It never made sense to me: you beg fans to go to your site. then you send them off to iTunes or Amazon to buy your music. The distributor takes a cut, retailer grabs 30-35 cents and you're left with 58 cents of the 99 cents your loyal fans shelled out for... plus they''ve left your web site.
Bandcamp.mu launched this morning with a set of tools solving these problems. You sell or giveaway your music from what looks and feels like your site The rights are yours and for the next six months at least 100% of the money is deposited directly into your PayPal account.
The exact revenue split is a bit of a work in progress at...
Bandcamp (they promise it will never go above 15%) as are the evolving set of tools they're offering. But during a tour I took of the site ealier this week I saw a site of white label tools that were easy to set up and functioned well.
These guys are geeks so you don't have to be and they've thought of stuff like making sure your metadata is clean and handled in a way that helps search engine rankings. They also offer tools to help fans share your music and you get to track the all data.
I don't mean to gush here. TopSpin Media and a few others do a lot of this stuff and more. But Topspin (which I promise I'll be writing more about soon) is not yet open to all musicians and Bandcamp is here now and at least for the moment free. Here's a screencast tour
Bandcamp Screencast from Ethan Diamond on Vimeo.
