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 lucas green (@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 😜
