Bandcamp, CD Baby etc who uses them sell "product"?

JCA2550

Who on here uses and recommends Bandcamp as a selling platform for your "Art" or CD Baby or other platforms? And if so, what are the pros and cons?

Cheers,

C

PolarityMan

We use CD baby to get us on all the streaming services but we see more sales through bandcamp.

Jahanasaurus

Bandcamp for making sales of digital downloads, physicals and merch.

Distrokid for distribution to streaming sites like spotify/itunes etc. Just make sure you upload to distrokid 3 weeks before the release date to ensure it's on the platforms in time!

thomasross20

Never used bandcamp in my life. People use it? 
I had heard of CDBaby but never bought anything off there. 
Are you planning on going on Spotify? 

How do yuo intend to market it and make it KNOWN about to a wider audience? That's the hard part. 

JCA2550

thomasross20 said:

Are you planning on going on Spotify? 

We already use Spotify and you can buy our stuff on the usual platforms, but quite a few semi well known bands and artists seem to be increasingly punting their stuff on Bandcamp.

rico

We use bandcamp for digital sales and merch. Our latest output is on streaming platforms via CDBaby but the last record was distributed via TuneCore. The digital distros are much of a muchness really but CDBaby have actual reps that you can speak to which is very handy. Our manager even managed to waive the first fee with the CDBaby rep!

Let's say you sell a digital album on Bandcamp for £10, after bandcamp (15% for digital sales, 10% physical sales) and paypal (2.9% + $0.30) take their share, you end up with approximately £8. In order to generate that through Spotify, you require roughly 2500 streams.

However, it does seem to be the case that Spotify is the great leveller in terms of popularity although, if you are lucky enough to be placed on an editorial playlist, your listeners and streams can explode whilst still remaining relatively unknown on social media etc.

Bandcamp.
Pros: more money to the artist, high quality media, easy to manage yourself, direct engagement with fans (direct messaging, email lists etc), you set the price of your product and there is an option to allow fans to pay what they want - this is where cultivating 'super fans' is very important (we had a couple of fans pay £10+ for a single track lately)
Cons: inevitable fees, no real 'streaming' platform, somewhat complicated page design if you want anything but a very simple page aesthetic

Streaming.
Pros: 'universal' method of music consumption, easy to find the artist & listen quickly (assuming a non generic band name otherwise it becomes almost impossible), possibility of being playlisted which is a huge leg up
Cons: requires a distro and associated fees & lead times, media quality is lower (only MP3 unless you listen on Tidal etc)

Essentially you want your music available everywhere. 'Real' fans & 'super fans' will generally support bands via bandcamp and hoover up all music and merch but your general punter will listen via streaming so make it easy for all consumers. When it comes to marketing your music, then you can be a little more specific in what platform you want to put in front of people - for example you have new merch, push them to bandcamp, and they might be more likely to look around and maybe buy your music there. If you have a new release, you want to get the streaming services infront of as many people as you can, thus you steer them to spotify etc.

Will update if I think of anything else!