Bandcamp is an American online music company founded in 2008 by Oddpost co-founder Ethan Diamond and programmers Shawn Grunberger, Joe Holt and Neal Tucker; the company is headquartered in Oakland, California.
Business model
Artists and labels upload music to Bandcamp and control how they sell it, setting their own prices, offering fans the option to pay more and selling merchandise. Fans are able to download their purchases or stream their music on the Bandcamp app/site only once or unlimited times by preserving the purchase voucher. They can also send purchased music as a gift, view lyrics, and save individual songs or albums to a wish list. Uploading music to Bandcamp is free, and the company takes a 15% cut of sales made from their website, which drops to 10% after an artist's sales surpass $5000. Downloads are offered both in lossy formats as MP3, AAC and Ogg Vorbis and in lossless formats as FLAC, ALAC, WAV and AIFF. In addition to digital downloads artists may offer the purchase of their music on physical media such as CD or vinyl. Bandcamp's website offers users access to an artist's page featuring information on the artist, social media links, merchandising links and listing their available music. Artists can change the look of their page and customize its features. In 2010 the site enabled embedded/shared links in other social media sites.
Charity
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Bandcamp announced that they would be waiving their share of revenue and donating all sales to artists for 24 hours on March 20. They repeated the initiative in April, May, June and July. In response to the protests that took place following the death of George Floyd as well as multiple other African Americans who have lost their lives to police violence, Bandcamp announced for 24 hours on June 19, they will donate 100% of profits to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Notable artists and labels
Bandcamp gained much attention in July 2010 when Amanda Palmer, Low Places and Bedhed gave up their record labels and started selling albums on Bandcamp, using Twitter for promotion. Several indie gamedevelopers published their game soundtracks on Bandcamp, including the creators of Aquaria, Bastion, Sanctum, Machinarium, Terraria, Plants vs. Zombies, Limbo, Super Meat Boy, To the Moon, Fez, and Minecraft. In December 2014, Bandcamp for Labels was launched. Popular independent labels such as Sub Pop, Fat Wreck Chords, Relapse Records and Epitaph Records launched their own Bandcamp pages. In November 2019, Peter Gabriel added his complete solo catalog to Bandcamp. On June 18, 2020, Björk published her discography on the platform.
''Bandcamp Daily''
In the summer of 2016, the company launched Bandcamp Daily, an online music publication which expanded its editorial content and offers articles about artists on the platform. The publication is based in New York. Its managing editor is Jes Skolnik, a writer for Pitchfork, BuzzFeed and The New York Times, as well as former author of punk zines. Among Bandcamp Daily columnists there have been writers of Wired, Vice, NPR Music, Pitchfork and Paste. On August 4, 2017, the staff of Bandcamp Daily donated all the sales proceeds from the day to the Transgender Law Center, a civil rights organization for transgender people. In February 2018, the audience of Bandcamp Daily had increased by 84% since the previous year.
