Grouper’s music distribution

The indie musician/multimedia artist Grouper comes to mind when talking about a successful niche, experimental artist who uses a music distribution strategy primarily 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 platforms like Spotify. For another case study from a more mainstream perspective, check out my case study detailing Radiohead’s music distribution.

The advantages of Bandcamp

Grouper communicates with their fans through the Bandcamp platform regularly, and uses Bandcamp as a distributor of physical media and other merchandise.

Regardless of if Bandcamp stays in business or not, Grouper has access to the email addresses of all of their fans on the platform, allowing direct contact with them.

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 own fans directly, without being locked into a platform to access the audience that you’ve earned.

Balancing niche and mainstream music distribution platforms

We often think of independent vs. mainstream musical artists as two black and white creative categories that are diametrically opposed to each other, but Grouper’s career shows that there can be a powerful middle way.

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 leveraging the reach of Spotify to expand their audience, without becoming fully dependent on Spotify to reach that audience.

Distribution value propositions

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

I’d speculate that, had Grouper eschewed the mainstream music streaming platforms entirely and kept their music only self-distributed on Bandcamp exclusively, without any label help whatsoever, they might not ever have been able to work up to listener counts this large, as a niche experimental artist.

Balancing label distribution and self-distribution

Note that Grouper does both label distribution and self distribution, and has worked with many different smaller labels over the years.  For several albums, they distributed music through the Chicago label Kranky (a great source for 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 musical distribution

The moral of the story?  Being creative with your musical distribution strategies, and moving around different 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 label out on every individual project you release.

A downside of this approach would be that, if you switch labels too much, you’re kind of starting over on promotion each time you switch.  And, keeping track of all the licensing, contracts, and accounting with 20 different labels across a multi-decade career of releasing music is a lot of administrative work.

Perhaps a nice hybrid approach would be limited first-look distribution deals: do one album with a small experimental label, then if it works out maybe you agree to give them first-look on your next few releases, while you build up your working relationship together.