“But you should be able to set the price yourself because you know your audience better than we do, and if somebody wants to come along and pay more than you set as that minimum, then great.”īandcamp publishes the sale of each item through a live feed on its homepage. “Maybe your album’s 200 tracks and you spent ten years on it,” Ethan Diamond, one of Bandcamp’s founders, said in a recent interview. Rather than follow Apple’s lead and set a standardized price structure, Bandcamp looked instead to the example set by Radiohead the year before, when the choice to grant fans the ability to pay whatever they wanted to download In Rainbows turned the album into a global sensation. But in giving musicians the ability to upload songs and albums to their pages, Bandcamp’s engineers soon realized they had stumbled into an architecture for a grassroots online marketplace, one that represented an appealing alternative to the then-dominant iTunes Store. When it launched in 2008, Bandcamp’s founders envisioned the site as a “publishing platform for musicians” that would do for recording artists what WordPress and Blogspot had done for writers: offer them the means of maintaining a reliable, fully customizable web presence.

Finally, it argues that Bandcamp’s marketing and software development efforts, while good intentioned or at least neutral, leave enormous potential for growth untapped. It argues that this contrasts to Spotify¹, which routinely loses money due to that company’s ultimate long-term ambition of monopolization and the removal of the human musician entirely. This report argues that Bandcamp’s basic business model of potentiating people’s various impulses to pay for things and allowing those impulses to freely interact, modulate, and compound one another has turned the company into one of the most chimerical in Silicon Valley: a profitable startup run on mostly outmoded technology.

: A smaller analysis looking at income distribution on Bandcamp. : My reaction to the Epic acquisition of Bandcamp. This report was originally published on Components.

Bandcamp revenue