I started a Bandcamp Subscription

Happy New Year, everybody! After 20 years of music, I decided to expand my reach by placing my discography onto different platforms. Joining my Bandcamp subscription supports a sustainable ecosystem for indie music, and also helps me to pay annual expenses for distribution. I will offer most of my singles and remixes as high quality downloads and for streaming.

The problem of music streaming

When talking about music streaming, most people rely on Spotify, Apple Music or Amazon Music. Of course, mainstream platforms offer a huge amount of songs and artists, but their revenue is minuscule. In average, 1000 streams of a song pay 2-3 USD – and most indie artists don’t even reach 1000 streams on one song. They pay for distributors and playlist promoters, though it’s pointless to compete against a huge amount of fake artists and AI generated music. In the end, artists do a lot of work and get nothing.

As streaming platforms are the new normal, I’m working hard on getting my music there. I don’t do music for the money, but I want to have a reach. Besides having serious problems of finding a distributor that can handle my extreme amount of collabs and songs, we encounter several technical difficulties. We’re running tests since May 2024 – Now it’s January 2025, and we don’t have a result yet. If we succeed, I’ll end up with annual expenses just to be on streaming platforms. If we don’t – there’s still no place to download our singles.

Why regular Bandcamp doesn’t work

There is a much better way to support indie artists most people don’t know about: Bandcamp. Besides of offering high quality downloads and sharing 70-85% of their revenue with artists, streams are reported to music collection societies and chart reporting systems. That said, Bandcamp is not only an online shop, but also a different ecosystem that pays a fairer revenue for musicians.

I always wanted to have my discography on Bandcamp, but I did not find a good way to handle it. My discography is huge. The more songs you upload onto Bandcamp, the slower the site, and there’s no way to filter or sort. After some long thoughts, I came to the idea of offering my albums on the regular Bandcamp site and the singles and remixes as annual subscription. This would keep my Bandcamp site fast and neat, while helping me to pay for the annual expenses to get my music on streaming platforms.

What does a Bandcamp subscription mean?

Similar to Patreon or Steady, you pay 25 EUR (equals 25 USD) per year to access all singles and EPs under the subscription tier. These will be included into your stash, so you can download them or stream them everywhere and anytime you want. I decided for an annual model, because Bandcamp and the payment provider already take a cut of 15-20%. Setting everything up is quite a tough amount of work including remastering, designing covers and correcting metadata. Please understand that I can’t do that in a few days – it will take months.

My Bandcamp subscription offers:

• Both remix albums as a “Thank you!”
• High quality downloads of new songs as soon as published (starting 2025)
• High quality downloads of older singles, including remixes and alternate versions
• Unpublished material and b-sides
• Irregular discounts for purchasing the albums.

If you support me with a Bandcamp subscription you get my music for a lower price than on any other platform, make sure that the money reaches the artists directly AND support me to get my stuff on streaming platforms. Already 4 subscriptions help me to break even.

Important: The Bandcamp Subscription is a service from Bandcamp. Their terms and conditions apply.

Of course, most of my music is still accessible without subscription. You can download my albums on Bandcamp without being a subscriber. My YouTube channel continues the same way, and my SoundCloud offers the last 10–20 songs (and the published material, if possible). However, Bandcamp is the only place where you can download unpublished material and remixes.