Bandcamp provides you with a free home for your music and gives you all the tools to promote it in this Web 2.0 world. Their approach to promoting music on the internet has made me question how good our band’s approach is on various topics such as: search engine optimized track pages, quick streaming and downloading of music, clean album layouts, and stat tracking for music plays.
Upload your music, cover art, and custom header graphic to your page, which is clean and ad free, unlike Myspace. Your discography is displayed while fans can stream your music and read your track description, lyrics, and links to your other websites or band blog. Check out their video below.
Bandcamp Screencast from Ethan Diamond on Vimeo.
Say you want to learn more about a particular track, you click on it and it goes to the track page, where your can describe your individual song more in detail. Then you can download the song in various formats and charge your own price. When the music is downloaded it is tagged correctly with artist name, song name and song art. Their example shows an artist giving away a free 128k mp3 version of a song and letting fans name their own price for a higher quality version such as AAC or FLAC. This is great because I always hear DJ’s complaining about low quality mp3′s and not using them in their sets. Give consumers options.
The stats look awesome, and the buzz section shows all the places on the web where your code is embedded and how many plays per track. Great way to join in conversations about your music. Connect with fans, acknowledge their effort.
The feature I enjoy the most is the ability to promote your music with their “Share” option. Choose where you want to share your music on sites such as Facebook, Myspace, WordPress, and Twitter. Within a click you will be provided with a link or code to promote your music on various sites.
Even if you have distribution, I think Bandcamp can be a useful tool. Promote free songs, EP’s or mixtapes. Each track gets it own URL making it great for search engine optimization. Your music is your content and the more music you make and describe thoroughly, the better your fans can find you when doing searches on Google or Yahoo for instance.
My only question is how long before this service is no longer free. They offer great utilities for indie musicians which makes me wonder how long it will remain free. Their site says they are “experimenting” with revenue models and might charge in the future by taking a cut of download and merchandise revenue from artists selling over a certain amount per month. Until they decide, the service is free and I plan to try it as an outlet for future promos.
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