Do you ever spend money on music? If so, I recommend that you use Bandcamp to buy music directly from artists. On their app, when you buy music (songs, albums, physical copies, merch), the artist gets 85% of the money you spend. If you buy on “Bandcamp Friday”, the first Friday of the month, Bandcamp forgoes their cut, sending 100% of revenue to the artist. The next Bandcamp Friday is September 5th, 2025.

This is not a sponsored post! I have no vested interest in Bandcamp; my interest stems from my belief that artists should earn as much as possible from their music, and that intermediate parties — whether a streamer like Deezer, a record label like Warner, or a brick and mortar shop like HMV — should earn enough to keep the lights on, and not much more. In this post, I offer a few justifications for shopping at Bandcamp.

Rates vs. cuts

When comparing music services, many people focus on the tiny payout-per-stream rates. For example, in one accounting, Spotify was estimated to pay around $0.003 USD per stream, about a third of a penny; Apple Music pays a more generous one penny ($0.01) per stream; YouTube pays least of all, less than a tenth of a penny per stream.

But comparing these rates is not easy. Each service has a different formula for calculating payouts, which could depend on the size of one’s audience, and whether one’s listeners are paying subscribers or using an ad-supported tier. The fairness of one’s payout also depends on how well the service can detect which listeners are authentic and which are bots — yes, money laundering via Spotify streaming payouts is a thing.

The better way to compare services, I think, is to focus on the portion of revenue they keep. These services are all middlemen; the product is identical on each service; so, what’s the middleman’s cut? This is where the difference between services is starkest:

• For Spotify, the revenue split is 30-70. That is, of all the revenue Spotify earns from subscribers and advertisers, they keep around 30%, and pay out around 70%, to be split among the rightsholders.¹
• For Apple Music, the revenue split is 48–52; Apple keeps almost half the profits!
• For YouTube, the revenue split is 45–55 for regular videos, and 55–45 for Shorts.
• For brick-and-mortar shops selling CDs and records, the typical revenue split is (was?) 17–83, according to a BBC piece from 2013. (Was.)
• For Bandcamp, the revenue split is 15–85! The split is even more favourable to artists for sales of physical media (10–90), or for sales on Bandcamp Friday (0–100).

Put another way: for every £1 earned by Apple Music, an artist earns £1.08. For every £1 earned by Spotify, an artist earns £2.30. For every £1 earned by Bandcamp, an artist earns at least £5.60 — and possibly much more. Bandcamp is clearly the most frugal middleman.

Extra extra

There are other reasons to use Bandcamp. I like how I can get physical copies along with my digital purchases. I like how my purchases are permanent: I don’t need to subscribe to a ‘premium’ version of the app in order to access my old purchases, and I can download the raw audio to any device I use. I like how when I play an album, and the album ends, there is silence, and I am allowed a moment of peace to consider what to play next.

I like how the money I spend goes directly to the artist I’m buying from, instead of being added to a giant pool that is allotted pro-rata to all artists on the platform — including people who are spamming Spotify by uploading AI-generated tracks. (Whether these uploads are part of another royalties scam or part of a scam yet to be understood, I don’t care; I don’t want them to earn any of my money.)

And I like how the money I spend on the platform isn’t funnelled into the pockets of tech billionaires who then reinvest that money into, for example, startups engaged in developing AI tech for war. And even if the current or future owners of Bandcamp did want to invest in despicable things, they would not have much of my money to do so.

Finally, I like how streaming from Bandcamp is always free, with no ads. I didn’t include Bandcamp’s payout-per-stream rate earlier, but it is the lowest of all the services I’ve mentioned: zero. An artist earns nothing if you browse the library and try out their album. However, you cannot stream indefinitely; after listening to the album 3 times, you are prompted to buy the album instead. It reminds me of a time before streaming, when you would go to a music store and check out the new releases at a “listening booth”. This seems like the right way for a music store to treat listeners, and the right way for listeners to treat artists.

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