I use Bandcamp to sell my music. On my “business” website, I embed a Bandcamp player to promote my latest work. All this is a little one sided. You hear my stuff, and choose to download or purchase it. Well, it works the other way too, and Bandcamp have just upped their game in that sphere.
Quite a defining feature of most musicians is a love of music regardless of how narrow that definition of music might be. Bandcamp allows you as an artist to tag tracks and albums so people can find your music more easily.
Another self-evident truth is this: a lot of people on the publishing side of Bandcamp might also find themselves buying a lot of music from it as well. I have spent more than I earned through Bandcamp on other Bandcamp artists. And so when I logged in this week to see what was going on, I found that all my purchases from Bandcamp had been added to my “collection” which is very cool. I can leave comments about why I bought things and why they’re important, and even better for the artists, you can click through to find out what I was so interested in.
It’s not just an online list of stuff I bought that I can access from anywhere in the world if my media player runs out of juice. It’s a social media style promotion tool for music fans to meet other musicians’ music.
Bandcamp is playing matchmaker between fans of my music or aficionados of my taste and the people who make the stuff I listened to and bought (or downloaded for free with the artist’s prior knowledge and consent) from Bandcamp. And anyone who buys my stuff can show my music in their collection and generate traffic for me too.
For a heavyweight pro, that’s a serious improvement in general service which could help to drive meaningful sales, and probably much more besides. I’m not such an expert or pro and I don’t get the full implications of this new feature. For a jobbing amateur like me it’s simply another very cool aspect of a site which already has a reputation for catering to the musician in the face of more traditional distribution models. This is why I signed with Any And All Records, and why I sell through Bandcamp.
Andrew Clayton 