There was this widget you could put anywhere … on the interwebz that is … what were you thinkin’?

Well, a couple weeks back I saw a tweet from Derek Sivers who was wondering what people’s experience was with Bandcamp.  I didn’t know what Bandcamp was so I decided to check it out.  Turns out it’s a pretty cool little start-up that offers a place for musicians to upload their music and distribute it (free or priced downloads) for FREE.  Yeah, I know! There’s tons of those out there so why would you want to use this one? Time to dissect the features …

Features:

• It’s super easy to set up!
• Downloads:
  • You upload your music as a lossless audio file (for ex. a wav) and it will automatically convert that file into 8 other downloadable formats that your fans can choose from. Now I’m not an  audiofile … but if I were one, that sounds pretty cool!
    • your run of the mill mp3 320k
    • mp3 VBR High
    • mp3 VBR Low
    • AAC High
    • AAC Low
    • Ogg Vorbis
    • FLAC
    • Apple Lossless
  • Your fan can download just one song or the whole album at once and you can have multiple albums.
  • Licensing: You can restrict it to All Rights Reserved or choose from the array of Creative Commons Licensing.
• Pricing: There are 4 ways you can set up the way your fan can download your music …
  • Totally for free!
  • For free, but with a catch … they have to enter their email address & where they’re from,  then an email is sent to them with the download link
    • The way you get this mailing list information is by downloading a CSV which you should be able to then import into your email program.
    • Downside is that it doesn’t catch multiple email addresses that are the same, but  hopefully your email program should.
    • And with your fans having to enter their location, you have a better idea of where your fanbase is.
  • Set Pricing (per song, per album) (only fees taken out right now are the ones from PayPal)
  • Name Your Price (you can set a minimum) … never tried this but heard it worked well for that little known group Radiohead? But if you’ve tried this type of selling, leave some feedback and let us know how it worked out for you. (only fees taken out right now are the ones from PayPal)
• Tracking:
  • Reports to SoundScan … just put in your UPC codes for your albums & your ISRC codes for your tracks and next thing you know you could be moving up the charts!
    • Probably the easiest way to get at least a UPC code for your album is through CDBaby … not sure if that includes ISRC codes for the tracks or not?
    • But here’s where you can get ISRC codes … apparently it’s $75 and allows the owner to assign up to 100,000 tracks per year (that doesn’t sound too bad).
• Bonuses: Don’t we all love bonuses!
  • Download Codes:
    • Reward your biggest fans by giving them free downloads of your tracks or albums that normally they’d have to pay for.  You can do this through e-mail, print, wrapped up nicely in your merch, or whatever other cool ways you can think of …
    • of course, everything can’t be for free … so while Bandcamp will generously give you up to 200 free download codes, additional download codes  are $.03 each for 100-999, or $.02 each for 1000 or more (100 is the minimum order) … still pretty damn good & nice
      of them!
  • Bonus Download Items: And let’s face it … if you want to sell your music online you need add something extra!
    • As a consumer, I love it when I get something extra with my purchase! And Bandcamp does a pretty cool thing by allowing you to upload bonus items like PDF liner note booklets, videos, alternate art… pretty much whatever goodies you like … and then will zip that on up with the downloadable album.  That’s pretty cool in my book!
• Statistics: Aw the marketer in me loves this!
  • Loves that the stats are so visually appealing so its easy to tell what’s going on!
    • And talking about cool bonuses … there’s a fun Defender game in the stats section.
  • It’s nice to to be able to see not only how many plays a song has gotten, but how many only listened to part of it or skipped it altogether.
  • You can also see from where on the web fans are listening to your music through Bandcamp and from where they are being referred to your Bandcamp site.
  • And lastly, you can see the stats on your downloads & revenue.
  • The only additional stat I would like to see is what audio format are they downloading … just because I’m curious like that.
• Web Geekiness: The web geek in me both likes & dislikes this …
  • Viral Distribution: That’s right, want this to go viral … well Bandcamp allows your fans to  share your music through widgets and such.
  • Search Engine Optimized & Metadata: All good things to improve your ranking in search  engine results!
  • The Website Itself: Here is where my web designer side has a problem …
    • The URL will be yourbandname.bandcamp.com unless you set it up to forward to your  own domain name like we have music.midwestmusicfound.org … but I recommend you  have someone familiar with website maintenance to set this up .. it can be confusing.
    • You can customize the look to brand more to your band’s look & feel with colors & a  header graphic
    • What I don’t like about this, as someone who run’s a band’s website, is that I can’t  integrate Bandcamp more into the band’s website. I don’t want to steer fans away from  the main website & its look & feel to Bandcamp’s look & feel.  What I would like to be able to do, if I am so inclined, is to at least be able to insert my own header code that would include the band’s website menu not just a header graphic.

Okay … that about sums it up.  Overall, I really like what Bandcamp has done & they do it with a great sense of humor.  Like I said in the beginning, they’ve just started and for the foreseeable future it’s basically free (except for the additional download codes, which is still a great bargain!). They are fans of music and thought musicians should have an easier & better way to distribute their music and I think they’ve done that. Online music distribution is where they’ve started, but they say on their site they have much more planned.  I look forward to see what more they have in store.

I wouldn’t use this as your sole band website, but would definitely use it as a way to distribute your music online and would possibly use it as the music page on your band website but I really wish I could insert my website’s menu into the header.  All in all though a great time was had at Bandcamp!

Have any experience using Bandcamp for your online music distribution or use another way to distribute  your music online? Leave some feedback & let us know!