J. Edward Keyes is the Editorial Director at Bandcamp, an online record store and music community dedicated to the autonomy, fair compensation, and discovery of artists. Through Bandcamp’s blog, Bandcamp Daily, Keyes spotlights diverse artists and music scenes around the globe to directly support musicians and help fellow music lovers find their next favorite sound. Keyes spoke with UCLA Radio on these shared values, the future of the music industry, and advice for aspiring music professionals and journalists.
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This interview was conducted by Dylan Simmons on November 14, 2025. This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Dylan Simmons: Could you tell me a little bit about what you do for Bandcamp and what that role entails?
J. Edward Keyes: I run Bandcamp Daily, which is Bandcamp’s editorial arm. That’s the place where we publish spotlights and features on artists all over the world who use Bandcamp to connect with fans. The “all over the world” part is pretty crucial. When I started at Bandcamp in 2016, they didn’t have any editorial at all. Founding Bandcamp Daily was one of the first things that I did with my senior editor at the time. And back then, whenever I would tell people, “I just got a job with Bandcamp,” the main thing that I heard, understandably so, was: “Oh, that’s where I buy all my punk records. That’s why I buy all my indie rock records, my hardcore records.” But one of the things about Bandcamp is that it is truly a global community, and it has every single style of music. So when we started Bandcamp Daily, it was really important that we showcase these communities that are happening all over the world, these independent music communities with people making great music. So all of the editorial that we run on the daily is really focused on platforming those kinds of artists. We run written editorial on Bandcamp Daily, which reports on things like the electronic music scene in Thailand and the hardcore scene in the Philippines, and interviews with artists. But then we also just launched a Substack, which drops every Wednesday. It’s called “Cool Band Alert,” and it’s one artist that we think people need to know about. We also do video content on our Instagram, and then we have three radio shows on bandcamp.com. We have a hip-hop show, a metal show, and then a show called Bandcamp Selects, which is kind of a mix of jazz and soul. So that all of that kind of encompasses everything that I sort of oversee across Bandcamp.
Dylan Simmons: That’s super cool. That’s very multimedia. I think that’s super important in this new digital and [journalistic] landscape, like you really need to like to tap into video, especially as people’s attention spans are kind of fried.
J. Edward Keyes: Yeah. We also want to meet people where they are, right? People discover music all kinds of ways; some people like to read long pieces, and some people would just prefer to listen to a radio show, and so we try to kind of meet people where they are. I’ll throw two other quick things into the mix now since we’re talking about music discovery in general. We just launched public playlists, so that people who buy music on Bandcamp can create playlists of all the stuff that they love to share with their friends. We also launched these digital clubs. They’re in metal, indie rock, jazz, and club music, and all of those are overseen by known people in those realms. That’s also for folks who don’t necessarily want to have to spend a ton of time digging. They just know Tina Edwards is a jazz expert, and that she’s going to pick a great jazz record every month. And for $13 a month, they subscribe, and they get that record and a whole bunch of other content. But those are all the different ways that we get people in touch with new music, hopefully.
Dylan: Very cool. What’s the team like for the Bandcamp editorial department? Is that global as well?
J. Edward: We’re a pretty lean team. There’s four of us here. As far as the writing goes, we have freelancers who are based all over the world. They are the folks who pitch us stories and let us know what’s going on in different parts of the world and keep us looped in there.
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Dylan: What’s your background in the [music] industry?
J. Edward: I started in the days of print, around 1998, ‘99. My first gig was an internship with the Philadelphia Weekly. It was an alt weekly in Philly, and I was an intern in the music department, because I really just wanted to get my foot in the door. I don’t know what the editor was thinking; the first album they gave me to review for the Philadelphia Weekly was Radiohead, Kid A. I was like, “You’re going to give this to an intern? You don’t want one of your staffers to do this?” And so I just kind of kept building from there. The music editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer saw my writing in the Weekly and called me and was like, “I really like your writing, would love to have you write for us.” And then just kind of hopscotched from one publication to the next, until eventually I was doing a bunch of stuff for Rolling Stone, and Pitchfork, and a bunch of other outlets. And then there was a digital music service called eMusic that was kind of like Bandcamp before there was Bandcamp. It was totally focused on independent music, and I saw that they had an opening for a deputy editor. I had all these clips from just doing all this freelance work, so I applied, and I got the job. And then, people cycled out, and eventually I worked my way up to becoming the editorial director of eMusic. Then from there, [I] bounced around to helping some other sites launch editorial verticals, and eventually ended up at Bandcamp in 2016. But it was all really incremental steps to get to this point. It was really just like gradually working up the ladder of the size of publications that I was working for over the course of 20 years. My college background is a little weird.
Dylan: Did you go to college for journalism?
J. Edward: I went to a Bible college, and I was going to be a youth minister.
Dylan: Oh, wow.
J. Edward: Yeah. Real detour. And then just over the course of being at Bible college, [I] was like, “This is not something I believe in this way anymore, and I don’t want to be associated with.” It was pretty far right, and I am not, and by the time I got out, I just tried to get as far away from that as possible. So, I changed to be an English teacher. I did that for one year, because I was at this college and I just had, you know, stasis. So I was like, “Well, I’ll just stay here and be an English teacher, and it doesn’t matter that it’s this weird right-wing Bible college.” It did matter. Then once I got out, I just kind of made a clean break. I was teaching English at this private Christian school and just hated it and was miserable. And then I saw the ad for the intern in the music department at the Philadelphia Weekly, and just kind of shot my shot. But that was like really was designed for someone who was still in college, and I already had a full-time job as a teacher, and I was squeezing [the internship] in on the weekends or when I could, just to like get out of the situation I was in and and try to get over to doing what I wanted to do.
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Dylan: What drew you to Bandcamp [specifically]?
J. Edward: Because the entire course of my life as a music fan, the music that has always excited me the most has been the stuff that kind of exists on the margins. It doesn’t really matter what style of music it is. And Bandcamp gave a really unique opportunity to be able to elevate that music that doesn’t often get covered a lot of other places. We have free rein in editorial to cover whatever we want. No money changes hands. There is no payola. Everything you see on Bandcamp Daily, it’s because someone on the team likes it. So to be able to say, “I really love this record by this experimental electronic artist, and we’re going to do a feature on them or put them on the homepage” — that is really important. Then the other part of it is just knowing, especially in the streaming economy, that when we feature an artist on Bandcamp Daily, and someone buys their record, they’re going to take home 82% of that money after fees and everything else. Being able to be a conduit for people to directly support artists in a really meaningful way was also incredibly important to me. There’s not a whole lot of places that give opportunities like that. That really is what it was about, just being able to lift up artists who might not get covered elsewhere and hopefully make a meaningful difference in their income.
Dylan: Yeah. I feel like I love UCLA Radio for the same reasons. Obviously, we have a lot less to lose by covering whatever we want, because there’s like zero money involved. We’re fully student-run. But it is so special, because it’s been great to just have so much creative freedom, and just letting everybody write about whatever artist they want to write about or whatever album is on repeat lately. So that’s kind of our mission as well, is just highlighting smaller artists.
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Dylan: You touched on this a little bit already, but just like in your own words, why is it important for you to empower independent artists?
J. Edward: We both talked about — you with Radio, and then us with Bandcamp Daily — having free rein to do whatever we want, right? I want artists to be able to do whatever they want musically, and be able to know that they don’t have to necessarily water that down [and] they can pursue whatever vision they want, and being able to create a system where they can get by a little bit, or at least buy groceries or pay their rent while they pursue the vision that they have. The most interesting stuff, in my opinion, comes from people who kind of live outside the lines a little bit. And it all kind of filters and works its way to the center. I mean, a great example of this is the PC Music people; A. G. Cook and all those folks have been doing stuff for ten or eleven years now. When they first started out, [they] were just very much able to do what they wanted to do and were just left alone to create. SOPHIE was part of that universe. And now, A.G. Cook produced most of that Charli XCX record from two years ago. So that’s just a testament to like, they were this weird, fringy UK electronic label in 2014, and now they’ve made it to the mainstream, and that’s because they were able to just pursue what they wanted to do.
Dylan: Yeah, totally. Any sort of change or any new face in the industry is almost always going to be an independent artist. Like, you’re independent until you’re not. I feel like the people and the scenes that are making change and rising in notoriety, obviously all that starts as independent and underground. So it’s just about finding the next thing that you’re going to love listening to, that you know people are going to love and connect with.
J. Edward: Yeah.
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Dylan: What [are] your thoughts on the future of the music industry as things become increasingly digitized?
J. Edward: I think about this a bunch. I feel like the music industry’s always been so precarious, and having been doing this for as long as I have now, so far it’s found a way to adapt. Specifically, to your point about physical goods, which I think is interesting. I do feel like as methods of consumption become more digital, it does kind of create more of a longing for something tactile. I mean, I follow hip-hop a lot, and vinyl is huge in the hip-hop community. So I do think that there’s a migration back. I mean, if you look overall, everybody tries to do the “vinyl is having a moment” story, but it still makes up a relatively small portion of the music industry. But what I think it signals is the desire for some kind of tactile, physical element of music. And maybe it’s not vinyl. People still love buying t-shirts, love buying tote bags. It’s always amazing to see the cool physical merch that bands come up with, whether it’s tarot cards or incense or blankets. I do think that as stuff becomes more ephemeral in that way, people do want to have something they can hold on to. So hopefully that will be there. I mean, more than anything, I worry about people being able to make a living. I have issues with the way the streaming economy works in general. It bums me out the way that revshare model works, where you might stream [a] band a thousand times, but they’re not getting that money. It’s one of the things I like about Bandcamp. So I worry in that regard. But I’ve also been worrying about this stuff for a long time now, and it seems to kind of hold together. So hopefully we’ll continue to do so.
Dylan: Yeah. I think I definitely agree [that] the industry does always find a way to adapt. It’s good that I’ve seen a lot of added pressure on Spotify lately, for a multitude of reasons. And like seeing Chappell Roan use her GRAMMY speech to just shout out the poor wage conditions for smaller artists, or bigger labels taking advantage of smaller artists. I think that’s important that there’s definitely a dialogue around that. Not that this is the first time this dialogue is being had, but I’m glad that’s at least circulating right now.
J. Edward: Totally.
Dylan: Hopefully something comes of it. I completely agree. I think because everything’s becoming so digital and because we’re all staring at a screen all day, people are starting to realize they don’t really like that. Like, let me touch something with my hands. Thinking about books, too, people are really just preferring the feel of having a book in your hands, you know? So yeah, it does feel like a good sign that people are kind of realizing that and reverting back to collecting vinyl, even if not for the audiophile part of it, but just having something physical. I also like how that kind of brings some attention back to albums being a complete project instead of, you know, the single economy, I guess.
J. Edward: 100%.
Dylan: I think it’s really interesting, being in college right now and seeing the future of music fans– so many people are collecting vinyl. It’s so so common. I feel like I’d be surprised if I met someone in Radio who doesn’t collect vinyl. And it’s like, none of us grew up doing this. None of us even have to do this, but it’s like an intentional shift back. Obviously, Radio doesn’t represent the average person, but I think it’s good overall.
J. Edward: Nor do I. This is like two edge cases having a conversation, but that’s okay.
Dylan: No, totally. But it’s still nice to see. And like concert videos and stuff can be livestreamed and go viral, but people are still going to concerts, you know? Like, the virtual world is not fully going to take over, and we’re not going to be walking around with VR headsets on. I don’t think that’s the future, and I’m glad it’s not.
J. Edward: I agree completely. Especially when you talk about concerts, that connection. I mean, my 15-year-old niece just went to her first concert. It was Sabrina Carpenter, and she loves her just as much as I loved whatever it was when I was in that age bracket. So, it’s cool to see exactly what you’re talking about. People still want to be around other human beings, and want to sing all the words to all the songs really loud, and it’s fun.
Dylan: I really do love that. I mean, that’s a whole other conversation about all of us being on our phones and the loss of community and talking to people in person, but I’m glad that music and concerts will always be a space for that kind of connection.
Thinking about the increasing digitalization of everything, I was wondering what your perspective is on seeing the [acceleration] of generative AI entering the music industry.
J. Edward: It’s a gnarly one. I don’t love it. I’m really trying to work a lot of it out in my brain, too. I can tell you what I don’t love, is just albums made whole cloth from AI, which is happening. And AI covers. Some of my favorite hip-hop producers have disappointed me lately with AI album covers. To me, that bums me out, because there’s an artist or an illustrator out there who’s young and looking for their first break and would probably love to design your album cover, probably for not that much money, and you’re paying it forward by helping another artist in a different medium out by doing that instead of just typing a line command. So I don’t love that it’s shrinking the community in that way. There was always such a great symmetry, too, between musicians and visual artists and videographers and everything else. They’re all part of the same artistic community. And you start taking those opportunities away from other people — it feels like we’re not helping all the boats rise. So, that bums me out. One of the things that I’m wrestling with and where I’m trying to find the line– and I don’t have the answer for this at this point, because I’m still really thinking about it. As a hip-hop fan, I remember in the ’90s in the heyday of Wu-Tang Clan and Biggie when the sampler was first created. There was a lot of the same kind of [rhetoric]: “This isn’t even music. There’s no band. You’re just taking someone else’s music and you’re creating tracks to it.” So what I’m trying to figure out is, where is the line? To what degree is AI similar to the invention of the sampler and these other tools? And I haven’t figured it out yet. So I don’t have a stance on this part of it. So yeah, stuff that’s just a full album made with some lines of code, which definitely does exist, I don’t like that at all. And I think I would just say that anything that is taking potential work away from other artists, illustrators, I tend to be a little wary of. What do you think?
Dylan: I feel the same. It’s something I’m still grappling with, too. It’s really scary, ‘cause it feels like something so unprecedented, but I think that’s also because I haven’t really lived through this level of technological advancement in this sort of time [frame]. But I think about the internet, and like the internet got rid of so many jobs. But we found a way to adapt and keep some jobs, get rid of some that became obsolete, but also create new jobs. It feels like we [found] a balance eventually. So part of me is like, “Well, if we figured it out before, then hopefully AI isn’t going to be this humanity-ending monster that some people freak out that it’s going to be.” But also, I get angry about it all the time as an artist, as someone who’s always loved making art and enjoying art, and as a writer. It’s really scary and disheartening to see people just grasping onto [generative AI] so quickly. I feel like art is a major part of what makes us human. It’s so essential. Also, not to mention all the environmental impacts.
J. Edward: Oh, yeah. I mean, that’s awful.
Dylan: And I’m like, “Am I the only one who cares about this?” It’s crazy.
J. Edward: No, I agree with everything you just said. I will say, first off, I’m definitely not one of those people who’s like, “AI is great. It’s the future. We should embrace it completely.” Like, no way. And yeah, listening to you talk about art is what makes us human — I totally agree. And that’s the thing that we keep coming back to in this conversation, right? Whether we’re talking about concerts or we’re talking about buying physical, like when you start to erode the human from the equation, you lose that element of connection and community, and we’re already so fragmented as it is. Like, do we need to be removing the human touch from another thing? Which, as you say so accurately, art is what makes us human, and that connection is what makes us human. And I’m uneasy about the more we sand away that element of it, and digitize more and more of it, and turn more and more of it over to the machines– I don’t know. Is that good for us as a people?
Dylan: Yeah, as a people, as a planet… It feels like it’d be ignorant of me to plug my ears and ignore it, because it’s not just going to go away. It’s like you’re saying, we are going to have to find a space for it. But I think something I’ve been thinking about is, I think we’re going to reach a tipping point very soon where we have to decide, what do we want AI for, and what do we not want it for?
J. Edward: Yes, totally agree.
Dylan: ‘Cause it’s like, just because AI can make art and can make music– do we want it to do that? Don’t we want AI to deal with all our taxes and stupid customer service stuff? Don’t we want AI to make life easier so that we can focus on doing the things we love? Or do we want AI to just do all the things we love and we all lose our jobs? Eventually, we’re going to kind of have to figure out where that line is, before things just spiral out of control, I guess. I think it’s a universal decision we’re gonna have to make, but also individual decisions of like, what are you gaining from this if you’re going through life not making art, not listening to art as a means of connection to other people, and you’re like using AI to fill in the blanks of love and relationships. At that point, what is life about, you know? Like, what’s going to be left behind? Not to get super existential, but it’s true.
J. Edward: No, it is a little bit. I mean, you touched on [what] I think the key thing is, right? We need guardrails, and we need to figure out what the boundaries [are] of this thing, rather than just letting it run roughshod all over the place.
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Dylan: [At] UCLA Radio, we have a lot of aspiring musicians, music industry professionals, and journalists. I was just wondering if you have any last advice or words of wisdom for living in this industry.
J. Edward: I swear this is going to sound so stupid and cliché, but I really mean it. If you have a vision for what you want to do, pursue that at all costs, and don’t feel like you need to compromise it. Don’t feel like you need to water it down, whether it’s a kind of writing that you want to do, or a kind of music that you want to make. Stay committed to doing that. There’s a flip side to that. No one’s guaranteed to necessarily be successful at that, but I just feel like ultimately you are going to feel more satisfied by doing the thing that feels truest to you. And the other thing that I would say is all of this — making music, making art, writing — so much is about community. So find your people. Find your community. Find the people who really [like] what you’re doing [and] your distinct vision. Find the people who that resonates with. Find the people who are attracted to it, and give to one another and support one another. Find your local scene and be an active part in that. Play shows in your scene. Start there. We started this conversation talking about my specific journey, and it started with 300-word reviews in an alt weekly that not really many people read, but just being part of the Philadelphia scene and being around. We joked about it a lot, and it came up a lot over the course of the last 50 minutes, but like all we have is each other. All we have is other humans. Believe in your vision and find other people who believe in it, too, and help each other out and support each other. That’s what I would say.
