Bandcamp are launching a service that will allow musicians to control a subscription service for their fans.
Chief Executive Ethan Diamond explained the system to the Guardian: "It's kinda like what U2 and Apple did, except that it's music that you actually want."
Diamond announced the new service at the SF MusicTech Conference yesterday. Through this subscription-service musicians will be able to release and charge for music as they think appropriate. Once the subscriber has paid to access the musician's feed, the artist can release subscriber-only tracks, discounts on merchandise, send individual messages to subscribers - the options go on.
Diamond went on to say that: "The whole motivation here is that when you get to a point that you love an artist - when you go from liking them to being a real true fan of theirs - at some point you just want everything they make. You just want to support everything that they do."
The new service will generate followers or friends as other social media sites do, but these followers will have subscribed to the musician's updates and will be guaranteed to see posts rather than have them lost in the walls of other social media.
"We're trying to create a channel for artists and their biggest fans where they aren't having to compete with the other things. There'll be no 'boost a post' nonsense like Facebook. We're not going to do anything like that," Diamond explained.
Potential subscribers will still be able to discover and listen to music a certain number of times for free, at the discretion of the artist. When that number of plays is reached though, Bandcamp will then inform the listener that they have to either pay for the track or subscribe to the artist to continue listening to the music.
On the Taylor Swift and the Spotify subscription-model debate, Diamond said, "The reality is that streaming is of course the future: people are going to download less and less. But that particular model of subscription-based streaming isn't the only model. There is this other model where you support the artist."
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