Bandcamp and the Growing Underground Music Industry
By: Joseph Zapinski
While humongous music streaming services like Spotify can brag about their 140 million users, where do the smaller music streamers come into the conversation? In every industry there are companies that are innovating on current ideas made popular by the top dogs of whichever industry they happen to be in. While not all of these companies will actually make it into the mainstream, they still make up a sizable portion of the overall digital music market share and therefore I think it's worth highlighting one of these services that has been performing especially well. Not all of them mimic the same music streaming idea that powers Spotify or Apple Music, but nevertheless they are common ways that people use to find new music and listen to the stuff they already enjoy.
That said, I'd like to talk briefly about Bandcamp. This platform works a lot more like a hosting website than a music streaming service which gives it a unique edge over other services. This unique edge has drawn in a whole host of underground artists and has acted as a major facilitator for the underground digital music scene. Artists can make their own individualized page where they post their music and can update fans on what's going on with their coming releases, tours, etc. The kicker is that artists get paid by Bandcamp and by random listeners who want to donate to a particular artist they like. This platform is comparable to a blog, but with the entire focus on underground artists and allowing listeners to pay whatever they want for music. That said, in 2015, Bandcamp made a $100 million payout to its artists, on top of the around $3.5 million that fans give artists every month. That amount of money is no joke, making Bandcamp a potentially serious option for new and emerging artists to post their music.
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