You can now send any album or track on Bandcamp as a gift. Just click “Send as Gift” (below the Buy Now link), enter the recipient’s email address, add an optional personal message, and then check out as always. Your friend will get an email containing a link to the high-quality download, as well as instant, unlimited mobile access to the music via the free Bandcamp app.
Some things you may be wondering:
Can I send physical items as gifts?
Sure can.
What about gift cards?
We may add them in the future.
So if the gift recipient doesn’t have a Bandcamp fan account, they can use the gift to create one, no purchase needed?
Correct.
I’m a fan. How can I insure that I only receive gifts I actually want?
Easy: send your friends a link to your Bandcamp wishlist (it looks a little something like this: bandcamp.com/yourfanname#wishlist). Don’t have a fan account yet? Get yours here.
I’m an artist. Do I use “Send as Gift” to give some of my fans my music for free?
No, continue to use download codes for that. “Send as Gift” is for your fans to give your music as a gift to other people.
I’m an artist. Should I tell all my fans about this?
Yes please. Your fans would love to support you by giving your music to their friends. Please let them know that there’s now an easy way to do so!
The gift link is there in the Facebook Page app installation, but does not yet appear to be working…
Thanks Mike, that’s fixed now.
Very cool!
Is there a way to specify when they’ll receive the email?
Thanks Josh. The best we could do is allow users to specify when the email is *sent*, but that wouldn’t guarantee when it would be received, or when the recipient would check their email, so we’re not keen to do it (and of course that problem is only worse for physical items sent as gifts, which we’ll be enabling shortly).
I will metaphorically fill many stockings with this feature. Thank you.
How long does the recipient have to redeem their gift download?
David, they have until forever, or Bandcamp is acqui-hired by Kabletown, whichever comes first.
If the recipient already has a fan account & wishlist, can the album be directly gifted there without the sender having to know the recipient’s email address? I want to use it with our message board community as a secret santa thing, but some may have privacy concerns with giving out their email address.
Jay, at the moment if you go to somebody’s wishlist and click Send as Gift, you do need to know their email address. In the next week or so we’ll remove that requirement, so that if you don’t provide an address we’ll just send the gift to the one on file for that fan.
Great feature! 🙂
It’s definitely gonna please a lot of people out there.
Does each gift count as a new purchase by soundscan. We have fans who want to by a number of our CD for presents, but they want to help us (in the very highly unlikely event that we get close to charting).
Hi James, a gift is the same as a normal purchase for SoundScan reporting purposes.
Sweet! Many thanks for adding this feature!!!
I love it! This is quite good.
Any news on when we can send gifts without having to know the users e-mail address? I’d like to start sending a few albums as presents.
Cheers
That’s working now Adam. Just go to the fan’s wishlist and click “Send as Gift” on any track or album.