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Bandcamp and e-commerce for superfans

First shared by @brodconley in #general

The music community is still reverberating from last week’s Bandcamp x Epic News. Many of us wonder what our options are for financially supporting musicians outside of the streaming ecosystem, now that one of the major independent players has new corporate oversight.

@brodconley shared an impassioned thread from indie rock veterans Deerhoof, which voiced many of our frustrations and concerns around the Bandcamp acquisition — especially around the idea that fans only care about “pain at the pump” when it comes to how they consume music, rather than any ethical considerations. (this may be true of many fans, but certainly not all — and there’s a high possibility that the sort of fans that do care may be fans of bands like Deerhoof).

While many pitch Bandcamp as an alternative to Spotify and other major streaming services, it’s important to remember that Bandcamp is as much a merch business as it is a music business. @cheriehu recalls hearing at a 2018 conference that ~50% of Bandcamp’s revenue is from merch, while a recent Components piece names Bandcamp as “one of the largest sellers of physical music — vinyl, CDs, cassette tapes — anywhere in the world.” We’ve also written previously about how the rise in demand for vinyl is driven more by demand for collectibles than it is by the desire to discover or consume more music.

Merch is also an area where many streaming services notably come up short. Amazon Music have just started offering in-app merch, while Spotify’s Merch Bar integration is notoriously buggy. With Bandcamp’s future uncertain, there could be a gap in the market for an artist-friendly e-commerce provider. Perhaps one that bolsters artist-fan relationships by allowing artists to sell a more comprehensive, customizable range of goods and experiences, tailored to the whims and preferences of their particular fanbase:

“Just riffing again: I think it could be pretty cool if there was a version of Spotify where each artist’s page was basically like a Shopify store; and worked just like Shopify in that devs could build plugins/tools for artists to add on to their artist page in the same way that shopify stores can add tools/plugins. i feel like that will just open up so much more of a rich ux for all parties involved.”
– @CRITIQ

The customization element is an important one. As @deklin.eth notes, 60% of Bandcamp customers chose to pay extra at checkout. This generosity is likely partly due to warm feelings towards Bandcamp itself and partially to the knowledge that a significant cut of profits are going towards the artist, rather than to a faceless platform (interestingly, Spotify’s tip jar feature hasn’t experienced the same success).

Either way, it fuels the thesis that fans are willing to pay more for an experience that feels more like they’ve “unlocked a richer fan-artist experience” (as @CRITIQ puts it), acting as a direct expression of their fandom rather than a sterile commercial transaction.

This merch-centered framework isn’t always a perfect proposition — as @nobide and @CRITIQ noted, few independent artists will have been exposed to the kind of growth strategies necessary to pull off a complicated e-commerce enterprise. And as @abhijitnath notes, strengthening e-commerce offerings is more of a band-aid than a solution, adding a layer of upselling on top of a broken streaming system.

Interestingly, one of the net positives that the Bandcamp x Epic acquisition might have going for it is the possibility of bringing more multimodal, diversified business models and commercial opportunities to a wider range of indie artists. Digital merch and ecommerce are already par for the course in today’s biggest games (including Epic-owned Fortnite), and have been a major business engine behind lucrative in-game music events for the likes of Travis Scott and Marshmello. But it remains to be seen how, if at all, Epic will expand these game-centric ecommerce opportunities to a wider range of artists beyond the top 1%, at the same level that Bandcamp has enabled on its platform as a whole.