freerange/jam-coop

EPIC - Label Support

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chrislo commented

A placeholder for the things we might need to do to support labels.

Feedback from a label

From: https://trello.com/c/ctBz9xK7

We're publishing releases in album format roughly every two months. I'm handling the digital distribution to dance music stores and the streaming services but Bandcamp became heart and soul of the label. Due to recent events I decided to find alternative, in case BC starts changing its policy and stops being what it once was. Your site looks very promising in my eyes.

I have found great success in Name Your Price model and each release yields a couple hundred dollars of profit on release month that I can pay to the artists. We're also pushing CD issues of every release and while the vinyl is the prefered medium for dnb fans, we managed to sell a couple hundred copies in total so far.

Here are a few things I find crucial and most helpful in running my small outlet. I hope you will find that helpful:

  • Merchandise - that's the most reliable source of income for my label and many other label owners I spoke to. Many of them thrive on small vinyl runs they can just put up very easily on BC. I think that's the most crucial feature you should polish as much as you can. A lot of the listeners don't care about digital goods and are only interested in paying for physical releases. I think that's the main reason behind Bandcamp's success and the thing other sites are missing so I'm happy that's one of the things on your todo list. PayPal integration would be really appreciated as I found that's smoothest way to receive and pay money (from listener and artist perspective).

  • Name your price - as I mentioned earlier, it's great way to gather followers and spread the music. A must have in my opinion.

  • Mailing list - another thing Bandcamp does really well is collecting emails that I can add to my own newsletter. The automatic email notifications about every release are invaluable.

  • Ability to buy tracks separately - from the perspective of someone into club music it's very important. Many DJs go through a lot of label catalogs and they purchase just one track from each release, so they got only music most fitting for their sets.

  • Stats and graphs - I really value the stats page that BC provides, especially the sources. I can directly see where the traffic comes from and this way I sometimes can even find out new places to promote my music. They keep some of the details behind BC Pro paywall which is the only downside I can think of. I'd love to have detailed breakdowns on visitors and exact URLs the were redirected from.

  • Detailed metadata - it would be great to have ability to fill in all the MP3/FLAC tags while uploading tracks so they get encoded directly into the downloaded files. The file naming is something Bandcamp struggles with, if each track lists different artist the track order is always wrong.

  • Gallery and artists bios - something like that would be really nice to have, a space where you can include a lot of text and some pictures so the listener can get more insight into who the artist is.

  • Good embeds - make sure the embedded links look professional and display the crucial info about the release on all the popular social media platforms. A HTML player which tracks song plays would be valuable addition.