As many of you know, bandcamp has decided to change the way it runs its “free” streaming/download service. Let’s face it – the old model could not support the success bandcamp was getting as far as bandwidth was concerned. A lot of people applauded their refusal to put ads on bandcamp pages, but they simply did not make enough money through revenue sharing (they take a cut of all sales).
So instead of putting a single ad on each bandcamp page, the company has decided to charge their users. You read that correctly – instead of earning revenue like almost every other site out there, bandcamp decided that the best course of action was to charge musicians for every “free” download. They charge $0.03 per download, and while that does not seem like a lot, it adds up when you have thousands of downloads.
With their current model, they have decided to give each artist 200 free downloads (a week or month, I’m not sure which), and when those are gone, the artist(s) must pay for a block of free download credits. A little math makes it clear that this is not acceptable for a lot of users. Since we currently do not bring in money (I am definitely – and decidedly – in the hole here), there is no way we can afford to pay roughly $75.00 a month to provide free downloads via bandcamp.
Luckily, we always provide multiple download sources. Archive.org remains free, and while the download speeds might not be optimal, you will get the music you want. The biggest problem with bandcamp at the moment is that they do not simply shut off downloads when you run out of your 200 free credits for the time allotted. Instead, they set everything to purchase with a default of $5 an album and $1 per track. Even worse, they do not automatically set everything back once your free download credits have reset. This means that every time those reset, I have to manually edit 140-some release. This just can’t happen.
Still, bandcamp is the best embeddable streaming service around right now. So what do we do? Well, we are not going to give bandcamp our money until they find a more reasonable business model. As of now, all releases are set to allow streaming, but no downloading. We have had people pay for things that were supposed to be free, and since we do not have contracts with most of our artists, this presents a problem. We never want artists to think we are taking advantage of them, and several artists have been confused to see their music suddenly being sold.
Remember that you can always stream or download flac, mp3 and ogg files on archive.org (links are at the bottom of each release page), and you can still stream from bandcamp. In fact, we encourage you to continue listening there, and download from archive.org if you like it.
We never want you to pay for something we intended to be free. There will be plenty of opportunities to purchase music – CDs, vinyl, tapes, etc – in the near future. (As a side note, we are aware of several sites of dubious origin selling our releases for pennies a track – we do not endorse these.)
There is still hope for bandcamp, though. We will continue to use the services we agree with – streaming music and download codes for hidden releases, etc. Here’s hoping they come up with something that would cost us a little less than $900 a year.
~John & co.
P.S. Please let us know if you know any services you’d like to see us support, and let us know how you feel about this situation.
