D.I.Y.

Bandcamp Offers Free Indie Download & Viral Tools

Bandcamp_white_2
It never made sense to me: you beg fans to go to your site. then you send them off to iTunes or Amazon to buy your music. The distributor takes a cut, retailer grabs  30-35 cents and you’re left with 58 cents of  the 99 cents your loyal fans shelled out  for… plus they”ve left your web site.

Bandcamp.mu launched this morning with a set of tools solving these problems. You sell or giveaway your music from what looks and feels like your site  The rights are yours and for the next six months at least 100% of the money is deposited directly into your PayPal account.

The exact revenue split is a bit of a work in progress at…

Bandcamp (they promise
it will never go above 15%) as are the evolving set of tools they’re
offering. But during a tour I took of the site ealier this
week I saw a site of white label tools that were easy to set up and
functioned well.

These guys are geeks so you don’t have to be and they’ve thought of
stuff like making sure your metadata is clean and handled in a way that
helps search engine rankings. They also offer tools to help fans share
your music and you get to track the all data.

I don’t mean to gush here. TopSpin Media and a few others do a lot of this
stuff and more. But Topspin (which I promise I’ll be writing more
about soon) is not yet open to all musicians and Bandcamp is here now
and at least for the moment free. Here’s a screencast tour


Bandcamp Screencast from Ethan Diamond on Vimeo.

Bruce Houghton on 09/17/2008 in D.I.Y. | Permalink | Comments (5)
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5 Comments

  1. the reason bands don’t mind using a digital distributor is because of TRUST ; it’s easy for Bandcamp and others to SAY they’ll pay more, but when it’s time to write the checks, can and/or will they ? Tunecore has been trustworthy so far, but snocap failed miserably at this…

  3. “At least 100% of the money”? You mean, they might give you more than you earned? 🙂
    Hey, you guys might be interested in the interview I did with Bandcamp’s co-founder, Ethan Diamond. We covered their inspiration for building the site, the current state of band homepages online, music piracy, and their justification for requiring lossless audio.

  5. this looks awesome for artists that are totally just starting out, i mean common!!! where else are you going to get a thing that let’s the fans pay what they want ala radiohead…i think i’m in love

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