We’ve long preached the gospel of Bandcamp, highlighting the ways in which allows independent artists and record labels to take control of their careers and the way it shares the wealth with those artists and labels in a fair and transparent way.
There’s a lot of wealth to go around, actually. At the time of writing, fans have paid artists $156 million using Bandcamp, and $4.3 million in the last 30 days alone, according to the frontage of the service, which gives users a constant update.
In fact, according a recent blog post from Bandcamp higher-ups, the company is killing it and is actually doing better than the music industry as a whole, growing by an incredible 35 percent in just the last year.
According to Bandcamp’s own stats, fans pay artists $4.3 million dollars every month using the site, purchasing about 25,000 records a day, which equates to about one purchased every four seconds, with a real-time feed of the purchases available on the site.
What’s most remarkable, however, is the growth across Bandcamp’s sales. Digital album sales grew 14 percent last year, whilst dropping three percent industry-wide and track sales grew 11 percent whilst dropping 13 percent industry-wide.
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Vinyl was up 40 percent, cassettes were up 49 percent, and even CD sales managed to grow by 10 percent whilst decreasing 11 percent industry-wide. “Most importantly of all,” they write, “Bandcamp has been profitable (in the now-quaint revenues-exceed-expenses sense) since 2012.”
“Subscription-based music streaming, on the other hand, has yet to prove itself to be a viable model,” they continue, “even after hundreds of millions of investment dollars raised and spent.”
“For our part, we are committed to offering an alternative that we know works. As long as there are fans who care about the welfare of their favorite artists and want to help them keep making music, we will continue to provide that direct connection.”
