Is Bandcamp’s new vinyl pressing service a ripoff?

In 2020, it was hard to find a bad word about Bandcamp.

Ever since touring income vanished at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the music industry has been reckoning with the failure of streaming economics to pay most artists’ bills. Spotify scrambled to set up a “tipping” system that allowed fans to donate to artists directly through PayPal or Cash App, but they and other major DSPs still faced backlash for how their pro-rata payment model arguably incentivized scale and favored the top 1% of musicians.

Meanwhile, Bandcamp doubled down on their reputation as an artist-friendly platform. In March 2020, the company introduced Bandcamp Friday, an initiative that saw the platform waive their usual revenue share (15% for digital music purchases, 10% for merch) on the first Friday of each month, passing on the full transaction value (minus payment processing fees) to sellers. These monthly events have been a vital income source for many artists and labels, bringing in a total of $48.3 million in sales in the last 12 months — or over 25% of Bandcamp’s entire revenue over that time period, according to Billboard.

Importantly, this isn’t just pure philanthropy on Bandcamp’s part; it’s also good business. As of September 2020, the additional traffic from Bandcamp Fridays translated into a 122% year-over-year sales increase for the platform — not to mention glowing mainstream press coverage, with the Los Angeles Times evendubbing them the “anti-Spotify.”

Overflowing with goodwill among artists, label owners and fans, Bandcamp kicked off 2021 by announcing an even more ambitious endeavor: Their very own in-house vinyl pressing service.

Borrowing from the model behind Japanese vinyl crowdfunding company Qrates, Bandcamp’s vinyl pressing service, which initially launched in beta in 2019, folds the financing, manufacturing and distribution of vinyl records all under one roof. The aim is to create a one-stop shop for artists who want to cash in on the ongoing vinyl boom and see their work pressed to wax, but don’t have the team, knowledge or interest to take on that process themselves.

Yet for a company that has built a reputation around transparency, Bandcamp has been surprisingly opaque around the actual pricing of this new service — and, based on conversations with several musicians and label owners who have years of experience in the vinyl industry, it probably isn’t the best or most artist-friendly deal that the company makes it out to be.

Vinyl is growing, but the industry still faces challenges

As I mentioned earlier, and have covered in the past, the current demand for vinyl records is at its highest point in generations. According to the IFPI, global vinyl sales grew by 23.5% year-over-year in 2020, compared with just 6.1% in 2019. In the U.S., MRC Data reported that vinyl sales outpaced CD sales for the first time since 1986, growing by 46.2% year-over-year to 27.5 million units sold.

Unsurprisingly, Bandcamp artists have also benefited from this industry-wide surge. In a blog post on Bandcamp Daily, the company’s CEO Ethan Diamond claimed that fans bought 2 million vinyl records through the site in 2020, roughly double that of the year prior.

But the current state of the vinyl sector as a whole is a lot more complicated than just a rosy tale of booming sales. Pandemic-related safety precautions — plus one-off disasters like the devastating fire at Apollo Masters — have led to extensive delays and price increases for vinyl manufacturing and shipping.

Prior to 2020, it typically took three to four months for a batch of vinyl records to be produced and ready to ship out to fans. In contrast, Kevin Duquette, co-owner of the Portland, OR-based indie label Topshelf Records, says that the vinyl manufacturing plant he’s been working with for years — Czech Republic-based GZ Media, whom Bandcamp and many other major companies also work with — has pushed back turnaround times to six months and counting. Shipping palettes of vinyl records via plane also became four to five times more expensive during the pandemic, so many labels have been forced to resort to sea freight, which ends up tacking on 30 days to the whole process.

“I remember a year ago being like, ‘We can’t have a preorder that’s longer than a month. It’s so annoying to fans,’” says Duquette. “And now I’m like, ‘Yeah, four months [for a] preorder is super normal.’”

Moreover, because it takes a given plant the same amount of time to set up a vinyl pressing (i.e. cutting the master lacquer disc and electroplating it for replication) whether it’s 20 or 50,000 copies, smaller orders are simply not worth their time — which can put smaller indie artists and boutique labels in jeopardy. “For smaller-run stuff, they’re like, ‘If it’s under 250 copies of something, I don’t even know what we can do for you,” says Duquette.

Bandcamp’s pitch: Simplicity, crowdfunding and profit(?)

Against the backdrop of this incredibly complicated and potentially unstable time in the history of vinyl, Bandcamp introduced their new vinyl pressing service with the intention to simplify vinyl pressing for the long tail of independent artists.

The 10,000 or so artists who currently have access to the service are able to order a limited pressing of vinyl records through Bandcamp (minimum 250 copies), and are granted full control over the packaging design (jacket, insert, center labels, etc.) and the color of the vinyl itself. Then, they’re given 30 days to use a built-in, Kickstarter-like system to crowdfund the costs by letting fans pre-order the record via multiple different pledge tiers.

Bandcamp automatically sets a minimum campaign goal and pledge tier (usually between $20 and $25) by calculating expected production costs, including four test presses and shipping from the plant to their fulfillment centers. The artist is able to increase the goal from there by using what Bandcamp calls an “expenses” line, which defaults to $500 for each order but can be taken down to $0 or increased to any higher figure.

The company frames this “expenses” line as a way to earn money for paying back costs like audio mastering or artwork design, but a more logical term for it would be the “profit” line. If the expenses are set to $0, then the only way the artist will make any profit from the campaign is if they crowdfund more than the goal, which essentially functions as the “cost” (or the break-even point) of the whole ordeal. In contrast, if, for example, the artist inputs $2,000 for expenses, then they’ll inherently earn $2,000 in profit if they meet the overall campaign goal. However, increasing the campaign goal also increases the minimum pledge level (which bottoms out at $12), therefore increasing the retail price for each unit of vinyl — i.e. the amount of money fans are paying when they pledge to buy a record from your campaign.

If and when the artist meets their crowdfunding goal within the month, Bandcamp works with a broker — as of 2019, it was the Bay Area company Pirates Press — to order the records from the actual manufacturer, GZ Media. For context, artists and labels often work with brokers like Pirates Press or A to Z Media, rather than directly with manufacturers, to facilitate vinyl orders. Brokers help streamline managerial and administrative tasks, like finding the best deals among several potential manufacturing partners or coordinating between plants and various air/sea freight companies — all the way up to when records need to be shipped to a given distributor to be sent out to fans, at which point the artist or label usually takes over.

Hence Bandcamp’s service is acting as yet another middleman in this broker ecosystem. But unlike brokers, Bandcamp also takes on the “last-mile” job of distribution and fulfillment — shipping all of the records to the fans who placed pre-orders, while also handling customer support issues such as billing or shipping changes and replacements for lost or damaged items. Fans pay shipping and handling fees upfront when they pledge.

Interestingly, Bandcamp doesn’t charge artists an upfront fee for this service; instead, Bandcamp takes its manufacturing costs out of the artist’s crowdfunding campaign revenue, and only if the campaign succeeds. After 4% payment processing fees and Bandcamp’s standard 15% platform fee, the remaining profit goes to the artist’s PayPal account within around ten business days of the campaign closing. As Bandcamp frames it on their official information page: “Your fans finance your pressing, you don’t.”

Eric Slick was intrigued by the service. The Philadelphia-based indie songwriter and drummer, who plays in Dr. Dog and appears on Taylor Swift’s latest re-recorded single, had put a ton of time and effort into his third solo album, Wiseacre, but couldn’t find a label who was willing to release it on vinyl. As an artist with a relatively established fanbase but no institutional support, he was the ideal target for Bandcamp’s vinyl ambitions.

In July 2020, back when the service was still in beta mode, Slick placed an order of 250 LPs for Wiseacre through Bandcamp, all on colored vinyl with an upgraded matte finish. He then set up a crowdfunding campaign on his Bandcamp page, with a goal of $4,390 and three pledge tiers ranging from $22 to $50. At first, he was a bit nervous about how it would play out, but he ended up meeting the campaign goal in 21 days — largely thanks to the higher-priced pledge tiers, which gave fans access to test presses and unreleased demo material on top of the official vinyl record and digital download.

Slick ended up crowdfunding $6,538 during the month-long campaign; around $4,000 of that went to covering Bandcamp’s manufacturing and shipping costs, resulting in around $2,500 in profit for the artist himself. He says that fans had their records in hand by mid-November, just a few months after the album’s digital release in August. All in all, he was incredibly happy with his experience: The elimination of upfront capital and shipping labor on his end, the smoothness of the whole process and the amount of money he took home at the end of the day.

“That’s more than I’ve ever seen from any vinyl record that I’ve ever self-produced … [and] the fastest I’ve ever recouped on anything, because I didn’t have to invest in anything,” says Slick, who’s been working professionally as a musician since the mid-2000s. “Most of the time, you press an album and you have 800 records sitting at home. And you go on tour and sell half of those records if you’re lucky. The really appealing thing about Bandcamp was, ‘OK, I’ve already sold 250 records right off the bat in the first month.’”

The catch? A 25% to 250% markup

That $4,000 that Slick had to fork over to Bandcamp, though — the equivalent of $16 per record — is much more expensive than the market standard. In fact, many of the other sources I spoke with had a less positive read on the service, specifically regarding the amount that Bandcamp is charging for the whole ordeal.

How does the service pricing actually break down? Bandcamp’s FAQ page is strangely opaque about it, but Grace Ambrose, owner of the label and publishing imprint Thrilling Living, was able to draft up a mock order while I watched via Zoom’s screen-share function.

According to what we saw, the most basic package that Bandcamp offers for vinyl pressing (inclusive of a 15% platform fee and 4% payment processing fee) starts at $2,857, which includes 250 black 12” LPs with a full color jacket, semi-gloss finish, white paper record sleeve, shrinkwrap encasing and no insert. “Premium” add-ons can increase Bandcamp’s starting fee significantly. Swapping black for colored vinyl would add $270 to the same order; increasing the vinyl weight from 140 grams to 180 grams (which usually improves the sound quality) would tack on another $163; including a colored insert for lyrics and/or credits would add $326; and upgrading the jacket design from standard to gatefold would jack up the price by $593.

Again, the artist would not be paying these fees upfront to Bandcamp; rather, the costs would be taken out of earnings from the artist’s crowdfunding campaign, and only if the campaign succeeds. But all in all, for a pressing of 250 LPs through Bandcamp with all of the above specs — which are relatively common, if not standard, for a new vinyl album in 2021 — an artist would need to crowdfund $4,209 (or $16.83 per record) within the required 30-day period to cover Bandcamp’s fees and break even.

This is more than double the per-unit cost that you could pay by ordering 250 records with comparable specs through a traditional broker or a pressing plant (about $6 apiece is standard, sources say). Many music-industry veterans agree that these fees are suspiciously more expensive than virtually all other options for vinyl manufacturing and distribution in the market today.

Ambrose was one of the first music-industry professionals to speak out about this price discrepancy: In a Twitter thread, she shared that it would cost her around $3,719 to press 250 7” LPs through Bandcamp with her typical specs. In comparison, according to Ambrose, the cost of manufacturing 300 LPs with full-color jackets and labels through Ohio-based vinyl pressing plant Gotta Groove would cost only around $2,500, inclusive of shipping and mastering costs — and lead to about 3.5x more profit for the artist. “More records and less up front [sic] costs … I think the numbers speak for themselves!” she wrote.

Jake Sulzer, who runs the emo-focused Counter Intuitive Records out of his apartment in Boston and has been releasing vinyl LPs for five years, tells me that he was initially concerned that Bandcamp’s vinyl service might eat into some of the main draws of what labels can offer artists, including distribution and plant coordination. But after learning about the prices Bandcamp was charging — particularly the base price of roughly $3,000 to manufacture just 250 LPs — he became way less worried. “I can press double that for the same price,” says Sulzer, citing the 500-record batches he orders through A to Z Media, whose broker fee is included in that $3,000 figure.

Duquette also confirms that the prices he pays for the beautiful vinyl packages he puts together for Topshelf’s artists cost significantly less than what Bandcamp is charging. For instance, he recently pressed 500 records and paid way more than usual for shipping due to pandemic upcharges (about $688), and the entire total came to $4,200, or around $8.40 per record. Once again, Bandcamp charges artists roughly that same price to manufacture only half the number of LPs.

Bandcamp claims that per-unit costs dip when volume discounts kick in for 500-, 1,000-, and 5,000-copy orders. But they don’t mention what those discounts are anywhere on their interface, and sources say the cost doesn’t decrease to the point where the service is legitimately competitive with ordering directly through a plant or a broker. Sulzer says he can order a 1,000-LP pressing for somewhere in the neighborhood of $4,500 to $5,000, which is slightly more than what Bandcamp charges for just 250 records with a few packaging upgrades.

One could argue that Bandcamp is clearly selling a service that goes beyond what typical brokers provide, namely acting as a middleman between artists and the pressing plant. In addition to the cost of pressing the vinyl and manufacturing/assembling its assorted packaging materials, the fees that Bandcamp charges also include a few test press copies for the artist, plus handling of the entire fulfillment and distribution process.

But even independent artists with no prior experience or industry relationships can already access similar all-in-one fulfillment services to what Bandcamp provides for cheaper prices — including but not limited to the near-identical service at Qrates.

Compared to Bandcamp’s 250-LP base point, Qrates’ minimum starts at 100 LPs and then increases in intervals of 100. I drafted up an order of 300 records for their version of the one-stop-shop service (crowdfunding, pressing, and shipping), adding all sorts of special upgrades like two-color splatter vinyl, a heavier weight, a glossy jacket finish, five test press copies and a printed download card (the latter two features are actually included in Bandcamp’s price for no additional charge).

With all of those fancy add-ons — plus a 15% platform fee (around $600 at minimum) and a $1,008 shipping fee to get the records from Qrates’ broker GZ Media, to their distribution center in Michigan — the total cost on my end came to $4,071, or about $13.57 per record, to break even.

Notably, this is also quite expensive compared to other options available in the market. But to underscore the difference here: Ordering a similar package through Bandcamp’s service costs around $200 more, for only 250 copies as opposed to 300 — the equivalent of a 25% markup on the unit cost compared to Qrates. (Interestingly, Qrates gives artists the option either to take it out of their campaign earnings or to pay production costs upfront, as pictured below.)

What if you decide to go with a more traditional crowdfunding platform like Kickstarter that doesn’t have manufacturing or shipping services built-in? You probably will still save money as well. For instance, the indie rock band Halfloves crowdfunded their 2014 debut album using Kickstarter (when the band was originally named The Olympics), using A to Z Media as their broker, and ended up paying just $1,147 including shipping for 250 LPs with basic specs (black vinyl, 140 gram, full color jackets, shrink wrapped packaging, and a download card). That’s a per-unit cost of $4.60; against that baseline, even adjusting for inflation, Bandcamp’s service is charging artists a 230% markup.

Halfloves frontman Jeff Roalson tells me that after having taken this DIY route and finding the process both affordable and manageable, he isn’t intrigued by what Bandcamp is offering for triple to quadruple the price he paid. “[As] someone who had never pressed vinyl before, I was actually surprised at how well it came together for Halfloves’ debut album when we decided to pursue it independently,” says Roalson. “Just by doing some basic research on different companies and rates, I was able to narrow down a short list and then begin conversations to get the ball rolling.”

Who is Bandcamp really targeting — and what will the platform become?

It seems that with its vinyl pressing service, Bandcamp is targeting a very specific kind of independent artist: One who has a big enough fanbase to sell at least 250 LPs in 30 days, but for whatever reason isn’t signed to a label and is completely inept at packing/shipping records, and/or unaware of the sea of vastly cheaper options out there.

As an artist, if you like Bandcamp’s interface and all you care about is getting records in the hands of some fans, then this kind of service might work for you. But if you’re a career musician trying to make income from your recordings — much of which will likely go to paying back audio professionals for studio/mixing/mastering time, anyways — then it seems like the Bandcamp route for vinyl will yield you the least amount of profit.

“[The service] might come across as, ‘Oh we’re trying to help the small artists,’” says Sulzer. “But in reality, they’re actually going to be profiting off of the mid-tier artists.”

Importantly, this doesn’t just impact artists’ bottom lines — it also hits the wallets of fans. With significantly higher fees, artists will make less profit on vinyl manufacturing through sites like Bandcamp and Qrates unless they crank up the retail price of the records. Additionally, Bandcamp charges fans a fixed shipping rate of $6.90 for each record, which inflates the typical cost of shipping a record in the US by $2.45, according to Ambrose. She says that it typically costs $1 for the cardboard mailer materials and $3.45 for domestic media mail shipping.

Hence through Bandcamp’s vinyl campaigns, fans are expected to pay more than the industry standard to ship a record, that itself will cost significantly more for the artist to produce compared to the industry standard. This seems peculiar for a service that seems to cater to indie artists who don’t necessarily have the lucrative fanbases of major stars.

In this vein, Ambrose believes that the way Bandcamp is executing its vinyl manufacturing service is antithetical to the artist-friendly persona that the company claims to uphold. In her mind, Bandcamp’s tone about the process — using phrases like “risk-free” and “hassle free” to market their product toward artists who aren’t familiar with the vinyl process and/or aren’t interested in learning — is also doing a disservice to the independent communities that thrive on their platform.

“They’re not making the process any clearer, and they’re not empowering people to be in control of that process themselves,” says Ambrose. “It’s actually not that hard, it’s not that complicated. So many drunk dumbasses have figured out how to put a record out.”

A more financially wise route might be for artists to launch a pre-order option on their own website, raise the funds and then order the records directly from a broker or manufacturer at a fraction of Bandcamp’s price. “I understand how the upfront cost of putting out a record might be a financial burden for some people,” says Ambrose. “But … if money is a concern for you, and you need to make your money back because you don’t have a safety net or a cushion, then of course you want to get the most possible return on the investment. [And] if you do the Bandcamp model, you are going to make way fucking less money, all things considered.”

For instance, if an artist wanted to net $2,000 on an order of Bandcamp’s baseline vinyl pressing package, the retail price (i.e. the “minimum pledge tier”) for each record would have to be $23. If that artist instead paid what Halfloves did for the same number of records and sold them for $23 each on their own, they’d make more than double the profit ($4,600) — or they could charge their fans less per record, and still take home more money at the end of the day.

If Bandcamp’s vinyl pressing service is indeed a ripoff, then you might be wondering: Why are they even doing it in the first place?

Looking at Bandcamp’s business moves in the past year, the price tag of their vinyl service alone is far from the only issue at stake here. There’s also lingering concern that Bandcamp is morphing into a more totalizing platform — one that folds manufacturing, physical distribution, digital distribution, press, livestreaming and even brick-and-mortar record stores all under one roof, directly competing with the other branches of the music industry with which it’s existed in harmony, up until now.

They wouldn’t be the first artist- or creator-facing company to pursue this strategy of vertical integration; this is arguably what Spotify is trying to do for podcasts, Netflix for film, Splice for music production, Amazon for retail at large. In fact, writing for the German-language music publication DJ LAB in September 2020, Kristoffer Cornils argued that Bandcamp might eventually turn into “the Amazon for the indie world,” gradually replacing record manufacturers, distributors and other “infrastructure that has been essential for the international scene for decades.”

To some, this comparison to Amazon might be extreme or unwarranted. All of the label owners and artists whom I spoke with for this piece use Bandcamp both personally and professionally. The platform is undeniably one of the most financially conducive tools for indie labels and artists in the age of penny-fraction streaming payouts, and it’s been an indispensable buoy for selling art throughout the pandemic. And unlike what we tend to see with vertical integration and consolidation in other industries, Bandcamp’s vinyl pressing service ironically seems to be inflating costs, rather than driving them down and forcing competitors out of business.

But a growing number of other professionals in the music industry share a similar concern and skepticism to Cornils about the way Bandcamp is expanding the kinds of services it offers artists. “Bandcamp is useful. It’s great and I want it to exist. [But] I want it to exist with thriving competition,” says Ambrose. “I’m fearful for what [vertical integration] will look like for the music industry, small labels and even music discovery. To pretend that what Bandcamp is doing is different than any other form of consolidation is just naive.”