Quick disclaimer here: I’ve been asked to join Bandcamp as a member of an advisory board. I’ve said yes.
Bandcamp is a platform for musicians to promote and sell their music online. They say their job is simply to power a site that’s yours. No banners, ads or Bandcamp logos everywhere. You get control over the design, your music, your name, etc. You retain all ownership rights, and they just hang out in the background handling the tech stuff. They don’t even take a cut of what you sell.
It’s all free and it’s very, very customisable. You can choose to give away your music, sell it for a set price, or let your fans name their price — it’s up to you. Here’s a screencast that explains everything.
Bandcamp Screencast from Ethan Diamond on Vimeo.
So… personally, I think this rocks. But then I’m pre-disposed to be biased here. According to the site’s founder, Ethan Diamond, the site was at least in part inspired by my 20 Things e-book.
But what I think of the site is irrelevant here. What you think of it is what’s important. That’s what this site is for nowadays: peer review.
Go have a look, see what you make of it, and report back here in the comments, if you’d be so kind.
What’s good about it? What could be improved? Is it something you think you would use? Do fries go with that shake?
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13 Comments
It sounds awesome and is probably what an artist with limited technical knowledge could hope for from a download site, my only worry is:
“Our monetization strategy boils down to the simple belief that we should only make money if you make money. So, for example, we might show ads, but if we do, we’d do it as a revenue share (meaning if you end up driving tons of traffic to your site, you stand to profit too — and we’d of course allow you to opt-out of ads entirely for a fee).”
What would that fee be? When will this be in action? What kind of ads? It scares me a little to build up a download platform and then have it flooded with ads. Maybe I worry too much, its hard to be 100% comforable with this vagueness. Other than that, I’d probably sign up for an account right away. The concept is excellent. It needs some features, but i’m certain they’ll all get fixed in the future. They got the core right.
Love bandcamp. More importantly, the people I’ve pointed it out to have started to use it as a “tool”, rather than the obvious “music page of your website” application.
Escape Act are releasing their new album via various blogs, but are using Bandcamp as the back end for it – http://www.escapeact.bandcamp.mu
And Bandcamp is helping Penny develop our licensing strategy. With a small catalog (35 albums, 10artists), we’re developing a series of “Bandcamp only” albums directed at local media companies and their supervisor departments – the albums will be made up of music from a particular genre, rather than the artists/album names, and each track will be named according to the primary instrument or voice of the piece, keywords (scary, defiant, joyful etc), and tempo.
The goal, of course, is to provide an easy way for supervisors to find the music that suits their project, have an easy way to download and sample the music and thus increase the licensing of our catalog.
Thanks, Bandcamp!
I like bandcamp for the simple fact that they offer the music in any format you could possibly want (saves me the trouble of baking all those different files…).
The one thing I really wish this site had, as a user looking for music, is the ability to search through bands. So far, I’ve found nothing implemented on their site, and all I can get to are the eight bands featured on the front page.
I generally like tagging features, when they’re well-implemented, so perhaps bands could self-categorize in genres as well as having “sound-alike” tags (bands that they might sound somewhat like). That would maybe again make possible what I ranted about on MTT open. :-)
After giving Bandcamp a thorough look I am very impressed. I love the pricing and file format flexibility it offers, and everything has been implemented in a very user-friendly, elegant way. All in all, it appears to be a fantastic distribution and retail solution for artists, and we at Trifonic are very tempted to give it a whirl.
My main suggestion for improvement? Get rid of the 128k mp3s!
Bandcamp gives you 3 options for selling your tracks:
1. Let users download all file formats free
2. Charge users to download all file formats (pay-what-you-want or fixed price)
3. Let users download 128k mp3s for free and charge for all other file formats
Now, I admit I’m an audiophile… but I find 128k mp3s offensively lo-fi. And so would many of our fans. I would love to be able to offer, say, 192k mp3s for free — like NIN and Saul Williams did with their recent digital albums — and charge for higher-quality files. I’m not sure why Bandcamp selected 128k as the “normal quality” (their words) encoding rate. I think 160k or 192k would be much more reasonable.
Addition suggestion!
If you’re offering a band a platform to sell it’s music, and a fine one at that, you may want to add a way to allow for unique “product codes” or “download codes” to be activated and added by the band.
This allows the music to be offered on physical goods (t-shirts, Vinyl, tickets, pin-collections etc). If you can make the process of simply and efficiently allowing bands to generate “download codes” to allow buyers of other products in the physical world to ALSO receive the download/album art you’re on to a winner. I know I’D PAY for a service which let me do that.
Nick
I’m really liking bandcamp, as well, although I still have my reservations about a few things.
1) Paypal’s cut for single track downloads is well above 30%, not bandcamp’s fault, but still less than ideal.
2) The Paypal arrangement bandcamp has only let’s people buy downloads with a Paypal account, and not, for example, via credit card through Paypal. This is a gigantic limitation of the system. Mp3s purchases are more often than not impulse buys, and signing up for Paypal to buy a few downloads is absurd, as it’s a time-intensive process. I can use Paypal checkout on my website that allows people to pay via paypal, using their credit card, without having to sign up to a Paypal account. If I can do it, why not Bandcamp?
3) None of their widgets (they told me so via support) work on wordpress powered sites. If their hosted on wordpress.org yes, but if you host on your own website and use WP you are currently stuffed. Neither their “wordpress” code, nor any of the other codes function. Given the wide popularity of wordpress, this will no doubt prove to be a real annoyance to some.
The good news, is that the support team answered my email within 10 minutes, and promised a) to fix it, and b) to contact me once they have a solution. So… I’m pacified for now! :)
4) Although many will see this as a positive, not a negative, I am am not in the slightest so enthusiastic about it all being free. Not because free doesn’t feel all nice and fuzzy to me, but because I can’t see their efforts as a rational and sustainable way forward. They do mention that they wish to develop a business model (i.e. Ads… *yawn*), but I’m not so sure that will generate enough profits to offset the cost of running the site. And if they can’t make money, then neither will we in the long run.
So, to conclude: Certainly love the site, the formats, the flexibility, the uncluttered interface. I actually would give everything aside from the above mentioned points close to perfect score.
But with the 30%+ paypal cut for single track downloads (album downloads fare a whiole lot better!), the fact that potential buyers have to sign up for paypal (honestly!?), the fact that thus far WordPress is poorly if not at all supported, and the fact that I just can’t see it all lasting, give me some _serious_ doubts about it all.
Thus far, I’m on board, but I’m not going to get all excited until I see how it actually all pans out over the next weeks and months.
Fingers crossed, though!
-Mark
http://www.theenrighthouse.com
http://www.theenrighthouse.bandcamp.mu/album/six-acoustic-renditions
Thanks for the excellent feedback everyone.
Mark, re: “None of their widgets (they told me so via support) work on wordpress powered sites,” the widgets actually work on any of the 4.5 million WordPress.com sites. We have a bug with WordPress.org sites that should be fixed up later next week.
Darren: that’s coming soon!
Hey Ethan,
Good news re. fix. I think what you are pointing out and what I was trying to get across (albeit, perhaps, poorly), is that your widgets currently function on websites hosted by WordPress, but not on websites that are independently hosted, but which use the wordpress platform. 4.5 million WordPress.com supported users is awesome, by the way. Now it’s just the rest of the 2 million 527 thousand and 341 users (that’s just WP 2.6 alone!) that would love to implement your fantastic widgets, as well!
Seriously though, much respect for your site. Just wish customers didn’t have to sign up for Paypal in order to purchase albums or single track downloads. Sort of kills the impulse unless you’re already signed up and happen to have credits on your account.
All the best,
Mark (www.theenrighthouse.com)
So yeah, I’ve been using bandcamp for a few weeks now, and I feel it’s time now to share some final thoughts on it:
Firstly, despite there still being a few bugs and things that have not yet been ironed out, I have been incredibly impressed by the people responding to support questions. Everyone there seems really genuine and eager to make their platform something special and functional, and I’m confident that bandcamp will continue to improve its platform by addressing the few lingering bugs etc.
Secondly, I’ve really enjoyed the gorgeously simple interface and the effective presentation of listening and download stats, as well as being able to monitor what sites are linking to my download page and how many users arrive from those pages. This is a real asset in learning where to invest time in terms of online promo.
Despite having thousands of myspace friends and only a hundred on facebook, I was interested to learn that I have had more people arrive at my bandcamp site via facebook than via myspace. This sheds some interesting light on the “quality of fanbase” various networks produce, and has reminded me not to neglect sites with fewer fans, as they might often prove to me smaller yet more dedicated to supporting my music.
My disappointment over bandcamp’s limited payment options (note: not pricing options, they are super flexible!). Getting a paypal account is no small step. It requires a lot of time and effort to set up one’s bank account and credit card details, and verification (especially if you are not based in the US) can take up to a week. Perhaps it is easier to set up an account for the purpose of purchasing items (I’m not sure), but either way, I doubt that many people who do not already have paypal accounts will be bothered to set one up in order to buy my music.
Really wish credit card payments were supported. That would push bandcamp from an “interesting option” to my number-one go-to place for my music sales. As it stands, CD Baby etc will still prove a far more convenient a place to buy music than bandcamp.
As it stands, I am happy not to chose. If people have paypal accounts then bandcamp offers great diversity in download formats. If people don’t have paypal accounts, then CD Baby etc is still a great option. Just wish there was a place that offered both diverse formats and diverse payment options.
So, in conclusion, I have decided to circumvent the payment issues with bandcamp entirely by deciding to use bandcamp exclusively for free releases and CD Baby etc for paid releases. That way I can just create a simple link to my free output via bandcamp. That solution is far from ideal, though, as I am no doubt missing out on spur-of-the-moment sales aided by my free releases.
Perhaps in the weeks to come I will add my for-sale releases to bandcamp’s site just to give people the option to buy my music whilst their downloading my other releases for free. But I won’t direct fans to it for the sake of purchasing as of now, as it just far easier for them to buy it a CD Baby.
So, in conclusion, I really, really do like bandcamp for a lot of reasons, will no doubt make it part of my online presence in terms of free releases, and, lastly, will just keep my fingers crossed in the hope that they will add more payment options in the future!
-Mark (www.theenrighthouse.com)
P.S.: If you’re interested in checking out some of the free releases I have been referring to, be sure to drop by my page on bandcamp, where you can download a free album of remixes and collaborations, as well as an acoustic EP and two 7″ tracks:
http://theenrighthouse.bandcamp.mu/
Mark: the WordPress.org embed code should now be fixed, please give it a shot and drop a line if you still see problems.
Darren: check out http://bandcamp.mu/artists
More details on our latest blog post, blog.bandcamp.mu
Thanks!
Ethan, blessed be your heart! :)
It’s beautiful!
Check the embedded code here to see how shiny and pretty it looks:
http://www.theenrighthouse.com.
-Mark
Just a note to point out that bandcamp just added the ability to allow free downloads in exchange for an email address (and name, country and zip). That’s pretty much completely settled the score for me in favor of bandcamp.
In fact, I find it hard to live without bandcamp now. I just uploaded a free live recording of a track that we played last weekend to bandcamp:
http://theenrighthouse.bandcamp.mu/track/elektra
I had it up within 24 hrs of the show, and there were quite a few people interested in it. So I’m really glad that I can now collect these people’s email addresses and ask for their permission to keep in touch via our mailing list.
Sweet! :)
-Mark (www.theenrighthouse.com)