Bandcamp Launches Artist Subscriptions

For many artists, having their fans subscribe to a monthly subscription is the way to go. That way the artist gets a fairly predictable income, while the fan gets exclusive content and first dibs on wide release content as well.

The infrastructure for putting that together can be a lot more daunting than an artist wants to deal with however, so platforms like Patreon have sprung up to make it easier. Now the widely use artist utility Bandcamp has launched it's own subscription service.

When this feature was originally announced more than a year ago, I wrote a blog post about why I didn't think it would work. It's certainly not for every artist and the post explains why.

That said, Bandcamp makes it fairly easy to incorporate a subscription into your BC site, as well as set the subscription price and tiers. It also makes it easy for the subscriber to receive newly released material as well.

Bandcamp charges a 15% commission plus a 2.9% processing fee, while Patreon only charges 5% plus a processing fee, which is something that every artist wishing to use the feature has to take into account.

Here's a video that describes the feature in detail.

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