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:

1. Organizing all your releases, plus any one-offs you might want to offer to folks as part of said feed, into folders
   
2. Writing some .eno files (basically just text) with the metadata around each release
   
3. Running a pretty simple Terminal command to generate the site
   
4. Uploading it to a host (which could be totally free) with a bit of work)
   
5. 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.

Habit reversion

I want to publicly apologize to my REMIXED CASTLE collaborators because I’ve been terrible about promoting their wonderful remixes of my stuff.

Life has gotten chaotic again - work is great but busy, kid is not sleeping well again, house requires maintenance, world is highly unpredictable, etc etc etc which leaves little time for this project lately. And when I have that time, I gravitate naturally to the thing I like doing the most: writing and/or mindlessly meandering the piano.

This means that I’ve depiroritized (1) work promoting the material & channels I have to promote (outside of random stuff I post here) and (2) rehearsing for some kind of live set. These are arguably the two most important things I could be doing to build an audience, but I find myself wanting to compose. With limited time that’s all I end up doing. I’m conflicted because I know this limits me, but I think it’s ok if I’m ok with it?

Related: maybe I just need to livestream this stuff?

Rethinking the Bandcamp subscription

I have this Bandcamp subscription scheme set up & I haven’t done much to make it valuable, outside of a way to basically bulk-purchase my entire discography (+ a little merch discount). I also continue to be underwhelmed by playing the streaming game, and would rather be investing in the tiny but amazing audience I do have.

I still have some backlogged music, works in progress, etc just sitting there, and a bunch of other ideas sitting in my head. And it’s one thing to share it on social platforms, but I keep feeling like stuff gets lost in the algorithms.

And so I’m going to try something new! 🤪

I am going to begin releasing some music way in advance to subscribers on my Bandcamp. The first of these is going to be a possibly-finished-but-not-sure-yet EP, which I was planning to release this summer. Subscribers will be able to hear a version of this today.

Alongside this, I’m lowering the barrier to entry - $3/month for to all my EP/single releases and this bonus work-in-progress, plus more regular updates from me. For $10/month you also get all my albums for free, I’ll send you a t-shirt of your choice (I have some more ideas here), and I’ll invite you to my very quiet discord server where we can shoot the breeze about anything we might find interesting.

This may be a total nothing failure experiment, but it’s worth trying something rather than nothing. Subscribe today: kidlightbulbs.bandcamp.com/subscribe

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.