Music

Bandcamp paid out $200 million to artists in 2016

by Jeremy Mersereau

We all know getting your music on streaming services doesn’t exactly translate to a lot of money for musicians, even if you’re a top artist raking in millions of streams. That’s why Bandcamp’s recently-released year-in-review is so interesting: according to the platform, they paid out $200 million to their roster of artists in 2016.

“Every aspect of Bandcamp’s business was up in 2016,” reads the post, going on to say that digital album sales, track streams, merchandise revenue, and artist signups had all grown by double-digit percentages in 2016. As per Bandcamp, “fans have now paid artists nearly $200 million using Bandcamp, and they buy a record every three seconds, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year”.

Even accounting for Bandcamp’s huge number of artists, and certainly not equitable payouts across them, that’s not a number to scoff at. Long renowned for its equitable payout model, Bandcamp only 15% of digital sales and only 10% on other merchandise, which stands in stark contrast to the pennies-per-stream model of the streaming giants, as well as the state of the music industry in general.

“If subscription music rental can’t work as a standalone business, then it will only exist as a service offered by corporate behemoths to draw customers into the parts of their businesses where they do make money,” Bandcamp says, “and when the distribution of an entire art form is controlled by just two or three nation-state-sized companies, artists and labels will have even less leverage than they do now to set fair rates”.

Food for thought for any band weighing their options: the alternative, digital marketplace model offered by Bandcamp is almost certainly a better bet for your bottom line. Sure, there’s no substitute for the massive exposure offered by the the huge user bases of the streamers, but you can’t pay the rent with exposure.