One man and a guitar have much lower overheads than a four-piece band with a trailerload of equipment - you can't take a drum kit as cabin baggage. The band have to sell four times as many tickets to make the same revenue per person.

Even if a band can draw a bigger crowd and sell more tickets, the economics are still stacked against them. Small venues generally provide a house PA system and lighting rig, but larger venues don't. Equipment hire or a touring road crew take a huge bite out of ticket sales. Bigger venues also offer less favourable terms to artists, because they're far more likely to have a local monopoly.

I think this is a hugely overlooked factor in the decline of rock music. Young musicians are smart enough to realise that drummers and bass players need to be paid, but drum machines and looper pedals don't.

I sold $330 worth of tickets (small sunday night show), paid the soundperson $160 ($40 an hour), $50 for poster design and printing and then $100 to hire a set of drums... works out that each band ends up with $5???

I want to support the artists, so i usually get one if I liked the show, but sometimes I wish they would get more creative with merch options. I know there's an upfront cost and focusing on t-shirts is a pretty safe option. But I just love it when they get creative with patches, stickers, hip flasks, rings, belt buckles, skulls, necklaces, booty shorts, all kinds of stuff.

It may be a little bit odd, since I usually don't like obvious branding and advertising, but doing something different will absolutely make me consider buying more merch.

But it feels sort of condescending to just hand them money at a show.

Though I think a lot of places around here have a beer allowance for performers. I'll give it a go, though :-)

And yes, the fact I can support beautiful music makes me happy. I want to support these artists so they make of more of these beautiful tracks.

The problem is like with all alternative distribution channels - if you actually want to sell your music, marketing is more important than the music itself and very few people have the ability and time to do the creative work and the marketing at the same time. If nobody knows about your music, nobody will buy it. It's the same with self-publishing platforms for books.

Traditional publishers have all the marketing channels already set up, so marketing is easier and more affordable to them than for startups, let alone individual artists.

Bandcamp takes 15%/10% (depending on your yearly sales). Combined with the payment processing fees, that gives a return of around 80%, as mentioned in another reply to your post. I think that's perfectly fair, considering the hosting costs for thousands and thousands of hours of music, and their entire platform.

What Bandcamp offers is a sales channel that is already configured, all you have to to is give it a theme, upload your music in a lossless format, name the songs and choose a price. Bandcamp handles the layouts, the tagging, the multiple formats, the embedded album art and the whole shopping experience. You do the art, they do the technical stuff.

You're spinning a yarn that the traditional labels are necessary in order to do marketing, but with the rise of social media and the huge trust people have in word of mouth, the big in-your-face advertising campaigns of yesteryear are simply outdated. The only reason the big labels still have some kind of clout is that they own all the big radio stations. But the rise of streaming and internet radio has eroded that power.

And even if what you say was true, it only holds up for mainstream pop artists, not the much more interesting indie artists out there.

Not at all, I'm an independent artist at Bandcamp. What I am saying is that without marketing you have 0 sales.

I'm also not saying that there are no artists who can do the marketing themselves (through social media, etc., as you mention). Most artists, however, neither have the time nor the connections to do that.

It's the same effect as with app stores, where also just a very small number of developers make any money. You're right that Bandcamp offers a sales channel,of course. That's essentially all that these alternative distribution channels offer. We can debate whether that's worth 15% of the sales, though. As I've said, it works for some people who are well-connected and have a natural talent for self-marketing. For most of the artists, it doesn't work.

The sales pitch from the big labels is that they will use their connections to get you noticed, but the prerequisite is that you should already be reasonably established before they want to pick you up, or ridiculously lucky that you just caught the right person's attention at the right time.

The best way to get your name out there is still to play tons of smaller shows, build a local fanbase, and get on festival lineups, either through competitions or because your fanbase pesters the promoters into booking you.

15%, or 10% if you're really successful. That means 85% of the money goes to the artist. This is better than e.g. Steam and the app stores, and far better than the old physical-media based sales.

I think Bandcamp is fair in that it enables all those people to make their production available and get something, however small, for it; and enables other people to find art which would otherwise not be accessible. All in all I think it's a cultural plus for the world.

It's just a really convenient way to make your music purchasable for download.

If you don't sell anything, you don't pay anything.