Faircamp, self-hosted music store, now a self-hosted music feed?
Whoa, so Faircamp (the self-hosted Bandcamp alternative) now supports RSS feeds and podcasts.
Meaning, you can self host a podcast, or perhaps even a Patreon-style feed where patrons can get updates & new releases, with no platform fees. All for the cost of hosting (or free via something like GitHub or netlify) and some light coding.
A lot of these words probably are nonsense to music people, but this is very interesting to me. I have yet to set this up, but it’s as simple as:
- Organizing all your releases, plus any one-offs you might want to offer to folks as part of said feed, into folders
- Writing some .eno files (basically just text) with the metadata around each release
- Running a pretty simple Terminal command to generate the site
- Uploading it to a host (which could be totally free) with a bit of work)
- Periodically repeating this process for new releases for the feed, which feels like something that could be automated
This creates a Kid Lightbulbs music site, storefront, and RSS feed to alert folks whenever I release something new. This now makes it possible for fans to subscribe via RSS anytime I release something, or semi-automate email announcements (via my Buttondown newsletter) when I release something.
I can even create special download codes for stuff that is exclusive to patrons, and create simple Subscribe buttons in the storefront with a very small amount of text and light coding. This could complement, or even outright replace, the Bandcamp subscription – which has been nice, but has a lot of limitations and I lose ~20% of the recurring proceeds to platform fees.
This doesn’t feel very hard, and something I’d think my small fanbase would be into. Coding may sound scary to folks, but fortunately there are some good writeups online from folks walking through how to set it all up. Plus, Faircamp looks very nice and clean out of the box — here’s an example:
I’m going to try and set this up when I have time.
