Last Friday, Bandcamp – the music sales and streaming platform that I use for all my music distribution – donated all of their revenue share back to artists for 24 hours. This was an amazing gesture, resulting in several million pounds/euros/dollars ending up directly in the bank accounts of musicians struggling to pay bills and find ways to replace lost live income right now.
I released two new albums on Friday to celebrate – a public release of February’s subscriber only album, Better Living Through Technology, and the brand new (dis)order. Listen to both here, and click through if you’d like to buy them for just £2 each :
The feeding frenzy of sales was extraordinary, and ground the Bandcamp servers to a halt at various times through the day. Still, the headline stat for me is that when you add up all the new subscribers, sales of my entire catalogue and all the people who bought one or a few albums (at the new £2 price per album across my entire Bandcamp shop), I sold just under 900 albums Between Friday and Sunday. If those had been individual copies of the same album sold to separate buyers, that’d be enough to land me in the lower reaches of the UK album charts…!
So firstly, a massive THANK YOU to everyone who bought anything during the day, or even listened to it and decided it wasn’t for you – I’m grateful you took the time, and you found something else that was more to your liking elsewhere!
These are perilous times for musicians, and my decision to focus my release strategy around the community of listeners on Bandcamp 10 years ago has made me a fair bit more resilient to these changing economic times than my friends whose strategic success plan was for a viral hit on Spotify. I really hope they find it, but I’m insanely grateful for the compact community of curious and caring music lovers who sustain me via the Bandcamp subscription.
If you’d like to join us, please head to stevelawson.bandcamp.com/subscribe – the community aspect is going to be ramped up through this time of isolation with subscriber video hangs and some creativity inspiration videos. If that sounds good to you, go check out what’s on offer…
And if you’re looking for a new soundtrack to these uncertain times, please go check out my fan account on Bandcamp – I bought more music in the last 3 days than in perhaps any comparable period in my entire life (matched maybe by a trip across the US in 2004 when I ended up throwing away clothes so I could fit more CDs in my suitcase 🙂 ) – it’s all there. <3