BandCamp - The Basics
Using Facebook to Promote your BandCamp Tracks
At the time of writing, if you’re looking to sell your HandPan music online, directly to your fans, etc., ‘BandCamp’ appears to be the place to be. I’m not yet personally at the stage where I’m trying to sell my music, but as nine out of ten people I stumble across promoting themselves online are using BandCamp as at least part of their strategy, I thought that I’d create an account, partially out of curiosity, and partially to be future ready, should I ever decide to try and record my own album (or put out a 'Best Of' type release).
Bandcamp is an online music store, as well as a platform for artist promotion, that caters mainly to independent artists. Artists on Bandcamp have a customizable micro-site through which they can promote, and sell their music (for a small percentage). Visitors can listen to songs/albums for free, and/or purchase music directly, and easily, straight from the artists page, both as a digital download, and/or as a physical CD.
Signing up is easy, choose a username, enter a few contact details, set your URL (web address), and then you’re good to go... or so it seemed. In fact there were a few issues to start with, after hitting the add music tab and trying to upload the only test MP3 I’ve so far made. I got an error message, which explained that the format was not ‘lossless’. And then giving up on that for a second, and choosing profile, and attempting to upload an image, I was informed that the number of images I tried were each not of a suitable size.
Solving Issues with a Little Persistence
The first issue was solved easily enough by finding a list of lossless audio formats, importing my MP3 back into Audacity, and exporting it again, this time in ‘FLAC’ file format. A format that Bandcamp now accepted on first attempt. While the second issue was (for me) a little more annoying, with even when re-sized to the suggested dimensions, the interface still repeatedly telling me that the image was either too tall, or possibly too narrow (but not specifying which). But eventually, it accepted my image (578x290 pixels for the profile picture worked for me - if you have similar problems).
After these few initial teething problems though I was done, and Bandcamp was plain sailing from there-on-out. There are all manner of options to play around with once your tracks are uploaded. You can set prices per download, or choose to give them (or a certain number per month) away for free. Connect up your PayPal account by entering the related email address, and get paid (as and when you make sales). You can set privacy levels, and licensing levels, add tags to gain internal traffic (visits from people searching BandCamp for a specific type of music, i.e. ‘HandPan’). And even sell your own Merchandise (t-shirts, and stuff). All backed up with some nice stats that allow you to keep check of who’s been visiting your page, what tracks they’re listening to, to what extent, and of course, keep track of sales.
You can sign up to BandCamp: HERE
Or to have a look at how other HandPan players are making use of BandCamp to sell their music online, check out the following artists pages:
After these few initial teething problems though I was done, and Bandcamp was plain sailing from there-on-out. There are all manner of options to play around with once your tracks are uploaded. You can set prices per download, or choose to give them (or a certain number per month) away for free. Connect up your PayPal account by entering the related email address, and get paid (as and when you make sales). You can set privacy levels, and licensing levels, add tags to gain internal traffic (visits from people searching BandCamp for a specific type of music, i.e. ‘HandPan’). And even sell your own Merchandise (t-shirts, and stuff). All backed up with some nice stats that allow you to keep check of who’s been visiting your page, what tracks they’re listening to, to what extent, and of course, keep track of sales.
You can sign up to BandCamp: HERE
Or to have a look at how other HandPan players are making use of BandCamp to sell their music online, check out the following artists pages:
And should you have your own website outside of BandCamp (or Facebook page - see video above), you can offer your tracks up for listening (and for sale) by embedding a playable widget (see below) by simply clicking the embed link over at BandCamp, and then pasting the html code (or URL (web address) for Facebook), to get something very much like...
