This week on The Music Rookie Podcast, Rachel has a conversation with J. Edward Keyes who is the Editorial Director for BandCamp.
They discuss the benefits of using Bandcamp as a direct to consumer platform for musicians. With their editorial arm, BandCamp Daily, and their plethora of artist’s tools, the independent platform gives their users unique ways to connect with fans and allows them to actually make money from their art. We highlight all of the special features that users sometimes overlook. Plus, Jedward gives away a way to pitch Bandcamp’s editors that not many users know about.
TRANSCRIPT
Music Rookie with J. Edward Keyes
Rachel: [00:00:00] So we’ve talked over email several times, but this is my first time seeing you face to face.
And I don’t really know how you came about working with Bandcamp. So do you want
to tell that story?
Jedward: [00:00:10] Yeah, sure. So I had been a freelance music journalist for a long time. Did zines, really got my start interning for the Philadelphia Weekly and then one thing led to another.
But so to speed up, I had launched a site in 2014 called Wondering Sound, which was short lived. And when that fell through, I was looking for my next opportunity. And around the same time Bandcamp had posted an ad that they were looking for someone to head up editorial. So I thought, man, I love Bandcamp,
I bought tons of music from Bandcamp, and it was similar to things I had done before. I used to work in the editorial department of a site called E Music and headed up the editorial there for a while too. So when I saw the Bandcamp posting, I thought, “Yeah, this seems like a dream job.” And just went through, several rounds of interviews and it all worked out and I’ve been here for five years now and just delighted every single day.
Rachel: [00:01:02] You Have an independent store for musicians where they can upload their own music, they can sell merchandise.
You can pre-order and then you have a editorial page.
Jedward: [00:01:15] We’re a platform where artists all over the world can connect directly with fans and sell directly to them.
And Bandcamp Daily is basically Bandcamp’s publication. And we publish about four pieces every single day. And our mission statement for The Daily is to shine a light on the artists all over the world who are using Bandcamp as a way to connect with fans. So when we launched in June of 2016, that was our mission statement from the beginning and everything we do goes back to that.
Rachel: [00:01:41] And I know from working with a lot of journalists, they really love working with Bandcamp you make a profit off, a small amount off, any music sales that Bandcamp does. And then you’re able to fund your editorial side that way, instead of having to do a bunch of advertising.
And worry about clicks, right?
Jedward: [00:02:00] We definitely have the freedom to write about whatever we want to write about.
That said like any publication, we’re paying attention to what our readers like to read about. And we’re not just, flying blind. We do check in and see how stories do, whether it’s in terms of page views or followers for that artist or sales for that artist. Because we do want to be able to keep delivering the kinds of stories that people who read The Daily want to read about.
So those sorts of metrics do figure in that way and just guiding the overall direction of the site. But the great thing for us is that, there’s no onus on us to just keep chasing whatever the popular trend is, we can discover things that we like on our own and in turn our readers onto them as well.
And a lot of our most popular stories that come about that way, it’s just an album that someone on the team found on the site or that one of our freelancers found on the site and pitched as a story and it turned into a hugely successful piece and also was like a piece of learning for us that, “Oh, wow.
There’s people out there who love this stuff.” The one kind of baseline. For everything we publish. If you see a story on Bandcamp Daily, at least one person on the editorial staff loves that and will go to the mat for it. And that sounds like a minor distinction, but we see every piece that we do as a kind of endorsement, and we never put something out in front of people, if no one on the staff believes in it or likes it.
So that’s the baseline for what we do. Usually it’s more than one person, but one person has to really believe in it and actually like the music in order for us to do a story there.
Rachel: [00:03:30] You are looking at page views of editorial stories that you put out. What kind of analytics are you looking at with the people that have their music on the site?
Does that bubble up anywhere where you see, this album’s going off the charts, a lot of people are buying this. How does that work?
Jedward: [00:03:48] Yeah, we do have ways that we can see, who’s doing well in pre-orders. Anybody can even just see if they go to the Bandcamp homepage and go to the “Discover” section.
You can sort by “Best Selling” and you can just see right there in any genre who’s selling well. So in fact, this afternoon, I had finished up doing some editing and knew I had a little bit of time, just a little bit of time to kill before we talked. And so, a fun thing for me to do is I just scan through best-selling and new arrivals.
I just click out on things that look interesting to me and we discover things that way. We do have the metrics and the ability to see what’s selling well, but it does come down to: we think this is also interesting music or an interesting story, and that there’s something here that we want to share with other people.
Rachel: [00:04:26] I actually was talking to a client earlier this month and advising him that he should put his album on Bandcamp. And he did have this question, “Do you think that looks unprofessional? If I’m just selling it myself?” But I think a lot of labels these days are using Bandcamp too.
Jedward: [00:04:42] Radiohead put an album out on Bandcamp, and Trent Reznor has been putting his stuff up on Bandcamp, and we have the new albums by St. Vincent is on Bandcamp. Sub Pop and all of their artists are on Bandcamp.
Rachel: [00:04:53] I think that the reason why this did come up and I’d told him, I would bring this up to you, is that it was a country artist.
And so he hasn’t seen very many country artists with their music on Bandcamp. So is that something that’s maybe a little bit it’s more indie rock and maybe hip hop and like you’re not getting as much like the countryside.
Jedward: [00:05:12] The New West label is on Bandcamp. Jason Isbell is on Bandcamp and does phenomenally well. Sturgill Simpson is on Bandcamp.
Bloodshot Records is on Bandcamp. There’s definitely plenty of country artists use the site. And even, semi underground ones. There’s an artist named Brianna Barbara –she’s not strictly country– who I really love. There was an artist named Ruby Force country artist who put her album on the site a couple of years ago.
I thought that was phenomenal. So they’re definitely there. That was important to us when we watch The Daily, we wanted to make sure, and we really strive for this. And hopefully if you go to daily.bandcamp.com and check it out, you’ll see that the stories that we cover, we try not to keep them in anyone, stylistic wheelhouse.
So you’ll have a story about a dance hall artist next to a story on indie rock artist next to a story on a free jazz combo. That is really to showcase all the different kinds of music that are available on the site.
Rachel: [00:06:01] Is that something that you’re talking about in editorial meetings?
Oh, there’s too many indie rock bands this week, or there’s not enough jazz or blues or country or whatever it is.
Jedward: [00:06:10] Definitely said that. Having a balanced editorial schedule is really important.
Every Thursday we have a senior editors meeting, where myself and the two senior editors, Jes Skolnick and Mariana Timoney go through the calendar for the remainder of the few weeks and try to look and make sure that we’re staying balanced. And if we notice, oh man, this week’s like a little guitar heavy, or this week’s a little jazz heavy or something.
We’ll move features around to balance it out a little bit more. So we’re putting an eye to that weekly. And then the entire editorial staff meets twice weekly. We meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and that’s when we spend time reviewing all the pitches that we’ve gotten from freelancers.
And also talking about albums that we’ve discovered on the site or albums that we’ve heard about coming down the line and talk about how we want to cover those as well.
Rachel: [00:06:52] And I know you guys kind of book up pretty early. You book way out because you have a full schedule, and you have people releasing records and I’m sure everybody’s beating down your door to get coverage. What kind of stories are you guys looking for?
Jedward: [00:07:06] The ones that always do really well with our readers are the scene reports that we do. And those are focused on emerging scenes all over the world, whether it’s screamo in the Philippines or Norwegian jazz. I actually have a waiting on a piece right now on the jazz scene in St. Petersburg, Russia. We did a great scene on Latin American electronic music. So those are the ones that our readers tend to love because a lot of our readers are US-based, and they don’t have that kind of entryway into what’s going on in Uruguay or something like that.
And if we can deliver to them, a scene report with some great artists in it, that’s more for them to discover. So those always do phenomenally well for us
A lot of these come from writers who live in those parts of the world. We have a writer named Carl Dixon, who lives in Bangkok, and he’ll just email me out of the blue and say, “Hey, there’s a lot of great rock bands forming here right now, and some clubs opening up and it would be a really good time to drop in and check out the Bangkok rock scene.”
What we have to do in that case is interview a bunch of people who were involved in the scene, not just musicians, bookers journalists, promoters, and open the piece with scene setting on getting the voices of people who actually live there to comment on what’s happening in the city
at that moment, time. That’s especially important if the writer who is writing about the scene, doesn’t live there. We don’t want our writers projecting their views. We want the voices of the people who actually live there and who are part of it to come out. So that’s something we always emphasize in the intro.
And the remainder of the piece is just a roundup of seven to eight bands presented in a list who are either some of the most buzzed about, or honestly that the writer just likes and thinks are interesting with a short little profile of each of those as well. You can drop in.
You can learn a little bit about the history of the scene and then find out some of the bands who are making it happen. We just did a piece on ambient musicians in Argentina. And the root of that actually began in the nineties with these traded CDRs of super lo-fi underground ambient stuff. And the people who are making it now were influenced by having these CDRs passed around to them way pre-internet and then Myspace and et cetera, et cetera.
So it’s an example of a scene that has built over the course of 30 years, step by step. And so we took a look at the history of that.
Rachel: [00:09:21] So you started off by saying what your readers like, so who would you say your reader is?
Jedward: [00:09:26] I think our reader is somebody who is curious to discover something new.
That sounds really broad. People who read The Daily, they’re the kind of person who already knows about big indie releases. They come to us because they want to know what’s below the surface, and they want to dig a little deeper and they want to get turned on to something new.
And I think that transcends any age demographic or anything like that. Just based on some of the pieces that we’ve seen that have been really popular. One of the biggest pieces that we did over the last year was a guide to the prog rock sub-genre Zul. That piece did tremendous.
And that’s the kind of thing where it’s a niche that many people aren’t familiar with, but our readers are the ones who want to know more about that. Nobody should be intimidated by being confronted with new music. They more have an open mind. This is cool. I don’t know anything about this, and I want to learn more about this.
Rachel: [00:10:16] I started a music blog. That was my entryway into the music business in 2004. And so I was part of that Gorilla vs Bear, Stereogum, Muzzle of Bees scene, highlighting artists that didn’t get that mainstream coverage.
And then as a lot of those blogs grew, and if the ones that stayed around, I’m starting to look to make a little bit of a coin for their work, which is perfectly fine. Now they do cover a lot bigger artists and the smaller artists, it is harder for them to get any traction. And it seems like that’s your mission statement?
Jedward: [00:10:51] Yeah. One of the things that we do and another feature that does really well is because we do have a lot of really popular artists on the site, but we will try to cover them in a way that provides a path to discovering new things. So here’s an example, all of Wilco’s records are on Bandcamp, and we know that Jeff Tweedy is a huge fan of the site, but instead of doing an umpteenth feature on Wilco, what we did is, we got Jeff Tweedy on the phone and just had him pick his six favorite records on Bandcamp and talk about those. And that’s a feature that we do called Big Ups. So we do pick higher profile artists for that, but we’ll use it as a way to talk about their new record for a bit, but then have them guide people to newer albums on the site.
Rachel: [00:11:31] Like Amoeba Records “What’s in Your Bag?”
Jedward: [00:11:34] Exactly the same philosophy.
Rachel: [00:11:36] I tell every single one of my clients, at the beginning of the campaign, go ahead and put your album on Bandcamp, and you can sell merch on it, and you sell your vinyl records, you can use it as your pre-sell link, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I know that, different musicians have a different level of using technology. So, are there any tools that BandCamp provides that are underused?
Jedward: [00:11:58] I don’t know that it’s underused, but probably the best tool that we provide is the app called Bandcamp for Artists?
Get that from the app store. We have the regular Bandcamp Fan app, which is where you listen to music, but then we have Bandcamp for Artists. It gives you all of the features on your dashboard in a super easy user-friendly mobile setup. You can send messages to fans; you can track your players and play counts.
You can track new followers. You can even mark packages as shipped from there. All the different features that Bandcamp has available is all available in the app and you can do really easily. You can send customized messages. I think we’d all like to believe that there will be live music coming back into our lives soon.
So let’s use that as an example. Let’s say you’re playing a live show. You can message people within five miles of where you’re playing and say, “Hey, I’m going to be here on this night. Show up here early, and we’ll do a meet and greet, or I’ll sign something for you, blah, blah, blah, blah.” If you want to give a special award to people who have
bought over X amount of dollars of your merch. You can send out a special message and just customize it to those people and say, hey, thanks so much for supporting me over the last few years, because you’ve been such a great supporter, here’s a code for 20% off your next purchase. So there’s all sorts of ways to interact with your fans there and also just keep track and see how your plays and stats and sales are doing.
Rachel: [00:13:20] You guys don’t have a subscription service, do you?
Jedward: [00:13:22] We do.
Rachel: [00:13:23] Oh, you do? Oh yeah.
Jedward: [00:13:24] Yeah. So, artists can launch a subscription service and they can provide exclusive content to people who pay them every month to get in. So a cool one was Bang on a Can has a subscription service (the classical ensemble) and you can pay every month to them, but what you also get that everybody else doesn’t get is they’ve been uploading years and years of video from the Bang on a Can Festival that hasn’t been seen by anybody else.
And so subscribers get exclusive access to this video that they can watch. We’ve seen people use it to do video premiers early just to their fans and subscribers before they put it out in the world. It’s like a nice way to reward them. We had a band several years ago do an album that way, where subscribers got to hear all the tracks early and help contribute track order and stuff.
So, it’s a good way to give incentives to people who subscribe. I subscribe to a black metal label called Depressive Illusions, and it’s six bucks a month, and I just get all their albums in my collection every month, as soon as they release them. I know that I like what they do, and I want them to keep doing it. So rather than keep on top of it, I just pay them six bucks a month, and every month they’re new batch of record shows up there. So that’s how the subscription service
works.
Rachel: [00:14:38] So would you say it’s like a good replacement for a Patreon?
Jedward: [00:14:41] I don’t know if I want to use the word replacement. I would say that it’s a good way to give something special to your closest fans and to the people who want to make sure that you keep doing what you’re doing. It’s a good way to reward them for that. Folks could even do special merch if they have a big subscriber base just offer to those people special piece of merch that other folks can’t get. It’s more in that lane.
Rachel: [00:15:02] Besides the subscription service, what are the benefits of using BandCamp over just selling in your own store, on your own website?
Jedward: [00:15:11] The biggest benefit is that connectivity with your fans in a really real, and a genuine, tactile way.
They can message you and respond to you. We had someone who was going to do like an AMA style thing. The connection just feels a lot more personal in that way.
Cause you’re getting messages in your inbox back and forth and you can reply. We just launched the live streaming feature for artists. Artists can live stream concerts via their Bandcamp page, charge whatever they want for the duration of COVID, Bandcamp’s not taking any money from the shows at all. The full ticket price, less PayPal fees, goes to the artist. On that live stream page, the artists can also pick eight pieces of merch. So, it’s, as close to a real show as any of us can get right now. So, you can put your t-shirt out there. You can put your new album. If you want, when somebody buys a ticket, you can bundle your new album in with it.
So, a lot of people have been taking advantage of that. Oceanator just announced one, Georgia Anne Muldrow was doing one. We had The Beths do one of the first ones. That’s another feature that we have. And then we also have the vinyl crowdfunding feature where artists can use BandCamp to rally their fans and press a forthcoming record or an old archival record on vinyl and the different tiers there. It’s just, all these ways are ultimately designed to reinforce that connection between artists and fans and also, fans pledging to vinyl, they feel like they’re a real active part of bringing this record into the world.
Rachel: [00:16:33] Yeah. That’s a lot of stuff that I didn’t know you guys were doing.
That’s a lot of really cool stuff that I don’t think everybody knows about .
Jedward: [00:16:40] Yeah, Talking about a live show, just go to the homepage BandCamp.com and just scroll down and you’ll see a list of upcoming shows, and you can click from there to a list of even more upcoming live shows,
if you want to get a better look at the live streaming feature.
Rachel: [00:16:53] That’s very cool.
What’s the one thing that musicians on Bandcamp should do that they probably aren’t doing, and it’s probably one of these newer features that they haven’t really latched on yet.
Jedward: [00:17:03] Definitely. Those would definitely be things to take advantage of. Leveraging community base and fan base. The more followers you build up on Bandcamp –and you can get them via Instagram, social media, all the usual channels — it translates more directly into sales when people were following you on Bandcamp, ’cause they see when you put new things up. Have a really nicely designed page.
Artists who have merch for sale– and a lot of people translate merch as vinyl. It doesn’t. T-shirts, we’ve seen people put up decks of tarot cards. We’ve seen people put up custom candles, whatever. Artists who sell merch do better on the whole and see an increase in sales. Anything you can do to make your Bandcamp page your home.
We also have the community tab too, which we just launched on the artist side. Artists can use the community tab to post a question to all the people who follow them, and that can create some cool interaction. Chad, from The Beauty Pill does that a lot, and he’s got a really active fan base, and he’ll just throw out thoughts and missives to their community page, and you can see fans responding and interacting with him and interacting with each other.
The more you can do to engage with your fan base, that’s another opportunity to use the messaging app, to say, bring in three more fans and get X discount. There are all sorts of ways that you can play it to your advantage.
But the more you can put on the page, the better you can make it look, is generally steps in the right direction.
Rachel: [00:18:24] So, if you are trying to push your followers to Bandcamp, to follow you there so that you can message them, which could almost be like a monthly newsletter, right? Whatever’s going on.
Do you get those email addresses or is it just within the system?
Jedward: [00:18:39] Anybody who buys something from you, you get all their information so that you can contact them directly, especially if somebody is buying physical merch from you. You’ll get whatever email address is associated with there.
Rachel: [00:18:49] But what if they just follow you?
Jedward: [00:18:51] I don’t think you get their direct email address, but you can message them through the Bandcamp app.
Rachel: [00:18:57] I’m just thinking about all the different things that you could give up. If you could just have that one stop shop, here’s what I’m selling my stuff. I’m live streaming my stuff. I’m sending out a monthly email or newsletter.
I’m crowdfunding. Instead of using five different tools.
Jedward: [00:19:12] And that’s the dream on our end is just to make everything as easy as possible for artists. Artists are busy being artists. They’re creating, they’re writing songs, and let alone having to manage a bunch of different things.
We want to give them all the tools they need in one easy place to connect with people and make money for their work.
Rachel: [00:19:32] It’s almost like the perfect place for people who hate social media. Because you don’t have to make posts.
You don’t have to do that engagement stuff. I have clients I hate doing that, and it just makes their social media profiles just look dead. But if you could get the other benefits through Bandcamp that you would normally get from being on social media, it seems like it would be a good switch up.
Jedward: [00:19:56] The vibe is definitely different than the social media vibe. It’s more designed to feel more intimate and more personal. And clubhouse is too small. The people who are there following you on Bandcamp already love your music. And many of them have already paid for it.
So, you don’t have to do attention grabby stunts, you can just talk to them directly. And those are the ones that we find people respond to the most.
Rachel: [00:20:20] How do you get people to your Bandcamp if you’re not using social media to promote your Bandcamp?
Jedward: [00:20:25] It is a bit of chicken and egg. You do have to do some of that, but another way to let us know about your music, just Google contact Bandcamp Daily, and it’ll come up in the search result.
We have an open form where anyone can send us in a link to their music on Bandcamp and guaranteed, if you fill out that form, one of the five editors of Bandcamp Daily is going to listen to it, and consider it, and try to find editorial placement for it. And we just ran two stories recently came out of cold pitches to that contact form. One was on this guy Hailen Jackson who made an album by hooking up bio- transmitters to his plants and they made this lovely ambient music. The other artist’s name I’m blanking on because it was so long ago, but we put her in a feature that we do called The Shortlist.
So we do listen to that.
Rachel: [00:21:15] How many pitches a day are you getting through that contact form?
Jedward: [00:21:18] There’s two ways to answer the question. It used to not be split up between the five editors. And then it was insane. But now it’s split up between the five editors and just through that contact form, and this is people who are like unsigned each of the five of us get 25 a week, times five.
That’s obviously on top of the direct emails that we get from labels and publicists and et cetera, et cetera, and that is in the hundreds every day. But just through this form, it’s manageable. Yeah, they’re going to be heard. Yeah.
Rachel: [00:21:50] How many people are uploading music a day onto Bandcamp?
Jedward: [00:21:54] It’s so many that we actually don’t have a stat for it. We’re not being coy. We just don’t know. This is so many. I heard a number bandied about a couple of years ago, but it was like conjecture because we just don’t really have a way to track it.
Rachel: [00:22:07] So I heard once about how there’s 40,000 songs a day that go on Spotify. It made me think about how it dilutes the whole thing. It really makes it harder to find what you like, because there’s so much stuff being uploaded and through YouTube and everything. So are there any ways that you guys try to manage the dilution of so much music being uploaded to Bandcamp?
Jedward: [00:22:37] Yeah. A lot of it is just digging. We don’t do trade-offs for stories or anything like that. It’s all purely organic. So, we’re just digging and tag hopping. We have a feature that we run every month called Bandcamp Navigator, where the writer just starts with an album and on the bottom of all the Bandcamp pages, there are tags that you can click on.
So start there, click on an interesting tag, and see what album that takes them to, and so on and so forth. I’ll do that, just click around experimental, electronic and see what’s new and what’s, best-selling there. Writers obviously send us things. We all have labels that we love and develop strong relationships with, and they’ll give us early heads up on what they have coming down the line.
So it’s really just a combo of digging and then having those label and artist relationships and then through the contact form. So, it’s not really any one approach. It’s just constantly searching.
Rachel: [00:23:25] Sounds like it’s almost a replacement for a vinyl record digging.
Jedward: [00:23:30] It’s got the same vibe.
Rachel: [00:23:32] Used to go to the record store and just like tool around, look through all the CDs, look through all the vinyl, until you just saw something, and you’re like, ah, and then you didn’t even know what it sounded like, but at least with you guys, you can listen to it.
Jedward: [00:23:44] Yeah. The vibe is very similar. We’re talking about this through this lens because I run The Daily, but Bandcamp in general is just designed to be that way. Even if you don’t ever look at Bandcamp Daily, if you go to the homepage and go to that discover section, five clicks from now, you’ll be on an album that you didn’t even know existed.
And wasn’t even in the style of music you were looking for but is awesome.
Rachel: [00:24:05] If you upload an album and then just forget about it and no one ever purchases it, no one ever clicks on it, no one ever goes, does it just stay there forever?
Jedward: [00:24:16] Yeah, we don’t take it down unless, they take it down.
Unless we discover it’s got objectionable content.
Rachel: [00:24:21] Is there anything else that I didn’t cover that you think is interesting or we should talk about?
Jedward: [00:24:27] The other things that I would shout out is that we also have three radio shows. So every Tuesday, we have the Bandcamp Weekly, which is hosted by Andrew Jervis. And that’s a great selection of music from all of the world.
And then on Fridays we have two shows and they run on alternating Fridays. We have a metal show and a hip hop show. The metal show is hosted by Brad Sanders and the hip hop show is hosted by Stoney Creation. Maybe you don’t want to read an 800-word article on Bandcamp Daily.
You just want to listen to a radio show while you work. There’s another opportunity to discover great stuff and all the shows have interviews with artists. So, if that’s more your preferred method of discovery, we have that as well.
It’ll be at the top homepage carousel. There’s a play button. And next month we’re doing our second annual Juneteenth fundraiser. We haven’t announced who the beneficiary of that is going to be yet, but it’s our annual fundraiser to put our money towards businesses and causes owned by people of color.
So we’ll be making more announcements of that coming soon, but that’ll be in June.
Rachel: [00:25:22] Those radio shows, they’re not live. They’re on demand.
Jedward: [00:25:26] Yeah. They’re more like podcasts.
Rachel: [00:25:29] You’ve taught me a lot today. I thought I knew a lot, but I’m going to go back to my clients and tell them, there’s a bunch of stuff that I know you’re not doing that you could be doing and you need to check it out, so thank you so much for taking the time.
Jedward: [00:25:40] Glad to hear it. Hey, thanks for asking. I love talking about this stuff. So, thanks for thinking of us.
