Song Contest Blog » Bandcamp

Is Direct-To-Fan Working For You?

Lior Shamir — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 09:57:40 +0000

Five months ago, I began working with Audiolife, an exciting company at the forefront of the Direct-To-Fan revolution.

Direct-To-Fan is a popular business model adopted by independent artists. As the name suggests, artists cut out the middlemen (labels, distributors, retailers etc.) and promote and sell their music directly to their fans.

Radiohead’s release of In Rainbows and Nine Inch Nail’s release of Ghosts I–IV are popular examples of the Direct-To-Fan paradigm.

There are many benefits to Direct-To-Fan. There are many challenges too. Audiolife provides both the technology tools and the product fulfillment solutions to make Direct-To-Fan possible and affordable.

There are a handful of other companies with a Direct-To-Fan approach, including Topspin, Bandcamp, and Nimbit.

I want to ask you this:

If you’re doing it, is Direct-To-Fan working for you?

If you’re not doing it, what’s stopping you?

Please add your comments here.

Bandcamp Gets Physical

Lior Shamir — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:26:51 +0000

Bandcamp Stats

Lior Shamir — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 10:14:30 +0000

Bandstats. I don’t care what it’s for. I just wanna play with it. Gimme.

About Bandcamp.

Bandcamp and Creative Commons

Lior Shamir — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 10:28:33 +0000

I’ve been following Bandcamp for a little while now (see earlier post) and I noticed today that the company made some revisions to its home page. Most notably, Bandcamp created a “features” page which lists the entire suite of tools and services. I was also delighted to learn that Bandcamp now provides Creative Commons licensing designations:

Under the Creative Commons licensing designations, artists who make their music public, in this case via Bandcamp, are providing limited rights to other artists and music fans who wish to remix, share, or use the music in a variety of ways without having to formally ask permission.

Not yet familiar with Creative Commons? Overview:

Bandcamp

Lior Shamir — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:59:53 +0000

Ethan Diamond, the brain behind OddPost, the web mail service acquired by Yahoo! and, more recently, founder of Bandcamp, dispatched a newsletter today announcing the band portal’s new feature-set and recent upgrades. The free publishing platform boasts nifty and relevant tools for artists and band promoters to optimize their online presence and provide an uber-cool experience for fans and new comers. Armed with features such as domain redirection to a unique domain name within the site, fan email capturing on transactions, and IP licensing control (courtesy of Creative Commons) associated with the variety of ways to transmit music files, Bandcamp is set to become a popular choice for the brand conscious and online promotion savvy music community. In addition to Bandcamp’s visual bells and whistles and you-control-your-music ethos, the company focuses on pertinent music file meta-tagging and artist profile-specific search engine optimization for its individual members. Did I mention that it’s free? Bandcamp is really quite simple, down to earth, and rather wonderful.