Why is Bandcamp Loved by Artists and not by Consumers?

Kate Lord

Steve Cirino

Digital Distribution

8 March 2019

Digital Distribution Research Paper

In 2008 when Bandcamp was founded, the options for independent artists were slim. CD Baby was around, but outside of that the only option for selling your music online was to do it through your band’s website, which, in 2008, was a pretty horrific experience. If you’re an independent artist without a lot of money, the person you get do design your website is likely to be someone who doesn’t have a lot of real design skills — so the internet was pretty full of poorly designed band websites in those days. Ethan Diamond, who co-founded Oddpost and Yahoo! Mail was trying to buy his friend’s band’s poorly designed website, and he realized that there must be a better way to do it. Along with Shawn Grunberger, who was also his partner for Oddpost and Yahoo! Mail, Joe Holt, and Neal Tucker, Diamond founded Bandcamp — an artist centered platform that allows music fans to stream and purchase music and physical goods.

Bandcamp has a lot of features that make it unique. One of the big ones is that every artist gets their own website that is separate from the main Bandcamp website. It’s all still connected, and unless you pay for a Pro subscription your website will be your-artist-name.bandcamp.com, but it has the feel of a self contained website and has room for artists to make some design choices like adding a header and changing the colors of the background, text, etc. Each album/song/etc. also gets a separate page, which optimizes search engine results and helps people to find your music more easily. Because of this website function, Bandcamp can also act as your online merch store so that people can go seamlessly from listening to your music to ordering a t-shirt. According to Chief Operating Officer Josh Kim, Bandcamp views themself “as an online record store, not a streaming service. We’re a place for people to support artists directly. Bandcamp is almost half physical sales at this point. We’re really as much Etsy, if not more, as we are a Pandora.” (KQED). Another unique feature of Bandcamp is that it allows you to listen to listen to full songs and albums before purchasing them. “We require full streams, not 30-second samples. To paraphrase Andrew Dubber, music is unique in that it’s always listen-like-buy, never buy-listen-like. Contrast that with going to a movie, which is buy-watch-maybe like” said Bandcamp co-founder Ethan Diamond (Baio). And while they allow streams before purchasing, artists can set a maximum number of streams-per-person before Bandcamp will ask you to make a purchase, and prices are set by the the artist, ranging from free downloads to pay what you want or a set minimum amount. As an added bonus, when you do pay to download those files, they’ll be lossless, as long as that’s how the artist uploaded them.

Bandcamp also pays out the majority of the money that they take in to the artists. They pay out 85% of the money that they get from digital downloads and 90% of the money from physical sales (Klibanoff). While this is not drastically different from the percentages that Spotify and Apple music pay out, it end up being more money because they are paying out 85% of a purchase, which is bringing in more money than a stream. In addition to that, many of the artists utilizing Bandcamp are independent and therefore are keeping the entire 85% instead of splitting it with a label. Bandcamp also pays out money as it comes in, so artists will receive the money immediately after the purchase is made.

There aren’t a lot of services that are doing what Bandcamp does, but two of the closest and more comparable ones are Soundcloud and Audiomack. They are both also services that allow artists to directly upload their music to the platform for free, Audiomack skews more to the Spotify-esque/streaming service side of things and Soundcloud operates almost like a social media platform for music and has not nearly as much opportunity for monetization as the other two. One of the biggest things that sets Bandcamp apart is the format. Unlike Soundcloud, Bandcamp is not trying to be a social media platform, and the self-contained web page for every artist feels more clean and professional than the Soundcloud interface. While the Audiomack interface mimics the more seamless Spotify interface and includes a more prominent homepage and playlists, the Bandcamp interface has its own perks and again its function as a website is important for artists who don’t have other websites to sell merch on, etc.

Audiomack and Bandcamp are both similar in philosophy, as they are both very centered around what is going to make the best platform for the artist and not just the consumer. They both put effort into giving artists resources to connect with their fans and prioritize spotlighting smaller artists. A big difference between the two, though, it that Audiomack is so hyper-focused on just hip-hop, electronic, and other things that are popular right now, where Bandcamp has less of a specific genre focus. Bandcamp is definitely more popular with indie rock and alternative music, but that isn’t the only thing that they focus their energy and resources into. If you visit the Bandcamp homepage, you’ll see that they are trying to draw attention to artists from lots of different genres.

For consumers who want to find the best way to support the artists that they love, Bandcamp is definitely the best choice. To put it simply, it’s the best platform to get the most money to the artist, whether it’s through digital downloads or purchasing physical goods. It’s also a great platform for consumers who want a chance to listen to music for free before purchasing it, and for consumers who want to have access to higher quality audio files. If you’re a fan of having contact with the artists you’re listening to, Bandcamp is also a good platform for you because of its built-in contact form and feature that allows you to leave a note when you make a purchase.

One of the biggest Bandcamp success stories is that of Amanda Palmer. After having negative experiences with her label, Roadrunner Records, Palmer parted ways with them in April 2009. In July 2010, she released a collection of Radiohead covers on Bandcamp and sold over $15,000 worth of music and merch in just three minutes (Paste Magazine). Palmer was asking for a minimum of 84 cents for the album, which is less than it costs to buy a single song on iTunes and other similar platforms. Palmer talks in her Ted Talk about this phenomenon of people wanting to help, and feeling like it’s a fair exchange, if you are asking for money, and asking for help, rather than demanding it. There are no statistics for this, but it seems as if some of Palmer’s success, and the success of Bandcamp as a platform revolves around this idea of choice and willing participation.

Another successful musician whose music can be found on Bandcamp is Joanna Newsom. Though her music did not become popular through Bandcamp, it is one of the few platforms that Newsom’s music can be found on. She has spoken openly about her negative feelings towards Spotify, calling it “the banana of the music industry” (Gordon). Though many artists have spoken out about how little streaming services pay, Newsom is one of the few who has walked-the-talk and refused to put her music on any streaming service except for Bandcamp.

There are no particular artists that I know of who utilize Bandcamp who I would say have been completely unsuccessful, but that’s mostly because the unsuccessful artists remain completely unknown — that’s what makes them unsuccessful. It’s also because I think artists who mainly utilize Bandcamp tie it into their artistic identity less than it is typical for people to do that with some other platforms such as Soundcloud. The reason that unsuccessful Bandcamp artists are unsuccessful, though, is likely because they aren’t doing promotion or playing shows and don’t exist as artists outside of the Bandcamp platform. Bandcamp itself only does so much promotion, and so as an artist you cannot rely on them to be finding you fans — you have to go out and get people to listen to your music yourself.

I conducted an online focus group and asked participants some questions about their music listening habits and platform preferences. Of the participants in that focus group, 91.2% of them listen to music on a daily basis. Spotify is the main platform that people use to listen to music, with 61.8% using Spotify, 11.8% using Apple Music, 8.8% purchasing physical copies, 5.9% using Youtube, 2.9% listening to digital downloads from iTunes, and 2.9% listening to digital downloads from Bandcamp. Overall, people seemed to favor Spotify because of the ease of use, price-point, and curated playlists. However, when I asked the 27 musicians of the group what platform they feel best serves their art, 44.4% of those people said Bandcamp. Spotify came in second at 22.2%, then physical purchases at 18.5%, Youtube at 7.4%, and Soundcloud at 3.7%. Generally, people seemed to feel like Bandcamp is providing the most direct support to them as artists and bringing in more income, but also they all understand that Spotify is the most used streaming platform, and feel as if that user interface is better, which is why so many of them use Spotify themselves, so they have to go there to be where the people are.

Overall, from an artists perspective, Bandcamp seems to be one of the best options out there for getting your music to the people. On the other hand though, as someone in my focus group pointed out “Why put my music on MySpace if no one’s been on there for 15 years? As a musician, I’m at the point where I care more about my music being heard than I do about how much money it makes me.” This goes to say that is feels crucial for musicians to also put music on Spotify and Apple Music because that’s where the majority of the audience is. Bandcamp is doing important work, regardless, and consumers are using it, even if it’s not the most popular platform there is.

The future for Bandcamp is more of what they have been doing for years — supporting independent ar tists. Unlike Soundcloud, Bandcamp isn’t going away anytime soon, and I think that they will continue to find new ways to prioritize their artists. We can only hope that they will find more ways to drive music consumers to their service, perhaps by working on a new mobile user interface or adding curated playlists to their home page. Or maybe Bandcamp will continue to be a game-changer and find a new way to make their service feel important — and absolutely necessary — to consumers.

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