Bandcamp Updates

…then uh, we still couldn’t buy a kleina and a cup of coffee. Global financial crisis hilarity aside, you can now sell on Bandcamp in Pounds Sterling, Canadian Dollars, Euros, Australian Dollars, Israeli New Sheqels, or any of 13 other currencies. You set this up from your Profile page, like so:

To make migrating to a new currency as easy as possible, when you make a selection from the dropdown we show you all the unique prices you’re using across your site, and suggest an appropriate price in the new currency (since a pure conversion of say, $5 USD would lead to the somewhat user-unfriendly price of €3.778 EUR). You can then tweak the new price to whatever you like, click Save, and all your tracks and albums are bulk repriced. Viva las computadoras!

Fans see the new currency in all the places you’d expect, such as the Name Your Price dialog:

And while we were in a currency state of mind, we also added a handy conversion chart to all the places where prices appear. That way, when 小海 gets super into נדב אזולאי and decides to express his adoration monetarily, he can do so confident in the knowledge that he’ll be forking over no more than was his intent.

We’re declaring ourselves 1.0 today! This is the third of three posts regarding the release. The other two are here and here.

UPDATE Dec 12, 2009: Moo has decided to shut down their API, so the cards mentioned in the video below are unfortunately no longer available. You can, however, print up codes yourself by selecting the Print option on your Bandcamp Tools page. You’ll get a nicely formatted document (with crop marks and all) that you can print and cut up to make your own download cards, cheaply and easily. Alternatively, you can click the export link, and print the codes however you like.

A few weeks ago, we sent out an email promising to completely disrupt your world order with some of the new features we were working on here at Bandcamp HQ. Today we’re delighted to make good on that threat with the thrilling conclusion of our 1.0 announcements, download codes. And not just any download codes, mind you, but the sort you can email to your fans OR zap over to Moo for print-on-demand, great looking, and dirt cheap physical download cards.

> VERBOSE

Since day one of our launch, we’ve fielded dozens of requests like this one:

“I think a great feature would be to generate serial numbers to put on vouchers for free downloads. I want to provide free downloads to people who buy t-shirts. This would be mage cool.”

Yessir, it would. Personally, I love the trend of including digital download codes with merchandise, especially when it’s the vinyl, but hate the fact that when I redeem them I’m taken to some lame page hosted by the manufacturer, rather than the artist’s own web site. It should clearly be handled in the same place where your music lives, and if that happens to be Bandcamp, it now is. Here’s how:

Log in to your account and click the new Tools link in the navigation bar at the top. You’ll end up on a page that looks like this:

Select the track or album for which you want download codes, give the code group a name (for tracking purposes, e.g., “The Elbo Room 3/12/09” or “January newsletter”), enter a quantity, and click “generate codes.” You can then export those codes for sending out via email (Constant Contact integration details are here), or handing to your local print shop. But mage coolest of all, we think, is the ability to print straight to Moo MiniCards, with your album art on the front, and a unique, one-time-use code on the back. Cards are $20 per pack of 100. Just choose “print cards” and shortly thereafter this sweetness will arrive in your mailbox:

Your fans then go to your site, enter the code like so:

and are then whisked off to your track or album’s official page where their download starts (codes are single-use, and are considered redeemed once we detect that the download completed successfully). So easy that we repeated it in the gratuitous screencast up at the top of the post.

UPDATE 3/5/09: A few people have been wondering whether codes work with hidden tracks or albums. They do indeed, and they also work with tracks or albums for which download is otherwise disabled.

UPDATE Dec 12, 2009: Moo has decided to shut down their API, so printing is now DIY. If you click the “print” link next to the code group, you’ll get a nicely formatted document (with crop marks and all) that you can print and cut up to make your own download cards, cheaply and easily.

We’re declaring ourselves 1.0 today! This is the second of three posts regarding the release. The others are here and here.

One of Bandcamp’s core services is providing you and your fans with the tools to share your music as far and wide as possible, and in a way that drives traffic back to you. Thus far, those tools have been darn successful: each month, we’re seeing a slew of music being tweeted, emailed, IM’d, and posted to blogs and social networks, and a corresponding boatload of clicks going back to Bandcamp-powered sites from those shared links and widgets. Superb, but we know we could foster even more sharing by offering more embedded player formats, and some basic customization options. We know this because you guys (both artists and fans) have been asking for it. A lot. So, it being incredibly gratifying to build the things you request, that’s what we did.

The new sharing dialog gives you four sizes of embedded player to choose from (pseudoscientifically chosen from a broad survey of the sort of sites where they’re likely to be placed), and lets you customize the background and font colors:

We first give you the Venti, perfect for places where width is no object:

Then there’s the slightly more compact Grande:

The Tall, born to sit majestically atop an American Apparel ad for Unisex Tri-Blend Short Sleeve Deep V-Necks:

And finally, the Short (a.k.a. “Spartacus”):

Our aspiration here at Bandcamp has always been to power the site that you consider yours. It’s a fine objective, and limiting our branding to the small logo you see in your site’s footer was a swell first step, but as long as “bandcamp.mu” was all up in your URL, the vision did not quite match up with reality. Well hoo-ray, because as of this moment, you can point a domain of your own to your Bandcamp site, removing the “bandcamp.mu” from your URL and multiplying your site’s already-impressive veneer of respectability. For example, if your current Bandcamp site is blüchunks.bandcamp.mu, you can now change that to music.blüchunks.com, or even just blüchunks.com. Full instructions are right here, but the change on Bandcamp is easy and is made from the Edit Profile page:

So please, banish us to the wings! We can imagine no higher compliment.

From the Bandcamp mailbag:

Yo bandcamp dude and dudettes,
I freaking love the site from what I’ve seen so far. But…please find some cool way to support creative commons. I’d like to be able to offer my free mp3 downloads in a way that my audience knows they’re OK to share with their friends. From poking around in the options I couldn’t see anyway to do this. Maybe it could be as simple as a a tick box for the band to check when uploading a file. Dunno man, you will figure this all out I’m sure, you are smart. Just support Creative Commons please 🙂 Keep up the good work. Hugs and Kisses, JD

Hugs and kisses backatchu JD, and everyone else who requested Creative Commons support, then patiently worked around its absence by putting CC links in their tracks’ credits or about fields, slapping CC marks in their header graphics, and other reasonable zaniness. Situation rectified: starting today, you can select a CC license right from the Edit Track page.

So what’s Creative Commons you may ask? You’re no doubt already familiar with the all-rights-reserved, ask-permission-or-face-my-wrath, copyright ©. But what if you want to allow certain uses of your work, like remixing, sharing, and so on? Enter Creative Commons, a non-profit organization that has created a set of free, standardized copyright licenses which allow you to communicate which rights you reserve, and which you waive for the benefit of other creators. It’s basically an easy way to go from “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.” This moderately amusing video provides more detail:

In Bandcamp, you choose a license on the Edit Track page. It looka like dis:

Licenses proceed from most restrictive (“all rights reserved,” the default) down to most permissive (“attribution”). The license names may seem a bit esoteric at first, but easy-to-grasp descriptions of each can be viewed by clicking the “info” link. Once you choose a license, it’s added to the footer of your track (or album, if all the tracks it contains have the same license), like so:

Creative Commons’ mission is “to increase the amount of creativity… in ‘the commons’ — the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing.” A worthy goal, we think, so if © strikes you as too restrictive, we hope you’ll take a gander at the various licenses and find something that better captures the freedoms you want your work to carry.