Bandcamp saw a boom in 2017, with double digit growth in every part of its business. In the company's year-in-review blog post, it announced that last year, it was also able to pay over $270 million to artists.
The online independent music marketplace/free streaming service’s digital album sales spiked by 16 perfect, track sales by 33 percent, and merchandise sales by 36 percent. The service saw an increase in physical sales, too: vinyl sales grew by 54 percent, cassette sales by 41 percent, and CD sales by 18 percent. Revenue from Bandcamp’s almost 3,500 independent labels also rose by 73 percent, with over 600,000 artists having sold a digital or physical item through the website.
Additionally, Bandcamp’s digital publication Bandcamp Daily—which launched in 2016—saw an 84 percent increase in audience.
“Meanwhile, standalone music streaming companies continued to lose money in 2017, and industry-wide record sales continued to decline: in the U.S., digital album sales dropped 20%, tracks were down 23%, and physical sales fell 20%,” Bandcamp co-founder and CEO Ethan Diamond wrote in the blog post. “The seemingly inevitable upshot of these two trends is that the majority of music consumption will eventually take place within the subscription rental services of two or three enormous corporations, who can afford to lose money on music because it attracts customers to the parts of their businesses that are profitable.”
At the end, Diamond took a moment to reiterate Bandcamp’s mission as the service comes into its 10th year: “We want a music platform to exist where the playing field is level, where artists are compensated fairly and transparently, and where fans can both stream and own their music collections.”
