July 2025

Projects Bandwagon
1

July 2025

Sorry it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. For the last 3 months, I’ve been hard at work on something I’m finally ready to announce:

You Can Now Sell Your Albums on Bandwagon.fm

Earlier today, I launched one of the largest updates ever for Bandwagon and Emissary: the ability to charge visitors for the creative content you post online. There are many facets of this, so I’ll try to walk you through your new tools and how they work down below, but here are the highlights:

Ok. Let’s jump into the details…

Connecting To Stripe

Our initial plans were to support at least two payment processors: Stripe and PayPal. During the long odyssey that was this project, there were a number of technical limitations that forced me to cut PayPal from the list. So for now, online sales is limited to Stripe only.

Fortunately, Stripe is a fantastic payment processor that is easy to use and very secure. To get started go to your Profile > Settings > Payments and connect to your Stripe account. If you don’t already use Stripe, it’s easy to sign up from this same section.

Sell Albums Online

It’s remarkably easy to sell stuff with Bandwagon:

  1. You start by creating a new Stripe account, or connecting an existing account.
  2. To keep things simple and secure, we’re using Stripe’s “Product Catalog” feature. Just set up one or more products in Stripe, then you can link them to the albums you’ve already posted on Bandwagon.
  3. Last, you can upload a number of digital files that people get when they purchase your album. This should be digital music files in a number of open formats, liner notes, and anything else you want to give people when they buy.

You can sell albums using any of the options in Stripe’s Product Catalog, including fixed pricing or “pay what you want” pricing. You can also set up multiple prices for a single album, so your fans can pick one that works for them.

Sell “Circle” Memberships

This release also includes “Circles” – a new way of sharing specific content with specific people. When you add your followers to a circle, you can then make posts exclusively for that group. This should work great for fan clubs, insider groups, and more.

You can add people directly into a circle for free, OR you can put this up for sale just like an album. Stripe’s recurring subscription payment products let you charge small recurring payments every month for membership in the circle. Your fans can cancel whenever they want.

Circles even work seamlessly with album sales, so you can give those same digital downloads to circle members as well. You might want to do this if you let fan club members have copies of older albums included in their memberships. Or, you might add an industry rep to a circle for free as an easy way to share pre-release albums with them.

Pricing and Bandwagon Premier

With this release, pricing is also coming into focus. To start, Bandwagon.fm will not take a cut of your album sales or memberships. Our cut of your sales will be 0%. Please keep in mind that Stripe will still charge transaction (as with any payment processor).

But online sales will not be completely free. It will be a part of “Bandwagon Premier” - a paid service on our Roadmap that I still intend to launch by the end of the year. The details are still to be worked out, but the outline is coming into focus.

Here’s the current plan:

Bandwagon ($FREE)

  • Available now and forever. There will always be a free option.
  • Free custom profile with links to all of your streaming and online identities
  • Upload albums for free
  • Lower bitrate audio streaming
  • Publish music to independent radio stations like The Indie Beat
  • Share pre-release material with industry insiders

Bandwagon Premier ($10/month)

  • Launching later this year
  • Sell albums - 0% platform fee
  • Sell circles/memberships - 0% platform fee
  • High bitrate streaming
  • Publish and stream high quality video
  • Embeddable music player
  • Other cool stuff I’m still working out…

Other Payment Processors

I am still collecting a short list of additional payment processors to consider. And I’d love to hear your thoughts about payment methods that work best for you. Here’s the list as of today:

Processor Notes
Mollie mollie.com is a European payment processor with lots of payment options
PayPal Hoping to add this back in once technical limits are resolved
Shop / Shopify Popular online store for many online stores
Square Popular for in-person payments
Interledger emerging option for direct P2P payments
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://bandwagon.fm/6876a45ac1b76307ee6d3329
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