09-30-2012, 08:35 PM
Oh hey, lemme help you out with some details here since I've been using Bandcamp for a ridonkulous amount of time now.
First thing I'll say is that they have literally never done anything that I haven't bee happy with, I've never had any problems and every time they add a new feature or update their systems it's always an improvement.
Despite being the only service of their kind they really do seem to know exactly what they're doing, and to top it all off they actually interact with people directly on their blog, even I don't do that.
To keep it simple I'll just run through how to get things going there from scratch.
Firstly you sign up for a basic account, which is free, premium accounts are cool and not very expensive too (gives you access to more analytics and simultaneous uploads, you basically pay for the extra resource usage), then you can upload a header image and customize the look and feel of the page with very little effort, and throw up a band picture and fill in the bio and all that jazz.
Uploading tracks is easy and all hell, you just hit the upload link, select the file (you need to upload a lossless version, .wav is easiest but it also accepts .flac and other lossless formats), if it's part of an album you can either select the album name from the dropdown or set it as a new album (you fill in the new album details after it's uploaded).
They process all the file converting, ID tagging and all that cool stuff automagically.
You can also include bonus files and hidden content if you want, including bonus tracks.
Note: when you're filling in the details for the album there's a checkbox to set it as hidden, that way you can make sure it's all ready to go before anyone can see it.
The cool thing is that you can set the price in whatever way you see fit, you can give each track an individual price as well as the album it's attached to, and the pricing can be a fixed price, a minimum price allowing people to choose to pay more if they want, or awesomely, you can set a minimum price of 0 and people can get it for whatever they want to pay, including getting it for free.
You do have a limited number of free downloads, but it's plenty to be honest, I've genuinely never run out.
You can pay for more download credits if you want, but each month the counter gets reset if it's below the basic amount anyway, so you can more-or-less ignore it.
The way they handle their royalty fees is pretty nice too, rather than taking a cut of everything you earn they keep a tally of what's owed, and then they take that amount out of the next purchase you get that covers it, that way you never have to pay anything out of pocket and you lose a lot less money from paypal fess and such. Oh, and their cut is extremely reasonable, especially considering you never have to directly pay them for anything.
One of my favourite features is their "power-up" system, which gives you a set of milestones and rewards you when you reach them.
For example, the first things you unlock are larger track uploads and letting you add more bonus content, which is rad, after that you get 1000 free download credits or 1000 free download codes (for giving out free copies) at specific lifetime earning milestones.
If you manage to make $5k in a year they even lower their cut of the earnings down to 10%, which is crazy awesome.
Beyond that, they also let people listen to everything right there on the page in full, have their own embeddable player, and they pay you instantly whenever you get a sale, rather than monthly or when you meet some arbitrary payment cap, it's about as perfect a service as I can practically imagine right now.
Do it. Do it now. I'll even help you with setting up your page if you need it, maybe even try to direct some traffic your way to get you a bit of a signal boost if you like.
First thing I'll say is that they have literally never done anything that I haven't bee happy with, I've never had any problems and every time they add a new feature or update their systems it's always an improvement.
Despite being the only service of their kind they really do seem to know exactly what they're doing, and to top it all off they actually interact with people directly on their blog, even I don't do that.
To keep it simple I'll just run through how to get things going there from scratch.
Firstly you sign up for a basic account, which is free, premium accounts are cool and not very expensive too (gives you access to more analytics and simultaneous uploads, you basically pay for the extra resource usage), then you can upload a header image and customize the look and feel of the page with very little effort, and throw up a band picture and fill in the bio and all that jazz.
Uploading tracks is easy and all hell, you just hit the upload link, select the file (you need to upload a lossless version, .wav is easiest but it also accepts .flac and other lossless formats), if it's part of an album you can either select the album name from the dropdown or set it as a new album (you fill in the new album details after it's uploaded).
They process all the file converting, ID tagging and all that cool stuff automagically.
You can also include bonus files and hidden content if you want, including bonus tracks.
Note: when you're filling in the details for the album there's a checkbox to set it as hidden, that way you can make sure it's all ready to go before anyone can see it.
The cool thing is that you can set the price in whatever way you see fit, you can give each track an individual price as well as the album it's attached to, and the pricing can be a fixed price, a minimum price allowing people to choose to pay more if they want, or awesomely, you can set a minimum price of 0 and people can get it for whatever they want to pay, including getting it for free.
You do have a limited number of free downloads, but it's plenty to be honest, I've genuinely never run out.
You can pay for more download credits if you want, but each month the counter gets reset if it's below the basic amount anyway, so you can more-or-less ignore it.
The way they handle their royalty fees is pretty nice too, rather than taking a cut of everything you earn they keep a tally of what's owed, and then they take that amount out of the next purchase you get that covers it, that way you never have to pay anything out of pocket and you lose a lot less money from paypal fess and such. Oh, and their cut is extremely reasonable, especially considering you never have to directly pay them for anything.
One of my favourite features is their "power-up" system, which gives you a set of milestones and rewards you when you reach them.
For example, the first things you unlock are larger track uploads and letting you add more bonus content, which is rad, after that you get 1000 free download credits or 1000 free download codes (for giving out free copies) at specific lifetime earning milestones.
If you manage to make $5k in a year they even lower their cut of the earnings down to 10%, which is crazy awesome.
Beyond that, they also let people listen to everything right there on the page in full, have their own embeddable player, and they pay you instantly whenever you get a sale, rather than monthly or when you meet some arbitrary payment cap, it's about as perfect a service as I can practically imagine right now.
Do it. Do it now. I'll even help you with setting up your page if you need it, maybe even try to direct some traffic your way to get you a bit of a signal boost if you like.