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The music industry is in a weird place. Radio stations are disappearing, album sales are shit (unless you’re Taylor Swift), Pornhub has a record label, U2 is forcing free albums on everyone, and Britney Spears is making half a million dollars per show in Las Vegas.
Things are changing, and artists and labels are forced to adapt. SoundCloud is still trying to figure out a sustainable business model, and BandCamp is trying out some new things, too.
In an interview with The Guardian, Bandcamp CEO Ethan Diamond explained that the site plans to let artists launch individual subscription services. “We’re giving every artist the ability to create a subscription service of their own on the site,” Diamond said. “It’s kinda like what U2 and Apple did, except that it’s music that you actually want!”
The subscription service will allow artists to choose what they offer subscribers upon signing up, what they release exclusively through the subscription service, how much a subscription costs, and what discount subscribers get on merchandise. Bandcamp will take 15%, then 10% once an artist reaches $5,000 in sales. This is the same cut they take from digital sales.
“The whole motivation here is that when you get to a point that you love an artist—when you go from liking them to being a real true fan of theirs—at some point you just want everything they make. You just want to support everything that they do,” Diamond explained. “The reality is that streaming is of course the future: people are going to download less and less. But [Spotify’s] particular model of subscription-based streaming isn’t the only model. There is this other model where you support the artist.”
Bandcamp isn’t the only company going this route. BitTorrent is looking at a similar business model that would focus more on individual artists instead of an all-encompassing subscription service.
