Pirating music for fun and profit!

Jack Coleman is a serial rockstar. He’s toured the world in The Follow, opened for the Pixies in The Art, and torn up Sydney’s local music scene in the techno-grunge outfit Snout Cassette.

The Follow and The Art both enjoyed commercial success, signing with major record labels, but that’s unlikely for Snout Cassette with their heavy experimental sound. So with the launch of their second EP, Apocalypse Knights, they’re going pirate, with a twist.

Snout Cassette is using bandcamp.com to give away their music to fans (for free!), sell records, make money and kill the need for middle-man record labels.

The service, half Pirate Bay, half iTunes, takes the best of both worlds, letting bands make money for their work, while not limiting their potential audience to only those willing to pay.

City Hub sat down with Jack to talk about bandcamp, and find out how other local artists can take advantage of it.

City Hub: What is bandcamp?

Jack Coleman: It’s just a free online service for independent artists to release their music. It’s like if you went online and set up your own store, except they’ve already done it for you. At the moment we’ve only got our EP’s up there, but we’re gonna have t-shirts made up for it too. You can sell anything.

So how does it work?

It’s pretty simple; you upload the tracks, you upload the album art and you choose how much you want to charge for the tracks. You can choose whether or not to have them stream them for free – some people choose to have small snippets of songs and people can buy individual tracks or the artists can choose to give them away for free.

It gives the bands options on how they want to sell their music, and it gives fans options on how they listen to it.

What are the main differences that you’ve noticed between signing to a major label, and doing it yourself?

There are some advantages to being signed to a major label, like their access to infrastructure, but there’s no room for developing artists on major labels any more it just makes sense to be independent.

Are many people buying the EP from bandcamp, or are they just listening to it for free?

Since we released it a week ago about a fifth of the people who’ve listened to our tracks have paid to download a copy of the album. One of the great things is that you can pay $5 to download our new EP, or you can nominate your own price above that. We had someone pay $40 for a download. We don’t know who they are, but hopefully they’ll buy the next one too, haha.

Visit http://snoutcassette.bandcamp.com to stream Apocalypse Knights EP for free, $5 for a download.