[Read in full on NHAM]

Bandcamp and Similar Options

[This is an excerpt from a chapter of The Human Guide to Doing Music Online by @kit]

Ever since its founding, Bandcamp has been the very best option for musicians of all sorts, independent or not, to distribute and sell their work. And it may still be that! I won’t bother explaining what Bandcamp is, how it works, or why it’s been so good for musicians, because all of that should be painfully obvious if you know even the slightest thing about the state of the music industry. The website does a pretty good job of explaining itself too, and their artist guide goes a little further still.

There are only two real downsides with Bandcamp, though they are big ones:

1. The only option for payouts is PayPal. So if PayPal isn’t available in your country, you can’t access it for any other reason, or you simply hate PayPal and would prefer something else, you’re out of luck. That’s a pretty big downside, admittedly.
2. After Bandcamp was bought by Epic Games, then quickly sold to Songtradr alongside the half of the workforce being laid off despite the workers successfully unionizing, any trust that Bandcamp will continue to be the best has been lost.

If it wasn’t for that second downside, I might have wholeheartedly recommended Bandcamp potentially without even mentioning the alternatives. But alas, capitalism has a habit of destroying everything it sinks its teeth into, so alternatives are vital, and thankfully, they exist.

Mirlo is one such alternative, and an extremely promising one that I recommend. The road ahead is long, there is much work yet to be done, but you can use it right now nonetheless, so it’s absolutely worth looking into, and worth supporting if you’re able. jam.coop is a very similar alternative, but it’s much earlier in development at the time of writing. Both of these platforms are cooperatively owned and operated, with plans for the founding workers to exit to community.

If you’re a little more tech-savvy, or you just like the idea of being your own platform, there’s also Faircamp, a free and open source website generator. All you have to do is give it your audio files, cover images, and text data, and it builds a simple website for you that can be hosted anywhere for little to no cost. If that sounds interesting, check out the manual to get an idea for how it works and what it can do, and consider supporting development through Liberapay or Ko-fi if you’re able. A nice little community has formed around Faircamp, even going so far as to build an old-school webring just for Faircamp sites.

If you’re used to using large corporate platforms and services for everything, these might be a little scary just because of how tiny they are in comparison. Mirlo’s entire cash flow – excluding a recent Kickstarter campaign – was just three figures at the time of writing! But don’t let their smallness scare you away. That smallness is a good thing, for you and everyone else. These are more than just Bandcamp alternatives. These beautiful people are building alternatives to the entire music industry. There’s even an ambitious group of people working on building non-profit, artist-centric streaming platforms.

By all means, if you already are, you probably should continue using Bandcamp for as long as it remains alive and artist-centric, and you may even still find it worth signing up for if you haven’t already. But I do hope that at the very least, you will keep these alternatives on your radar, and keep an eye out for promising newcomers.

If you wanted to stop here, nobody could blame you.

Putting your music out on platforms like this and nowhere else is a perfectly good choice for anyone who is into music primarily as art and culture, anyone who just wants to share what they make without any complicated business stuff to think about, and anyone who simply doesn’t like or want to participate in the wider music industry. You should never feel pressured to monetize your hobbies if you don’t want to, but with options like this, at least the money is optional rather than the objective. But you can even make good money just through platforms like these, so if that is something you want, you wouldn’t be giving up that chance! It would just take more work. Of course, accepting support through platforms like the aforementioned Ko-fi and Liberapay can also help with that, but I’ll talk more about them later.

But of course, you’ll probably never be “successful” in the mainstream context, because even if you gain a large enough audience and earn enough money this way to change your life, it will still be a drop in the bucket compared to the top performers on big streaming platforms. For all their downsides, for all the grossness, mainstream platforms are still something that most people want to use, and most musicians want to be available on, so let’s get into that.

[Read The Human Guide to Doing Music Online in full]