How An Online Community Became Integral To Breaking Aussie Bands To The World

It's a little hard to believe that Bandcamp has only been around for 10 years. Though its growth has unarguably been incremental, the site — part streaming service, part merch store, part news platform, all music champion — has nonetheless assumed a position as an integral part of the global music industry, making it difficult to remember a time before bands had the option of utilising its vast services.

The company's Chief Curator, Andrew Jervis, is about to make his second trip to Australia in as many years (and ever, actually) for next month's BIGSOUND conference and showcase in Brisbane, having made the trek to the antipodes for Face The Music last November. It wasn't a hard sell to get him on board to return to our country so soon, either; not only is the weather better (obviously), but we're a nation with a lot to offer musically, a fact that struck him with immediacy when he touched down in Melbourne for the event.

"Melbourne was smokin'," he shares. "There was so much stuff going on, so much music, so many great venues, and it was such a really well-curated, nicely organised conference... It was very funky, super-cool, made loads of great connections, and yeah, it was just great to see such a buzzing scene.

"I guess the one thing that sticks with me is that it was a city where people — not in very obvious ways — but people seemed to be proud of their music. So, for instance, I got in a cab from the airport, and I recognised the tune immediately being from a local band. And then every restaurant, every bar we went into, it was like, 'Oh, ok, I recognise that'... It definitely seems like a place where people are very supportive of their music scene, and proud of it, and rightly so, and wanted to make sure people visiting there knew all about it."

Given how big the site has become over the past decade, filling a role such as chief curator is no small feat; between overseeing artist and label relations, hosting his regular discovery program, Bandcamp Weekly, being a driving force of the site's introduction of accounts for record labels, and all the other duties that Jervis fields on a daily basis, it raises the question as to whether he ever gets to just sit with an artist or album for more than a fleeting moment in the course of carrying out his workload.

"During the week, my ears are always open, I'm always making notes about things to check out — I usually check out a lot of tracks on a Friday in order to put together the show on a Monday afternoon, so it depends on where we're at during the week," he says. "I think it's really important to try and have some personal listening because I really do enjoy music and I don't want to get burned out on it. It's very easy to sit here and put together a show based on listening to a few tracks for a quick snip through… [but] it's not really about the music at that point, it's about churning out a show. So as long as I make time to listen — and some weeks that's harder than others — but I get by."

Crucial to that ability to "get by" is Bandcamp's mighty user base, whose contribution to the site's operations is, in Jervis' terms, "huge". Indeed, the music community is often written about from a live perspective, and while there's no discounting the bonds and relationships formed at a physical gig, it would be naive to think that those who engage online — some of them predominantly so — aren't as equally important contributors to the success, or otherwise, of an aspiring artist.

"Somewhere between 20 to 25% of sales on Bandcamp — so somewhere between $5.5 million to $6 million every month — comes from the community aspects of Bandcamp," Jervis reveals. "So, fans following other fans, fans having a music feed that they can tap into and see what the fans that they're following have just bought, fans having public collections that you can go and look at and see, you know, what have they bought, what have they written about those releases, who else has bought those records? It's that fan-driven recommendation that really makes Bandcamp take, and helps me do my job, too."

And, importantly, all of that — the bustling community, the site's growing scope, the barrier-breaking nature of the digital environment — can only mean good things for our own budding local musicians.

"In Australia, it's been really great to see how much the site has been able to help labels and artists that are based in places that maybe, you know, music business-speaking, were formerly seen as 'remote'," Jervis concurs. "The challenges facing those artists and labels are still the same, but maybe we've helped make them a little bit easier.

"So, previously, it might have been difficult for a band in Melbourne to get their music heard in London or Paris or Berlin or wherever but, because of the nature of the community on Bandcamp, because somewhere between 40-50% of sales on the site are cross-border, it's possible for a small band in Melbourne to be heard in all of those cities, and that's just super-cool. To be able to have a helping hand in that is just awesome."