Bandcamp Why Cant I Upload a Background Photo?
Brand new to the site? Visit our most folio to find out who we are, why we're here, and what we mean when we say Bandcamp puts artists first.
This guide covers our recommendations for how to achieve financial success on Bandcamp. If you're seeking advice on a specific feature, or experiencing a problem, please visit our Assist Eye. Otherwise, read on to learn how artists utilise Bandcamp to sell 80,000 records each and every day.
The Importance of Followers
Followers are key to your success on Bandcamp. We notify them automatically when you release new music or merch, and you tin can also message them using the Bandcamp Artist App, fifty-fifty targeting those messages by fan location and level of support. Followers receive your letters on Bandcamp, and too via skillful old-fashioned email. In other words, Bandcamp followers are non your typical social media audience that you have to pay to reach lest they miss your message because it coincided with a Pomeranian doing something ambrosial. Instead, Bandcamp followers are more like an enhanced mailing list. And building a following on Bandcamp is risk-free, because every fourth dimension someone follows you, they're also invited to opt in to your mailing list, which yous can export from your tools page at any time.
To go followers on Bandcamp:
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Add together a basic Bandcamp button adjacent to the Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and GeoCities icons in your email footer or site sidebar:
You can discover a further 1.ii billion button variations and logos here.
Making information technology Personal
Bandcamp is designed to feel similar buying something directly from an artist at a show, where a fan gets to connect with someone whose work they love, and experience the satisfaction of supporting the creation of more than of it. So when a fan arrives on your Bandcamp site, it'due south important that they immediately sense that it's yours, a place where they're directly supporting y'all. The virtually successful artists on Bandcamp practice a few simple things to underscore that direct fan connection.
Customizing your site'southward design is one of the strongest ways to convey that your Bandcamp site belongs to you. Cheque out our blueprint tutorial for details, but here's a glimpse of some page designs that are getting it correct:
Information technology's also important to add an artist prototype. A few of our favorites are below, only almost whatsoever epitome is better than none at all, provided information technology conveys who yous are (people are understandably less inclined to financially support empty rectangles, logos, or recycled album covers). You can add your image from any anthology page on desktop, or use the Creative person App to add one from your phone (no duck face up plz).
Accept the time to write a concise bio, and add together it via the sidebar on desktop, or the Artist App. Don't but copy/paste your Wikipedia entry — your Bandcamp bio is intended to quickly convey a bit about who you are, and anything across 400 characters will get cut off. HTML isn't supported, only just beneath your bio there's a separate department for links to your other sites, which you can edit from your profile.
Add your lyrics. Lyrics aid fans discover you via search, and strongly indicate that Bandcamp is your site, where fans can support yous straight. If you're instead letting the internet document your lyrics, non only are you inviting unfortunate misinterpretations, you're likewise letting cheeseball lyrics sites profit from your work instead of yous.
Good liner notes are crucial. Liner notes add value to music. They indicate that a record is a work of art that'south worthy of the listener'south time and coin. They provide biographical context, making the listening experience more than personal by telling people who they are listening to, and how the music came to be. And they're another indicator that you, the artist, are present, and that this is where fans tin express their support.
Offering Merch
One time you've established that Bandcamp is where fans tin support yous directly, the side by side step is to activate that support past offering them things they want to buy. And what fans want to buy almost these days is physical merchandise, similar vinyl, cassettes, and t-shirts. Digital music is withal an essential source of artist revenue on Bandcamp, and yous should absolutely commencement past uploading your albums and tracks, but merch now makes up one-half the sales on the site and is growing speedily. Vinyl sales, for case, are up 613% in the past five years, cassettes 349%, and t-shirts 492%. To engagement, fans have purchased 19.4 million merch items through Bandcamp, totaling $337 million USD. Part of this growth is owing to overall industry trends1 merely the particularly dramatic growth on Bandcamp is because we've washed several things to make the site an ideal place to sell your merch:
- Dissimilar the isolated sales of a typical storefront, merch sales on Bandcamp beget more than merch sales on Bandcamp.
- We provide merch-specific browsing tools, and then fans can bank check out the best-selling hip-hop on vinyl, newly-arrived culling cassettes, and and then on, which of grade bulldoze more sales.
- Hundreds of thousands of fans have their credit cards and aircraft addresses stored with Bandcamp, making it easy to buy your merch in just a few clicks. Over the form of the 10 years we've been in business, and the 128 one thousand thousand transactions we've processed, nosotros've earned the trust of millions of fans and honed our checkout completion charge per unit to 88% (which is excellent, just enquire your neighborhood e-commerce payments period specialist).
- Yous tin include a digital anthology or track with whatever concrete item on Bandcamp, so that when a fan purchases, say, your vinyl, they get instant streaming via our apps, as well as an optional high-quality download.
- Nosotros report merch sales to the charts. Physical format sales (vinyl, cassettes, and CDs) are reported to Billboard/MRC Data (formerly SoundScan) in the US and Canada and then long equally y'all provide a UPC for the item. We written report physical format sales as digital sales to the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland Official Charts, ARIA Charts, and The Official New Zealand Music Charts, in accordance with their specific guidelines.
- Nosotros provide powerful tools for order fulfillment. Our merch backend lets you encounter all your orders at a glance, mark items as shipped, search and filter orders, update customer addresses, and print shipping labels and packing slips. You lot can do it yourself (and the Creative person App lets you do much of information technology from your phone), give a fulfillment partner direct admission to information technology all, or tap into our Merch API to integrate with your own fulfillment system.
- Our merch player lets you promote your music and merch in a single embeddable widget. People can listen to your album and browse your vinyl anywhere you, your fans or the press identify the histrion, they're easy to make, and they look fantastic:
- And finally, Bandcamp'south forthcoming vinyl pressing service makes it take a chance-costless and hassle-free to offer your music on wax. Your fans' orders finance the pressing, and we handle the manufacturing and fulfillment.
This is how to add your merch to Bandcamp. To maximize your sales, be sure to include a digital album or track with your merch item, signal express edition merch by ticking this box in the merch editor, and well-nigh importantly, upload lots of proficient-looking images. You can utilize the Creative person App to add photos of merch right from your telephone, or if you don't notwithstanding take your merch in mitt, use our templates to create high-quality mockups. Here are a few inspiring examples:
1 Only a few years ago, manufacture sourpusses could plausibly dismiss the growth of vinyl, cassettes, and so on as a probablehoped-for-brusque-lived flare-up of hipster nostalgia for obsolete formats, but it is now a long-term trend with a more uplifting caption: at a time when all the earth'due south music can exist guzzled through an impersonal firehose for a suspiciously-low monthly fee, more and more than people want to possess physical evidence of their fandom, connect more deeply with their music, and directly support their favorite artists.
A Few Final Tips
Pre-order Setup
If you've fix your release as a pre-order, be certain to tick this checkbox to include at least ane rails for streaming/download during the pre-order phase. Doing and so boosts sales for the simple reason that fans are more likely to buy or wishlist albums they can listen to, and likewise because only albums with at least i streaming track appear in Bandcamp's discovery tools.
Leveraging Stats
Utilise Bandcamp's rich, up-to-the-minute stats organization to see where your sales are coming from, so you can see what'south working, what's not, and refine your marketing efforts in real time. From the Creative person App, go to the Stats tab, select Sales, and tap on any album to encounter how the people who bought it establish it. You'll run across how many sales yous're getting from social media, search (along with the specific terms people are using), and Bandcamp's ain browsing tools. We also testify you the blogs and other news sites driving sales, and yous tin can tap on any of those to read your coverage and appoint those communities (from desktop, you'll discover like functionality in the Buzz tab of your stats section).
Engaging Your Followers
As mentioned earlier, followers are key to your success on Bandcamp, since we automatically notify them whenever y'all release new music or merch, and their purchases pb to more purchases by the customs. But to really maximize your sales, you need to exercise more than focus on your follower count, you also need to engage those followers using Bandcamp's messaging tools. By talking with your followers now and then, you're emphasizing that Bandcamp is where they tin can directly support you, and consolidating your nearly agog supporters in a identify where audience directly translates into sales.
Merely what should you say to your fans? We often run into artists sharing (and fans loving) photos from the studio, excitement almost an upcoming album, details well-nigh a new merch item, and updates from a bout. We too see artists but thanking fans (you lot can bulletin a single fan from the Fans tab of the Creative person App'southward messaging section), telling fans in a specific location well-nigh an approaching tour date, or extending special offers to fans who accept spent over a certain corporeality. And finally, information technology'southward common (and effective) for artists to message fans with a discount code (easily generated from your tools folio), either to anybody, or just those followers who accept non yet made a purchase.
Did we miss your favorite tip for making more money on Bandcamp? Allow us know!
Source: https://bandcamp.com/guide