According to Bandcamp, vinyl sales have soared 600% in the past five years, with 3,500 albums on vinyl being added each month to the site.Which shouldn't be too much of a surprise considering vinyl accounted for $419 million in sales in 2019 throughout the music business in North America. Still, Bandcamp notes that a good portion of the albums available on their platform are not available on vinyl. They're changing that now.
Bandcamp has announced they'll begin running Kickstarter-type campaigns for records on the site. Once there are enough pre-orders, the vinyl is pressed by Bandcamp and mailed to backers. Then it starts all over.
Today, we’re offering a first glimpse of an initiative from Bandcamp that aims to address these challenges. Our new vinyl pressing service streamlines the financing, production, and fulfillment of vinyl records. With no up-front investment, an artist or label can create a vinyl campaign and start taking orders almost immediately. Once they reach their minimum goal, we press their records and ship them to their fans.
The new service eliminates risk, since fans’ orders finance the pressing, rather than the artist or label. It eliminates hassle, since we press the records, print the packaging, and ship to fans (and fulfill digital too). It offers complete control, with the design and pricing up to the artist, and Bandcamp taking no ownership of the record. And it produces a quality result: our manufacturing partner has over 60 years experience pressing vinyl, so the records look, and sound, great.
Interestingly, one vinyl they're kickstarting as a test is the new Mesarthim record Ghost Condensate. Check out how that works here on both the Bandcamp page run by the band and the fundraising page.
