Bandcamp and the infrastructure of independent music distribution has changed more in the last decade than in the previous three decades combined.

The physical record store used to be the primary discovery mechanism for independent music. You went in, you talked to the person behind the counter, they recommended things, you trusted them because they'd already curated the section. The internet didn't immediately replace this — the first decade of music online was mostly about file-sharing and major-label streaming.

What Bandcamp created was something that had the curation and the direct relationship of the record store but with the scale of the internet. The discovery is messier and less curated than a great record store, but the direct relationship between artist and listener is actually stronger. When you buy on Bandcamp, the artist knows you bought it. That's not nothing.

The thing I miss from the record store era is the person behind the counter. The curatorial intelligence that came from a human who spent their life thinking about music in a specific genre. The Bandcamp equivalent is the label page and the community forum.