Kickstarter / Bandcamp / etc - C or D?

A good business model that adapts to these topsy-turvy download-y times? Or tantamount to groveling? Also, which is better?

They both seem pretty great to me, but also very different. Does bandcamp involve funding?

bandcamp and kickstarter appear to be two very different things xpost

Does bandcamp involve funding?

no

Oh, I see. Bandcamp is the 'pay what you like' site, then?

Friend of mine is funding their thesis film thru Kickstarter (pretty successfully, it seems)

pledgemusic is something similar to kickstarter but just specific to music

right now you can help fund the new cast and cornershop records

aw. i have a bittersweet feeling about kickstarter. it is cool and all, but we had $1400 pledged towards the soulstreamers which would have totally helped get us off the ground, but we lost it all since we didn't meet the entire goal. it was sad because at least with the $1400 we would have paid off the trailer and been partially on the way there...

what was your goal?

Bandcamp has been a solid 'C'. Kudos to them for not adding in a whole bunch of myspace/facebook 'networking' guff and having an A+ stats section.

What is Kickstarter?

funding site for the arts

good if you have fans

which means it would be useless for me

I mean, we were very short of our goal. I am just saying that the funds would have help, even if it wouldn't have gotten us on the road.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/344806759/soulstreamers-a-mobile-music-project-to-keep-vinyl

helped, obv.

you did pretty fucking good, it seems to me. Sorry you didn't make it!

Now who here wants to pay for my next film?

Yeah, we did really well. That was my point. We could have used that money and instead lost all of it because it is all or nothing with Kickstarter. :( In retrospect, this project would already be on it's way if we had that $1400 back then so I guess we should have made the goal lower. Instead, we still don't have a renovated trailer and we missed out on $1400 that people were wanting us to have.

The Mekons just funded a movie doc through kickstarter. They had some big name literary and musicial assistance

I would pay for new record by favorite artist X. Specially after all the downloading I have done in my life. Roky Erickson should do this, would be rad.

if you hit your target on kickstarter and get more pledged, do you get to keep that? would be handy if you set a lower target to at least get some cash rolling in, maybe.

Yes, you get to keep whatever you raise

in my experience (that is, watching/contributing to other people's stuff) for kickstarter you really need a decent fanbase coming in. if you're really lucky the kickstarter people will feature you, but you tend to need the former first

that said, if you have that it's great. know someone who raised >31K from an originally 8K project

yeah Kickstarter is tricky because their whole thing is they don't want you to raise half your goal and have a bunch of people still expecting you to finish your project without the whole amount you needed to get it done. you CAN kind of cheat the system by having some 3rd party help you meet the goal as kind of a loan, so that you can at least collect what had been pledged legitimately, which I'm not saying whether or not that's what happened with my project, but I'm just saying.

ok

I'm releasing my next album through bandcamp, I think. We're doing two songs a month for six months and then we'll actually have a vinyl pressed and sell that, but everyone downloads everything anyway so why not make it easy on them, frankly.

kickstarter: yeah good if you have fans or family. a friend financed the mxing of her album via kickstarter, but I think her family kicked in a lot of it. she was also relentless about nagging people on facebook which I'd have a problem doing.

isn't a one time ilxor heavily involved w/ kickstarter? anyway a ton of local (athens, ga) acts have used it, i think one even got mentioned in some times writeup about kickstarter; alot of local acts (generally the more redneck punk ones) regard it w/ disgust. it's basically a venture capital model applied to arts charity right? totally think it's a good thing.

if you hit your target on kickstarter and get more pledged, do you get to keep that? would be handy if you set a lower target to at least get some cash rolling in, maybe.

― cereal bad boy (haitch), Monday, 20 December 2010 04:00 (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Yes, you get to keep whatever you raise

So, if you were going to do something anyway with your own money, why not get a Kickstart thing, get some peeps to donate $, then donate to your 'goal' yourself if you're short and you'll be less out of pocket in the short term?

Which one time ilxor?

i love bandcamp. a lot of my favorite bands are on it, i've discovered new bands through it, and i'm putting my own stuff there instead of myspace.

So, if you were going to do something anyway with your own money, why not get a Kickstart thing, get some peeps to donate $, then donate to your 'goal' yourself if you're short and you'll be less out of pocket in the short term?

― The Jolly Roget's Thesaurus (S-), Monday, December 20, 2010 1:12 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you can't donate to your own project (at least not with your own name/bank account -- obviously you can have a middleman or something)

i like Band Camp a lot too btw, a lot of the local acts i cover have taken to it and it's become a really nice to way to keep track of artists who previously i had to go on goddamn MySpace to hear new stuff from

bandcamp is great.

i'm deeply suspicious of bands raising money to make albums via kickstarter though. maybe i'm just being a hater, but there's something weird about wanting your friends & fans pay for the entirety of your recording + mixing + mastering + duplication.

the other angle is that the band kickstarters that i've seen present it as "recording is expensive!". while i'm all about keeping studios in business, it seems like asking people to pay for your studio time is the easy way out when everyone else is buying some gear of their own, learning how to use it, and becoming at least somewhat self-sufficient.

But a lot of the Kickstarter projects I've looked at will promise you a copy of the final product with your donation, so it's essentially like paying a few extra bucks above the cost of the cd to see that the cd gets made in the first place.

I'm in for Marissa Nadler's new album through Kickstarter. Was in the I Like Trains pledgemusic one too, but Marissa's seems better value.

yeah...w/ music projects i think using Kickstarter treads a fine line. because either you have a fanbase and probably don't NEED to ask for the money (or wouldn't if you'd managed your career a little better or had slightly better luck), or you have no substantial fanbase and you're just kind of asking family and friends to help you make a CD they probably won't listen to. my project was a research-intensive book project, i don't know if that exactly makes my use of it better in any way, i may be a hypocrite, i'm just saying.

I think the chief problem I have with Kickstarter, at least as far as funding music projects goes, is that musicians are often terrible at managing money. Someone I know in a middling indie band (who shall remain nameless) put up a Kickstarter a year or so and got a fair amount of money to put towards the recording of a new album. One year on and there's no sign of the album, and I see him getting asked questions about it on Facebook all the time, with vague "it's coming soon" promises from him in return. I don't exactly know what he's done with the money, but I'm pretty sure most of it's been blown on boozing and partying.

So, if you were going to do something anyway with your own money, why not get a Kickstart thing, get some peeps to donate $, then donate to your 'goal' yourself if you're short and you'll be less out of pocket in the short term?

― The Jolly Roget's Thesaurus (S-), Monday, December 20, 201

That was our idea, but at the last minute when I tried to do that, I was made aware that I couldn't. I was trying to find someone - anyone - to donate (even just in theory) the last bit to make it happen but to no avail.

yeah there's a lot of ins and outs of how KS works that sometimes you don't know or think about until you've started your project -- really that's the main reason i'm being pretty forthright in this thread about how mine went down, in case the info helps anyone else here down the road

Trying again?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/344806759/soulstreamers

Oh, I know Heather! At least I know her from the store in Knoxville. Rad store, great gal. I'm tapped but I know some folks who might be into this - will alert 'em. This is a really cool idea.

Friendly advice - I'd offer some sort of physical product (I'm assuming these mixes you're offering are sent via email?) in exchange for pledges.

Thanks for that offer! You are very sweet. The mixes offered as incentives, though, are the actual mixes named on kickstarter and recorded live by the three of us. We send out the actual mix with our own covers and such.

Are you in Knoxville? When did I meet you? I live in Kill Devil Hills now, though. I left Lost and Found in December to move out here.

Verbena dudes / Wooden Wand just launched one of these

whoa. just found out that one of the cofounders of kickstarter is a guy i went to college with. worked at the college radio station with him. he also posted on ILX for a while.

started this thread e.g.

New from the DFA...

Yancey is one of the kickstarter cofounders?

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/ff_kickstarter/all/1

yeah i thought it was common knowledge that yancey was one of the main KS guys. also i always thought of him as a pretty major part of ILM for however many of the early years he was posting.

I read his on-again/off-again blog for a couple years before I even found ILM and was glad to find him here. Was disappointed when he stopped posting. Cool that that's what he's up to these days.

kickstarter kickin knowledge

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkck96gjE71qz4ede.png
Projects that reach 30% of their funding goal succeed more than 90% of the time. You can see that as the line turns green, the percent of projects that succeed approaches 100%.

that's kind of a "no duh" statistic though, isn't it?

i mean the curve could be steeper or flatter i guess but it's kind of like saying "people who grow to be 5'9" are more likely to end up over 6 feet tall"

we were all 3 feet tall once

I guess that’s so, but I would imagine the people who buy live albums tend to be completists anyway.

Update from Bandcamp United:

--

After an unnecessary hearing brought by our employer’s lawyers, the NLRB dismissed the case and has issued a date for our election. We’ll be voting by mail, and our ballots will be counted shortly after.
We’re calling on our supporters to stop sending emails to Ethan as we focus on casting our votes for our union.
If we see any more union busting in the coming weeks we’ll be sure to let our supporters know.
We’re grateful for the support that you have shown us in the Fediverse, and by signing our petition and emailing our leadership.
It made a big difference in proving to our employers that we have the backing of the Bandcamp community, and that we stand together in asking management to do the right thing.
Please share your messages of support on social media on why you think a union is good for Bandcamp (Please tag us so we can see them.)
To summarize:
We have an election date!
You can stop emailing Ethan (but thank you for your support in that campaign.)
Thank you for your continued support of our campaign.
Solidarity forever!

Epic sold Bandcamp?

it sounds like the writers for the bandcamp reviews/etc are either laid off or bailing, which sucks

yep, being discussed here

Thread for awesome stuff on Bandcamp that costs money but is still awesome

Damn, if they lose the editorial side, that's a huge loss and a bad sign.

Epic is doing layoffs with its remaining companies but is anyone saying they've been laid off from Bandcamp yet?

i think they just sold it off, rather than axe personnel

does anyone else have a bad feeling that bandcamp is just going to die by a thousand cuts and be left in the ether like myspace? i have a few albums i want to put out next year, and the thought of uploading them there just feels like dumping into a void to me. am i too pessimistic about this? i'd rather just make CDs and ship them out, but i also don't want to limit access or be awkward about it...

I wouldn't stop uploading to Bandcamp (all my stuff is on there) but I'd start looking at similar alternative sites as well.

Gotta love the new Bandcamp:

Subtotal: 2.00
Additional fan contribution: 3.00
Revenue share (15%): -0.75
Applied to your revenue share balance*: -3.94
Payment processor fee (PayPal): -0.31
Your share: $0.00 USD

How can we have a 'revenue share balance' if they take their cut right off the top anway? Bullshit

that is not a new bandcamp thing though, i see it in payments as early as 2015

i dont understand why, but for physical sales they dont take the revenue share cut on the actual transaction, they bill it against future digital sales

Maybe because they're not involved in fulfillment? Whereas with digital they're in charge of everything

No idea how big of a YouTuber this guy is (and how that would skew the numbers) but that’s a pretty decent alternative to streaming.

It’s been 6 months since I removed my music from all music streaming platforms

I’ve independently released 3 new albums direct to consumer since then

Here’s where we are today👇🏽

Bandcamp: $4,471
Even: $4,087.66
Website: $3,082
Total = $11,640.66

Equivalent to 3.4 m streams

— Curtiss King 🏁🛠 (@CurtissKing) May 23, 2024

Having to produce 66 albums a year is hard work, though.

Fuck, 6, not 66.

Hey Bandcamp developers! Give me an option to auto wishlist every new release by artists and labels I follow

has anyone used Ampwall? https://ampwall.com/

Got a fan account yesterday and look forward to putting it through its paces.

I've recently gone from streaming to local files (see also what should I put on my iPod? ) and very late to this party but wow I love buying music on bandcamp!

Since I stopped collecting records I haven't really been paying for music (I don't count Spotify) apart from shows and merch but... yeah, feels good to be able to directly support smaller artists! Feels good to be collecting digital files, who would've thought

Yeah, I don't do Spotify. My music spending is probably about evenly split between Bandcamp and vinyl/CDs (both new and used).

oh hey look LL asked about Ampwall here only a year ago

my issues with Bandcamp are:

1. recent change to Stripe
2. laying off all the people who flagged Nazi artist content/uploads
3. actually those are my main personal concerns but I am sure I am forgetting something that one of you will bring up

4. TOO MANY EMAILS

Yeah the emails are a bit much. One feature I’d like to se that might fix that is auto-wish listing new releases from artists / labels you follow

1. recent change to Stripe

I'm a little confused about this one. People seem to be asserting that you'll have to buy albums with Stripe, which I don't think is the case; you'll still be able to buy music with PayPal. But Bandcamp wants to pay artists and labels with Stripe, which isn't a problem for me (that's how I get paid from Substack so I'm already set up with it), but it appears there are many countries where Stripe doesn't work, and many artists in those countries are worried about getting paid going forward, so that's bad.

Are they thrifty enough to keep paypal payments separate from stripe, or do they just eat the double transaction cost by accepting paypal through stripe, or do they make artists eat it?

They make artists eat it.

Maybe I don’t quite understand the question but that’s generally what they do.

https://bandcamp.com/bandcamp_payments

So if they're consolidating payments through stripe, and stripe is not eating the paypal fees, the artist will have to eat not only the stripe transaction fee but also the paypal fee, so unless they're getting some amazing volume paypal discount through stripe, it seems like artists will get less, not more under the new regime, but it sounds like paypal is raising fees in any case.

Ned! Why have you chosen to stop writing for Bandcamp Daily?

I'm curious about the whole crop of bandcamp alternatives: ampwall, mirlo, subvert...
I may be forgetting one... anyone have any experience with any of them?

see here

The alternaBandcamps -- search/destroy etc.

(that prompted this revive, to be clear)

Ned! Why have you chosen to stop writing for Bandcamp Daily?

This decision was made some time back, so it's not new, and to refer to sleeve's revive for the thread:

2. laying off all the people who flagged Nazi artist content/uploads

This was not all of it but it was part of the letting go of employees in general that happened after Epic Games, having used Bandcamp essentially as a pawn in its court case with Apple, sold it to the Songtradr guy. As a number of the people let go because of that sale were, among other things, prime organizers of the Bandcamp workers union, it all left me uncomfortable. I had to think about it for a few days, being clear, but when I was specifically asked if I could keep contributing, I said I didn't feel right in doing that and have not done so since. (If this helps as a point of comparison: Shfl, where a lot of recent writing of mine this decade has surfaced, is strictly a one-person project where the owner does all the coding etc himself and supports various freelance contributions.)

I just got the email from Bandcamp about Stripe--fortunately I already had Stripe from my completely dormant Buy Me A Coffee account, so I was able to use that.

ah. cheers sleeve

This was not all of it but it was part of the letting go of employees in general that happened after Epic Games, having used Bandcamp essentially as a pawn in its court case with Apple, sold it to the Songtradr guy. As a number of the people let go because of that sale were, among other things, prime organizers of the Bandcamp workers union, it all left me uncomfortable.

FTR, I made the exact same decision. When one particular editor, who I wrote something like 70 pieces for between 2016 and 2023, was pushed out the door, and the editor who remained acted like a gaping asshole about it, I decided I wasn't going to write for them anymore. I didn't make a big announcement, I just stopped pitching.

thanks Ned, and unperson

I wish bandcamp editorial would write about my music! Been meaning to ask who I need to pester to make that happen. Anyone have ideas?

There's something in the help files about submitting your music there.

Many thousands of us want that, I've sent some music to a few of the writers but I don't think I've ever gotten in there (maybe once when a friend was writing a dance music column).

Im sure. Figured I’d ask anyway.

I have seen acquaintances be featured in spite of their music being (pardon me for saying this) extraordinary dull. Thought maybe I had a chance.

There's always a chance! My approach is usually to figure out contact info for the writer and send a personal message, and once in a blue moon it works out. Writers on this thread may have different views, lol.

Yeah, your best odds come from choosing a writer you think might be into your stuff and finding a way to reach out to them. They will pitch their editor, or maybe include you in a monthly column (BC publishes a lot of columns now.)

good lord, the download bandwidth is even more broken than usual for a BC Friday

Is that why the landing page is not showing my collection?

I assume so yeah, same here