Bandcamp Updates

Bundle Up, Winter’s A Comin!

You can now offer fans your entire digital discography for a special price, and fans can purchase or gift it in a single transaction. Check out a few examples here, here, and here.

The full discography purchase option is not enabled by default. To turn it on, first log in to your Bandcamp account. If you’re eligible to enable full discography purchase, you’ll see a notification linking to the section of your Profile where you set it up:

You can choose to offer your full digital discography for no discount, or from 5 to 90% off. Once you enable full discography purchase and save your Profile, we notify all of your followers automatically.

We quietly launched full discography purchase last week, and based on the percentage of eligible artists who have enabled it, and their earnings so far, we know that if every eligible artist turns it on, we’ll see about $2.3 million in bundles sell over the next few weeks. So get on it!

A few caveats:
Artists must have at least three purchasable albums in order to offer a full discography bundle (two albums is just two albums — three on the other hand… that’s an oeuvre!).

Labels (meaning those with label, not artist, accounts) can offer full discography bundles for any of their artists, provided they meet the three album minimum, and payment for all their releases is directed to the same account.

Subscriber-Exclusive Video

If you have an artist subscription set up, you can now post video to just your paying subscribers! You upload video from desktop, like so:

post a video

And your subscribers can then view your video from their music feed on the web, or in the free Bandcamp app for Android and iOS:

subscriber feed with video

For those of you who had already jury-rigged subscriber-only video by posting links to open-but-not-publicized YouTube and Dropbox URLs, we admire your gumption but are relieved to put that dark chapter behind the both of us!

Artist Subscriptions

You can now create your own subscription service on Bandcamp! Watch the screencast below to learn more, check out subscriptions by some of the artists who helped us test, like Rabbit Rabbit, The Disney Dish, and Jim Guthrie, and visit bandcamp.com/subscriptions to get set up!

App update: browse by genre, location, and format

You can now browse Bandcamp’s catalog of 1.8 million albums and 14 million tracks by any genre imaginable, and filter by format and artist location, right from the app. Portland chillwave on cassette? Pfft, you know it! Surf from Madrid on vinyl?! We’re as surprised as you!

The lets you filter by artist location…

…and the filters results by format.

In the likely event that you are now hyperventilating, please grab a paper bag and have a seat, because you can also follow any such browsing criteria, letting you channel all new beat tapes from Montreal (for example) straight into your music feed:

Tap “follow” at the top of Discover results…

…and whenever there are new suggestions matching your search, they’ll appear in your feed.

To demonstrate the stupefying power of these new crate digging capabilities, we dove into the latest hip hop, electronic, soul and indie coming out of Oakland, California, and compiled the result into our first ever Bandcamp City Guide. Pressed onto 12″ vinyl with a gorgeous gatefold jacket illustrated by Oliver Barrett, the comp features 11 previously unreleased/exclusive tracks from bands we love emanating from the other City by the Bay, plus tips from the artists themselves about their favorite dive bars, record stores, venues, and restaurants. Pick up your copy here, and listen to the whole thing below:

Dolla Dolla Bill, Y’All

Fans have now given artists $100 million USD through Bandcamp.

Fans give artists $3.5 million every month on the site, and buy more than 16,000 records a day, which works out to about one every five seconds, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year (there goes one now). In terms of units sold, Bandcamp’s share of the record industry is roughly the same as BMW’s share of the auto market back when Steve Jobs said this. Furthermore, sales on Bandcamp are up 30% in the last 12 months, at a time when the rest of the industry is down 11%. We see this growth as proof that if you give fans easy ways to directly support the artists they love, they’ll take you up on it every time. So a big, big thanks to everyone supporting artists on Bandcamp, and to all the artists and labels posting great music too. We wouldn’t be here without you.

P.S. We worked out of the public library for the first four years of Bandcamp’s existence. In May 2009, fans gave artists $12,823.12. It was the first time we’d crossed the $10K-in-a-month mark. I vividly recall sitting across from Kevin and Shawn,* being quietly stoked.

*Not pictured: me behind camera, Joe and Neal on irc.

EU digital VAT changes and Bandcamp

If you’ve seen the recent news of changes to EU tax law, you may be wondering how this affects you as an artist or label selling on Bandcamp. The good news is that for digital sales, there is no need for you to register for VAT, submit quarterly reports, and so on. We will take care of all of that for you.

If you happened to see our earlier help item about this, we planned to roll out a temporary solution where artists submitted the tax themselves. We’ve decided to accelerate the changes to our system such that the interim step is unnecessary.

Bandcamp for Labels

Bandcamp for labels has arrived! Read all about it right here, and check out some of the great independent labels already using it, like Seattle-based powerhouse Sub Pop (Sleater-Kinney, The Shins, Shabazz Palaces, Fleet Foxes, Iron and Wine), UK electronic trailblazers Ninja Tune (Bonobo, Cinematic Orchestra), the always soulful sounds of Daptone (Sharon Jones, Antibalas, The Budos Band) and Truth and Soul (Lee Fields, Lady), Montreal-based Grosse Boîte (Cœur de pirate), indie SF punk legends Fat Wreck Chords (NOFX, Lagwagon), metal-loving Relapse (Red Fang), ARIA-winning Future Classic (Chet Faker, Chrome Sparks, Seekae, flume), plus Innovative Leisure (BADBADNOTGOOD, Hanni El Khatib, Nick Waterhouse), Software (Oneohtrix Point Never), RVNG (Holly Herndon, Julia Holter), and Styles Upon Styles (Gabriel Garzón-Montano)!

New in Bandcamp Pro: Video!

If you’re a Bandcamp Pro subscriber, you can now present unlimited HD videos side-by-side with your music, with nary a lick of integrity-destroying advertising in sight. You can feature a video at the top of your album page, like so:

Or just display your videos inline, like this:

Videos are also organized in a new video tab, and look great on mobile (where they’re automatically optimized for lower-bandwidth delivery):

You add video from the album or track editor, here:

where to find video upload

And there’s even a new embedded player that lets you and your fans share your videos with cover art and direct links to purchase:

Video Embeds

We will now make sure it works really, really well by embedding several videos that you should watch immediately:

Quantic

Red Fang

Kandle

Shabazz Palaces

Alphabets Heaven & Deft

American Football

Iron Reagan

Some things you may be wondering:

Why can’t I just embed a YouTube video? That would be so much easier, and then video could be free instead of Pro-only! True, but then you risk having commercials for Olive Garden at the top of your site. Bandcamp is a service by and for people who care deeply about music, and part of that is not wanting to see every last piece of art in the world co-opted as “content” against which to sell ads for stuff you don’t need. We also didn’t find this to be all that reassuring.

Vimeo Vimeo Vimeo! Better, but we also don’t want to rely on/require an account at a third party service.

That’s all fine and good but I don’t want to dilute my YouTube view counts because there are human beings who actually decide what to make popular by looking to see what is already popular. By all means, if you’re view-count-sensitive, continue to direct fans to your YouTube videos! You might consider adding your videos to Bandcamp as well, because they’re a great way to round out your identity and boost sales from the fans already checking you out here (me, I went from Red Fang ambivalence to money-throwing-fan as soon as I saw the above video for Wires).

Bandcamp App Update, Now with Search, Music Discovery K-Hole

You can now dig through Bandcamp’s catalog of 1.4 million albums and 10.7 million tracks, right from the app. Search for artists and fans, too:

You can also now tap on any fan image in the new “supported by” section below the music in your collection, and then listen to that fan’s full collection (this is an awesome way to discover new music):

Tap on fans to listen to their collection

For items in your collection, you can pick your favorite track, and tell the artist and your followers why you love that record:

Add your favorite track and comment

And finally, if you still haven’t set an image for yourself, you can now do that from the app too (it’s in Settings):

Set your fan bio image for maximum fun

Do I need a fan account for all this? Yes, details here.

I already have a Bandcamp artist account, can I sign up for a fan account too? Yes. If you’d like your artist and fan account to be one and the same (e.g., you’re a solo artist and don’t want to maintain separate logins), make sure you’re logged in to your artist account, and then sign up here.

I’m an artist, is there anything I should do to improve my appearance in search? Yes, please visit Bandcamp from a desktop machine, go to your profile, and make sure you’ve set your bio image. We’ll show it in search results, your artist page, and the about section of your albums.

Mucho bueno el nuevo upgrade de la app de Bandcamp 👌
— The Real ƤℯℜℛⓄ ℬⅈℭℎℹ (@elchinix) June 24, 2014

Your New, Improved Discography

“The album array on the home page is very cumbersome. When I add a new release, if I want it to appear on the top left, I have to manually shift all 15 of my other albums over. Huge hassle.” –Mark D.

Agreed. And fixed:

Ladi6 discography

The new discography page automatically displays your releases from newest to oldest, and also lets you easily reorder them using drag and drop. The sidebar (which used to only show up on album and track pages) is also shown, so fans will always see your image, bio, links, shows, and so on.

By default, a fan visiting you.bandcamp.com will see your full discography. To instead take fans right to your latest release, go to your profile, and under Home Page, choose “When a fan visits my site: go to my latest release” (bonus: you also now have the option to go directly to your merch grid).

What happened to the index page? The discography replaces it.

The index page let me showcase just a few of my releases, and leave out everything else. Can I still do that? No. Most people used the index page as a full discography and were frustrated that it didn’t simply auto-fill, and this change is about fixing that problem. We’re considering adding a separate landing page option where you could feature a specific release, an image, a video, or a merch item, but no ETA just yet.

Hmm, I’m not seeing any of this, what gives? If you’re a label, you likely use the index page to link to individual Bandcamp artist sites. That is how-you-should-be-doing-it, so we haven’t touched your index page at all. However, we know you want the improvements mentioned here too, so stay tuned, a label solution is on the way.