Self-righteous people will frequently chastise illegal downloaders of music for “not supporting the artist”. They feel entitled by the 99 cents they spent on each song, and it’s true that downloading a song, especially if the downloader never intends to pay, even if they enjoy it,  is a refusal to support the artist and their intellectual property. But how much of that 99 cents actually supported the artist?

Chances are, the artist, even a rather popular one, earned about 8 cents from your purchase. The rest is split between Apple and the respective record companies. Apple receives 35 percent of the profit and the record companies receive a whopping 65 percent.

Is there a better way to support artists, especially new, obscure ones? Yes. This way is Bandcamp, a website with a revolutionary new publishing idea: give the money to the actual artists. When an album is bought on Bandcamp, at least 85 percent of the money goes to the artist. Also, albums are much more commonly bought than individual songs, unlike on iTunes and other music sites where tracks outsell albums 16-to-1.

Bandcamp doesn’t seize ownership rights like traditional publishing. When an artist signs to a label, they can be stuck in bothersome and unfair contracts, which can even lead to their cession of all rights to the music they created. Magnatune, another website, has this freedom of licensing as their main selling point. Their motto is “We are not evil.” However, Bandcamp combines this with many other things that aim to make the music marketplace a fairer place for the artist.

The music discovery opportunities are great too. The artist sites that make up Bandcamp allow streaming of whole albums, as well as a forward thinking pay-what-you-want pricing model if the artist wants. The main site has browsing tags by genre, popular artists, rising artists and more, giving the user multiple ways to find music he or she enjoys. There are plenty of good artists here, even fairly popular ones like Sufjan Stevens and Beats Antique. The site is so easy for artists to set up that I actually convinced one of my favorite bands to start using it. It is an obvious choice for artists: 8 cents or 85.

Bandcamp is the future of music publishing.