HOW TO SELL MUSIC ON BANDCAMP: A UK ARTIST’S GUIDE

You finished the record, you pressed a run, and now there’s a box of it in your hallway. Your last streaming payment came to about the price of a coffee. Somewhere between those two facts sits the reason nearly every artist I talk to ends up setting up a Bandcamp page.

This is the practical version: what the fees actually are, how to price a download against a disc, how to post an order from Glasgow to Bristol without the postage swallowing your margin, and what to do so anyone finds the page in the first place.

Bandcamp is not a streaming service and it is not trying to be one. It is a shop with a music player attached. That single difference changes how you should think about it, because a shop only works if someone walks through the door and finds something worth buying. Here’s how to give them both.

Because the maths is completely different from streaming. On a streaming service you are paid a fraction of a penny per play and you have no idea who listened. On Bandcamp a fan pays you directly, you keep the large majority of it, and you get their email address in the bargain. Fans have paid artists well over a billion dollars through the site since it launched, and a meaningful slice of that is physical rather than digital.

From what I see come through CD Unity, the pattern is depressingly consistent. An artist commits to a run, the discs arrive, and then there’s a pause while they work out where on the internet somebody is actually meant to buy one. Social posts point at a link that doesn’t exist yet. A shop page should be live before the boxes land, not after.

The other reason is the audience Bandcamp already has. It is full of people who buy records on purpose. They are collectors, they read liner notes, and they are far more likely to want an object than the average passive listener. That’s a very different crowd from the one scrolling a playlist.

Signing up takes about ten minutes. Go to Bandcamp for Artists, claim your name, and pick your URL carefully because changing it later breaks every link anyone has ever shared.

Uploading music is where people get tripped up. Bandcamp requires lossless audio, so WAV, AIFF, FLAC or ALAC at 16-bit 44.1kHz as a minimum. It transcodes everything else for the fan on the other end. Use the same masters you sent to the pressing plant, which is worth reading up on if you’re unsure what you’ve actually got in your project folder: our guide to what audio format to use for CD production covers the same ground.

THE BITS PEOPLE SKIP

Three or four genre tags, plus your city. The location tag is not decoration, it feeds Bandcamp’s discovery tools and it’s how somebody browsing Scottish post-punk finds a band who played the same venue as them last month. Add lyrics. Add credits. Write two paragraphs of a bio rather than one line, because the people who scroll that far are the ones about to buy something.

Artwork needs to be square and at least 1400 pixels. If yours came from a designer for print, you already have something usable sitting in the same folder as your sleeve files.

You can list individual tracks and albums as digital music, and you can list a merch item for anything physical you own: discs, vinyl, cassette, shirts, posters, zines, handwritten lyric sheets if that’s your thing. Artists and labels both use the same setup.

The revenue share and payment processor fees work like this. Bandcamp takes 15% on digital sales and 10% on merch, and that digital figure drops to 10% once your lifetime sales pass 5,000 dollars. Payment processing comes off separately, so budget for roughly another 3% to 5% depending on how the fan pays. On Bandcamp Fridays the platform waives its own share entirely, which is the single best day of the month to point people at a new release.

Compare that to a streaming service taking the overwhelming majority and paying you in fractions. It isn’t close.

Bandcamp lets you set a minimum price and let fans pay more if they want. Take that option. A surprising number of people round up, particularly on a release they’ve been waiting for, and I’ve had artists tell me their average digital sale runs a pound or two above what they set.

Sensible UK starting points: £1 a track, £7 an album for the download. For anything physical, work backwards. Take what the run cost you per unit, add packaging, add postage, then add a margin you’d actually be happy with. A card wallet album that cost you £1.70 a unit and £1.60 to post shouldn’t be listed at £8. The same thinking applies whether you’re online or at a show, and we went through the full sums in how much should you charge for a CD at a gig.

One tactic worth using every single time: include a digital download with the physical item. The fan gets the music the second they pay and the disc arrives a week later. It costs you nothing and it removes the only real objection to buying an object in 2026. You can also generate a discount code for your mailing list, which gives you something to actually put in the email.

Bandcamp does not ship anything for you. When an order lands you pack it and you take it to the post office, and this is the part that quietly ruins margins for people who didn’t check first.

The useful thing to know is where Royal Mail’s Large Letter band ends: 353mm by 250mm by 25mm, up to 750g. An album in a card wallet or a digipak, slipped into a card mailer, sits comfortably inside that. A 12 inch record does not, because the sleeve alone is 315mm square, so every vinyl order goes as a parcel and costs several times more. Price those two things separately in your shop rather than applying one flat rate and hoping.

Set the quantity available so the listing closes itself when you run out, and add your UPC or EAN if you want sales reporting to the music charts. If barcodes are new to you, we covered what an EAN barcode is and whether you need one a while back.

If you’re still deciding how many to make, run pre-orders through the page first and let the numbers tell you. That’s exactly what CD pre-orders before pressing is for, and it’s a far better guide than guesswork.

Nobody finds a shop by accident, or at least not enough of them to matter. Bandcamp followers see your updates in their music feed whenever you release new music or merch, so growing that follower count is the closest thing the platform has to an algorithm working in your favour.

Everything else is you. Embed the player on your own site so the buy button lives everywhere your name does. Share the link rather than the Spotify one when you post. Put a QR code on the merch table pointing at the page, because the person who just watched you play is the single most likely buyer you will ever meet, and we go into that setup properly in how to set up a merch table that actually pulls people in.

Then do the thing almost nobody does: export the email addresses. Every person who buys from you hands one over. Build a mailing list out of them and you own that relationship permanently, which is the whole argument in the benefits of email marketing for musicians. Bandcamp Daily also runs editorial features, and while you can’t buy your way in, a strong release with a proper story behind it occasionally gets picked up.

Josh McKenzie

Hello, I’m Josh, and I’ve been honing my graphic design skills for almost 15 years now, catering to the needs of bands and businesses alike. What really fascinates me is the business aspect of the music industry. In addition to my design work, I also happen to play the Hammond organ, and I strive to share my knowledge through helpful articles that I write exclusively for you all!