There are dozens of digital music distribution sites these days. New ones seem to pop up all the time, and old ones seem to disappear just as frequently over legal issues. In this blog I will sing my praises for one of the newest, and in my humble opinion, the best digital music distribution website on the internet. (Note: I wrote wayyyyy more than I originally intended for this blog, but I guess that just shows how large my crush is! I just kept thinking of nice things to say...)
About four years back, as a starving college student, I discovered a grocery store called Sunflower Market in Colorado. I was blown away with how fresh and tasty their food was, but even more shocking was the prices. It was as if they were actively trying to not make a profit. Four dollars for a giant steak that was cut only moments ago? A quarter for apple? The freshest sushi I've ever had (well, as far as grocery store sushi is concerned) for half of what I'd pay at a restaurant? Preposterous.
I had never heard of a company who cared equally about the quality of their products as they did about the price their customer's had to pay. Sunflower could been charging more than any other market out there, and they could be earning cash in the form of wheel-barrels.
But they weren't. And I've always wondered: how come there are so few companies out there like this? How come there's nothing like this in the music industry?
Well, last year I found a little website called Bandcamp. It's easily the closest thing I've ever seen to a Sunflower Market in the music industry.
The first thing I notice is that they completely remove the social element that Purevolume and Myspace had. It's not about which bands have the most fans, or who posts the funniest bulletins, it's purely about the music and getting the product to the fans in a number of different ways.
After a band sets up a free profile, they then send their music to Bandcamp. The company will digitally format the music into various audiophile-grade files (the lowest quality they offer is MP3 320kbps, which is one of the highest you can rip using standard software like iTunes) for the group.
The band is also in control of the price in which the music sells for. However, instead of a fixed price, the band selects a minimum price and the buyer can chose to go over that with an additional donation. Band's can also offer physical products like CDs or LPs of the same album, or shirts and posters.
And here's the best part for artists: Bandcamp only rakes in 15% of what you sell. And after you sell more than $5,000 then that percentage drops to 10%. See? Just like Sunflower, it would seem as if Bandcamp was actively trying not to make a profit. And personally, I think it seems like the first website to genuinely care about artists--a rare sight in this business of bloodsuckers.
In addition to allowing artists to select a creative commons licence--a necessary new version of copyright licences in the digital age--Bandcamp also allows me to post music directly into my blog. Here's one of Bandcamp's little success stories Cloudkicker with my personal favorite release of his, the Portmanteau EP:
I've been following this site for a while now, but here's what happened that recently inspired me to write this blog: Bandcamp published an article titled "Cheaper than Free" which outlined the progress the company has made in recent history.
According to the company's researching, a measurable amount of people who end up paying for music were directing to Bandcamp via a Google search for an illegal download of the album in question. Some fans even payed more than the minimum to get something they were attempting to steal.
I've been following the music industry's pathetic attempts to keep getting people to pay for music, but fans could see these ploys for exactly as lame as they were kept right on torrenting. But Bandcamp is slowly but surely finding a happy medium between how the internet age wants to get their music, and finding a way to pay the artists for their work.
According to the same article from Bandcamp, the website which often offers music for a minimum of $0 raked in one million dollars in the month of December 2011 alone. My jaw hit the floor when I read that. I thought they were doing well, not no where near that well. Holy shit.
Among the other neat facts in the article, there's also a statistic that says 53% of purchases came from outside the US. I find this interesting for a few reasons. The biggest reason of all is that Bandcamp provides something that was very crippling about the physical medium and its international distribution.
There's always a delay between the US release and the international release in different countries. Sometimes it's only a few days, sometimes it's several months or even a few years. It really sucks to be a fan of a band knowing that there are people around the world enjoying music that you want to enjoy, but can't because your country doesn't have the album for sale yet.
Well with Bandcamp, the album gets uploaded today and anyone in the world can enjoy it immediately. No more waiting. No more questioning if you should just find a torrent of it from Japan or whatever. Just go listen to it, or even pay for it.
...If I don't stop myself here, I'll keep rambling on and on forever about how fantastic this website is. I just want to finish by saying how great I think it is that Relapse Records has a Bandcamp profile with a ton of albums uploaded, and I hope more majorindie labels follow suit.
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