Established in 2007, Bandcamp gives independent
artists a full store, to sell digital downloads, subscriptions and
merchandise directly to the public without any setup fees. It's a
straightforward concept that is uniquely customized for the
independent musician. There are many companies out there that focus
on distributing music to the top global retailers (iTunes, Amazon,
etc … ) Bandcamp is not one of them, focusing more on direct sales
and fast payments to the artist. Digital sales on Bandcamp are
deposited into your paypal account within 48 hours minus their 15%
commission. This feature can be incredibly useful, considering
payments from iTunes or Amazon, filtered through your digital
distributor (cdbaby, Tunecore, etc …) can take 3-6 months to
finally wind up in your bank account. Also, if you are running some
kind of marketing campaign, you can see fast results which will let
you know if your campaign is effective or not.
Bundling physical merchandise with
music or concert tickets is very smart. Your digital music downloads
can become a kind of 'value add' when bundled with physical
merchandise. Your customers probably won't mind paying $25 for that
cool t-shirt you designed if the are getting a free 5-song EP with
it.
Dealing with customers directly, having
the ability to save all of their information for future use and
having very little “Bandcamp” branding to deal with, are all huge
advantages to using this service. Reverb Nation was notorious for
putting huge Reverb Nation logos on every little thing website, link
and widget you used. Reverb Nation has improved a lot, but Bandcamp
is the opposite. They allow you to customize your header and
background so that you can brand your Bandcamp store like your own
website.
Bandcamp also has a cool feature, where
you can give away downloads on their website in exchange for customer
email addresses. This feature is not as cool as the Topspin Email for Media Widget, but it's still very useful for collecting data.
Bandcamp has been around for almost a
decade and they are well established. Their website boasts that fans
have spent $137,000,000 USD over the last nine years on their site.
That is a staggering number which is almost half of the GDP of the
nation of Palau.
I created a Bandcamp page for
303infinity long ago, but never really promoted it. I think I'll set
it up with some music and merchandise and post about my experience in
a few months. It is hard to ignore such a powerful tool that I feel
should be used simultaneously with a distributor that reaches the major digital music retailers.
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