Meet Dance Music's Busiest Bandcamp Commenter
a.k.a. An interview with SVEBBE, a young Norwegian whose compact thoughts and observations on dance music have become virtually ubiquitous across the Bandcamp platform.
Bandcamp is an interesting place. Although it’s primarily a platform where artists and labels can sell their music and merch, the platform does have a social aspect, and if you spend enough time poking around on the site, you’re bound to see certain faces (or icons) pop up in the “supported by” section over and over again.
Most people ignore these little boxes, but each one represents an individual music fan, and dedicated users will even follow certain fans’ accounts, just to keep tabs on what like-minded listeners are doing and, most importantly, buying on the platform. Bandcamp subtly, and somewhat goofily encourages this behavior, automatically generating notification emails (subject line: “Booyakasha! You made something awesome happen.”) to let you know whenever someone else bought something they first spotted in your collection. These functionalities clearly help to drive sales, but they also promote direct fan-to-fan interaction, and are arguably some of the most community-oriented aspects of the entire platform. And though recent developments at the company have worryingly called into question Bandcamp’s understanding of (and dedication to) that community, the site—at least for the time being—continues to be home to all sorts of unique idiosyncrasies.
One such idiosyncrasy is the commenting function, as Bandcamp allows anyone who’s purchased a piece of music to publish their thoughts about that music, right on the release page. The percentage of users that actually do this is likely quite small, but during the past year, I started to notice that one user in particular, SVEBBE, seemed to be commenting on the Bandcamp page for virtually every single dance music release I came across. If you’re a dance music fan and even a semi-regular Bandcamp user, you’ve almost certainly seen this face:
As the months went by, and SVEBBE continued to appear, my curiosity grew. Who was this guy, and what was compelling him to comment on nearly every single dance music release of note? Was he just a dedicated fan? An aspiring music journalist? Some sort of clout chaser who was bizarrely trying to build his public profile via Bandcamp? How far did this commenting behavior go, and how much money was he spending on Bandcamp every month to make it possible?
Were any of these questions terribly important in the grand scheme of things, or even the grand scheme of dance music? Probably not, but as a heavy Bandcamp user myself, I eventually reached a point where I had to know more, and reached out to SVEBBE (whose real name is Viljar Sæbbe) to see if he’d be up for an interview. He seemed a little surprised by the request, but he quickly agreed to chat, and last weekend called me from his home in Norway to talk about dance music, Bandcamp and the outsized role that both play in his life.