Bandcamp is a no-brainer. Create account, upload and done
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For niche music without a large audience, itâs also worth thinking through your priorities. Do you just want the ego gratification of getting worldwide exposure but next to no monetary compensation? Or do you want to build a network of fans whoâll buy your music and come to see you in the places youâre likely to perform? Depending on the music you do these may or may not be mutually exclusive goals, but this discussion has got me thinking about releasing our next album only on Bandcamp and not bothering with all the big streaming services.
As I noted earlier in the thread, my partner and I make about $50/year (in a good year) from all streaming income on 30+ platforms via CD Baby. Nobody ever at a concert has come to us and said, âI heard you on Spotify and wanted to see you perform in person.â Thatâs not how it works in our musical genre, where most people still buy physical CDs, might hear us on a radio show or at a festival, or simply happen to see a concert announcement on social media or in a newspaper and are curious.
So really the only benefit for us from worldwide streaming is the sense that weâre getting wider exposure, but that exposure doesnât benefit us in any tangible way other than the ego boost. Our touring is limited geographically so the fact that 20 people in Taiwan have streamed our music is not going to entice us to fly there and do a concert. And by participating in the Spotify et al. economy weâre reinforcing the message that musicians are willing to earn almost nothing in exchange for exposure while the streaming companies get rich.
Almost all the musicians we know are releasing exclusively on Bandcamp now and are not on Spotify or the other major streaming platforms. That sends a message too, to audiences in our niche, that Bandcamp is the place to go to find the kind of music they like to listen to while supporting artists more fairly.
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Always read the contract, lol.
My 2 cents. I am both a software engineer and a musician. As a software engineer who has consulted for many types of businesses, I have been exposed to marketing techniques. My take-away from that exposure:
Try to test your marketing/business preconceptions against raw data. For example, I built a simple website which front-ends my music recordings. If someone asks me where they can hear my music I give them the URL of my website. When someone visits my website, they choose a song, then a platform (E.G. bandcamp, youtube, Odysee) to listen or watch my music.
A web server typically logs each request, where the request came from, when the request was made, and more. The web server log provides the raw data I need to challenge my marketing preconceptions.
On the other hand platforms that host music/videos do not provide access to raw web server data. They provide ambiguous summarized statistics with little to no explanation. They provide data that is opaque. Not a good source to challenge your marketing preconceptions.
To summarize, try to use objective raw data to verify/confirm your marketing plan. Your raw data doesnât have to come from a web server, perhaps plan a survey for your friends.
Hope that helps,
Lorin
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Just last week I ran across a band I really liked, but when I went to their website the only links were to Spotify and their YouTube videos. On a whim I went to Bandcamp anyway and searched their name, and found that I could buy FLAC downloads of their music on Bandcamp.
Why on earth would they leave out a link to a service where I could actually buy their recordings, and only promote Spotify? Mystifying to me. They got my $10 anyway, no matter how hard they tried to avoid it. 
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Just for the sake of completeness, there seems to be an attempt of creating something in between bandcamp and spotify, called resonate.is . The dev company is a worker owned coop (at least they say so) and the software is open source. It seems that they try to fund all of this only by donations and some kind of shares, while the musicians receive all the money from the listeners but the first stream is gratis and you pay more each stream until the ninth time, after which you somehow âownâ the track (I have not understood what thatâs supposed to mean). I like the idea, but it seems like it has a hard time gaining momentum. (Just to be clear: I am not affiliated in any way that would motivate me economically to mention this here)
Bandcamp has become corporate too recently, it is now owned by Epic Games.
Indeed. However, for me, the issue is not whether itâs a corporation (most attempts to do things in large numbers end up as some kind of corporation). The question is whether or not it remains a corporation that leans as far towards the interests of the musicians who release there, or becomes less so.
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Given Epicâs track record, I am not holding my breath for good news here, and neither are a LOT of people.
SeabladeWe released a new album last week and after one week weâve earned more in Bandcamp sales than we typically get from five yearsâ worth of Spotify streaming, so for us Bandcamp has been definitely worth it.
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Iâd have to second that: I think only a single person bought my album on Bandcamp, and that was still way more than all the revenue I got from all streaming services combined in 6 months!
That said, I also agree with @GMaq that itâs a matter of visibility too. I write and publish music purely for fun (Iâm not trying to make a career out of it), so optionally making money out of it would just be a nice plus, but not really the main target. For this reason I always share my albums on streaming services as well, besides Bandcamp, simply because I know thatâs what most of my friends and acquantancies prefer to listen music on: only keeping it on Bandcamp may be a better business decision for a âtrueâ musician, but if I just want to ensure that more people listen to it, the other streaming services canât be ignored unfortunately.
This 100%. I over and over again find this to be true that Bandcamp is far more lucrative than the streaming services. Bandcamp brings in per month what streaming services bring in over the year for sure. I hate pushing folks to Spotify but generally i push both BandCamp and Spotify most, one because itâs more lucrative and easier for folks who donât use subscription services, and the evil other for âdiscoverabilityâ.
I honestly feel if Bandcamp expanded its radio/playlisting capabilities, more folks would be down to using it more regularly.
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