271 – 5 eCommerce Solutions for Musicians

The New Music Industry Podcast | MusicEntrepreneurHQ.com | with David Andrew Wiebe

So, the ability to get your music out to dozens of destinations using music distribution services is awesome. But what if you want to sell your music and merch through other platforms and earn a greater income? What eCommerce solutions can musicians take advantage of? That’s what we’re going to be looking at in this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast. Download the PDF Transcription Podcast Highlights: 00:36 – The two pathways to earning an income from your music online 01:36 – Bandcamp 03:08 – Shopify / Single 04:22 – Gumroad 05:38 – Sellfy 06:46 – Koji 07:44 – Episode summary Resources Mentioned in This Episode: Bandcamp 155 – How to Use Shopify to Sell Your Music Single Gumroad 10XPro Sellfy Koji Transcription: Hey, it’s David Andrew Wiebe. Now, I’ve shared before about the two pathways you can take to create an income from music online. And of direct response marketing and eCommerce, eCommerce is the easier one to get started with. And the great news is, whether it’s direct response marketing or eCommerce, you can set the price of your music. You’re not obligated to sell your albums for $9.99 and your singles for 99 cents. You can be much more intentional and strategic about pricing. Plus, it allows you to do things like put your latest single up on Spotify, and then tell your fans, “if you’re interested in the whole album, check out my website at AtomikPenguins .com” or wherever you send people to buy your music. Now, the big question is whether you can even make money selling music as a musician, right? Just because you can set up an online store doesn’t automatically mean people will buy. But after listening to this podcast episode, I don’t think there’s going to be a shadow of doubt in your mind. So, keep listening to the end, and let’s get to the first of five eCommerce solutions we’ll be talking about today: 1. Bandcamp Bandcamp is one of the most popular eCommerce solutions for musicians, focused exclusively on music. On their homepage, they advertise the fact that fans have paid artists $199 million in the last year. So, forget the idea that you can’t get paid for your music – there are plenty of artists doing it already. Fans have paid Bandcamp artists $199 million in the last year.Click To Tweet Unlike most other solutions available, Bandcamp is a marketplace. And that means they actively promote artists through discover, tag hubs, artist recommendations, fan collections, and music feed. You shouldn’t expect to receive a ton of promotion this way unless you’re already growing a following and selling your music on Bandcamp, but it’s still nice to know they care. Bandcamp gives you control over the design and colors of your page, and it lets you add key information like a short bio, lyrics, and liner notes too. In addition to digital music, you can also sell vinyl, cassettes, T-shirts, and other merch. Bandcamp even says in the last five years, vinyl sales have gone up by 613%, cassettes by 349%, and T-shirts by 492%, and they’ve already sold $341 million worth of merch. Whoever said vinyl sales are a mere blip on the radar just isn’t getting the point. Bandcamp offers other great features like analytics, a merch backend for order fulfillment, and they plan to add a vinyl pressing service too. Bandcamp was founded on December 12, 2007, so it also has quite a bit of longevity behind it as well. 2. Shopify / Single Based on the success of my interview with Tommy Stalknecht (Stall – Neck) of Single Music, which is now simply called Single, in episode 155 of the podcast, it’s clear to see quite a few musicians are interested in the prospect of selling their music through the top eCommerce site builder. Shopify basically is to eCommerce what WordPress is to blogs. Single has expanded their functionality in the last few years. In addition to music, you can use it to sell live stream events,