Christian Montoya

How to deal with Bandcamp’s new free download restrictions

If you haven’t heard about the latest restrictions on free downloads being imposed by the team over at Bandcamp, please read this post at their blog before you continue reading mine. 

As an independent musician just-getting-started in the world of “give some music away for free to build a fan base,” Bandcamp has long seemed like a great option, because they don’t have any ads at all, offer lots and lots of customization and a service that looks wonderful, make streaming & sharing super easy, and allow you to offer free downloads in high-quality. Since I discovered the service at the beginning of this year, I’ve been recommending it heavily to other musicians. Unfortunately, these new restrictions on free downloads change things… a lot. I know quite a few musicians and netlabels that give all their music away for free and make all their money on live shows (or, in some cases, purposely make no money at all). Bandcamp seemed like a huge improvement over prior solutions, like Mediafire or Rapidshare where your content could be deleted on a whim… and lost forever. I still think it’s a must-have for most any independent musician. These new changes, however, are certain to disappoint many of them, and I figured I’d post a few solutions for dealing with them, as best as possible. 

Scenario 1: you have music you want to give away for free, always, and you want the best possible hosting solution that’s best for users, too. In this case, I have to say that you might be best off relying entirely on Archive.org from here on. If you want to see what a release looks like on Archive.org, you can check out my Return to Gravity Promo EP, which I just uploaded in the wake of these new Bandcamp rules. Archive.org is great, and I’ve been recommending it alongside Bandcamp to all netlabels and musicians that offer free music. It’s not too pretty, and that’s a shame… in the game of Bandcamp vs. Archive.org, Bandcamp is like a cool record store, while Archive.org is your local library. Archive.org does have a nice feature, however… you can link directly to the HTTP download for your release. This means that if you have a website where you announce your releases, you can link directly to the download from your website, meaning that users don’t have to go through the Archive.org interface to get to your music. They also make it super-easy to apply a Creative Commons license to your work. If free music is your thing, then my honest opinion is that you should use Archive.org religiously and forget about dealing with Bandcamp’s download limits forever. 

Scenario 2: you have a release on Bandcamp that’s free, and you want to keep it that way without running into the new download limits. If you are in this camp, there are two things to remember: 

1. Your chances of hitting Bandcamp’s download limits are slim. Getting even 100 downloads of your album / EP / whatever is hard work. Many people will listen to your songs, tell you they loved them, and still not download them. You can drive thousands of people to your Bandcamp page (I’ve done this) and still see only a handful of downloads. That’s just how it is. People only have so much room on their hard drive for yet-another-no-name-band’s-excellent-music. Giving your music away for free doesn’t mean people are going to take it. So there’s a good chance Bandcamp’s limits won’t affect you, and you have nothing to worry about. 
2. If your music really is good, and people come to your shows and say “hey, you did great, I liked it a lot,” then there’s a chance people are willing to pay for it. You don’t have to give your music away for free. Sure, it’s great to offer some free downloads here and there, but you are better off sending the free stuff to blogs or other music promotion sites (especially RCRDLBL.com). You could always try Bandcamp’s name-your-own-price model, with a minimum of zero. If your music is good (and I can’t stress that enough), people might just give you a buck or two for it. I usually put the following description on my releases (this example is taken from my latest release, Lighthouse): “Immediate download of [numtracks]-track single and cover art in any format. Want it for free? Enter 0 for price at checkout.” Again, chances are you won’t hit your download limits, and if enough people are willing to pay, you’ll be able to earn more download credits over time. 

That being said, let’s handle this scenario. You can remove the option to download your release from Bandcamp and upload all the files to another site like Archive.org. You can then update the title to say “Name of release (Download Link Below)” and post the full URL to the direct HTTP download at the top of the description. You can see this on my Return to Gravity Promo EP on Bandcamp. It’s less than ideal, but it’s a compromise, and fortunately for us, you can edit the title to your heart’s content without breaking old links. This way, you’ll still have Bandcamp’s excellent embedded players, but you won’t be cutting into your download limit (or costing them money). 

Scenario 3: You have a new release to share, and you are considering whether Bandcamp is a good idea or not. If you are in this camp, the short answer is “it depends.” Like I said before, if you have some fans and you think you can build the hype and get word-of-mouth, you might be able to sell your music. People pay $2 to get a lousy coffee at Starbucks… try charging them $1 for your insanely amazing synth-pop-mind-journey. Tell them they can download a couple songs for free, but if they want the whole ride, they have to insert a few quarters. After all, people can still stream your music all they want without ever having to pay a penny. If you still do not want to sell your music no-matter-what, then you probably don’t need Bandcamp. There are enough sites out there that allow you to host free downloads. You’ll manage. 

Now if you are wondering what I think of Bandcamp’s changes, I’m not really surprised. I think it’s unfortunate, because Bandcamp will lose some of their independent musicians, and it’s too bad to see this change come after months of being told that free downloads would always remain an option. Still, Bandcamp is a store, and their future lies in being the easiest way to sell music, with better margins than iTunes, Amazon, or anyone else. As they become more popular, there’s just too much risk that major labels and artists are going to use their service to give away free music… the prospect of millions of people downloading Kanye West’s spoken word remix of “Xanadu” featuring Justin Bieber from Bandcamp’s servers, at a cost far greater than what they’ll make from even their top artists, means that they have to protect their revenue model if they want to stay in existence. That’s just the way it is. Hopefully these ideas I’ve posted here will help those of you who want to keep the music free, or just cheap.