Bandcamp supports (Open)Subsonic API

[epoupon]

I was quite pleasantly surprised to receive/read this: https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/07/16/discover-improvements-and-subsonic-implementation/

[sentriz]

Saw that too, really cool move from them. And they even linked to OS 😁

[Tolriq]

Seems they return some invalid data :(

[martinmckenna]

[lachlan-00]

cool idea

[dmdeller]

I've been looking at Bandcamp's new API implementation, and here are some things I have found so far:

• In general, it seems that unsupported endpoints return HTTP 200 OK with this JSON response:

  {
    "error": true,
    "error_message": "bad version"
  }
  

  (This seems to have nothing to do with the Subsonic API version - rather, I think what's happening is that when it can't identify a Subsonic API request, it falls back to the private Bandcamp API, which requires a different type of version param. However this is just a guess.)

  Some may remember my PR New error code to indicate unimplemented endpoint #222 a while back, but that was ultimately not merged, so there is no standard for how to handle an unimplemented endpoint. Still, this is not ideal.

  It would be preferable if a request to any of the standard endpoints (as listed in the OpenSubsonic spec) which Bandcamp intentionally does not support would return either a 404, or a valid Subsonic error response (which this is not).

• getMusicFolders returns an empty array. This is the first problem that prevents a lot of clients (including mine) from continuing past this point. However, many other API requests work fine if we omit the music folder ID.

  I'm not sure if it's specifically called out anywhere, but I think the spec tends to assume that all servers will have at least one music folder. Ideally, Bandcamp would fix this by returning a single music folder, call it "Collection" and give it ID 1.

  Some clients ignore music folders, so they don't have a problem with this.

• Dates in responses are in RFC 2822 (email) format instead of ISO 8601. ISO 8601 is correct according the OpenSubsonic spec, and it is what all the other servers I've tested are using.

• Stars (favorites) generally seem to be supported, and we can read and write the starred status. getStarred2 is not implemented, but getStarred is. It would be nice to have both, since the newer endpoints are preferred by many clients.

• User ratings do not seem to be supported in any form.

  (Same as my server implementation, actually - I don't know of a good way to handle this within the spec. My server adds a custom extension to declare absence of user ratings support, but I don't have any suggestion for what Bandcamp should change here. Probably, clients will just have to special-case handle it somehow.)

• I have managed to create a playlist, and it appears in getPlaylists, but getPlaylist seems to be unsupported (returns the "bad version" response). So I'm unable to figure out how to play a playlist so far.

• search3 always seems to return "status": "failed", which is a valid OpenSubsonic error response. But I can't figure out why it's failing. The error code is 0 and message is null. I'm guessing it requires some magic combination of parameters, but I haven't figured it out so far.

• In general, it would be super helpful if Bandcamp would provide a list of which API endpoints they do or don't support. It is not necessarily expected for a server to support the entire API, and many servers do not. If we had such a list to reference, it would save us a lot of trial-and-error! In the meantime, I will continue to report findings here.

---

In more positive news, I have been able to stream music successfully through this API! 🎉 (Streams are MP3 256.) So I think this may ultimately be viable for my client. Although in its current state, it will need a lot of workarounds to get it working.

I'd like to thank Bandcamp for doing this, as I think it's a really great thing for the community! It would be great if we could establish some sort of dialogue with them, and perhaps work through a few of these issues; a few small changes on their end could make this a lot easier for existing clients to become compatible with their system.

In case anyone from Bandcamp reads this: Welcome! And please let us know if you have any questions, or if there's anything we can do to help.

- dmd (developer of Radiccio)

[martinmckenna]

i think they just laid off most of their remaining developers the other week (including one of the people who worked on the subsonic implementation), so doubting this API is gonna get much love going forward:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BandCamp/comments/1uj68me/bandcamp_has_laid_off_most_engineers/

[fluffy-critter]

Didn't the Subsonic support get announced well after the layoffs though? Songtradr also has claimed that they still have devs working on Bandcamp, they're just not from the original team anymore.

[martinmckenna]

no idea, i'm just going off that dude's bluesky account linked from the reddit thread.

who knows man

[dmdeller]

@martinmckenna I’m not sure why you replied to me directly, but I don’t think this is a helpful or constructive direction for this conversation. I have been through layoffs and believe me, it hurts more than I can say. So I get it. But I feel that this is a distraction from the work I am trying to do here. So if you don’t have anything to contribute to that effort, I would appreciate it if you could please take this kind of discussion somewhere else, at least not in my direct replies.

[martinmckenna]

It would be great if we could establish some sort of dialogue with them, and perhaps work through a few of these issues; a few small changes on their end could make this a lot easier for existing clients to become compatible with their system.

you quite literally asked if we could start a dialogue with the people who worked on the API, and i'm telling you it's likely not probable because the people that worked on it just got hit with layoffs after releasing it:

http://bsky.app/profile/grmnygrmny.bsky.social/post/3mqrnimwmus2h

if you don't see how that's relevant reply to your comment, i'm not sure what to tell you

[dmdeller]

I’ve released Radiccio 1.4.2 and Wavelength 1.4.2 today, which include workarounds that allow the user to connect to Bandcamp and stream music from it. A lot of stuff is still broken (search, user ratings, songs, playlists) so I am not officially supporting it yet, but basic functionality (overview, browse by artist/album, favorites, streaming playback) works well enough.

I’m still trying to figure out how to get search3 and getPlaylist working, so if anyone has had any luck with those, I would very much appreciate any advice!

And here’s a few more items for the bug fix wishlist:

• In getStarred response, artist->coverArt is an int (should be string). Curiously, album->coverArt and song->coverArt in the same response are string (correctly)

• In getArtist response, starred property is missing (even if the artist is starred and appears as such in getStarred and getArtistList)

[dmdeller]

From what I can tell, search3 works only when query is provided a specific way. query must not be absent, &query&... does not work, but &query=&... does work. In other words: the query param must be provided, the value may be empty, but the equal sign separating the name from the value must also be provided.

This seems to be another recent improvement - it was not working under any of those situations yesterday, so it looks like they're continuing to work on it. (Thanks!)

Still no luck with getPlaylist.

[dmdeller]

I noticed just now that getMusicFolders was updated since I posted this, and now returns a single item, like I suggested. Thank you to Bandcamp for working on this 🙂