A Month of Bandcamp’s ‘Pay-What-You-Want’
If free is a legal option, will people still pay for music downloads?
I moonlight as a musician. It’s not my day job, but it’s something I’ve been doing for the better part of 20 years now, and I’m enjoying it immensely. One of the projects I was hired to work on lately was Catzilla,a different kind of PC benchmark software, featuring a giant monster cat with laser eyes tearing up a city, all in the name of measuring how fast your PC and graphics card are.
Yeah, you heard me: giant laser monster cat.
When the teaser video was posted on YouTube, it started attracting quite a bit of attention and I got the idea to actually finish up a proper EP release of the music for it, featuring remixes and all kinds of good stuff.
After the music and mixes were all done, I started looking for options outside of the traditional iTunes and Spotify distribution. Much has already been written about the pros and cons of these services (from the perspective of artists), so I won’t go into details other than to say that streaming services do not pay the bills. So there.
One of the services I looked at was Bandcamp, which featured something I had never seen before: the ability to set the price of a release to 0 (zero, nada, nil) but with the option to pay more. In short: people could choose to pay for it if they wanted, but also just download it directly if they didn’t.
I was intrigued.
Could it be that offering up my music for free was enough of an incentive for people to actually pay for it? It was time to find out. I uploaded all of my material, set up the release data and sat back and looked at the numbers coming in.
What follows is the collected stats from the first month of traffic on the Catzilla EP on the self-hosting music service Bandcamp, and some of my observations and musings on the subject:
- 4244 hits on the download page
- 3886 streaming plays on the same page
- (+ 2165 plays from the embedded player, mostly from piracy sites, unfortunately)
- 211 downloads
- 29 purchases
- 86.68 USD in revenue (before 15% in fees to Bandcamp)
- 220 e-mail addresses collected (from both free and paid downloads)
- Roughly every 7th person who downloaded the EP, also paid something for it
- The average price they paid was ~2.99 USD
- ..or ~0.99 USD per track, if viewed that way (because individual track download was disabled on this release)
0.99 USD per track is identical to the price iTunes charges customers, which indicates that people have established a certain standard value for downloadable music.
This also means that even with all those unpaid downloads, each EP download on average still generated ~0.41 USD in revenue, because the paid downloads make up for the unpaid ones.
Considering that after the fees on iTunes, each 2.97 USD sale (the full EP price) generates ~2.08 USD in revenue, I’m happy with these figures. Of course, I do wish for more traffic on the site, as increased traffic directly correlates to increased revenue.
Nobody is getting rich off of these numbers, but it’s encouraging to see that things are indeed not as bleak in the digital music download-world as some seem to paint it.
When you can give away your music for free and still make an average income of roughly half of what being on iTunes would generate, the pay-what-you-want model has a right to live and prosper.
In addition to numbers above, I also wanted to mention that the highest price someone paid for the EP was 10 USD, and the lowest was 0.5 USD. Clearly, some have more money/appreciation, and some have less. Even with the large gap in what people choose to pay, I am very happy for every single paid download, as it serves as validation for what I do and how people perceive it.
I hope this has been an interesting bit of trivia for anyone looking at Bandcamp and their ‘Pay-What-You-Want’-model as an alternative to iTunes, Spotify etc.
Note: this should not be seen as empirical evidence of what this payment model can and cannot offer. This release, and my music in general, certainly does not appeal to everyone, and there are indeed different usage patterns for payment and compensation related to various age and cultural groups. For all I know, gamers and EDM-fans pay way more or way less for music.
I’ve added two related articles under “Further Reading” — one argues against my point, the other shares my view.
