a 2 i m

Associate Member Spotlight: Bandcamp

Bandcamp Launches App for Artists and Labels, Provides Powerful New Ways to Connect with Fans and Streamline Music Sales

Please watch the short launch video here.

The Bandcamp App for Artists and Labels, released last month for Android and iOS, gives Bandcamp’s community of over one million musicians and three thousand labels powerful new tools to connect with and sell music to their fans, and is another example of the company’s commitment to creating the best platform for artists to share and earn money from their work.

The app lets artists easily send messages to their followers, even targeting those messages by fan location and level of support. For example, a touring artist with an upcoming concert at Chop Suey in Seattle can notify just their nearby fans, and invite their top supporters to a VIP meet-and-greet before the show. Unlike communicating through social media, where an artist must pay for their post to be seen by any more than a fraction of their audience, messages sent through the Bandcamp App for Artists and Labels are not only delivered inside the Bandcamp fan app, but are also delivered via email, just like a standard newsletter.

Artists can also use the app to browse through their fans, view individual purchase history, and directly message any fan. The app also provides a real-time mobile view into plays and sales stats, and displays the sources of sales, making it easy to see what channels are driving the most purchases, and use that information to plan future promotions.

Finally, the app helps artists manage and fulfill their physical merchandise, an increasingly important part of artists’ sales: fans have bought 5.2 million merch items through Bandcamp, and last year vinyl sales on the site were up 48%, cassettes were up 58%, and even CD sales grew 14%.

The Bandcamp App for Artists and Labels is available today for both Android and iOS, and is free. Please direct any questions to press@bandcamp.com.

About Bandcamp

Bandcamp is an online record store and music community. Its mission is to create the best possible service for artists and labels to share and earn money from their music, and for fans to discover and enjoy it. Over one million artists, and more than three thousand labels use the service, and fans buy about $6 million dollars worth of both digital and physical records through the site every month. Bandcamp sells roughly 29,000 records each day, which works out to roughly one every 3 seconds, 24 hours a day, every day of the year. The New York Times recently called Bandcampthe holy grail of online record stores” and “one of the greatest underground-culture bazaars of our time,” Fast Company named Bandcamp one of the most innovative companies in music, and the American Association of Independent Music honored Bandcamp with their 2017 Independent Champion award.

About A2IM:
A2IM is a 501(c)(6) not-for-profit trade organization headquartered in New York City that exists to support and strengthen the independent recorded music sector. Membership currently includes a broad coalition of more than 700 Independently-owned American music labels. A2IM represents these independently owned small and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs) interests in the marketplace, in the media, on Capitol Hill, and as part of the global music community. In doing so, it supports a key segment of America’s creative class that represents America’s diverse musical cultural heritage. Billboard Magazine identified the Independent music label sector as 37.32 percent of the music industry’s U.S. recorded music sales market in 2016 based on copyright ownership, making Independent labels collectively the largest music industry sector.

Learn more about A2IM here.
For information about how to join our community, see here.