The Third Eye

Let’s be honest: Bandcamp Friday is supposed to be a celebration of artists, an altruistic ritual where fans throw money directly at the musicians they love. 

It’s noble! Beautiful! Pure!

But in practice, it’s a recurring nightmare of financial ruin and inbox spam. 

Here are ten reasons why Bandcamp Friday actually sucks, and why we keep coming back for more anyway like the masochists we are.

Your wallet as a sacrificial lamb

Bandcamp Friday begins with the innocent thought: “I’ll just buy one record.” Six hours later, you’ve impulse-bought $147 worth of tapes, vinyl, and Japanese psych-folk reissues. Dinner is mac and cheese again.

Limited to 200 copies … everywhere

Every release is “strictly limited to 200 copies.” By the time you’ve blinked, 198 are gone, and the remaining two are already selling for $80 on Discogs. The fear of missing out is weaponized.

The email avalanche

Suddenly, every band you’ve ever followed (plus five you don’t even remember following) is in your inbox. Every message is a 1,200-word manifesto about their new record, and you feel compelled to support every single one of them.

You absolutely don’t need that record

But you’re going to buy it. The cover art is a desolate and rather beautiful photograph of an open field in black and white.

The Bandcamp description mentions “field recordings of abandoned grain silos,” so this must be some obscure, totally cool “bootgaze,” right?

Something in your bones insists this is essential listening.

The “support artists” guilt trip

Supporting artists is the whole point. It’s noble, it’s righteous, it’s beautiful. But it’s also the reason you’re justifying your seventh purchase and spending all that money you should be putting toward rent.

FOMO is realer than riffs

You’ll spend the entire day refreshing your cart, terrified that the expensive but very rare Peruvian stoner rock compilation will sell out in the three minutes you look away to microwave a burrito.

Digital hoarding disorder

Your Bandcamp library is now 857 albums deep. You listen to maybe 14 of them regularly, but you swear you’ll get to the rest “someday.” Just as soon as you finish reorganizing your vinyl alphabetically, you can start.

Shipping from Europe = second mortgage

That €18 record looks cheap until you realize shipping costs more than the vinyl, and customs might eat the sleeve for breakfast. With any luck, it’ll arrive by 2027. That’s not to mention the tariff situation. Shit …

Instant merch regret

Yes, you love the band. But did you really need the glow-in-the-dark hoodie with a wizard smoking a bong on it? You’ll never wear it in public, but you also can’t throw it away. Now it’s just a $60 blanket.

We’ll do it all again next time

The cruelest part of all. No matter how broke or buried in obscure vinyl you are, you’ll be back next time like a moth to flame, hand hovering over the “buy” button on another limited-edition splatter pressing.

**

Bandcamp Friday actually sucks, but only because it works so well.

It’s a capitalist holiday in disguise, one that guilts and manipulates us into spending way too much money on music we may or may not ever listen to. And yet, here we are, every time, eagerly sharpening our credit cards for sacrifice.

So this is your official reminder from The Third Eye: embrace the suck.

Load up your carts. Buy the records. Screw it.

And when you wake up broke and surrounded by vinyl you don’t remember ordering, know that you were doing it for the greater good.