Case study: Connecting between musicians and their fans - The right way

From one path to a variety of well-designed channels

For more than 5 decades the music industry has provided artists one path to reach and connect with their fans while trying to monetize their pre-recorded music. Until recently, artists had to sign a contract with a record label, transferring ownership of copyrights (some still are), relinquishing exclusive artistic control and giving up most of the revenue from sales of their own recordings.

Revenue generated by the music industry ($5B in 2016) follows the consumption behavior of music fans and the technological infrastructure through which they get and consume their favorite music. For the last 90 years, music fans listened to music in two ways: on AM/FM radio and/or buying pre-recorded music in a type of ‘format’ (vinyl, cassette, CD, MP3 etc).

In that world, if someone heard a great song that grabbed them, they would most often buy the entire album with that song on it and play it via a hardware device (i.e. turntable, cassette deck, Walkman, CD player, MP3 player etc).

So if you weren’t a preforming artist, fans could only buy or listen to your pre-recorded music using a physical form of technology, catch your song accidentally on the radio, or simply download it (illegally) via torrents and peer to peer vintage software such as Soulseek. Music labels were aware of their unique position / power and took full advantage of it by gauging both artists and music fans — a pure manipulation that seems to collapse in the past 10 years.

Tech evolution serves music fans perfectly

Current status: In the new digital music industry, the gatekeepers are gone and so is the abundance of obstacles (preventing artists from connecting directly to their fans) for artists and music fans.

With the launch of streaming services, the proliferation of broadband and high-speed Net access via ubiquitous devices — smart phones, tablets etc — the only remaining relevant piece of the old industry is AM / FM radio in my car which sounds pretty bad.

One of the strongest tools we have today, thanks to the crowd awareness delivered by UX designers & Developers (we love you guys!) is the ability to bridge between a well-defined user experience to an optimized performance layer below that delivers any desired look and feel (mmm..kinda). A better user experience will always lead to more conversations and to the evolution of some innovative ideas- already a known fact.

UX — The voice of reason that leads us to the expected organic interaction between musicians & their fans, offers new online musical spaces providing us the ability to share our creativity with others and get paid for it without any aggregator involved in the process.

One of the most ambitious and well-designed projects we have today is bandcamp.com — a service / music host that launched in Sep. 2008 as an innovative online music store.Availability was global from day one, and Bandcamp allowed you and I to record our music in our bedroom, upload it to bandcamp.com in no time (depending in your internet connection), and then easily sell it via Bandcamp’s platform — integrated with Paypal services.

This was not so different from buying shoes online from Zappos in 1999 but with one huge exception — users / fans could actually get to listen to the music before purchasing it, and not just purchasing it based on album covers.

A clear and direct business model

In Bandcamp, users can choose between keep on listening for free with streaming, adding an embedded player to their own blog / website, or simply downloading the music as mp3, flac, ogg, aac, m4a and more for a fee. Regarding any legal restrictions, Bandcamp opted to list all of the music under DRM — Digital Rights Management which covers current digital rights fairly. (link)

Meanwhile Bandcamp became a 9 year old monster with a huge catalogue and more than 6 million songs, countless LP albums, EP’s, lovely art all over and probably today’s top platform for artist promotion / distribution.

The business model is simple and honest — Bandcamp artists get a basic & customizable microsite containing all the material they’ve uploaded after joining the service for free. All tracks can be played for free on the website and more than 15% offer their music for a free. Bandcamp takes a 15% cut of the sales made from their website which drops to 10% after selling $5000 worth, which make sense.

Bandcamp is also available on mobile and can be considered the cross platform music label of today. The platform was redesigned a couple of times since the official launch in 2008 and became more attractive to both major and independent artists. Bandcamp’s design approach motivates people to discover via a single page website that contain a bit too much information, a clear and well-designed mobile app (iOS & Android), and a dedicated weekly radio show promoting Bancamp’s variety of artists with interesting selections from all the latest releases.

On top of that, Bandcamp is also giving registered fans their own space to support artists, add songs / albums to their wishlist, and present their individual taste. From a personal experience, following fans is actually making music discovery quit easy and rewarding, even without searching.

Bandcamp.com — one of the best examples of how to do it right using a decent approach that preserves what’s important to us all — the music. (link)

Written by Nimrod. M, Sr. UX Designer at Red Interactive, TLV, IL