200 million listens as an experimental artist

Musician/multimedia artist Grouper comes to mind when considering a successful experimental artist using a music distribution strategy powered by Bandcamp.

You won't find this artist on social media as much, and they tend to reserve their most recent music releases exclusively for their Bandcamp audience, while also keeping a large portion of their older discography available on mainstream streaming platforms like Spotify/Apple Music.

Advantages of Bandcamp

Grouper communicates with their fans through the Bandcamp platform regularly, and uses Bandcamp as a point of sale for their merchandise.

Whether Bandcamp stays in business as a platform or not, Grouper always has access to the email addresses of their fans, allowing direct contact with them outside of the platform.

If Grouper wants to move their distribution over to a different platform, it’s as simple as exporting their Bandcamp contacts list. If their primary music distributor was Spotify, or Apple Music, or Tidal, that wouldn’t be the case: those distribution platforms own your audience, not you.

One of Bandcamp’s most artist-friendly features is the ability to own your customer list so you can contact your fans directly, without being locked into a platform to access the audience you’ve earned.

Balancing niche and mainstream platforms

At time of writing, Grouper has over 200 million Spotify streams on one of their songs, tens of millions on many others, and a monthly listener count of over 2 million listeners. Those are numbers many independent artists would dream of!

So, in this case Grouper is successfully leveraging the reach of Spotify to expand their audience, without also becoming dependent on Spotify to contact that audience. Thumbs up 👍.

Value propositions

To put some very loose, inaccurate revenue numbers on the potential value of those Spotify streams: Grouper’s 200M streams on Spotify if paid out at the rule-of-thumb industry rate of $.0035 cents per stream would total about $700,000. Now we’re getting sustainable working as an independent artist, no TikTok videos required!

I’d speculate that, had Grouper kept their music off of mainstream streaming platforms entirely and only self-distributed via Bandcamp, without any label help, they might not ever have been able to work up to listener counts that large, working as an experimental artist.

Balancing label vs. self-distribution

Note that Grouper does both label distribution and self-distribution, and has worked with many smaller indie labels over the years. For several albums, they distributed their music via the Chicago label Kranky (a great source for niche experimental/ambient music).

But, they’ve also worked with many other labels, including the hyper underground label Yellowelectric and the now seemingly defunct imprint TYPE Records, which was active in the mid-2000’s but hasn’t done much for years.

Getting creative with distribution

The moral of the story? Being creative with your musical distribution strategies, and moving around labels often, can work! As an independent artist, you don’t need to be tied to any one label if you don’t want to be; there’s no rule saying you couldn’t switch your labels out for every individual project you release.

A downside of taking this approach would be that, if you switch around labels too much, you’re kind of starting over on promotion from scratch every time you switch. And, keeping track of all the licensing, contracts, and accounting tasks over a multi-decade career of releasing music across 20 different tiny music labels is choosing to add a lot of administrative work onto your own plate. That’s why it’s more common for artists to switch labels just a few times over the course of their career.

A hybrid approach

Perhaps a nice hybrid approach would be doing limited first-look distribution deals with any prospective label partners. So, you do one album with a small experimental label, then if it works out well maybe you agree to give them the first look at your next release, while you build up your working relationship together.