5 Reasons Why You Should Use BandCamp To Sell Your Music

Band Camp is a system that I recommend that every band use. Read on to learn why you, as a band, should be using Band Camp in your online promotions!

Easiest Cart System Ever

Putting your songs up on BandCamp is actually one of the easiest uploading services available, and that's including the functionality of selling the songs!

I would even say that the whole cart system is easier than uploading your songs to Myspace!

All you do is click 'new track', and then follow the instructions. You can upload custom art for your song, decide a price (Or a donation minimum - Covered below), and even set it up so people can get your song for free.

Of course, that is provided they give you their email, that way you can add new subscribers to your band mailing list and hopefully have them buy from you in the future.

It's seriously really, really easy; so there's no reason to be intimidated by online sales and distribution any longer, all thanks to Band Camp!

Tips To Lower Your Transaction Cost From PayPal

Not only does BandCamp do their best to help you sell your tracks online, but they'll even give you some advice on how to get more money per download.

The thing is, when someone buys your track, PayPal will take a small cut of that money (It's how you pay for their services).

Well BandCamp offers advice on how to structure your PayPal account so you can lower these fee's, and take home more money than before!

Considering the basic PayPal account takes something like $0.30 from each transaction, if someone only donates $0.40 for you song, you can see how this would take away a lot of your profits!

Restructuring your PayPal can help remove this barrier, and BandCamp wants to help you get rid of the fee's by telling you how to do it.

They Take A Very Small Cut Of Your Profits

BandCamp only takes 15% of each sale, so if you sell a download for $1, they will take $0.15 of that download.

It's hard to really compare this to iTunes, as the amount of money you receive from iTunes sales is completely off the wall.

You can make as little as 10% of the download price, or you can make as high as 90% of the download price on iTunes.

I don't want to turn this into an iTunes distribution article or anything, but the main point is that BandCamp only takes 15% of your sales, and if you sell a lot you can even get a rate as low as 10%!

Donate To Buy (With Minimum Price) - Set Your Sales Up Like Radiohead!

The 'donate to buy' option is really simple to set up, and works like a charm.

You can ask your fans to pay a minimum, but give them the option to pay you more.

This allows some fans to show their appreciation to you by paying more, and really is a much more creative way to sell your music.

Radiohead did it, and it was wildly successful. This is simply a more "mainstream" market catching on to that idea.

Hipsters will agree that the 'donate to buy' option was cool slightly after Radiohead did it, but became passe when 1-speed bicycles were re-imagined.

You can always set the minimum to $0.00 if you want, so you can give the option for your fans to get it for free if you want.

I recommend setting the minimum to $0.01, as most people will want to donate more anyways, but then they don't feel like you are ripping them off (people want music CHEAP these days).

It also helps to keep people from justifying pirating your music. Heck, wouldn't you feel like a bad person if you couldn't pay the damn 1 penny to buy someone's music?

How their mindset would work is: "So if it's only a penny, I might as well just go and get it officially, and support the artist. While I'm at it, I might as well just pay them $0.50 instead of a penny!"

Holy cow, now we're booming profits now, aren't we?

It's Becoming One Of The Standards For Selling Independent Music

Most independent artists are now using BandCamp, and more and more people are getting on the 'band' wagon every single day.

Heck, even Omar Rodriguez-Lopez uses it! You can check out how he integrated BandCamp onto his website through that link!

The more and more that artists use it, the more and more your fans are going to be comfortable with buying your music off of BandCamp. It's only going to get better from here.

Most people have at least a few little security issues about using online transactions, so the more aware of a site that they are, the more likely they are to buy your music.

Bottom line?

BandCamp has become a useful tool for building an online presence and selling music from your website (or from theirs), and I don't see it stopping any time soon. So get on board quickly, before you waste too much time and money elsewhere.

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Andrew Muller is the Editor of TheRealMusician.com. He lives in Chilliwack, BC, Canada and spends much of his extra time writing articles, playing and writing music, setting up and playing concerts and demolishing video games.

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