Re: New Bandcamp page / Upcoming Release

[Mark Hamburg <mark@grubmah.com>]

On Mar 26, 2013, at 11:36 AM, Matt Davignon wrote:

> So far, the deal seems pretty good. You set your own prices. The site 
> takes 15% of digital sales and 10% of physical media sales. The rest 
> goes to the artist. (Compare this to iTunes, where the artist gets about 
> $1 out of a $6 download.) The artist portions go directly to your paypal 
> account. Rather than take 10-15% of each sale, they set it up so that 
> most sales go 100% to the artist, but 1/10 of the sales will go 100% to 
> bandcamp.

Ancient (2006) numbers, but the breakdown on iTunes used to be:

"Currently, for a 99-cent song, 72 cents goes to the label, and 8 cents to 
the publisher, leaving Apple's per-song profit margin at 19 cents per 
song, he said."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/03/AR2006030301852.html

So, yes, Bandcamp is better for artists.

In Apple's defense, they aren't there to serve musicians. They are there 
to serve the people buying music and their focus is on making that process 
work well. Bandcamp becomes yet one more place to entrust with your credit 
card number. I suspect that Tower Records, when it existed, got a similar 
cut. So, if it were just about the distributor cut, what Apple would 
essentially be offering is a better, broader distribution channel (more 
potential sales) but with a higher margin.

On the other hand, that still leaves the musician figuring out how much of 
the remaining 80% he or she can get. Apple hasn't set themselves up to 
deal with independent musicians so the musician is left with record labels 
serving as middle men.

Mark