With all the interesting commentary surrounding recording artist profitability from streaming giants like Spotify and Pandora, the underrated and ultimate good guys of e-commerce music site Bandcamp have announced a brand new feature to their website and mobile phone app that will grossly benefit both it’s artists and their fans.
The news arrived ahead of the San Francisco MusicTech Summit conference, in which Bandcamp CEO Ethan Diamond revealed to The Guardian (via Billboard) that Bandcamp would now feature a brand new premium subscription service to artists, as well as allowing them to set their own price for the service.
The basics behind the new service is that fans will now be able to “follow” or “subscribe” to artists on Bandcamp directly either via the website or smart phone application, creating an immediate channel between artist and fan which will allow fans to download new music straight to their mobile phone as soon as fresh material is released.
Diamond provided a practical situation of the new service at work, “As an artist, 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?”
This is where the subscribe service will prove revolutionary for the myriad of up and coming artists on Bandcamp, the struggle of announcing new music will not be lost in a sea of social media and e-mail updates.
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The website CEO continued on the added benefits, “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.”
Despite such a great new service, Bandcamp do not have any plans of charging artists higher premiums, stating that they will take the same revenue share as it does for digital sales: 15%, dropping to 10% once an artist reaches $5,000 in sales.
In closing, Diamond reiterated the integrity and intention of the online service, “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.”
