On Bandcamp Discover & audience building

I suspect a lot of musicians don’t value Bandcamp because they don’t see an audience growth angle. That they have to bring their audience to bandcamp and they just offer the storefront.

I think the singles-centric approach to streaming is why. We’re used to that now and it fundamentally DOES NOT work on Bandcamp. EPs, albums and merch do.

Their FAQ on their discovery features literally says so (source):

In other words: if you upload a single to Bandcamp it won’t show up on the Discover page.

Instead prep an album, EP, even a random collection of your songs and build a li’l release around that. You don’t even need to charge $ if you don’t want. That will yield a bit of community activity; doing so repeatedly will help build a lil audience. I’ve got a small one (268), but it’s something.

On Elastic Stage

A couple months ago I tried out Elastic Stage for on-demand vinyl manufacturing. The results were fine, but not what I was looking for:

• Cutting up a 50+ minute concept albums to fit on a single LP is hard and detracts from the experience
  
• Digital masters sound off to me on vinyl, definitely warrants a warmer remaster if you’re serious about it
  
• Artwork was not as high quality as I’d hoped
  
• Minimum sell price of $28 for this was not worth it imo

I’m trying them out for CDs now. I can see this working better: digital format, lower price point, easy process. If the artwork quality isn’t 👌 it may not matter as much on the smaller scale of a CD digipak.

I won’t profit much off them, but I don’t feel like a big CD manufacturing process with up-front $$ and if this is a suitable alternative, then great. Physical media for me and my (scant) fans.

I ordered a test print of a deluxe edition I spun up for RUINED CASTLE, will report back when it arrives. If this works, then I’ll have CDs available for all my albums (including SOLO PIANO and REMIXED CASTLE) in the near future.

More Bandcamp stats fun

On your payment summary page (under “tools”) you can see your lifetime sales/revenue, but also how much of that has gone to Bandcamp and credit card processors.

Turns out, thanks to Bandcamp Friday, Bandcamp itself isn’t taking much more out of my sales than PayPal/Stripe/Visa/Mastercard/Amex at this point.

Oh, by the way, I released REMIXED CASTLE yesterday. It’s very very good. This release raised over $200 to help house an unhoused trans musician. Trans rights are human rights.

More on Bandcamp sales & economics

I was very happy to share this finding on the internet the other day:

Oh huh I’m very close to 5000 lifetime plays on bandcamp, that’s fun 😉 kidlightbulbs.bandcamp.com

— brandon aka kid lightbulbs (@bgreen.lol) 2025-03-01T14:43:01.444Z

Building on this a bit: Roughly 75% of those (3,695 to be exact) are since I started Kid Lightbulbs. The rest are random scattered plays from old projects for which I’ve used my Bandcamp account. (I’ve had a Bandcamp account since late 2010 🤠)

I’ve also made $1398 in lifetime sales. All but $40 of this is from the last 18 months. This includes merch (I’ve sold like 5 shirts lol) but excludes recurring Bandcamp subscriptions (on which I make $196/year - wild that 6 people are gracious enough to subscribe to me, thank you all!)

That roughly comes out to 28¢ per play on Bandcamp. ~37¢ if you only consider the Kid Lightbulbs period. It also means it’s roughly taken 2.7 plays for Kid Lightbulbs to make $1 on Bandcamp. (This excludes platform and credit card fees, to be clear.)

What’s most wild is that this doesn’t even account for that many purchases. My stuff has been purchased (on Bandcamp) 164 times, across 84 people. That’s an average of $8.52 per purchase, and the average person purchases my music twice. (My top purchaser has spent $92 on Kid Lightbulbs!!!!!!)

Granted, this also comes with caveats:

• I don’t know or control how often the listener listens outside Bandcamp once they buy. (If I’m honest, I don’t care and nor should any artist if they consider the music the “product”.)
  
• I do know how often they listen on Bandcamp - I have 1,893 lifetime plays from supporters. Even when you add that to the nearly 5k “viewer” plays I’ve accumulated, that’s still a pretty nice revenue-per-play rate.
  
• It’s also quite unbalanced. I know of several folks who have purchased every single thing I’ve released, often for more than my asking price. Super fans are driving most of the money gained from Bandcamp.

But honestly, I think this is great. I’d rather make money from folks actually willing to financially support the project rather than through the twisted economics of streaming (even if they did work in my favor, which they do not). This makes more sense to me than the “go viral and get as many streaming listeners as possible to try and eke out a fan base from those listeners”. I’m not trying to build a massive audience or enter the conventional music industry. I am a purveyor of highly emotive and carefully crafted sounds & words, and Bandcamp is one of my storefronts. (There’s also one on Ampwall.com, and I’m working on another idea — stay tuned.)

I cannot reiterate enough how tiny my actual audience is. I’m just under 200 monthly listeners right now on Spotify. Excluding bot situations, I have fewer lifetime plays there than on Bandcamp. I made more fans by handing out square Kid Lightbulbs cards at the shows I played while on tour with another band last year than most of the other playlists I’ve been legitimately placed on. Most of my “fans” are people I regularly chat with on Threads and in Discord servers. I am extremely grateful for them, and they regularly inspire me.

Imagine if I had just a few hundred, or a thousand, fans worldwide. I haven’t even played live or really pushed this yet. It’s a slower, longer game than looking for a hit on a social platform, but I’m steadily building something here by making smaller & more intimate connections and continuously releasing.

You can do this too. Just shift your focus. Think of your releases as artfully crafted products, not commodities. I think this is how independent artists make their work sustainable and put some kind of market value to their art.

If this was useful, consider following me on Bandcamp 😜

REMIXED CASTLE: listening party, thanks, community & joy

I am overtaken with joy the more I think about REMIXED CASTLE. We’re holding a listening party to celebrate it and listen to the whole thing — it’ll be on March 5 at 8pm ET (sorry folks in Europe/Middle East!!) You can rsvp here.

This is now the second instance in my short time as Kid Lightbulbs where the community has come together and made a wonderful piece of art, and a time capsule for this community, completely organically. I literally asked publicly if folks want to remix any of my stuff, and then 2 months later, this album existed.

And it’s. So. Freaking. Good. I so deeply appreciate all the collaborators on this thing.

But also, I think this is a repeatable pattern for independent musicians to both build community and broaden the scope of their work.

• Each participant now has a new project to add to their repertoire
  
• Everyone now has a new project to promote
  
• Everyone has become (internet) friends in the process
  
• Everyone benefits from a multiplier effect of everyone promoting the project
  
• Everyone benefits from the plays / sales from such a project, which can enrich the community or be diverted to someone / a cause in need

Speaking of which! We’re pooling all Bandcamp Friday proceeds from REMIXED CASTLE and divesting to a fellow trans musician in the community who needs the support on a number of levels. Anyone who buys the album 3/7 (next friday!) will be directly supporting this individual in need, at a time when support for the trans community is directly under attack.

Community is joy. Community is support. Community is power.

REMIXED CASTLE

I am thrilled to announce REMIXED CASTLE: a track-for-track reconstruction (pun intended) of my last album, RUINED CASTLE.

This is not your typical remix album — this is a complete reimagining of the album featuring remixes and reinterpretations from some excellent musicians in the Threads community. It’s a rollercoaster of its own design.

Out 3/7 exclusively on Bandcamp. Each track coming to streaming throughout March, April and May.

Blogging & RSS are the next phase of creator culture

I tried writing something for my newsletter about the power of newsletters and ethical options for those not wanting to support ones that, say, platform or are funded by far-right zealots. Halfway through I got bored and then started questioning why I was energized by this topic. (I still posted a short version of it.)

Truth is, the idea of committing myself to a weekly (or even monthly) newsletter stresses me out. I don’t want to get stuck on a hamster wheel. I also don’t feel great about asking fans of mine to subscribe monthly to a newsletter with a specific commitment — that starts to put a price tag on my writing. I’d much rather feel free to share ideas when I have them, and encourage readers & fans of mine to patronize me entirely at their discretion, on a one-off or recurring basis. If you happen to send me a recurring donation, that’s great and I am super grateful! But I don’t want you to feel like you’re paying for a specific number of emails from me each month.

So I’m back to old-school blogging mentality, and it’s quite liberating. Functionally it’s probably similar to a newsletter, but the framing is different: Instead of committing to a specific cadence of writing, I’m just posting stuff when I want and then compile links to everything I wrote into a newsletter each week I have something.

I don’t think enough people realize the true power of a simple blog. Yes, newsletter culture took over because of the wildly successful engagement hack of email and Substack’s rise – but a Substack is really just a blog that also sends out emails anytime you post. It’s quite easy to set this exact same thing up with a Wordpress site, Medium blog, or really any ol’ blogging service¹.

Almost every blog — like my own — have an RSS feed built in. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s a standard almost as old as the Internet itself. I actually love RSS because it’s a way to read the newsletters and blogs I love, but without the stress of notifications or the frustration of a cluttered email inbox. (My RSS app of choice is Reeder Classic, for those who care!) If you find yourself overwhelmed by social networks and notifications, I highly recommend getting one. Many are free or quite cheap.

Pretty much anything can be set up as an RSS feed. You know what else is based on RSS? Podcasts. Your Bluesky profile. You can even make an RSS feed out of someone’s Instagram posts. The musician in me really wants an RSS feed that updates anytime I release new music; Bandcamp doesn’t have this built in, but (1) I could simply post a blog post anytime I release something or (2) explore Faircamp – the self-hosted, ethical alternative to Bandcamp – which has RSS built in².

How does this relate to newsletter? Well, so Buttondown, my newsletter service of choice, has a (paid, $90/year) feature that “listens” to any RSS feed you want it to, and automatically preps a newsletter email based on the content from the feed. You can either send an email with each new post, or aggregate them on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. You can also automate this entirely, or create drafts of those emails and make final tweaks before you send.

I’ve now set up my newsletter to do exactly this. It’s kind of amazing! I don’t have to specifically write a newsletter each week or month – instead, I can simply post to my blog whenever I feel like it (including when I release new music) and my audience can still get it however they like: in their email inboxes, or in an RSS reader app of their choice. I could even build audio blogs (or podcast episodes?) into this framework.

This could be very important (or very fun) for creators struggling with keeping up: You don’t need to make these fancy newsletters, or feel burdened with the idea of keeping up with one, or pay for an expensive or questionably ethical service for one. Just write a blog and people can subscribe to that in any number of ways, one of which is email.

One downside is that it’s not totally free to do – Buttondown’s cheapest plan with this feature is $90/year after all, and while other email marketing apps offer this, they also don’t for free (Mailerlite and Mailchimp both have a similar RSS-to-email feature on their paid plans.)

Well, it gets more interesting: I recently found a service called Feedmail. This isn’t a proper newsletter service, but rather a service that takes an RSS feed — yes, like your blog’s RSS feed — and sends an email out anytime there’s a new entry in the feed.

It’s quite elegant, for both creators and their audiences. And it’s also (basically) free! There are two ways where it becomes not free:

• Your reader can choose to pay after receiving 400 emails worth of updates to your RSS feed. After the 400th email, they can pay $10 to get 10,000 more emails sent to you.. This is a little weird – but the idea here is that the reader is paying for an email service that aggregates feeds they want to hear from in their email, so it does so (at a very low cost). A reader can also use Feedmail for any other blog feed, not just yours.
  
• Alternatively, as a “feed owner” (ie. creator), you can choose to pay on behalf of your readers, which means you can send out up to 400 emails for free (or, say, 10 emails to 40 subscribers), and then you pay 0.1¢ per email after that. With this math, if you have 500 people “subscribed” to your feed via email, you pay 50¢ for each email send. Send a weekly recap, and that’s $2/month.

It’s a little bit too minimal for my taste, but it’s an important option to have in your toolkit if you, like me, want to write more freely without the burden of a specific newsletter cadence.

I don’t expect any of these options to be the “right” way to do things; what’s more important to me is that folks in my audience know that there’s more out there than a TikTok profile and a hundred “newsletter services”, most of which are run by venture capital. You can communicate to an audience so easily on the internet in 2025 with technology that’s been around since 1999. And it’s kinda fun to tinker with too.

Some ethical newsletter alternatives

As I’ve stated before, I care a lot about the ethics and principles I try to follow with my creative work. This is a lot easier in the creation process than it is in the marketing process, especially if you are trying to stick to the values I put in place and/or are broke.

I find myself thinking a lot about ethics when it comes time to promote myself. I am technically an extrovert but, as a New Englander, I get viscerally uncomfortable bothering people. I don’t want to be bothered, and I assume nobody else does either. So marketing a music project online — especially in 2025 when 10,000 new songs are published to Spotify daily — is not a thing toward which I gravitate. The way social media has evolved into a certainly does not help.

Fortunately it seems like there are a lot of options out there for those who need to promote themselves but don’t want to get sucked into the echo-and-rage-cocktail chambers of social media. One obvious option is to use social marketing tools like Buffer (disclaimer: yep, that’s my employer) to post promotional content with actually being there. Another is the newsletter.

I think many creators do have newsletters, and I’ve subscribed to a few myself. This right here is technically part of an edition of my newsletter. It’s also posted to my site/blog thingy, and I use a service to collect subscribers who wanted it delivered to their email inboxes.

It still feels gross to me. But it’s somehow still wildly successful in 2025:

• 4.5 billion people have email addresses.
  
• Over half of “consumers” (gah that word) say marketing emails influence their purchasing decisions
  
• Email seems to have a really high return-on-investment – on average, every dollar spent on email marketing yields $42 back. (This feels wildly skewed toward certain types of businesses, but hey you get the idea.)
  
• It’s estimated to be 40 times more effective at gaining customers than social media posting.

I need to make my output known to the world (both music and writing like this), and ideally I’d love for some folks to buy it as long as I keep putting it out. Email newsletters are really good for that. Not only should every artist or creator have one – but it should be a primary way to communicate, one of the things you get potential fans & supporters to commit to (as opposed to following you on an algorithmic social feed where they’ll probably miss 70% of what you post).

The good thing is that it’s really easy to start one! There are a hundred options now for starting a newsletter. The not-great thing is that the most popular ones are rife with bad incentives, especially for creators.

Let’s talk about them: Mailchimp and Substack. Let’s put it out there up front: both are free. Both are pretty widely known, because they each spend a lot of money on marketing. There is a reason and method for this, and it’s not quite in the best interest of creators or consumers:

• Mailchimp is owned by Intuit, the same company that makes TurboTax and has lobbied for years to make it nearly impossible to file US tax returns – a basic civic duty — for free. They are a perfect example of a company where you are the product: many of their services are “free”, but cluttered with ads and sketchy, dark patterns to coerce you into upgrading or signing up for financial services that ultimately add risk and complexity to your life. The money they make on these dark patterns & lobbying is used to market their free offerings, like Mailchimp (and Credit Karma I guess? Long live Mint.com), which feed more folks into the cycle of dark patterns, treating them as leads to purchase services thus affording Intuit even more money to spend on lobbying and marketing.
  
• Substack is a social network masquerading as a newsletter platform for “thoughtful” writing & podcasting. As with any social network, the only way to survive is to relentlessly grow, even if that means giving a platform to Nazis and taking millions in funding from right-wing technocrats to grow & market the platform to hyper-scale because there is no path otherwise to profitability from “democratizing” the bulk sending of emails anytime you want to publish something. Not to mention that once you get a small-ish following of paid subscribers, you lose significantly more of your earnings to their platform fees compared to alternatives.

If I were a creator with a somewhat progressive code of ethics (and many I know seem to be), I would not use either of these platforms. So what to use instead? You’ve got options. First, you’ve got alternatives. A quick rundown:

• Buttondown – in my opinion, the best all-around for small creators and artists. Privately & independently owned by one guy named Justin who cares a lot about transparency, good customer service, and making a really simple and reliable service. It’s also free for your first 100 subscribers, then $90/year should pretty much be all most independent artists need. Buttondown is what I use.
  
• Ghost – Ghost sort of looks like a Wordpress or Substack alternative without a free option. Their cheapest plan is $108/year, but you get an excellent and reliable blogging & newsletter service with beautiful template options. They are independently run and funded, and your paid subscriber funds their ability to continue maintaining the platform and building features that help you. The incentives run different — unlike Substack, whose recommendation engine is meant to keep creators on the Substack platform, Ghost’s recommendations service helps readers find other writers to subscribe directly to, to help grow those writers’ audience and give them a reason to keep writing on their Ghost-hosted site.
  
• Beehiiv – A solid option if you’re looking for something very “Substack-like” but with less sketchy social-networkness and better financial incentives. Instead of losing 10% for every paid subscriber, you pay $34/month (minimum) and keep the subscriber revenue. The bigger your audience, the more it’s worth it.
  
• Kit (fka ConvertKit) – a more conventional email marketing solution that is independently run and has a quite generous free offering. I immediately recommend it over Mailchimp or most other conventional email marketing toolkits, if you want something more like a conventional “mailing list”.

This is all great, but with it all said: I’m also not convinced that everyone having a newsletter is sustainable. If everyone has a newsletter, then everyone’s email inbox becomes even more overrun with emails than they already are. I think blogging is due for a comeback, and RSS may be a more flexible alternative that more creators can and should be relying on. I’m going to explore this more.

please please please listen to my newest single I’m begging

My next single “please please please listen to me I’m begging” - is out on Bandcamp today.

This is an older song of mine — it dates back to 2012 or so, and was intended as the lead single for a previous solo project of mine. An even earlier version of it was something I explored for the original concept album project that evolved over the years into my last album RUINED CASTLE. Needless to say this one has a place in my brain/heart.

It’s mostly instrumental, jagged and desperate. It shares DNA with “when I sleep”. I was originally inspired by the writings of noted conspiracy theorist Francis E. Dec when composing it, and it sort of reflected (at the time) some of my early thoughts around social media and one’s desperate need for attention on such platforms. That sentiment has only become even more prevalent in daily life.

The Bandcamp version also contains 2 extras: the originally intended intro to the song (“rant”), and an excellent house remix from the producer BP dating back to 2014.

My bandcamp strategy for 2025

Bandcamp recently announced their Bandcamp Friday schedule for 2025. I’m honestly just happy this is still a thing at all; Songtradr (Bandcamp’s owner) could easily have shut it down after they laid off half the Bandcamp staff upon acquisition. But they seem to want to keep the goodwill of their artist community (thankfully), so we still get this nice thing — even if it’s not all year round.

As a reminder, Bandcamp Friday is a day on which Bandcamp waives its normally 15% revenue cut – instead, if someone buys your music or merch on a Bandcamp Friday, all the money (other than credit card fees, usually 3-4%) go to you, the artist. If you don’t want to read their blurb, here are the Bandcamp Friday dates worth remembering in 2025:

• February 7 (This is not technically a Bandcamp Friday, but they’re donating their revenue share to California wildfire relief, which is admirable and important)
  
• March 7
  
• May 2
  
• August 1
  
• September 5
  
• October 3
  
• December 5

My plan for Bandcamp Fridays

As I wrote last year, I (got lucky and) backed into a strategy that somewhat worked for me, combining:

• A backlog of music I could trickle out over the course of the year
  
• Intentionally-timed big releases lining up with Bandcamp Fridays
  
• Finding good causes to donate Bandcamp Friday proceeds
  
• Promoting all of this organically, almost entirely on Threads

I think I can largely repeat this in 2025, with a few tweaks.

Incorporate Bluesky & Reddit as promotional channels. I still have a decently large (for me) audience on Threads, but I also see the platform waning a bit as a place to cultivate community. The recent policy changes and the imminent introduction of ads feel icky but more importantly mean that Threads will become (to a degree) a place where the loudest and richest capture the most attention. Reddit still seems like a place for healthy discourse (I think?) and most of my music contacts have migrated to Bluesky.

Slow it down. I was releasing something every 2 weeks in 2024. This was really exciting and I think helped me amass my audience quickly, but it came at the expense of my exhaustion. And I suspect my small audience may have gotten tired of me a bit. I want to try releasing less frequently on Bandcamp, perhaps monthly, and focus most of my “promo” on this cadence. I’ll still release to streaming services, but I’ve found that almost no value has come from focusing my promo on the streaming releases (without paying for ads, which I have an aversion to for increasing reasons).

Milk my previous work. I released 3 full-length albums in 18 months. This was awesome but probably overkill and not a realistic pace to keep up. I have a few singles I may put out this year, but 2025 may be best suited for some companion releases building on those 3 albums in a new way.

• I put out an album of piano music last year, and I am keen to do more of these. This has been a great way to test an even shorter record-to-release timeframe (I can record solo piano music quite easily) and mix tons of different source material into a cohesive work.
  
• I also commissioned a compilation of covers of some of my songs made by indie artists I’ve met online. I loved the experience of making this, and I’m keen to do similar things projects again. The last one was covers — the next one will be an album of remixes.
  
• I had so much fun covering my buddies Death Waits, and I have a few ideas for covers of other artist friendlies of mine. This could make for either a few single releases or a covers EP – I’ve got options!

All of this allows me to have a consistent set of releases and not commit to a full-length album. I’m buying myself time.

Here’s what I’m thinking for 2025: Have something to release the first (or second) Friday of each month. Not everything warrants a Bandcamp release, but at least have something for the Bandcamp Fridays. Every other month can be for trickling out releases to streaming. Here’s a current sketch:

• Jan 10: “empty me” (death waits cover) single release
  
• Feb 7: “please please please listen to me I’m begging” single release
  
• Mar 7: the LP3 remix album
  
• Throughout March & April: trickle out LP3 remixes to the streaming services
  
• May 2: a new piano music collection
  
• May through July: trickle out piano music and outstanding remixes to the streaming services
  
• Aug 1: perhaps another cover single
  
• Sep 5: new original single
  
• Oct 3: some kind of EP release
  
• Throughout October and November: trickle out the EP to streaming
  
• Dec 5: holiday single???

I hope this inspires some ideas for you, fellow struggling independent musicians!