Turn the music industry on it's head - that's what we were out to do when we launched the Open Goldberg Variations project. We'd raise the tens of thousands of dollars needed to record a famous piece by J.S. Bach, and then we'd reward our backers by releasing it copyright-free, so that anyone and everyone could use it, whatever their purpose. As a benefit, the pianist, Kimiko Ishizaka, would receive loads of publicity, and her brilliant interpretation would become a new standard for the work.

Everything worked according to plan, until the day we released the album, in May 2012. Boingboing and Slashdot both announced the story, and The New Yorker, Wired, Gizmodo (in the US), the F.A.Z., Spiegel.de, and Heise.de (in Germany) all carried the story. People came to our website to download the music. Thousands and thousands of them.

Our joy took a severe hit, however, when the first AWS S3 bill came for hosting the downloadable files. Nearly $2,000 was due the first month alone for providing access to so many downloadable files. Ouch - that hadn't been budgeted for. Worse than that, we hadn't prepared properly for the idea that people might want to donate money for the free product, just because they wanted to support what we were doing. We could have used those donations to offset the bandwidth costs!

We lost thousands in unforeseen bandwidth costs and missed opportunities to accept people's generous support

So here we are, months away from the release of the Open Well-Tempered Clavier, the successor project, and once again we're hoping thousands and thousands will want to download Kimiko Ishizaka's music. This time, however, we'll have Bandcamp on our side.

Bandcamp to the rescue

Bandcamp is a fantastic tool for musicians to release albums, and it has two features in particular which are going to make all the difference to us, and which would have saved us thousands if we'd have released the Open Goldberg Variations originally on Bandcamp (we moved the album there last week and are thrilled with the results).

In addition to great presentation of the music, an embeddable player widget, lists of upcoming concerts, and a network of fans that can find and discover the music, Bandcamp has two features that make it invaluable to our efforts to promote Kimiko Ishizaka's music without going broke.

Zero-cost downloads that allow fans to name their price in case they want to send Kimiko some money for her music Zero-cost downloads are not for free, they're paid for by the money collected in #1

Zero-cost downloads are not for free

This is what it looks like when you download a "free" album from Bandcamp.

The important things (for us) are that you can name your price - even zero, and that your email address is added to our mailing list so that we can say thank you, and tell you when we release new music.

So why doesn't everybody just download for free? Because zero-cost downloads are not for free. They actually cost around 1.5¢ per download. Bandcamp issues a credit for free downloads - 200 to begin with - and when that number is exceeded, the music cannot be downloaded for free anymore. This is Bandcamp's method for protecting themselves against the massive bandwidth costs that I paid when releasing the Open Goldberg Variations.

The musician can either top off the download credits by paying Bandcamp, or, in a much better outcome, fans will have willingly paid $500 for their 200 downloads, at which time Bandcamp gives you 1,000 more credits. Long story short: someone pays for the downloads, either the fans, or the musician. Very smart, Bandcamp, very smart indeed.

Enjoy the music of J.S. Bach

All this means that come March, you'll be able to enjoy Kimiko Ishizaka's Well-Tempered Clavier recording for free, but you'll be able to choose to help offset the costs by putting something extra towards download credits, and thus help Kimiko make her next recording, whenever that will be.

Until then, enjoy the Open Goldberg Variations from 2012 - they're as beautiful as ever!