Bandcamp lets artists create their own music subscriptions

Thanks to Ms. Swift's recent actions, artist compensation from music streaming is quite the hot topic, and one company has a new option to lend a hand. Bandcamp has been a choice for musicians to sell their music and merchandise for years, and now it's looking to help sort streaming subscriptions as well. Each artist will be able to create a subscription-based plan for their music, allowing fans to access new tunes as they become available through the Bandcamp app. Listeners can download the tracks too, and acts can decide to offer parts of their existing catalog as a perk for opting in. New albums or songs can be released to subscribers only for a certain amount of time or remain exclusive, and the musicians themselves can set the cost of the plan. For its efforts, Bandcamp takes the same 15 percent cut that it does for regular sales -- a fee that drops to 10 percent once the $5,000 sales mark is reached. "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," the company's chief executive Ethan Diamond told The Guardian.

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