According to a Bandcamp news blog released late yesterday

We’re offering a first glimpse of an initiative from Bandcamp that aims to address these challenges. Our new Vinyl Pressing Services streamlines the financing, production, and fulfillment of vinyl records. With no up-front investment, an artist or label can create a vinyl campaign and start taking orders almost immediately. Once they reach their minimum goal, we press their records and ship them to their fans.

The new service eliminates risk, since fans’ orders finance the pressing, rather than the artist or label. It eliminates hassle, since we press the records, print the packaging, and ship to fans (and fulfill digital too). It offers complete control, with the design and pricing up to the artist, and Bandcamp taking no ownership of the record. And it produces a quality result: our manufacturing partner has over 60 years experience pressing vinyl, so the records look, and sound, great.

The Bandcamp vinyl service will open to all artists and labels later this year, but today we’re launching four pilot campaigns that provide an idea of what’s possible:

This a great concept and we believe this will benefit many artists looking for a way to satisfy fans needs in an ever-changing music environment.

About Bandcamp
Bandcamp is an American online music company founded in 2008 by former Oddpost co-founder Ethan Diamond and programmers Shawn Grunberger, Joe Holt and Neal Tucker, headquartered in Oakland, California.

Bandcamp’s mission is to create the best possible service for artists and labels to share and earn money from their music, and for fans to discover and enjoy it.

Artists and labels upload music to Bandcamp and control how they sell it, setting their own prices, offering fans the option to pay more (which they do 40% of the time and selling merchandise. 

According to Wikipedia
Fans can download their purchases or stream their music on the Bandcamp app. They can also send purchased music as a gift, view lyrics, and save individual songs or albums to a wish list. Uploading music to Bandcamp is free, and the company takes a 15% cut of sales made from their website (in addition to payment processing fees), which drops to 10% after an artist’s sales surpass $5000.

Downloads are offered both in lossy formats as MP3 (320k or V0), AAC and Ogg Vorbis and in lossless formats as FLAC, ALAC, WAV, and AIFF. In addition to digital downloads, artists may offer the purchase of their music on physical media such as CD or vinyl.

We first heard of other start-ups going back some years offering this same type of service, such Qrates, and French startup Diggers. 

Fortune Magazine Vinyl sales grew by just shy of 12% from 8.6 to 9.7 million sales, while cassette sales grew by almost 19% from 99,400 to 118,200 copies sold in the US, The Verge reported.

The Bandcamp blog Create Vinyl with Bandcamp. reported that sales of vinyl records on Bandcamp have grown 600% in the last five years, and every month another 3,500 unique vinyl albums are added to the site. 

Read the full story at Create Vinyl with Bandcamp.