www.bandcamp.com

• Indie Ave Rating: 8 (really great, but still needs to add new features)
• Alexa: U.S.: 3,100 (3/2/10)
• Quick summary: Truly dedicated to the indie artist, Bandcamp provides you with free and low cost tools for you to sell and promote your songs and albums. Promises new features in the near future.

Review

Bandcamp has been designed to provide the indie artist a way to sell and promote music – and for the smallest cost around – it is almost nothing at at the moment. While there are still good reasons to distribute your music on iTunes, Amazon, and other traditional web retailers, with Bandcamp, you have more control, and get to keep more of your sales income.

Here’s the feature list:

1. You can make your bandcamp page look like it is a page on your site. Using one of our standard examples, this is the Ivory Drive Bandcamp page: music.ivorydrive.com – note that the page is accessed as a sub-domain of ivorydrive.com. If you have your own web site, Bandcamp is set up to allow this kind of access. You can also use a default Bandcamp address like this: ivorydrive.bandcamp.com. Bandcamp is set up to handle sub-domains. There is limited but adequate control of the page’s look – top banner, side background, text colors. Has very nice layout.
2. They (at the moment) don’t take any commission on selling – you just lose the paypal fee.
3. Huge flexibility on setting prices. They offer two models – a fixed price, or a let the fan set the price at or above some minimum you specify.You can generate unique codes for free downloads per album or song. (200 free, then 2 cents each). The codes are provided to you either as a list or a page you can print on card stock to hand out.If you pick the fixed price model, you can also generate a single discount code to hand out – works on everything you have listed at a fixed price. There is a single code (e.g., March_save_30 or other code you specify) which can automatically expire or be manually expired. So you could make a Twitter or Facebook post: “Today only – 30% off all our albums” to get fans to visit. Unfortunately, at the moment, the discount code works for all items you are selling on your bandcamp page. This might change in the future as there is a choice pulldown provided, but it only lets you pick “anything” at the moment.

   Even with a few limitations, I haven’t found anywhere else that offers these selling features like this. You could use the discount feature as a promo for collection you fan email list, for example. Sign up, get a 50% discount on our ablum. Or buy a T-Shirt, get a free ablum download.

   The per album and per track info provided is huge – more than most anywhere else I’ve seen. Album art, lyrics, liner notes and album art with album download (optional), all the mp3 id stuff. They let the customer pick the download format – 320K mp3, lossless FLAC, others. Only lossless download I know about. All pretty attractively laid out. Plus, of course, nice sharing links – including a very decent player to embed where ever.

4. Bandcamp only provides digital downloading, but you can also sell a physical package – per album – includes an instant download, plus whatever physical thing you want to sell – CD or merch. The restriction is that you have to arrange for fulfillment. But given the low volume on web sales experienced by most up and coming indie bands, the fulfillment task may not be beyond reason. Bandcamp lets you give access to the orders to a third party, so if you can find a small local fulfillment company, it might be cheaper than using a big outfit like CafePress, etc, although then you have inventory issues. Problem: no provision for specifying a size, like for a t-shirt. Only one physical offer per album. Hope they can fix those.
5. Good instructions – Bandcamp has a large number of features, and they are all pretty well explained in their FAQ. You can get your account set up pretty quickly. But after you get the basics out of the way, you will find it worthwhile to read all the information contained in the FAQ. For example, if you want to set up your Bandcamp page as a sub-domain of your own site, there are detailed instruction available from the FAQ.

Summary

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