Label Integration Using the Index, Image Maps and Custom Artist Field



Update July 23rd, 2010: Another nice example from Gerry Loves Records:



One of the cool things about the new index page and image map features is how they can be used in conjunction with one another to power a label’s music store. Icelandic record label Bedroom Community’s forthcoming site redesign does exactly that:

They’ve customized their header and added an image map to integrate with their site, and they’ve set up an index page on Bandcamp to highlight all of their artists. The artists themselves have individual accounts on Bandcamp, which has the advantage of letting them each have their own design, as well as artist-specific URLs (which is better for SEO):

Note that each artist’s page has navigation built into the header (using an image map), so fans can explore other artists on the roster, and quickly return to the index.

Adding releases to your index page that go to other artists on Bandcamp is easy. You click the Set button in any cell, and then the “change” link:

You can then enter the URL of any artist on Bandcamp, and click the popup menu to choose which release you want to feature on the index page:


Finally, a few weeks ago we added the ability to customize the artist field at both the album and track level (whereas before it was always set to the account artist). This had the effect of better supporting compilation albums, but it also paved the way for label samplers. Bedroom Community’s sampler lives within their account (as opposed to within the individual artist accounts), is linked to from their index page, and looks like this:

Note each track on the sampler has a custom artist name set, which appears in the track listing and in the metadata of the downloaded tracks.

Loads more in the way of label support still to come…

The Index Page

…could not be a less enticing title, so let’s cut right to the awesome it enables:

Those are all just standard Bandcamp-powered sites. The second two use the new image map feature to add site navigation to the custom header. But all three use the new index page feature to display a selection of releases when fans go to your site, rather than just bringing them straight to your latest release.

Setting up an index page is simple — look for the “Home page” section on your profile page and select “go to my index page”. Save your changes and your home page will now look something like this:

We pre-populate the grid with your existing catalog, but you can customize the page to highlight just a few releases, adjust their order, and so on. Click the plus/minus icons in the yellow bar to add or remove rows and columns. Click the “x” icon in the lower right of any release to remove it. And click the Set button in any cell to pick the release you want there:

To actually make the index page what people see when they go to yourband.bandcamp.com (or yourcustomdomain.com), click the “…to see this index page instead, click here” link in the yellow header, or go to your Profile page and look for the new section labeled “Home Page”:

Once again we’d love to see what you guys come up with, so please point us toward your efforts in the comments!

P.S. The “change” link next to your band name in the Set Index Cell dialog lets you put any release on Bandcamp on your index page, rather than restricting it to just your own releases. In the next post, we’ll look at how a label can use this to power their roster’s music pages.

Integrating Bandcamp into Your Existing Site (SPOILER ALERT: Image Maps)

Once again to the Bandcamp mailbag:

“Is it possible to add html links to the custom header? Right now the whole thing links back to the home page, but wouldn’t it be cool if we could put a few tabs on that bad boy linking to say our blog, or our true home page? This would make an already awesome site a bit more customizable and integrated into an artist’s other web activities. We love how we can bring Bandcamp into our other sites, but what about bringing a bit of us into Bandcamp?”

“I want to provide navigation links back to the other parts of our site from our music ‘page’ (which is in reality our Bandcamp page). Is there any chance that you might include some way of making customisable links to provide this functionality?”

“Is it possible to upload an html image map with my custom header image? I’d like there to be seamless clicking between my Bandcamp pages and the rest of my site, and that would require my site’s navigation to appear on my Bandcamp pages as well.”

We enjoy doing as we are told:

Yep, from your Profile page, you can now specify an image map for your custom header, thereby emulating your own site’s navigation and making its integration with Bandcamp seamless. Here’s an example of an image map applied to the custom header of the most excellent Chicago rock band, Empires:

The above is just a simple custom header with an image map, no iframe trickery needed. Note too that they’ve customized their Bandcamp URL (to http://music.weareempires.com), making the integration even tighter.

Here’s another example:

Again, a custom header, image map, and some creative design, and Jed’s Bandcamp-powered music pages smoothly integrate into his own site.

Aside 1: An image map is just some basic HTML code that turns various parts of an image into clickable links. You can create them using Dreamweaver, Photoshop or most any other image editing program (there are even a few web-based image map generators if you’re feeling mildly masochistic).

Aside 2: Eagle-eyed readers will note that in the Profile page UI shown above, there’s also a new option to set your entire header to link anywhere you wish (whereas before it always linked back to the top-level of your Bandcamp site).

Please point us towards your own image map uses in the comments, we’d love to see them!

Update April 27, 2010: Cool image maps are popping up left and right. A few recent favorites:

Oh No, Not Another Music Community!

Back when we first started working on Bandcamp, we had no desire to create another online music community. Like many fans, we were turned off by the way the noise in those communities often drowned out the thing that matters most: the music. So we decided instead to focus on being the best possible home for that music, setting aside many of the social features that seemed mandatory for any consumer internet startup at the time.

Apparently a lot of you were also suffering from thanks-for-the-add fatigue, because over the past year and a half, artist signups have steadily accelerated, and today we host a large and diverse pool of music. But every Bandcamp-powered site is still an island, and not surprisingly, one of the most frequent questions we now get is “How do I find out about other [industrial mariachi | new-age horrorcore | death ragtime | etc] artists on Bandcamp?”

When there were just a few hundred artists using the system, our answer was “Why on earth do you care?” When there were a few thousand, it was, “Uh, use Google?” But by the time there were tens of thousands, it was clear we were neglecting a big opportunity: the opportunity to leverage the power of every individual artist’s site to help fans discover new music — your music.

So we sat down and pondered whether there was a way to seize that opportunity without completely screwing up the good thing we had going. Could we somehow activate this large, dormant community while keeping the integrity of every Bandcamp site intact? We think the answer is an emphatic YES, but we’ll describe how it works, and then you can decide for yourself and let us know.

Starting today, you can specify your genre and location, and tag up your tracks and albums with relevant keywords, and fans can browse all the music on Bandcamp by those attributes. You set genre and location in the Account Details section of your Profile page, right here:

Note that location is geocoded, meaning every artist on Bandcamp will have a real location. Stuff like “Mars,” “stepdad’s garage,” “back of beyond,” and “the ionosphere” is fun and all, but only puts you at a disadvantage in terms of fan discovery. So here you enter your city, state, province or country (even misspellings are AOK), and we map that to a discrete, browsable location.

Tags are set on the individual edit pages for both tracks and albums, here:

and finally those tags are displayed on your track and album pages, just below your cover art, here:

When a fan clicks one of those tags, they’re taken to its page, where we show other music by you with that tag, as well as a sortable list of music across the system with that tag:

By clicking the “browse all tags” link, fans can browse by popular tags and locations, like this:

And that’s about it. Pretty simple and obvious really, but we think it has the potential to build a community in the best possible sense of the word, where every individual contributes to its strength. It won’t, of course, be built overnight. At the time of this writing, there are exactly zero tags in the system, but with your help (and the help of the screaming yellow nag-bar that you’ll see next time you log in), it shouldn’t be long before the solitary goal of these new features is realized: make every artist on Bandcamp more successful, by making it easier for fans to find you.

P.S. Search is coming soon.

P.P.S. If you’re one of the many generous artists who have recently released Haiti relief fundraising records, please tag your album with “Haiti relief” and we’ll promote the centralized tag page for it shortly.

Music as Artifact: Introducing BCWax

As I sit here reading over the specs of the new iPhone Jumbo, and look at the guy next to me gazing deeply into his Kindle, I can’t help but wonder whether Steve and Jeff’s ultimate vision for my living room isn’t a padded white cell filled with clear goo, with me suspended in the center, slowly poking at a sleek, silver tablet that dispenses entertainment, oxygen and waste management services. I have some vague concerns about the jacking-in process, but what really bothers me about such a future is this: what happens when my friends come over? Or my kids get a little older? How will they know what books and music are important to me, not just at the moment of my last Facebook update, but in my life up until now? Apple’s solution is likely to be a stunning, incredible, truly revolutionary user interface that looks kinda like the opening credits to Star Wars, from which you can fly through space and time, all the way back to June 19th, 2007, when dad’s Playlist-on-the-Go™ briefly included “Lip Gloss” and the eBook at the top of his Wish List was If I Did It (three year AT&T MobileGoo contract for friend/kid not included). I don’t think I’m just being a crotchety Luddite when I say:

The fact is, if you want to get a quick sense of what a person is about, you can’t beat walking into their house and spending a few moments browsing their living room shelves. The best stuff, like say, Edward Tufte’s 12-color-printed, foldouts-galore Visual Explanations, or Moldover’s circuit board instrument CD, or Cheech and Chong’s rolling-paper-included Big Bambu, always yearns to be picked up and examined, and I think, points to a basic human desire to interact with physical objects. Holding them can feel good, and a talented designer can arrange their atoms in all sorts of pleasing ways that are impossible to achieve with bits alone. Not that we should all erase our hard drives, chuck our routers out the window and replace our iTunes libraries with vinyl. But for the music and books that are really important to us, possessing our own physical versions of those works allows us to express who we are. And when those physical versions are well-made, when they are true artifacts, owning them becomes a source of joy.

This belief in the fundamental value of physical goods recently led us to enable artists to sell merchandise side-by-side with digital music on Bandcamp. Of course, it’s one thing to talk about the importance of offering a physical product to your fans. It’s an entirely different thing to actually do it. And so, in the grand tradition of eating your own dog food, we picked two great, independent artists on Bandcamp who already had strong digital sales but no physical offering, we produced physical packages for both of them, and starting today, we’re selling the first of these packages under our newly-formed unlabel, BCWax (more on its un-ness later). You can listen to and buy it right here.

Besides dogfooding, our other big motive for creating BCWax is to demonstrate what we feel is the right way to make physical goods, and hopefully encourage some artists to emulate our methods. Too many bands nowadays seem to go about the production of their merch with the sole objective of fulfilling fans’ perceived format preferences, and end up with lackluster products that offer no advantages over a download. It’s an unfortunate mindset (fueled by the rise in print-on-demand services) which in our opinion entirely misses the point. Yes, the world still contains a few people who want their music on CD or vinyl simply because it’s CD or vinyl. However, we’re fast approaching the point at which the convenience of digital files is preferred by everyone, and in order to sell, the physical version must offer something the digital does not. It must somehow be made into an object that every one of your fans has to own, has to hold while they listen to your music, and has to show to all of their friends. It must be transformed from a disposable good into something your fans will fetishize.

BCWax’s first release, Love.Life.Ukulele. by Sophie Madeleine, is just such an object. We hope you’ll check it out because above all, it’s wonderful music, but we also hope you’ll take a deeper look because this limited-edition physical package, which includes a killer silkscreened print, mind-bendingly beautiful LP, and high-quality digital download, is a meticulously produced work of affordable art:

A few words about what makes the package so special (best read while listening to it for free or with one eye on Sophie singing the first track, “Take Your Love With Me”:

  • This release, like all BCWax releases to come, was designed by Dan Stiles, the force behind striking poster art for Sonic Youth, Arctic Monkeys, Death Cab for Cutie, and Feist, to name but a very few. In the 1950s and 60s, Reid Miles and Francis Wolff created a series of iconic album covers for Blue Note Records, pieces which were themselves gorgeous and unique, yet clearly part of a whole. Fans were driven to collect them all, and ended up exposed to music they might otherwise have never explored. We aspire to this same lofty goal, and think you’ll agree that Dan (who we stumbled upon at last year’s South by Southwest Flatstock show, standing way out from the hordes) is the perfect man for the job.

  • The print is not simply a reproduction of the cover art. It’s silkscreened, uses an overprint technique that gives it a sense of depth and texture, includes a silver ink not present on the record jacket, is printed onto sumptuous, 100% recycled French Speckletone paper, and is signed and numbered by Dan. You will want to frame it, and you’ll be free to do so without any do-I-hang-this-jacket-on-my-wall-or-do-I-leave-it-on-my-shelf angst.

  • The LP is truly something to behold. Yes, it’s an LP. As in a record. As in vinyl. Not because it sounds better (though it often does), but because of all it allows from a design perspective. A size that allows you to appreciate, not squint at, the cover art. Full lyrics and liner notes right on the sleeve. A die-cut that lets you peek right into the label graphics. And a candy apple red disc that begs to be ogled, handled, and spun around and around.
  • This is an enduring object. The sleeve and jacket are printed onto heavy and even heavier paper stocks (respectively), so the tearing and edge splitting common to lousy vinyl production is not present here. The record itself is pressed onto super heavyweight (200 gram) virgin vinyl, which we chose not for audiophile reasons (though some say a heavier record sounds better), but because of the sense of permanence and quality that a stiffer, heavier disc conveys. When you hold it in your hands, you immediately feel that it’s worthy of the music it contains.

  • There are only 500 copies. In an age of infinitely replicable digital goods, part of the attraction of physical items is the knowledge that only a very limited number exist in the world. It’s just more fun to own number 37 of 500 than to own that thing that anyone can get by clicking a link.
  • The record sounds terrific. This isn’t a lazy direct transfer of the CD. The tracks were remastered specifically for vinyl, and the record went through multiple test pressings to get the sound just right.
  • The digital music files are included. The fact that 99% of the CDs and LPs for sale today don’t come with downloads is beyond comprehension. BCWax records always include the downloads, and in just about whatever format you could possibly want: 320k mp3, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Apple Lossless, AAC high/low, or mp3 VBR high/low.

That’s the sort of package I want to buy from all my favorite bands. And really, there’s very little stopping them (or you) from offering it to me. Our biggest expense in putting this together has been time, not money. Time finding a great place to silkscreen the prints (like D&L Screenprinting). Time finding a great place to press the records and print the jackets (like Pirates Press). Time finding a great mastering facility (like Mr. Toads). Time finding a great fulfillment house (like…well, it’s the topic of an upcoming post). And time finding a great designer (that one’s up to you, but starting here worked for us). Now please consider thanking us for all the time we just saved you by grabbing BCWax01 before it’s gone, and then making something brilliant, putting it up for sale on Bandcamp, and telling us about it!

So, we’re launching BCWax because a) we believe in the eternal power of physical goods to delight, and to act as a legacy and means of self-expression for their owner, b) we believe software gets better when the people building it actively use it, and c) we want to demonstrate to others the kinds of goods we ourselves would like to buy. But there’s one final reason we’re doing this, and that’s to test out a different kind of model for a record label.

For BCWax, A&R consists of browsing through aggregate system stats, seeing which bands are exhibiting the early signs of success, giving them a listen, and discovering favorites. Production and manufacturing consists of taking an already excellent recording and coordinating the production of an awesome physical package around it. Distribution is Bandcamp itself. And the record “deal” is nothing more than a co-marketing agreement, where we recoup our manufacturing costs and then share the profits with the artist (but take no ownership rights in the music). It’s a model that diverges enough from a traditional label role that it seems wrong to even call it a label. “Unlabel” maybe? Yeah, OK, maybe not.

We hope you’ll collect BCWax releases because first and foremost, they’re great albums and great physical packages. But we also hope you’ll pick them up because you believe in a world where motivated, independent artists can make a living selling directly to their fans, with little outside help. Thank you, get Sophie’s record right here, and watch this space for BCWax02.

P.S. Bandcamp blog readers may enter the discount code “damn” at checkout to receive 15% off BCWax01. As in, Damn, we can’t believe you read this far.

P.P.S. Discount code? What? Yep, we’ve just launched discount codes in support of this release, as well as a merch management table and fulfillment partner accounts. Enjoy!

Discount Codes

You can now create codes (like “ukulele” or “snooki”) that your fans enter at checkout to receive a discount on your music. Discount codes can be valid for anything on your site, or just a specific track, album or package. You can make a code expire on a certain date, or let it remain valid forever. And you can see how many times a given code has been redeemed, so that you can create different codes for different channels in a marketing campaign (YouTube, Twitter, email, etc.) and easily track their effectiveness. All of this is set up from your Tools page, like this:

and fans enter the discount code in the checkout dialog, like this:

Note that you cannot create a discount code for 100% off (essentially, a multi-use download code). We may add that in the future, but no ETA just yet.

UPDATE December 14, 2012: We now support discount codes on all items with prices above zero, including items where you selected “let fans pay more if they want.” In that case the discount simply reduces the minimum price.

Merch Management Table & Fulfillment Partner Accounts

As promised when we first launched physical goods support, we’ve just introduced a simple table where you can see all your merch orders at a glance, mark orders as shipped, search for orders, or filter orders by date and shipped status. Head over to your Tools page and click the Physical Orders > Manage link (or click the new link in any of the “Cha-ching!” email receipts we send you), and you’ll see something similar to the screenshot above.

One of the best parts is that you can grant one or more fulfillment partners access to this page. You click the link to send them an email invite, they create their account, and then they can view and edit the merch orders page but not the rest of your site. It’s dead easy, and it’s exactly how our own fulfillment partner is shipping the first BCWax release. Mmm Puppy Chow.

Physical Goods Update

It’s just too cool seeing all the success you guys are having selling physical/digital bundles through Bandcamp. We expected the feature to catch on gradually, but here we are a little over a month since its launch, and the quantity and variety of goods being sold (and we do mean sold, not simply listed) through the system is astounding. There’s zombie ukulele jams on 7″, CDs in miniature pillow cases and TV dinner trays, music-to-fall-asleep-to in handmade packaging, bundles with silkscreen posters, t-shirts and coloring books, beautifully executed album pre-orders, and discs of jazz from Poland, ambient piano music from Italy, and post-classical electronic from Iceland. The average price paid for all these packages is more than double that of digital albums, and package sales are already 20% of overall system sales for December.

Oh, and congratulations to Malajube, whose limited edition vinyl EP Contrôle sold out in a heartbeat. Awesome.

Physical & Digital, Together at Last!

Once more into the Bandcamp mailbag:

“I like your service but want to add some physical copies, and it would be really nice to use your interface to sell these items so I don’t have two different payment UIs (I worry my customers may be nervous about that). Obviously I would ship the items myself.”

“Does Bandcamp allow us to sell physical items? So, allow the user to select quantity and give us their postal address? If you do, can we do stock control via Bandcamp?”

“Can you guys take payment for physical product via the same route as for downloads and simply forward the delivery details to your bands?”

It pleases us greatly to finally be able to reply, “Agreed, implemented,” “Yes yes yes” and “We can and do.” Starting today, you can sell both your physical merchandise and your digital music from Bandcamp, and better yet, you can sell them together. So, for example, you can easily create a vinyl, poster and download package, give your fans the digital files immediately, and then ship out their merchandise. It looks like this:

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Notice that we provide a simple, clear way to show your fans what you’re selling. They just click the thumbnails, and those expand into nice, large product images. Seems obvious, yet we constantly run across online music shops that rely on nothing but a 75 square pixel cover shot and a few brief sentences to help make the sale. For online physical sales, where customers can’t evaluate the product by holding it in their hands, it’s especially critical to give them as much detail as possible, and now you can do that quickly and easily.

Below the images is a package title and description that you can of course customize, mentioning things like any bonus items (such as videos, or PDF liner note booklets) or hidden tracks that are included in the download. You’ll also see that you can specify the shipping details, and even call out when a package is a limited edition.

checkoutdlog

When the fan clicks “Buy Now,” we display a dialog from which they can adjust quantity, view shipping costs, and pick the format for their download. They then check out, we start up their download, and send you an email with their shipping info and the details of what they purchased (for those who prefer to let someone else do the shipping, we’ll be launching fulfillment house support shortly).

All of this is easy to set up — you just click the edit button on your album page, click the “add” link in the new physical package section, and go to town:

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Note you can specify shipping and handling costs for different destinations and quantities, adjust the shipping time to give yourself some leeway or take pre-orders, and also manually adjust the quantity remaining of limited edition releases. We automatically update the quantity for orders that happen through Bandcamp, but if you’re selling at shows or elsewhere, it’s great to be able to change the quantity yourself.

Now, as anyone who has ever sold physical goods online is painfully aware, charging the proper tax is typically a colossal pain in the ass. In California, for example, there are literally hundreds of different tax rates, and if you’re in say, Los Angeles, and shipping to an in-state fan, the tax is determined by the buyer’s location, not yours. The usual solution to this issue is to allow a seller to set up a bunch of tax profiles, but with so many rates, and increases happening all the time, expecting the seller to create and maintain those profiles is just ludicrous. Many people end up throwing in the towel, and make the risky decision to not charge anyone tax, or charge all in-state buyers a single, flat tax rate and hope things just work out. Fortunately, there is a better way.

In Bandcamp, you go to your Profile page and tell us your location, right here:

taxloc

Then, when a fan enters their shipping address, we take a look at your location, compare it to the buyer’s location, and if taxes apply, we dynamically pull in the current and proper rate.* It’s practically invisible to you, just as it should be.

OK, that about covers it. We’re tremendously excited about this feature, and think that bundling physical and downloadable versions of your music will help drive sales from folks who might a) never pay for a digital download alone, or b) be reluctant to buy a physical copy because of the hassle of ripping or the added expense of a separate transaction. Looking forward to seeing the sorts of packages you guys put together!

*Dynamic tax lookup currently applies to U.S. sellers only – if you’re outside the U.S., you have a choice between charging a single tax rate, or none at all. We hope to improve upon this as we learn more about what’s desired/required (and continue working towards our advanced degree at the EU VAT eLearning center).