SoundfishComparison
Soundfish vs Bandcamp
Bandcamp is a storefront: artists upload releases, set prices, and sell downloads and merchandise to fans. Soundfish is an album page you own, with a waveform player and comments pinned to moments. Nothing on Soundfish is for sale.
The two jobs
Bandcamp is an online record store and music community. Its own help center describes it as “a retail music destination” with discovery features: fans buy releases, collect them in a library, and download purchases in MP3, FLAC, WAV, and other formats.
Soundfish is an album page. It has no commerce at all: no prices, no checkout, no sales reports. Uploads play through a waveform player with comments pinned to moments, hearts, and play counts, and each track can keep revisions under the same link.
Bandcamp answers “where do fans pay me.” Soundfish answers “where does this album live.”
What each costs
Artist accounts are free to open; Bandcamp Pro is a paid tier for extras like batch uploads. On each sale Bandcamp takes a revenue share: 15% on digital items, which drops to 10% once sales pass $5,000, and 10% on physical items. Payment processing fees are separate.
Soundfish costs $0. A free Hraness account publishes one album of up to 10 tracks, each an MP3, WAV, or FLAC file up to 200 MiB and 20 minutes, with up to 25 revisions per track and 2 GiB of storage. There is no paid plan and nothing to sell, so no share is taken from anything. See the pricing page.
Where Bandcamp is the better choice
- Selling music or merchandise with your own prices, including name-your-price, per Bandcamp for artists.
- Lossless delivery: uploads must be at least 16-bit, 44.1 kHz lossless stereo files (WAV, AIFF, or FLAC), and buyers can download them in FLAC, WAV, ALAC, and more.
- An existing fan economy: purchases collect in a fan library, and follows and recommendations surface new releases.
Where Soundfish fits
- A finished release, an EP, or a rough draft that needs a page and a link, not a store listing.
- Timestamped feedback on the wave, on a page you can keep unlisted until it is ready.
- Revisions under one link: listeners always hear the current take, and earlier ones stay in the history.
- Embeds and a Markdown twin an agent can read, documented in the agent guide.
Sources
- Bandcamp for ArtistsBandcampChecked
- What are Bandcamp's fees?Bandcamp Help CenterChecked
- I already have a direct-to-fan store on my own site, why bother setting up on Bandcamp?Bandcamp Help CenterChecked
- How do I upload music?Bandcamp Help CenterChecked
- In which formats can I download my purchases?Bandcamp Help CenterChecked
See also
Give your album a page of its own
Listening needs no account; publishing needs a free Hraness account.