With the help of Bandcamp.com now anyone can explore 900,362 music tracks, 111,324 albums, from artists spanning 183 countries. Bandcamp is a new platform for up and coming musicians; it’s a site where fans can discover new music while at the same time directly support the artist who makes it. This fast and reliable way of acquiring music has essentially transformed the platform of do-it-yourself (DIY) music by allowing any musician and any listener to tune in and sign up. Bandcamp utilizes social media to both promote the site, as well as offer musicians statistical feedback of their social media use.
According to the Bandcamp homepage in the past 30 days alone, artists have made $341,243 using Bandcamp. The site has driven 359,168 paid transactions and served 6,954,284 downloads to fans. With this many people involved, it’s no wonder Bandcamp has globalized and influenced the promotion of independent music.
Bandcamp offers the musician hope in a digital age of torrent sites and free downloading by offering a platform to share their art, and in turn create a music community. Typically musicians upload their music and will either enable a pay-what-you-wish option or ask for about $1 per download ($1 per song.) It is free to preview their music, but if you want this particular music in your iTunes or on your iPod then most musicians ask for a dollar per song, or slightly less if you buy the whole album.
Musicians upload their music and each band is given any number of free form labels in the form of tags. As a result, anybody can go to Bandcamp.com, search for the tag “Brooklyn” and over 65 pages of bands that have tagged themselves as a Brooklyn band shows up. It’s such a simple process that its way of creating a musical community can be overlooked. For example, bands tagged as “bossa-nova” can preview other bands with similar “bossa-nova” styles, and can directly contact them to book shows with them or to simply network.
As stated on the Bandcamp website, they are a publishing platform, “anthropomorphically speaking, your fifth, fully geeked-out Beatle—the one who keeps your very own website humming and lets you get back to making great music and building your fan base.” Even though the site is appeasing for the listener, the site was really made for the musician.
The purpose behind Bandcamp is to not let good music die. The website states, “We’re not yet another site wanting to host your tracks alongside the trailer for High School Music 4: I’m Pregnant. Instead, we power a site that’s truly yours, and hang out in the background handling all the technical issues you dread… We keep your music streaming and downloading quickly and reliably, whether it’s 3 a.m. on a Sunday, or the hour your new record drops.”
Essentially, musicians no longer have to be reliant on P.R. firms and record labels. A lot of the great musicians of this generation are classified as “indie,” or DIY (do-it-yourself.) The musicians are making it happen from scratch to print, and this DIY culture is possible largely in part to sites like Bandcamp as well as sites like Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter.
The artist login of Bandcamp offers a detailed statistics page, which includes graphs and numbers for daily, weekly, monthly overall plays, downloads, and buzz.
For example, Snuffaluffagus a new band based out of both San Diego and Brooklyn has 54 downloads and 33 purchases from January 25, 2010 to October 10, 2010. The reason that this band has a higher number of downloads than purchases is because musicians can acquire download codes from Bandcamp and sell them at their live shows. In the case of Snuffaluffagus, they sold download codes on the back of homemade bookmarks for five dollars on their West coast tour this summer. The revenue made from the purchases, (not including the sales from download codes) is $246. Being that Snuffalugus’ music is posted on torrent sites, such as what.cd, it means that these 87 people chose to pay for music rather than illegally download it. Whereas 574 people have downloaded Snuffalugus music on what.cd, but the members of the band don’t receive rewards for their hard work on torrent sites like what.cd.
The plays section of Bandcamp’s artist login offers detailed statistics of the amount of plays: complete, partial, and skipped. From January 25, 2010 to October 10, 2010 Snuffaluffagus has 3,684 total plays. For the first song of the bands new record, “Om Mani Padme Hum,” there has been 2,050 complete plays, 1,111 partial plays, and 523 people skipped the song. This page also details how many plays came from the Bandcamp, as opposed to the amount of plays from embeds on other music sites. “Om Mani Padme Hum” has 3,612 plays from within the Bandcamp and only 72 plays from embeds. This shows that the band is more reliant on Bandcamp than any other site to play their music, such as blogs.
Buzz shows how many links have been clicked via other sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Google that include the name of the band. This allows the musician to see what social media sites are drawing the most attention. From September 28, 2010 to October 4, 2010, a span of seven days, 48 people visited a Snuffaluffagus site. The MySpace attracted 11 visits, while the Facebook only attracted 3. One person looked at a video of the band on YouTube, and one person Googled “Snuffaluffagus, Om Mani Padme Hum.” The buzz page also tells us where the Google came from; in this case the Google was done in the United Kingdom.
By Bandcamp offering these sort of statistics for their musicians, relative advantages of larger institutions (major labels and PR groups) have disappeared into the hands of the musician; “the music industry for one is still reeling from the discovery that the reproduction and distribution of music, previously a valuable service is now something their customers can do for themselves” (Shirky 23).
People use Bandcamp as a sort of artists’ business card. Interview magazine’s assistant editor wanted to do a story on the new band Cults. After looking at the Cults Bandcamp site, the editor went on to explain that Cults will not be featured in their new edition because it looks like they are not making new songs. The Cults Bandcamp had the same posting since the group came out last winter.
The Bandcamp blog is filled with people who are praising the new age of digital music, an age in which globalization of independent music is possible. Cynthia from Latin America said, “I just discovered Bandcamp today and I have to say it’s a revelation. I don’t have a band but I have been working in the music industry throughout Latin America for over 10 years and I’ve spent the past hour sending my friends (who do have bands and are now mostly independent because of the recession) from Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, Mexico, Jamaica, Norway and the UK a link to your web page.”
The Bandcamp blog has user comments as well as posts on new music, where a Bandcamp event is, and new ways to use the site, etc. The Bandcamp blog as well as the Bandcamp tags add a social dimension to the simple act of listening. Musicians bind by a tag, and users bind through communication about the music. Adam Smith, another thankful customer states, “The conclusion I came to is that Bandcamp is nothing short of the future of digital music distribution.”
Erin, I cannot but thank you again for pointing me to Bandcamp, it’s really a great site. Your travelogue provides a lot of useful information and points to a couple of key concepts/questions. First, the contrast between the pay-what-you-wish model vs. the “this is the price” model, which characterizes Itunes and other commercial platforms. I wonder how many bands are using the pay-what-you-wish option on Bandcamp and whether that generates actual revenues or other immaterial returns such as more exposure.
The reason why I pose this question is that the second key question here is the comparison between Bandcamp and Bit Torrent. Bandcamp strikes me as a post-P2P site, or what happens to music when artists have finally faced the reality that no matter how hard they try their music will be always available for free online. Once you accept this reality (something with which music labels are still coming to terms, as Shirky notes) the point becomes how to survive and possibly thrive in this radically transformed scenario. I assume that most bands who are on Bandcamp manage themselves. But what does it mean to manage your own band? How does the relationship with the fan base changes? Is it possible to imagine that bands’ fans co-promote their music, help them book places for gigs, etc? It would have been good to have a feeling of whether the web site is actually facilitating these kinds of interactions (I assume it does, but a couple of examples would have helped the reader to understand this better). By the way, I am listening to Snuffaluffagus, great band!
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