If you're a musician, starting your own Bandcamp is free and uploading your music is easy. Here's how to set up an artist account and how to upload your tracks.
- To upload music to Bandcamp, and start making money off of sales, you'll first have to create an artist account.
- You can create a free Bandcamp artist account via the website, or sign up for a premium Bandcamp Pro subscription with additional features.
- Enter your band or artist name, your genre, genre tags and location and set up your URL.
- Once created, you can go ahead and customize your site's design to add your personal touch to it. Add an artist image, write a concise bio, add a background image and a custom header.
Next, you'll be able to upload your songs to the website. You can upload a single song or an album of tracks. You can make your music available for free download, set a minimum price, or allow your friends and fans to pay whatever they want.
- When you’re logged in, you can visit your dashboard and choose whether you want to add an album or a track
- Add your track details
- Set a price
- Add more information about the track, lyrics and credits
- Upload the cover art
- Add tags, which will help people find your music
- Select what kind of licence your song is under. If you’re independent, select “All Rights Reserved”
- If registered, add the ISRC code for your track (you can find this in your Make Waves account)
- Add a release date
- Save draft and click “Publish”. Your song will then be published on your official Bandcamp page, for people to stream or download.
Next to uploading your digital music, you can also add and sell your merchandise items on your Bandcamp page. Merch actually makes up half the sales on the website and is growing quickly. The first time you add a merch item, you'll be asked to set your country and tax settings. You can then specify what sort of item it is (CD, vinyl, cassette, poster, T-shirt, tote bag, etc.), add a title, description, upload photos and set a price. Lastly, you can set the shipping options, specify the available quantities per item or size and you can include a track or album download with a merch item to increase sales of that item.
On a normal day, the majority of sales go directly to artists. Bandcamp takes 15% of digital sales and 10% of merch sales. But on the first Friday of every month (#bandcampfriday), 100% go to bands. Which is pretty big!
Find more tips and tricks in their Artist Guide, to get the most out of the platform.