Bandcamp to help musicians launch their own subscription services

Bandcamp launched in 2008 as a way for musicians to run their own online stores selling their music, and has since paid out more than $87m to those artists. Now it’s preparing to help them run their own subscription services too. “We’re giving every artist the ability to create a subscription service of their own on the site,” Bandcamp chief executive Ethan Diamond told the Guardian, ahead of announcing the new feature at the SF MusicTech Summit conference today.

Artists will be able to set their own price for subscriptions, with all their new music made available to paying fans through Bandcamp’s app as soon as it’s released. “It’s kinda like what U2 and Apple did, except that it’s music that you actually want!” said Diamond.

Subscribing fans will still be able to download music files as if they’d bought them individually, but Diamond said that Bandcamp’s mobile app is now being used by hundreds of thousands of people as a way to access all the music they have purchased.

“Another element of this is that any artist can choose any number of items from their back catalogue to give to subscribers as a bonus when they subscribe. We have 12 million tracks on the site and 1.6 million albums, so it’s an easy way for artists to start.”

Musicians will also be able to choose to release music to subscribers only – either temporarily or permanently – as well as giving them a blanket discount on merchandise that they are selling on their stores.

Bandcamp will take the same revenue share as it does for digital sales: 15%, dropping to 10% once an artist reaches $5,000 in sales. Diamond said that in tests of the new subscriptions feature, artists have opted for a range of prices.

British band Candy Says, for example, are selling their subscription for £20 a year. “We heard from another label who represents an artist who is really prolific, and for whom they don’t even know what to do with the quantity of music the person is giving them. They were talking about $200 a year,” he said.

“We’re excited to open it to everybody and see what happens: I suspect it’ll be all over the map.”

‘You just want to support everything that they do’

Bandcamp is keen for the new feature to be seen as a way for fans to support artists, at a time when the debate around how musicians make money – particularly from streaming services like Spotify – is more heated than ever.

“The whole motivation here is that when you get to a point that you love an artist – when you go from liking them to being a real true fan of theirs – at some point you just want everything they make. You just want to support everything that they do,” he said.

“As an artist, serving that type of fan can be really challenging: you can talk about a new release, but you’re competing with somebody’s social media firehose – with sponsored posts and their 1,000 closest Facebook friends. So how do you even get the information to them that there’s a new release?”

Artists will also be able to use Bandcamp’s app to post messages and photos to their subscribers, which will appear at the top of those fans’ news feeds within the app.

Diamond suggested this will be an artist-friendly alternative to social networks like Facebook, where posts from a musician’s page may only be shown to a minority of their fans.

“We’re trying to create a channel for artists and their biggest fans where they aren’t having to compete with the other things,” he said. “There’ll be no ‘boost a post’ nonsense like Facebook. We’re not going to do anything like that.”

Bandcamp’s new feature is the latest attempt to offer musicians a way to earn a regular income from their fans. One alternative is crowdfunding service Patreon, where fans sign up to pay small amounts whenever a creator – musicians, but also YouTubers, filmmakers and journalists – releases a new piece of content.

Another service, Drip.fm, focuses more on independent labels, with clients including Domino Records, Ninja Tune and Sub Pop using it to run monthly subscriptions for fans. It has also attracted a few independent artists, including Mike Doughty and Christopher Willits.

Diamond compared Bandcamp’s new feature to the one-off crowdfunding campaigns found on sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, with their rewards for donations made by fans.

“When I’ve contributed to a crowdfunding campaign and got something in the mail for it as a reward, I’ve always felt surprised. It was almost unnecessary,” he said. “I don’t want the artists I love to be knitting me beer koozies! I want their music. I’m not interested in funding studio time for just one album, I’m interested in funding them generally.”

Diamond also hopes that Bandcamp subscriptions will show that streaming music – as used in the company’s mobile apps – can help rather than harm artists’ careers, in the wake of the row over Taylor Swift pulling her albums from Spotify, and wider discussion about that service’s impact on musicians.

“The subscription streaming services are presenting a false dichotomy between downloads and streaming, as they’re conflating the idea that downloads versus streaming is the exact same as saying downloads versus subscription-based streaming,” said Diamond.

“What they’re actually saying is ‘our particular model of streaming – subscription-based – is the future, and anybody that doesn’t agree with that is living in the past’. The reality is that streaming is of course the future: people are going to download less and less. But that particular model of subscription-based streaming isn’t the only model. There is this other model where you support the artist.”

Diamond added that he thinks the latter is what Apple is working on as it prepares to relaunch its recently-acquired Beats Music streaming service in 2015. “I suspect Beats and iTunes radio will become the discovery system for ultimately making a purchase and getting access to your music,” he said.

‘We’re going to give artists complete control’

But Bandcamp is evolving in that direction as well. The latest release of its mobile app allows users to listen to anything in its catalogue twice before being prompted to pay to add it to their collection, for example.

“You get a little nag saying it’s time to support this artist, and get unlimited streaming plus the satisfaction of knowing you’re directly supporting the artist,” said Diamond.

“So you can use the app as a discovery tool, but at a certain point it’s saying if you want to add this to your collection, you need to buy it. And we’re going to give artists complete control over the number of times something can be streamed before they get that prompt.”

Bandcamp’s $87m of payouts to artists may be small compared to the $2bn in payouts to labels and publishers reported by Spotify, but Diamond said it is an increasingly meaningful platform for independent artists, paying out $3.1m more every month.

Musician Zoe Keating’s announcement in February that she’d earned $38,195 from iTunes and $25,575 from Bandcamp in 2013 provided some evidence to back that up, but Diamond hopes that adding artist subscriptions will bolster his company’s case.

“We want Bandcamp to be an important part of how any artist develops a sustainable career, and subscriptions can be a big part of that.”

Source: The Guardian