Bandcamp Updates

Andy Hull, lead singer of Atlanta band Manchester Orchestra, has just finished the third in a trilogy of solo albums under the name Right Away, Great Captain!

On May 17th, pre-orders opened on the $60 4-LP triple-album set, and a $120 deluxe edition. It sold out in four days. We caught up with Andy to learn more…

First off, congratulations. You signed up for Bandcamp the day before your record went on sale, so we were pretty surprised when your pre-sale just blew up.

Yeah, that was crazy. The Bandcamp front page had the real time sales updates and we could see what was moving. That was my home page for a couple of days.

How did you come to release a 4-vinyl set?

For me it was a pretty intense decision to print up all three of those albums, especially on a four-LP set with colored vinyl. We’ve done extensive packaging before with the other bands that I’m in but there’s always been a label who’s helped to do it all. This time it was truly just me on my own, with a little bit of help from Jeremiah [Edmond, former Manchester Orchestra drummer]. It’s an investment in yourself, and it’s daunting to put down enough money to print that many.

When the day came to finally put it on sale, I was hoping that in the first hour we’d have 10 to 15 sales overall, of anything. By the time I got back home I think we’d sold 60 of the deluxe package and 70 of the regular, and within two hours the deluxe was gone! I hit a point where I’d made a profit and it was a total relief. It had been an eight-month waiting period to see if it was going to work.

I’d never printed a Right Away, Great Captain! vinyl and I’d only printed 500 CD copies of each of the two first albums. I figured there were fans because people were talking to me about it but I didn’t really know if they were serious, if they were going to be able to drop $60. It’s a pretty expensive package.

You’ve really concentrated on the physical product here, and created something quite extraordinary. Did you make your ideal package or did you try to figure out what your fans might want?

Both, but when what you like and what the fans like are aligned, that’s usually when you’ve got something that’s going to work. I find more and more that I like the really unique stuff.

When I was planning the whole thing it would have been easy to decide to print it up on standard vinyl and not do the tri-fold packaging (which is really expensive!). But I wanted to make it worth the $120, which is a totally ridiculous price. So the deluxe edition is made by my mom and me in my basement with a Dremel tool, drilling holes in these books. I wrote all the lyrics out by hand and we’re hand-stitching them with yarn. There are 120 of them, and everything’s numbered and signed. It’s totally crazy the amount of work that’s gone into it.

For me it was such a labour of love to finish this trilogy of albums (it’s been six years in the making), and this was the coolest way to release it. Make a limited run of 1000, make sure everything’s top of the line. The fact that it sold out proved that people like something tangible, especially if it’s done well, and that they are willing to pay for it. It’s up to us as musicians to create something that’s cooler than they could imagine.

How did you go about promoting the release?

I partnered up with one website called Property of Zack, who’s a nice kid who lives in Philadelphia. It’s a site that gets some traffic, and that might get reposted by one or two other sites. I just needed someone who puts out good stuff online to partner up with. So we did an interview about three months before the release, talking about this last chapter of the trilogy. Then about a month and a half after that we released the first song from the record and let that sit for a couple of weeks. Then we announced the record, the track listing and the release date. The next week the pre-order date went up.

So it was probably about six weeks of just dropping stuff on the Favorite Gentlemen site, Manchester Orchestra’s site and on Property of Zack. But very little press at all. People just knew that it was coming and they wanted it, I guess.

How valuable do you think the pre-order process is?

Massive! Massive. It was so easy. I’m going to sound like a commercial for Bandcamp, but it literally was the easiest thing to do, and the numbers were right there in real time.

I’d paid for the vinyl and was waiting for it to be shipped, and the pre-order was way helpful for me because it really gave me an idea of how fast I needed to move on everything. I was fully prepared to be moving about ten records a day for a while, but it didn’t work out like that.

In the end you sold 820 vinyl records in four days.

That’s right. Along with another twenty that we bundled with pre-sale tickets that’s 840 in four days, which is pretty cool for such a big package.

Thanks Andy!

You’re welcome. I appreciate everything you guys did to make it possible!

The Church Of The Good Thief is out today on Favorite Gentlemen Recordings. The vinyl is all sold out, but you can still buy the digital album.

We’ve got a new staff picks section on the home page, you can check it out here. It’s updated daily with favorites from the Bandcamp crew, and covers a seriously wide range of musical taste. The now-retired Album of the Week was a good start, but we wanted to feature more music, and everyone here was itching to share their own selections. The whole thing is powered by Twitter, so if you don’t feel like checking the home page every day you can simply follow @bcstaffpicks.

The Bandcamp team is spread out all over the world, which means we don’t have lunch together, we don’t bump into each other in the hall, and we don’t have impromptu across-the-table conversations. In short, we don’t do many of the things that are often considered crucial to any startup’s success. To make up for this, we’ve developed a fairly disciplined system of communication that includes a daily company-wide video call, a comprehensive wiki where all of our projects are documented, lots of one-on-one Skyping, and a few in-person meetups each year.

Our most important mode of communication, however, is our group chat system (we use IRC). We all have it open all day long, running side-by-side with whatever else we’re doing, and we use it to ask each other questions, share links, coordinate feature rollouts… all of the stuff that elsewhere might happen in a hallway or over a desk. But what this system lacks in eye contact, it more than makes up for by being fully participatory (nobody is ever left out of a conversation), persistent (conversations happen 24 hours a day, 7 days a week), and most critically, archived and searchable (so regardless of when you’re offline or for how long, it’s easy to read the transcript and get caught back up).

The coolest part of our chat setup, though, is that it also doubles as the heartbeat of the business. In addition to the room/channel where the team communicates, we have another channel where a script announces every signup and every music sale, in real time. It looks like this:

We originally implemented this site activity ticker for the simple reason that we wanted to celebrate every signup and sale. It’s fun, helps focus everyone’s energies on our core metric (artist sales), and acts as one of our warning systems when things go wrong (the few times the feed has stopped, we could practically hear the flatline tone from the heart monitor). But it also has had an amazing, unintended side-effect, and that’s that it’s a brilliant tool for music discovery.

For years now, we’ve all glanced over at the feed a few times a day, been intrigued by an artist or album name, clicked it, and discovered new music that we loved. At some point someone suggested that we should add album art to the feed, at which point someone else said yeah-we-should-but-this-is-ridiculous-we-should-share-this-with-everybody.

So now we do. Take a look at “Selling right now” over on the new home page. It’s a bit of a firehose at times (particularly Tuesdays around noon PST), but it turns out that “someone just paid money for this” plus “this cover looks cool” is a great filter. It’s kind of like lurking at the checkout counter at Tower on a Saturday in 1997, and the line has three switchbacks and the clerks are ringing people up as quickly as they can, but in this case the Tower is at least three times bigger, you can listen to everything that’s being bought, and the customers are from every corner of the globe. Yes, you may end up questioning some of their taste, but just as often you’ll go “Whoah, what is this!? This is awesome!”

We have open positions for developer generalists and a designer (the kind who also codes). Even if you are gainfully employed you may enjoy the application process: http://bandcamp.com/jobs