That’s why I’ve decided to focus my energy on Bandcamp as the main place to support my music.
The Problem With Traditional Streaming
Streaming platforms have changed how people listen to music, but not necessarily for the better when it comes to paying the people who create it. Payouts are usually based on fractions of a cent per play, which means that even thousands of streams often translate into just a few euros for the artist.
In practice, it looks something like this: you can get 1,000 streams on some major platforms and earn only a few units of your local currency. For independent musicians who invest time, money and emotion into writing, recording and producing their music, this model is simply not sustainable. The system is optimized for volume and scale, not for fair artistic compensation.
How Bandcamp Treats Artists Differently
Bandcamp is built on a very different philosophy: direct support from fans to artists. When you buy music on Bandcamp, the majority of what you pay goes straight to the artist or label, usually within 24–48 hours. Bandcamp’s revenue share is transparent: they typically take a small percentage from digital and physical sales, and artists keep the rest.
According to Bandcamp, on average around 82% of each sale reaches the artist or label once payment processing fees are included. On special “Bandcamp Fridays,” that share can rise to roughly 93% after fees, because Bandcamp temporarily waives its revenue cut. Fans have already paid artists and labels well over a billion dollars through the platform, directly fueling careers, releases and tours. That’s a completely different scale of respect and support compared to the fractions of a cent from traditional streaming.
On top of that, Bandcamp gives artists the option to let fans pay more than the minimum price if they want to offer extra support, and it also supports merch, vinyl and subscriptions in one place. It’s a model that treats listeners as a community, not just as data points in a massive algorithm.
Why Your Support on Bandcamp Matters
When you buy a release on Bandcamp, you’re not just “adding a track to your library.” You’re helping to pay for instruments, studio time, mixing, mastering, artwork and all the invisible hours behind every song. For independent artists like me, those contributions can be the difference between making another record or having to park projects indefinitely.
There’s also a psychological side: seeing that people are willing to pay for the music, even a small amount, is a powerful motivation to keep creating and experimenting. It feels like a direct conversation between artist and listener, instead of shouting into the noise of a giant catalog with millions of anonymous tracks.
Bandcamp’s Stand on AI and Why It Matters
Another important reason I’m prioritizing Bandcamp is its clear stance on artificial intelligence in music. Bandcamp has announced that it does not allow music generated wholly or substantially by AI on its platform and that it prohibits scraping or using audio from Bandcamp to train AI models.
In other words, the music you find there is created by humans, and the platform is taking active steps to keep it that way. At the same time, many big streaming services have been much slower and more ambiguous about how they handle AI-generated music and how they protect artists’ work from being used as training data without consent. For me, as a composer and musician, knowing that a platform is committed to human creativity and is willing to draw a line around AI training is a big deal.
How You Can Help
If you enjoy my music and want to support it in a way that actually makes a difference, the best place to do it is on Bandcamp. Buying a digital album, a single or any future physical releases there helps me far more than thousands of passive streams elsewhere.
You can of course keep listening on your favorite streaming services if that’s more convenient, but if you ever feel like saying “thank you” in a tangible way, consider heading over to my Bandcamp page and grabbing a track. Every purchase is a direct vote for more independent music, more artistic freedom and a fairer ecosystem for creators.
Thanks for reading, and thanks even more if you choose to support my work there.