Eamonn Forde Meets… – each month, the veteran music business journalist speaks to a senior industry figure about the topics that really matter – and gets the opinions of the people who make the decisions that count.
August 2025: Aly Gillani, artist and label relations lead at Bandcamp. He talks about why downloads are still a lifeline for many artists, how paying to own music has become an ethical choice for fans in an age of streaming micropayments, what damage “rinsing” superfans can do to their faith in musicians, why Bandcamp Friday became a fixture for the service and how deals are done on an egalitarian basis, not bent to better favour the most commercially successful.
Aly Gillani has been at Bandcamp for the best part of a decade, helping to build it up to become the music platform of choice for a wide range of artists – from the emerging all the way up to the likes of Radiohead. While it sells physical products, a key part of its appeal is selling downloads. Large sections of the record industry may have given up on downloads, but Bandcamp has shown just how important, both culturally and economically, they are to a particular class of musicians.
In the IFPI’s Global Music Report 2025, the headline figures were that streaming accounts for 69% of global recorded music revenues and subscription streaming revenue was up 9.5%. This is streaming’s world and we just live in it. There were nods to the “vinyl revival”, with physical formats making up 16.4% of all revenue. Then there was a head tilt towards poor old downloads, declining for the twelfth consecutive year and (when amalgamated with “other digital”) making up just 2.8% of all revenue.
If you are any of the acts IFPI triumphantly offered case studies on in its report (Chappell Roan, Tyler, The Creator, Myke Towers), downloads are the mere crumbs of your income. If, however, you are a small label or a self-releasing act and you use Bandcamp, downloading can be a significant part of your income, and certainly the format where you get the biggest share of earnings.
Bandcamp has over 285,000 artists and labels listed on it, with over 100,000 of them having released music in the past quarter there. In the last year, the platform drove over $55 million in download sales (and $195 million in total sales). That might feel like small beer for a superstar act, but for niche and DIY acts, that money is a lifeline.
Aly Gillani, who joined the company almost a decade ago, knows only too well the importance of the Bandcamp economy as he is also director of First Word Records. He does not, however, fantasise about some perceived lost “golden era” in the record business. “This notion that everyone was always making money in the 1990s is false,” he says. “It’s never been the case that everyone was going to make a living out of music.”
That said, there have been many acts who are loudly critical of the streaming economy and, on top of this, government inquiries into perceived inequalities and lack of transparency. In the heated moral debate about streaming, fans and artists commonly point to platforms like Bandcamp as being perhaps the more ethical option for supporting musicians.
“This notion that everyone was always making money in the 1990s is false”
Ali Gillani
Gillani says there is a demonstrable carrying over of this burning sense of morality in Bandcamp consumer behaviour. “The people who use Bandcamp are people who want to pay for music,” he says. “That might not be a lot of money. It could be a £5 download, but it’s the ethical and social act of saying, ‘I love this artist. I want them to be able to carry on making the art that I love, so I should pay them.’”
He adds that people in the music industry, perhaps among the most entitled people in any industry, really should be leading by example here. “I buy a lot on Bandcamp because I want to buy it,” he argues. “Because if we don’t all buy each other’s records, the whole thing falls apart.”
Superfandom and Bandcamp
On the purchasing issue, the industry’s increasingly heavy focus on superfans can start to look less like catering to the needs of your best customers and more like finding an increasing number of ways for them to part with their money for your products.
“For us at Bandcamp, superfans are just Bandcamp users,” he says. “You don’t want to get down to the thing of just rinsing people for their money. When the wider industry is talking about superfans, they’re talking about superfans of massive artists, where it’s all at scale and conglomerated. I’d imagine there are all kinds of KPIs of what the average spend is per fan, what tiers they are in, all that sort of stuff.”
With its focus on album sales (“Our editorial is all about albums, not singles”), Bandcamp finds that customers want to go above and beyond for the acts they like. “On Bandcamp, you can set the price to wherever you want, and then you can choose to charge and to let fans pay more if they want to,” says Gillani. “More than 20% of the time, fans choose to pay more than the minimum. Because they get it.”
Are we forgetting what an artist is?
This is increasingly important at a time when music, due to instant accessibility and seeming ubiquity, is at risk of being seriously devalued, both culturally and economically. “It sometimes feels that we’re now just making music a thing that is there when we’re doing something else,” he proposes. “Your commute playlist, your cooking playlist, your study playlist. But what is that doing to the artistry? We’re actually forgetting what artistry is, what an artist is, why they exist and why they make things. It’s just serving the creation of money for someone to soundtrack a lifestyle. That connection is a challenge for artists, particularly emerging ones.”
“For us at Bandcamp, superfans are just Bandcamp users”
Ali Gillani
Understanding just how precarious an existence it is for small acts, the company introduced Bandcamp Friday in March 2020, right at the start of the pandemic when shows were cancelled and many small artists were facing financial ruin. The company waived its cut of sales (it still had to charge payment fees, though) and turned this into a regular thing: a very visible form of support for the artists its business relies on.
“Pre-pandemic, we’d probably turn over about $300,000 on an average Friday, maybe half a million on a busy release week,” reveals Gillani. “The first Bandcamp Friday was $4.3 million. The second was $7.1 million. It’s carried on being between $2.5 million and $4.5 million, right through until now.” It has four more planned this year, and has just announce that the event on 1st August generated over $3.5 million for artists in 24 hours.
“On a Bandcamp Friday, once you take payment fees into account, the average percentage paid out to the artist is about 93%. But on a regular Friday, it’s about 82%.”
Huge act or small – the deal is the same
Huge names – among them Radiohead, Björk and Peter Gabriel – use Bandcamp, but the core focus is on helping small acts get heard and make something approaching a living from their music. “The situation now is that, with social media and streaming in particular, we have big winners and big losers,” he says. “We really try to create something that, no matter what stage you’re at, you can have some degree of success.”
As such, acts get the same deals, regardless of size. And, crucially, they keep all their own data. “They’re their fans, they’re not our fans,” insists Gillani. “We are just helping make that happen. We don’t need to keep that data.”
The record business, particularly the biggest labels of the record business, is fixated on the growth in streaming and ways to boost that even more: more markets; more users; more ARPU. Why would they care about downloads? Didn’t they go the same way as ringtones? And yet, for the acts opting out of (or knowing they’ll never win in) the streaming cattle run, downloads are what are keeping them afloat.
These acts are often the innovators, existing at the margins but pointing to where music can go next. If the music industry dismisses them, or pushes them out of the picture entirely, all it is doing is cutting off its own supply of oxygen.
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