Recommended Albums

Our favorite part of Filter Magazine is the band interview section in the front. Not for the interviews themselves (though those are plenty good), but for the little section at the bottom, where the band tells you about three albums that they love. It’s a reliable source of new discoveries, and each band’s tweet-length blurbs about their favorite records are always interesting and fun to read:

We see artists doing more or less the same thing on Bandcamp all the time. Danny B recommended Laura Shigihara, for example, but the link was in his liner notes where it was pretty easy to miss. Amanda Palmer recommended Tristan Allen, but did it by adding his album to her own account — not really ideal either. Better would be if any artist could make recommendations in a way that wouldn’t distract from their own site, yet would be impossible for their fans to overlook.

The recently-launched download page provides the perfect space to do just that. Fans only see it when they’ve decided they love your music enough to buy/download it (which also means they now consider you a trusted source), and while fans wait for their download is just the right time to send them off to do a little exploring. The download page also happens to be hit 1.2 million times each month and climbing, so recommendations there have the potential to drive a ton of new exposure to all the artists who use Bandcamp. Here’s what it looks like:

Setup is done over on your profile page, and looks like this:

We’re pretty excited to see how you guys use this. Personally, we’d much rather get a recommendation from an artist we love than, say, view an algorithmically-generated list of suggestions for a 30 to 39 year-old male who enjoys strawberry Pop-Tarts, recently listened to Friday from start to finish, and did indeed purchase /\/\/\Y/\, but for his brother. Enjoy, hope to see you at the SxSW meetup!

UPDATE November 15th, 2011: Thanks for all the great feedback! Per the suggestions of Makell, Allen, DJ Rotten HD and Creidieki, recommendations now not only appear on the download page, but on their own dedicated page as well (linked to from the sidebar). And as Martin proposed, we now notify you whenever your music is recommended.

South by Southwest by Bandcamp

If you’re coming to South by Southwest this year please drop by Botticelli’s on Thursday, March 17th between 3 and 6pm (we’ll be hanging out in the back garden). Talk shop with other Bandcamp artists, drink beers, and tell the team about the features we should be building and bugs we should be fixing. Please RSVP to sxsw@bandcamp.com. Hope to see you soon!

Speaking of SxSW, we invite you to listen to the 452 artists on Bandcamp who will be performing at the festival. We had a blast putting this together, and made some key improvements to the API along the way.

Game Soundtracks as Record Industry Bellwether. Also, Furries.

Something wonderful, and a little surprising, has been happening on Bandcamp lately. Indie game soundtracks have not only proliferated on the site, they’ve also been selling. A lot. The music for games like Super Meat Boy, Plants vs. Zombies and Shatter is often right up there on the top sales chart next to albums from artists like Sufjan Stevens and Amanda Palmer. This wasn’t something we expected to see on Bandcamp, and at first mull it seemed a bit odd. If you’ve played through any of these games, you’ve already listened to the music for dozens — or in some cases hundreds — of hours (damn you P vs. Z!). Furthermore, gamers tend to be dismissed as the sort of punks who would just utilize their 1337 skillz to get all their music for free. So what’s going on here?







We suspect the answer is pretty simple. Gamers, like any artist’s fanbase, are a passionate community, and when given the opportunity to support the creators of the music they love (and when the relationship is clearly a direct one with the artist), they jump at the chance.* Many people are undoubtedly buying the music to get the music, but a large portion are likely buying it to tell composers like Danny B, Laura Shigihara and Jeramiah Ross, “Hey, we love what you’re doing and we want you to keep doing it.”

And this phenomenon isn’t restricted to the gaming community. Right next to the sorts of great and strong-selling artists that we always hoped/expected to see (like Omar Rodriguez Lopez and Dub FX) are big sales from niche communities we never anticipated: dance music for furries, a webcomic soundtrack, and a student-produced college musical regularly top the sales chart. Their sales might not put them in #Bieber territory, but it’s so exciting to see these tight-knit communities defying the abysmally low expectations heaped upon this generation of music consumers and instead supporting the creators they love. These artists are already an important part of Bandcamp’s business, and we think this bodes well for the record business as a whole.

*How passionate? We recently got this email: “The game Curse of the Crescent Isle just dropped on XBL, which we did the soundtrack for and I was crushed to see that we weren’t able to upload the .nsf files as bonus material! These are .midi like files that you could get onto your modded Super Nintendo to hear the tracks played on the actual chip, instead of software modified. Nerds and audiophiles around the world would be grateful if you could help us out with this!” Happy ending: we whitelisted .nsf immediately. Disaster averted.

Upcoming Shows

“Hey, when are you going to have a feature for listing my shows/concerts? I love Bandcamp but until I can post my gigs here, I still need to refer fans to [other site that shall remain nameless] (which I don’t like) or [another site that will also remain nameless] (which I hate). Love, Heidi”

The future, Heidi, is NOW:

But never fear, Bandcamp has not suddenly become Yet-Another-Place-to-Enter-Your-Shows! That’s already a big enough problem for bands, and we had no interest in making it any worse. Instead, we partnered with a site called Songkick that collects shows data from tons of ticket vendors and venues throughout the world, and then provides that data to us (as well as YouTube, HypeMachine, Yahoo, and many others). The result is that your upcoming shows just appear without you having to do a thing. And if Songkick happens to be missing a show (they might not catch every living room gig, for example), you can simply add it yourself, since their whole site is set up as a user-editable wiki.

That’s it, your upcoming shows with none of the typical hassle. Visit your Profile page to learn more.

P.S. Songkick’s announcement is here.

Free Sophie Madeleine Show and Bandcamp Meetup this Saturday in SF

Please join us this Saturday for another Bandcamp gathering, this time featuring Sophie Madeleine (performing for the first time ever in California). The details:

When: Saturday, December 11th, 6-8pm.

Where: The Elbo Room, 647 Valencia Street, San Francisco. Upstairs.

Who: 21 and over.

How much: free free free.

Hope to see you there!

Battle of the Bands, Hooray for APIs

For any and all well-rested from the holiday and ready to engage in combat: Shure is holding a Battle of the Bands where the grand prize is $10,000 worth of Shure gear and a performance at the RedGorilla Music Fest. It’s trivial (and free) to enter (all you need is your Bandcamp account), so hop to it right over here. We get nothing out of it, other than the tremendous pleasure of seeing the promise of our API fulfilled. A few basic calls exposed, and ta-da, a very snazzy site — complete with its own sharp audio players — just pops up:

Kudos to the folks at Shure who put this together, we love it. Note that the deadline to enter and vote is December 17th. Good luck!

Facebook Like

You’ve probably noticed by now that we recently added Facebook Like buttons to Bandcamp-powered pages, just beneath the album art. For some (particularly the many who requested it), the reasons for adding Like may be self-evident. However, if you’re wondering why in tarrrrnation the whippersnappers slapped that newfangled gewgaw on yer internet pages, or even if you just want to learn a little more about about what Like does and why it’s a great thing for artists (regardless of your own feelings about Facebook), then read on.

A few months back, Facebook bumped search out of its reigning spot as the #1 source of traffic to Bandcamp. Put another way, the number of fans coming to your pages by clicking links on Facebook surpassed the combined referral traffic of Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. This didn’t happen because search traffic has weakened, but rather because Facebook has simply grown faster (Twitter, by the way, is a distant third – for all that tweeting and retweeting, Facebook sends six times more fans your way). It wasn’t until Facebook hit this milestone that we decided to set aside our near-pathological aversion to placing anything even remotely branded on Bandcamp pages and instead embrace the logical next step, which is of course to pour gasoline on the mother.

That’s why we added Like. Before it showed up, Facebook traffic coming into Bandcamp could primarily be attributed to the tens of thousands of times each month that people clicked Share -> Facebook on Bandcamp pages, or made a purchase and then clicked Share to Facebook in the download dialog. But Like is even more powerful: it’s already being clicked 4 times as much as our other Facebook sharing options, and even more interestingly, without cannibalizing the existing usage of those options (which continues to grow).

So what does clicking Like actually do? The short version is that it exposes your music to a wider audience and helps build your fanbase. Specifically, when a fan clicks Like:

  1. A post appears in the fan’s Facebook News Feed informing all their friends that they like your album or track, along with a link back to it. If the fan includes a comment when they click Like, then a Bandcamp embedded player also appears in the fan’s post.
  2. Your music is added to the fan’s list of Likes on Facebook, again with a direct link.
  3. Your music becomes a part of Facebook’s search.

Note that you don’t have to personally use or care about Facebook at all to still benefit from Like. But if, conflabbit, the durn thing still offends, you can easily turn it off via your Profile page:

Full Tracklist Players, Facebook Love

By extremely popular demand, you can now go to any album page, click Share, and choose from a few different types of full tracklist embedded players. Like all our players, they’re clean, free of any Bandcamp branding, and streamlined for music listening and purchasing. Here, for example, is grande-with-tracklist (cover art is optional):

And here’s tall-with-tracklist:

We also recently introduced the ability to embed players into Facebook.* You can do so via the Share menu on Bandcamp, or just paste a track or album URL directly onto anyone’s wall or in your status on Facebook:


Shortly after Facebook embedding launched, one customer wrote on his blog: “I had such a good experience today purchasing some music that I thought I should share the user journey.” The full post, modestly titled “Saving an industry with better user experience,” nicely expresses the appreciation a fan feels when presented with a no-nonsense system for music discovery, listening and purchase. Glad to hear it Ben!

*You probably won’t be shocked to learn that 18 months ago, the number of fans sharing from Bandcamp to Facebook was dead-even with MySpace, whereas today, fan sharing to Facebook outnumbers MySpace 10 to 1.

Free Downloads & Power-Ups

Update September 15th, 2010: Please read this.

When we first started working on Bandcamp, we wondered whether it might be possible to always provide an unlimited number of “free” downloads* to artists for, well, free. Our hope was that free downloading might be highest amongst the artists who were also selling the most – for example, a band giving away a track or two in promotion of a paid album. That way, the revenue share on the artist’s sales would naturally cover the costs associated with the streaming, support and storage of their freebies.

What we’ve learned, however, is that most of the music being given away through the site is from a relative minority of bands who have decided not to sell anything at all. It’s obviously unfair to burden every Bandcamp artist with the costs of a few outliers giving away hundreds of thousands of free downloads, so we’re making some changes to button that up.

Starting today, new accounts come with 200 free downloads, and all existing accounts are granted 500. Your free download credits also refresh every month (meaning that if you have less than 200 downloads remaining, we’ll just bump you up to 200 again). Each time a fan downloads a track or album for free, it counts as 1 against your balance (an album, regardless of how many tracks it contains, still only counts as 1 download, and streaming is still unlimited). You can buy more downloads for a small fee from your Tools page. The pricing is the same as for download codes:

300 downloads for $9 USD (3¢ each)
1000 downloads for $20 USD (2¢ each)
5000 downloads for $75 USD (1.5¢ each)

But here’s the cool part: for every $500 USD you have in sales, we’ll give you another 1,000 free downloads (kind of like a power-up, but based on sales rather than say, eating a Super Mushroom**). The idea is that if you’re selling through Bandcamp, you’ll probably never run out of free promo downloads, and if you’re using the site to distribute your music for free, there’s still a cheap and easy way to keep doing that. (Actually, the cheapest way would be to head over to ZRapidShare, but if you’re reading this, you probably care about your fans too much for that.)

You can check your free download balance over on your Tools page, but you don’t need to check it obsessively. If you get low, we’ll notify you via email, as well as display a reminder up at the top of your account. And if your balance drops to zero, free tracks and albums won’t go away, they’ll just automatically switch to paid (at whatever price you last set, or the default if you never set the price). We won’t start decrementing your free download balance for another week (on September 16th), so anyone planning a big free promo has time to make sure their download needs are covered. Again, the above applies to free downloads only – there remain no download limits whatsoever on tracks or albums that you’re selling.

*By “free” downloads we just mean downloads of tracks or albums that you’ve set to free, free but email-required, or let-fan-name-price with no minimum and the fan enters zero. Download code redemptions don’t count, and neither does streaming.

**We’re extending this power-up idea to other parts of the site as well, with sales raising your upload limit and granting you more download codes, for starters. We’ve got plenty more power-ups in store too, all of them useful, fun, and in the spirit of helping to kick-start your success.