YouSaid · the spoken record

Ethan Diamond

lines on the record: 32
first: 2021-04-08
most recent: 2021-04-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The sales team on the advertising side wants to encroach on the interface as much as possible and get people to see as many ads as possible. And you're maybe trying to make a mail program, for example, where you're just trying to make the best possible product that people say subscribe to or something like that. So when that misalignment occurs, I feel like that's when anybody gets into trouble. But that's, I think, the majority also of businesses, right?”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I guess it just completely depends on what that slight shift looks like. I think my advice and what has served us really, really well has been aligning the business model with the community that we're here to serve. And if the shift still allows you to do that, then the only risk really is, I think, is that the priorities of a major investor aren't necessarily going to be your exact same priorities. You may have find yourself in a situation where you're pushed to sell the company or push to grow quickly in a way that risks your mission, right? But yeah, I think that at the core, the problem that I've seen in previous companies that I've worked at is when there's that misalignment in what you're apparently here to do versus how you actually make money. And that's typically a problem with like an advertising-based businesses where.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Artists overall. And then because of this alignment of our business model with the interests of the artists, it actually is a huge benefit to Bandcamp as well, the company.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know we were concerned at the beginning, the first one we did. We didn't know how it was going to go at all. And we didn't know that we were going to do another one. And we didn't call it Bandcamp Friday. That's something that just happened on social media. People started calling it that. And we're like, yeah, that sounds great. Let's embrace that and use that for all of the future ones as well. But what we saw after that first one is that it resulted in a lot of artists driving awareness to their fans that, hey, here's a way to directly support me. And that extends past that day of the month, right? You know, on Bandcamp Friday, 93% of what a fan spends gets to the artist. The other days of the year, right? It's 82% on average. So all days are good days, right? To support an artist. And so the effect of these days has been a big positive, I think, for”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we scrambled to do that. We had our first one on March 20th of last year. And it was huge. It was about 15 times our normal Friday sales, which for the systems team, for support, for developers, it was a really big effort to keep the site running and have it keep up with all of that. But obviously the benefit to artists was enormous. And since then, we've had another one tomorrow, but we've had 11 since then. And just on those days, fans have paid artists $50 million.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was crazy. I mean, and it happened very, very quickly. The pandemic hit, the shutdown happened. We realized, okay, artists are losing a huge part of their, many artists are losing a huge part of their income. This is our community. What can we do to help? We've had successful fundraisers in the past. Like when the former president had the Muslim travel ban, we had a really successful fundraiser for ACLU. The former president had the transgender military ban and we held a very successful fundraiser for the transgender law center. We've done others and it just felt like, okay, well, what are we going to do? What's the organization that we should support this time? Should it be something in helping support the venues that are shut down, helping maybe support artists healthcare? And ultimately what we settled on was something very simple, which is, yes, waiving our revenue share.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was enormous. I mean, it was everything more or less doubled in 2020. Artists signups, fan signups, sales through the site, digital. Physical music, yeah.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100% a response. Yeah. We weren't thinking about entering that at all. And in retrospect, it was kind of crazy that we weren't. It was conceived, designed, and built in a very, very short period of time. We moved several people off of other projects to get that done.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a music town like Austin or New Orleans, right? And you walk down the street and you just hear music everywhere around you and you pop your head in and see what's going on and potentially fall in love with a new artist. That's the experience that I think we'll soon have on band camp.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've thought about it for sure. And I think it would be really interesting to get into, I guess, toe dip into this world is our new live streaming service that we really just launched. We've rolled it out now to, it's in about 100,000 artists have been enabled with this. And it allows you to stream to anybody. So you publish a show. It goes out to all of your followers. You can have an integrated merch table. Some of those early shows. It's very exciting to me because people are buying the merch. There's a chat that's very active. And when somebody buys something, it shows up in the chat. Hey, this person actually just bought this vinyl record. And then that kind of triggers more people to do that. And when I think about how many artists are on band camp, and it seems inevitable that we'll get to this point where all these, there'll be shows happening constantly and you'll be able to have that experience of, you know, when you go to a town.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But laws are changing, right? There's a lot of antitrust activity that I'm cautiously optimistic about. But the other part of the industry I would say that the good news is that I think a lot of people have rethought how to support artists during the pandemic. And there's been a lot of conversation about like, okay, if artists aren't touring or aren't doing shows, what is the way to keep art alive at this time and how should we be compensating artists? And that's a conversation that I feel like that's why we started Van Camp, right? Because of those issues. and that it's changing that there is a lot more direct support happening through platforms like ours is really encouraging to me.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's good news and bad news about that. I'll start with the bad news. I think a lot of venues have closed during the pandemic. And I think a lot more are likely to close because the Save Our Stages Act, that passed, but the money hasn't been distributed yet. So I worry about to all those venues. And in the meantime, one of the crazier monopolies that exists between Live Nation biggest venue.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An artist or adding your music to the site. You can expect that that community to find you and that you benefit from that in a way that would be very different from you just setting up your own standalone site. So yeah, I feel like the community has gone from something that I thought it's just an annoyance to at first, again, based on my space to something that is really a key to the entire thing.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“$100,000. It started to really make sense to me that there was an opportunity here, that there was a group of people of like-minded fans who want to directly support artists and directly connect with them in this way and that we have a chance to help facilitate that, right? So we started building the community up, but very carefully and around the idea that the community is, that your ticket to participate in this community is that you are an actual supporter of these artists. So you don't, you know, click a like button or a heart to add something to a collection. You transact, right? Yeah. To create a collection. And that gives the collection so much more meaning, right? Because you actually spent a limited resource, right? Your money to create this collection. So, you know, that's become just an incredibly important part of the business. It drives something like 30 plus percent of the sales. So meaning, you know, if you were as”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This gets back to your earlier question about the high fidelity and being that record store. Because when we started off, because MySpace was kind of the reference point where the community had devolved essentially into people spamming each other's pages with their own flyers and saying thanks for the ad and things like that, we decided that there wasn't going to be no community on Band Camp zero. We were essentially a white label in those early days. We were a white label service for artists and that was it. You know, after a couple years of doing this and there were enough artists on the site where people started to say, hey, could you tell me, you know, what are the other like math rock bands that are on bandcamp? And my reaction at first was, you know, why do you, I don't understand why you care, you know, just use Google, type Mathrock into Google and go find other vans, right? But then once, you know, once we'd gone from maybe 10,000 vans.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It can sometimes change your goals, change them to growth at all costs. And so getting, as you said, to getting to profitability, that was a really important milestone for us. We wanted to do that because we wanted to be able to retain control of the company and know that this mission that we have would be around long term.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yes. You know, before the pandemic hit, we had regular meetups all the time with artists and labels around the world, really. And the most common thing that I heard from people direct from artists and labels during those meetings were things like, you know, hey, I just wanted to come over and say, please don't ever sell the company. You're our last hope, you know, things like that. And I take that responsibility that the service that we are now providing to artists and labels, I take it, it's a really, it's a responsibility I take very, very seriously. So, you know, we would, I think, really only align ourselves with another company that had the welfare of the artist in mind in this same way. And yeah, take.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was the name of an album plus the word torrent, or the name of an artist plus, you know, free MP3 or something like that. And so You know, I don't know that the people who were using those search terms were necessarily thinking to themselves, I want to get this music for free or steal this music. But when they got... Band camp where it was clear that if they bought here, they were directly supporting an artist, that actually led to a sale. So that moment where we saw those kinds of surge terms resulting in money getting to artists was really the moment where it felt like, oh yeah, this is going to work”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I know that's definitely the hunch at the beginning because that's what I wanted personally. You know, I wanted to have that direct relationship with an artist and directly support them. And I figured there's got to be other people out there who want to do it this way and who want to directly support artists, but there's just there's no way to do it. It's not easy to do. And there was a moment early on that I think where everything clicked. And that was when we were looking at the search terms that people were using to get to band camp that ultimately ended in a sale. And we found, again, 2008, 2009. So what we were competing with, right, as you said, was like lime wire, right? Hulk share and stuff like that. So we looked at those search terms”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What makes Bankamp Bank is that anybody can sign up for it, you can sign up for it tomorrow and start five different bands and thinking about what that would mean for the average that each artist makes, it just starts to not make any sense that we would measure it that way. Instead, what we really are measuring is like the total amount that fans are paying artists through the site. Is that going up? And yeah, that's generally been the focus.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say that any artist should be doing a lot of things. They should be on band camp and they should be in a lot of other places as well. And I think that's had the approach that almost all of them take. But yeah, I mean, a lot of artists that are on Bandcamp are making significant amount of money. We hear all the time, mostly through Twitter, that the money that artists make through Bandcamp is orders of magnitude bigger than what they're making from streaming services, that it's how they're paying rent and getting equipment and buying groceries and all of that. So it's clear that we're, to me, a part of how a ton of artists are sustaining themselves. And that is great. I love hearing that. But, you know, the focus for us has never been on like measuring how many people are making over this amount, how many people are making over this amount.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, both artists who are completely independent and artists who are on labels. So we're at this point we have almost 10,000 independent labels on the site. So subpop, merge, ATO, NinjaTune, Relapse, just loads and loads of independent labels. In fact, I did not even know that there were so many independent labels in the world until I started working on Bandcamp. I've been blown away by that. And, you know, I think when a lot of people hear the word label, they think of, you know, Sony, Warner, Universal, right? The big, the major labels. But there's a huge, huge number of these independent labels out there, and some of them are really quite large, like beggars group. A lot of them are just mom and pop kinds of small businesses. And they and their artists. Are a big, big part of Bandc”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, they don't. No, I mean, we're really just focused on our mission of serving artists. That's what inspires me. That's what I get excited about doing. And I would say the company has grown and succeeded more as a side effect of focusing on that mission that we really have. And that to me is just, you know, that's. A lot more satisfying than if we, I think, took the approach of, yeah, we're focused on what our mission here is actually grow the company, get it to this size, go public sell it, whatever it is. That just hasn't really been the focus ever.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it was yours, right? And it just seems so weird that if your artistic output was words, you had all those options if your artistic output was music, you know, you're out of luck. So, you know, I wanted to solve that problem, not just for this one artist that I ran into, but for every artist.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it wasn't really your site. It was their logo, a bunch of their advertising. It was their traffic, their whole identity, right? And then so you had like all of these forward thinking bands, in my opinion, who were spending a lot of time, a lot of money building out custom sites, and then ending up with something that didn't really work. I found that particularly crazy because, again, in 2007, if you were a writer, you had blogger, typepad, movable, all these things that led you set up your own site very, very quickly and easily. And then it would say like powered by movable type in the bottom.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought they deserved all the success in the world. And when you love artists, right? You want everybody else to hear them, right? So I knew as a result of all these problems, very few other people would. But the other thing that killed me about it was that I thought that what they were doing, like it made perfect sense. Of course, an artist should be able to go directly to their fans for support. The internet makes that super easy. This is the promise of it, I think. And I also think it just creates this direct connection, creates this mutually beneficial relationship because not only does the artist get to make more music when I pay them, but also I But this was 2007 and there were just no mechanisms like this for musicians. There was MySpace MySpace, they didn't have a way through MySpace to sell directly to fans.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know what? I don't want to call them out because kind of the point is that this was a lot of bans at this point. I wrote to, there was an email address on the site and I wrote to the address. And I think it was the lead singer who wrote me back. And he's just sent me a link to a zip file, an totally open zip file that anybody could then share. And then I opened that up and there were all these all of these files with names like Master 3 final document super low quality, no liner notes, nothing. And I just basically, in this process, ran into like every technical problem that you could imagine. And that just, it killed me for two reasons. One, the music was amazing. And I thought the artist.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't know if it wasn't quite, the thought initially wasn't really a record store. It evolved into that. So I'll take you through it. So basically what happened is about 13 years ago, there was a band that I loved, and they decided that they were going to sell their new record directly to their fans on their own website. And on the day that that record came out, I went to their site and the site just didn't load at all. And I thought, oh, they must be slimmed. I'll come back the next time. And the site loaded on that day, but it loaded very, very slowly. This was also in the days of Flash. Everything was Flash. So, you know, it took a while to figure out exactly what was going on on the site. But eventually I bought the album But then I didn't actually get anything. The transaction went through, but no music.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. Yeah, and which I take as a compliment, right? I think that it's a really good comparison Etsy and Vancamper both really large marketplaces that I think really focus on supporting the creators.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it ends up being, there's payment processing fees and then there's webcams fees. So, and it varies by transaction size. But on average, it comes out to about 82% that goes directly to the artist. And then we pay that out every, it usually takes about 24 to 48 hours.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And, you know, that sort of alignment of interests that we have built into our business model is really just everything that we're about. I would say an artist first music company.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As you said, we're essentially an online record store and use a community where fans connect with artists and directly support them. And about half the business is physical records, so vinyl, cassettes, CDs, a lot of t-shirts as well. And then half the business is digital music. So people buying digital albums and digital tracks directly from the artist. And we also recently launched live streaming. So now tickets are part of it as well. But, you know, I would say that the thing that really sets us apart is that we've just built the whole company around the welfare of the artists. So we don't sell advertising. We don't really focus on subscriptions. We just help artists sell their music. And then we take a small revenue share on every sale. So what I like to say is that we only make money if artists make a lot more money.”
2021-04-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Ethan Diamond of Bandcamp · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT