News: People Do Buy Music
Even if they originally set out to steal the same record. So sayeth Bandcamp
Words Helen Lawson
The beginning of the year brought us the miserable stats for music sales in 2011, but banish those from your mind for a second and be cheered by the news from Bandcamp that fans are shelling out for music they set out to illegally download.
The site, as used by the likes of Amanda Palmer (pictured) to fund releases, has released an overview of their findings from the past few months’ traffic.
Bandcamp staff analysed their sales data and noticed that internet searches for torrents were leading fans to the site, where all the music can also be streamed for free, which then led to them paying to download high-quality files.
One fan paid $17 for music after searching for “murder by death, skeletons in the closet, mediafire” sent him to Bandcamp instead.
This post on the Bandcamp blog explains the good news for independent artists using the site, writing: “Our favorite recent example of this was an $8 sale that started with the search ‘milosh flac -torrent’. So here was a fan looking for a Milosh record, wanted a high quality flac, but didn’t want to have to sift through a bunch of torrent sites. And that led them right to Bandcamp, and right to putting money in the artist’s pocket. Beautiful.”
The sales stats also showed that 40 per cent of fans were paying more than the asking price for music where artists had the ‘name your price’ option available. Heartwarming!
