Every band should use Bandcamp!

December 10, 2009 | by Joseph Rose | Featured Articles

There are countless tools available to bands nowadays, especially when it comes to delivering your music on the internet. The focus of this post will be Bandcamp.com, which is by far the most impressive service I have ever seen for musicians.

The short version of what Bandcamp does is simple; they host your music files and allow fans to play it and download it in a variety of ways. Big deal, right? There’s a million ways to do all that. Bandcamp has gone far beyond what bands can expect from any other services. I’ll try to break it down is a simple way:

• Your band uploads full quality masters (aif. or wav.) and artwork.
• Set your price. Any price works, including $0 and even “pay what you want” options.
• When a fan downloads a song, they have just about every format option available to them. Several flavors of MP3, FLAC, Apple Lossless, and more. It’s all seamless, Bandcamp does all the file converting for you behind the scenes.

In addition to all that, your songs are available to listen to in their entirety right there on your site, lyrics and liner notes are all included, and you can even choose to add bonus content to your album. This can be PDF artwork, videos, or pretty much anything you want. They also give you embeddable widgets to post all over the place.

Maybe they can explain it better than I can. Here’s an overview video straight from the Bandcamp site.

THIS SERVICE IS FREE! There is absolutely no good excuse for any band to not utilize this. The pages are customizable to a degree, but they all maintain a basic, well designed layout that benefits both the band and the fans.

What about physical CD’s, or vinyl? Yeah, Bandcamp can help you there too. Check this out:

Big Terrible are using the service as are tons of others.
http://bigterrible.bandcamp.com/

Seriously, all bands need to take advantage of this. GO!
www.bandcamp.com

About Joseph Rose

Joseph is a father, a music production teacher, and a front man. He consumes as much music as he does pizza. And that's a lot.

kevin856

Is this an ad?
Joseph_Rose

Nope.
cnh1572

Tough to make a choice with these types of sites. There seem to be scores of them--which one to choose? Bandmix, Reverbnation, Fanbridge, Numubu...and now this one??
Joseph_Rose

I don't think this one is really the same as those. But as far as a place to host and sell your music, this is the best.