Bandcamp alternatives you can try soon, or even right now!
An overview of the market, and what's coming up in the aftermath of Bandcamp acquisition by Songtradr
There are some music download (and streaming too) platforms that came about after Bandcamp was sold to Epic Games in 2022 and then to Songtradr in 2023. A lot of people online were very quick to announce that Bandcamp is done, but nothing really changed with the platform since then, if anything, after a round of layoffs, it has improved a little, and it’s business as usual.
Of course a whole bunch of entrepreneurial people saw this as an opportunity to start their own “bandcamp alternatives” in hopes to be the one to fill the void when bandcamp is actually gone, and win big. Although in my opinion, there are no indications that this might happen any time soon. However, I’m going to list the bandcamp alternatives that I’m aware of. Most of them offer better deals to artists and labels than bandcamp can, but what they can’t offer is the most important element of all — the audience that will pay to hear your music. Until they manage to gather a big enough user base, they’re not really a competitor to bandcamp. Anyway, time to end this rant and see what we’ve got!
Unlike bandcamp, artcore.com targets specifically electronic dance music fans, producers and labels. It’s kind of like something between bandcamp and beatport. It has a player where you can adjust the pitch of the track, it displays the bpm and claims that you can keep up to 93% of the revenue (with bandcamp it’s around 80%). Navigating around the site as a regular user is good and easy enough, although could be less cluttered and cleaner. However music uploading process and other management still needs a lot of improvement. In this particular area, bandcamp wins without a doubt. In my opinion artcore.com was launched before it was ready to replace another platform, without proper beta testing, user feedback etc. And I find it slightly frustrating that some improvements are taking a very long time, although that’s probably because the platform is understaffed.
This one is brilliant in my opinion. I discovered it through Scuba’s podcast called “Music not Diving with Scuba”. Somewhat clean, minimalist design, that will need improvement if they were to compete with bandcamp, but it’s not bad. What they offer really needs to be highlighted here, because with ac55id.com you keep a 100% of the revenue, and if that’s not amazing enough, you get paid 0.01$ for every stream! Only imagine if bandcamp had that! That’s better than the latter, Spotify or anything else that exists out there. But of course, they need to make money too, so there’s a flat monthly fee — 10$ for an artist account, and 19$ for a label account. If you don’t expect to cover the fee with the sales/streams you will generate on the platform, then maybe you should think twice, because remember, they don’t have what bandcamp has, which is the users who want to buy the music. I didn’t try to create an account and see how that works, so I can’t tell anything about that.
A collectively owned platform, which will have thousands of co-owners all around the world. Still in the works. Can’t say whether this is going to be worth your attention or not. They released a physical, limited edition zine, not only to make a statement, but also to raise money for the development of the platform. I didn’t read the entire thing, but it seemed like a manifesto also. I’ve sort of joined, they have a forum for all the co-op members, unfortunately I don’t have time to spend time there and follow the whole development of the platform and the community, but in my opinion, they’re a bit behind, moving too slow, although they claim that it should be launched this year. Honestly I don’t know if I even believe in its future. They’ve posted some screenshots of what’s being built (https://subvert.fm/blog/platform-preview-album-page-checkout/), I appreciate the simplicity, ease of navigation, but I didn’t see anything really impressive there, actually the visual look is kind of dull and uninspiring. Maybe because it’s presented in all gray.
If there is a platform that you should try despite bandcamp still dominating, it’s this one. However, it’s not launched yet, but if you go to their X page (https://x.com/tonedotaudio/media) and check the demo videos of what they’re working on, you can see that it a has it’s own look, everything seems to be on a professional level and they know what they’re doing. There’s very little information about what the revenue share is going to be for artists/labels, and all the other features, but if it will pay for streams, and have a revenue share that’s not any worse than bandcamp, then it’s a no brainer — you have to test it! Looking forward to the launch.
Seems like for now, the only competetive advantage some of the platforms mentioned above can have is if they pay artists for streams too, not just the downloads and merch sales, and pay more than Spotify does. If they do that, I’m sure they will turn some heads in the bandcamp office.