In praise of Bandcamp

I am a fan of Bandcamp - but not as much as Mark Dowdell who wrote this guest post over at Tight Mix.

It's a great summing up of why any musician would be wise to check out Bandcamp for selling their music - and he looks at it from the point of view of both the listener and the musican - the service that Bandcamp offers is great for the consumer just as much as the seller.

Would I use Bandcamp as my only 'direct to fan' sales channel? No, I wouldn't.

In fact, I might if I couldn't afford any other route as it's free at the point of use and charges a 15% share of any sales income.

Why wouldn't I use it as a sole sales presence if I had the financial choice? Well, it's not as flexible as building your own store and offering bundles and packages of tracks, merch, different formats - the model that Topspin is pioneering.

That said, it is a cracking way to sell digital tracks direct to fan and I would always have a Bandcamp site, even if I had my own store at my band site selling tracks as well.

We wrote about how music writers, bloggers and sync agents are trawling Bandcamp looking for gems (as they did with MySpace back in the day) and obviously you need to be there to take advantage of that possibility. Plus, there are music fans who now prefer to buy at Bandcamp - so let them.