn’t recommend Bandcamp to any of my friends that are searching for new music.