Using Bandcamp to promote and sell your music

One of the newest and coolest dig­i­tal publishing/distribution plat­forms on the net is Band­camp. While MySpace offers more fea­tures, such as blogs, videos, tour dates etc, Band­camp focuses on a cleaner, less clut­tered look with NO ADS!  This means you won’t have to share your page with a mobile phone or sin­gles ad. With no ads, you would think it comes with a mem­ber­ship fee. Nope. It’s FREE!

Band­camp offers some dis­tinc­tive fea­tures that sep­a­rates its ser­vice from other sites, par­tic­u­larly MySpace.

Let’s dig deeper and look at 13 rea­sons why adding Band­camp is a must for your online pro­mo­tional efforts.

1. Easy to configure

Yeah, I know there are thou­sands of MySpace tem­plates, but why make it harder than it has to be? With Band­camp, you can cre­ate a cus­tom header, choose your back­ground color, image and eas­ily upload your music and album art­work. Con­fig­ur­ing MySpace looks like rocket sci­ence com­pared to this…it’s that easy.

Upload­ing album art and adding audio is a cinch

Upload your cus­tom header with one click

Fin­ished exam­ple of Band­camp mem­ber SHIPWR3K

2. More ways to share your music

You have the abil­ity to share your music with oth­ers on a vari­ety of plat­forms like Face­book, MySpace, Twit­ter,  Email/IM or through blogs with the option to select dif­fer­ent play­ers for your fans to embed your music.

Exam­ple of shar­ing your embed­ded music on MySpace

3. Detailed track­ing on plays

Per­haps one of the coolest fea­tures of Band­camp are the track­ing lists that you have access to. Let’s look at MySpace. The first song of an artists page is typ­i­cally going to have the most plays, espe­cially if it is set up to auto­mat­i­cally play when some­one vis­its the site.  This doesn’t give an accu­rate account for actual plays. With Band­camp, you will be able to see all your play activ­ity from par­tials, skips and com­plete plays, giv­ing you more of a feel for which songs are most pop­u­lar. In addi­tion, you can get detailed lists on vis­its, embeds and downloads.

Track­ing overview page

Detailed vis­its tracking

Embed­ded plays

4. Meta­data auto­mat­i­cally down­loads with music

I get annoyed when I down­load music from a bands web­site and there is no meta­data avail­able. Band­camp auto­mat­i­cally includes all meta­data for each track and inte­grates seam­lessly with ITunes etc.

Exam­ple of metadata

5. Auto­matic con­fig­u­ra­tion of mul­ti­ple audio formats

Band­camp offers mul­ti­ple audio for­mats for your fans, giv­ing them pref­er­ence as to what type of file they want to down­load. The best thing about this fea­ture, is that you don’t have to do any con­fig­ur­ing. You merely upload your FLAC, WAV or AIFF music files and they do the rest for you.

6. Abil­ity to set price options on your songs

You have com­plete flex­i­bil­ity on how you want to price your songs. You can offer less qual­ity files for free and charge for higher qual­ity for­mats, or have your fans choose the price. It’s up to you!

Options for pricing

7. Choose spe­cial visu­al­iza­tion settings

If you don’t want album art, you have the choice of var­i­ous visu­al­iza­tion set­tings. If you like that Pink Floyd type video art (check out the flow­ers set­ting) then you’ll love this! These also trans­fer over into your embed­ded tracks.

8. SEO optimized

Band­camp is SEO opti­mized, plac­ing your Band­camp page ahead of the pack.

9. Advance con­fig­u­ra­tion options

Many bands use their Band­camp sites as their main music page and pro­vide that link to their band web­sites. How­ever, you can con­fig­ure your Band­camp site to do the following:

a. Cus­tom Domain. You can con­fig­ure your cus­tom domain (www.yourband.com) to your Band­camp site if you wish.

b. Image Maps. You can cre­ate an image map in your cus­tom header which pro­vides links to your var­i­ous social net­work­ing sites such as YouTube, Face­book, Twit­ter and MySpace.  Some bands link their MySpace tour dates page to these. Here is an example:

10. Abil­ity to sell dig­i­tally and physically

Band­camp gives you the option to sell both dig­i­tal and phys­i­cal mer­chan­dise side by side. You can also can give away bonus stuff, such as PDF liner notes, biogra­phies or what­ever you want and include them in your zip file.

11. Cre­ate dis­count and down­load codes

Band­camp gives you the option to cre­ate pro­mo­tion codes to give your fans so they can get dis­counts on your music. This is great tool to entice poten­tial fans to pur­chase. You can also cre­ate down­load codes, for one-time down­loads. These codes work well in emails to your mail­ing lists.

12. Sell in most currencies

You have the capa­bil­ity to sell in most avail­able cur­ren­cies around the world.

13. Sound­scan reporting

Band­camp reports sales to Sound­scan which is Billboard’s barom­e­ter for chart positions.

Band­camp makes money when you do. When a fan makes a pur­chase, Band­camp charges a pro­cess­ing fee. In their FAQ it does men­tion that in the future, they will prob­a­bly take a small per­cent­age of sales, how­ever as of now, the site is 100% free. What are you wait­ing for?