Krakatoa’s been livestreaming our grassroots gig since 2022, most recently using Bandcamp. What we found on Bandcamp was that there’s tremendous potential for bands to use Bandcamp to spread awareness and, more importantly, to monetise the footage of their performance at Krakatoa! Bandcamp presents bands with the tools to stream their sets, to release their music as digital albums, and to get paid for it. Krakatoa has invested heavily in our AV recording facilites, and we want to use Bandcamp to benefit every band that performs here by helping them set up their own pages, affiliating them with our own, and posting their performances. If you’re a band looking to set up an online presence, you’re in the right place!
For Bands
Our goals are:
- Increase interest in grassroots music.
- Help expand the online fanbase for local artists.
- Produce high quality content that artists can monetise, and/or use for their own promotional purposes.
- Use Krakatoa’s social media reach to raise awareness and drive support.
- Help make your content easier to find.
For the past 9 months we’ve been investigating ways to help you monetise this stuff. However we also need a way to finance this activity, because we need to cover the cost of:
• AV technicians
• platform fees
• software licenses
• gigabit fibre rental
• upkeep of cameras, network, streaming console, AV workstations, and network storage.
That amounts to a whopping £500 per week!
We’ve spent 9 months figuring out the best way to achieve all this, and propose to:
- Cover the bulk of our costs by building Krakatoa a substantial subscriber base on Bandcamp.
- Take out Bandcamp’s highest tier subscription, to provide the benefit of automatically upgrading all your pages to a Pro subscription entirely for free. This would usually cost you £120 a year. It unlocks live streaming, monetisation, and subscription features on your Bandcamp pages at no cost to you.
- Feature artist links to all your Bandcamp pages from our page, so that it also acts as a sort of portal to local grassroots music.
- Streamline the process of delivering the content recorded here from our AV suite directly onto your Bandcamp pages as live albums with video. You would retain full control over your pages, and decide when to publish that content, and whether to leave anything out. This saves us having to dick about with hard drives (unless you require the raw data).
- Pass the monetisation of this content over to you, with the entire proceeds from your sales going directly into your own PayPal accounts. You would also control the pricing, number of free plays etc.
- None of this would interfere with any Bandcamp content you create outwith Krakatoa, but would help bring that material to the attention of more fans.
- Publicise these releases to Krakatoa’s own fans and subscriber base.
- Divert some of Krakatoa’s existing advertising budget to expand awareness of this on social media.
The livestreams will be a joint venture between the artists and Krakatoa, with a 50/50 revenue split. Your cut will be added to your concerts fees. Krakatoa will advertise the streams worldwide on social media, and you can help by promoting the livestream to your own fanbase well in advance of the gig. The livestreams only remain available to the purchaser for 48 hours, and there’s no facility for them to download that content.
In order to attract subsrcibers to Krakatoa’s Bandcamp page, we’ll be providing them with access to a selection of the AV content from our shows, plus the interviews etc. This content will also help to send our subscribers to your bandcamp pages in search for additional material. The main selling point to subscribers will be that they’re helping to support the grassroots music scene.
As a registered nonprofit, our cultural activity is ring fenced from the bar trade, so any surplus raised from Bandcamp subscribers would automatically be recycled back into funding the rest of our live music programme.
In exchange for all this, we’d like you to regularly boost Krakatoa, and encourage more people to subscribe to our Bandcamp page. It’s critical that we gain enough subscribers to cover our costs. You can do this by mentioning us on social media, but please also do some by word of mouth. We’d like you to help get word out about what we’re doing for local music. We’d like more people to know more about our organisation and what we’re working to achieve.
Your Bandcamp Page
If you don’t have a Bandcamp page then you’ll need to create one, which only takes a few minutes of your time. We can do a rough page and assign it to you if that helps. As part of the process you’ll need to setup a PayPal account for it, to collect the money that fans pay for your audio.
Once your page is setup then we’ll send an invitation for you to accept as us a ‘label’. This doesn’t tie you into anything: you can have as many label connections as you want, as remove these at the click of a mouse. All it does is:
- Allows us to transfer the AV from you live sets directly over Bandcamp. This saves you paying us to dick around with hard drives (unless you also want the raw channel feeds).
- Automatically upgrade you to a Bandcamp Pro subscription at no cost to you. This unlocks several worthwhile features for you, such as live streaming capability, and your own subscriber area.
- It features you as an artist on Krakatoa’s Bandcamp page, so anyone visiting our page can more easily find your page. We plan on running regular social media ads that will click through to our page, and that will also bring more fans into contact with your pages.