When we designed Troubled Clef Studios, a core element was to ensure that rooms were large enough for anything from solo artists to 30 piece orchestra, and we achieved that.  Additionally we also built our rooms to ensure that every artist can see every other artists through smart window design.  And additionally that the control room was adjacent – not detached, from the recording rooms.  This was not easy to achieve, but we managed to do that.  We wanted the artists to feel that they were in the same room with each other – just like they are used to in rehearsal rooms or on stage.  That’s native to them, and it should reflect in an authentic capture of their greatest creations.

Air flow

This is generally the most forgotten, misunderstood and poorly addressed design of any modern recording studio.  Whereas you want a sound proofed and isolated recording environment that shields exterior noise out of the recording, and keeps interior noise in as to not impact neighbors, etc. this is juxtaposed with client comfort.

The flow of air is critical to our existence and everyone knows just how uncomfortable it is to be in a room that has poor airflow.  Stale air is nobody’s friend – particularly when you are in a room with a physically active drummer or percussionist.  Fresh air is the key reason clients break from recording, to go outside.  If you are in the zone of recording something, that’s the last thing you need and it is likely that you will never find the zone if you are constantly gasping for clean air.

The ducts of a recording studio are complex and pose a challenge – how do you provide air ducts that connect the air flow of fresh air from the outside into a room when your entire goal is to isolate the room from exterior noise?  This has been the bane of any studio designer for decades.

Most HVAC experts focus on the climate of a room, but in our case that is not as much of an issue.  We have multiple layers of thick, concrete poured walls around our studio.  San Miguel de Allende has an average temperature of about 72 degrees Farenheit (about 22 celcius) and weather here is closer to San Diego or a mediterranean climate even though we are far from a beach.  So temperature control is not critical.  What is critical is air flow.

When we began the search for HVAC experts or best practices for recording studios, we had a very hard time.  It was indicative of an industry that didn’t put client comfort first – they put the sound engineering of the rooms first and often that was at odds with client comfort.

We found the answer, however.  Energy Recovery Ventilation (ERV) technology.  This is a newer technology that is just starting to take off in modern HVAC designs – mainly in homes. 

ERV system design

ERV systems are an integrated system to bring fresh air from outside into air ducts and extract stale air from inside and send it out.  It seems simple enough, but the physics are quite extraordinary.  The air passes through a series of filters to remove dust particles, and optionally de-humidify the air.  Some systems add climate control into the mix as well, but this simple pumping system only requires a low level of power to run. 

The ducts that carry the air in and out must be sound proofed and isolated, so our design includes about 8 “silencers”.  These are similar in concept to what you would see as a silencer on a gun.  They surround the ducts to remove noise, and all of our ducting is fiberglass encased to further remove noise.  The ERV main units are external to the recording rooms, to remove any chance of ambient noise from the environment. 

The end result is that every room where clients will gather – from live room, to the vocal room, to the control room, has ERV powered client comfort built in.  Ducts are part of the wall design, so no unsightly mini-split heads in rooms that need to be manually turned off between recording takes.

Whereas retrofitting something like ERV systems into existing structures is VERY expensive because it requires a full duct installation, and most recording studios attempted to not have ducts fearing the noise transfer in/out of a room, we designed our facility with this from the start.

We believe we are one of the pioneers of this technology and it is just another part of the frontiers of sound recording that we are proud to be a part of.

Control room comfort

I’ve worked in studios before that had a massive recording console in the control room, some seating space for engineers, but literally only a small couch space for clients.  The most folkloric studios in the past often had this flaw – the worst one was one of the studios in Muscle Shoals where there was literally no room for clients to sit with engineers during a recording or mix review session.

This meant that clients were removed from the process – sent to a kitchen or break room area because they had no room in the control room for them. 

This is not what we have at Troubled Clef Studios.  Our control room was designed to have the best technology (both vintage equipment with our Neve recording console but also the best of modern technology), but a very large living room style area for clients to relax.  There is a lot of “hurry up & wait” in making records.  We wanted the client to be as comfortable during this process as possible.

Artist rendering of our control room layout

When a client books our facility, they won’t suffer comfort for a great recording.  We are spacious and offer all the creature comforts.  From large sofa style seating, to a refrigerator, sink, microwave, coffee machine, espresso machine, etc. along with easy ordering of food from local restaurants, including full catering if needed, the client will love the experience.

We’ve even included a large screen TV with video game console if they want (just keep the noise down if you can  ).

If you want to leave the artificial environment of the studio, you can walk the grounds outside in comfort too.

Ready for 2026

Building something of this magnitude has been a 3+ year process.  But making history takes time.  Every day that we progress, we see the dilution of the human experience – usually to make way for some technological innovation that often goes against the very interest of the human.  That’s not the case for Troubled Clef Studios.  We embrace art and humanity, and that means going the extra mile to ensure that people are comfortable to give the best performance of their lives, with the tools and experience to capture it for perpetuity.

We hope you desire the same experience for your next recording project.  We will be ready for you in early 2026, so if you are planning the recording of an album, we will be opening bookings from March onwards.  Contact us for rate sheet, etc. or if you have any questions feel free to message us here on our website.

We feel honored to be here. The economics of Mexico and San Miguel de Allende allow artists to flourish without the expenses of big cities like New York, Paris, London, Los Angeles, etc. This is a gift to artists. A place to think and contemplate without the stress of the modern urban city. Where one can see the world and comment upon it, tell stories and maybe help others realize the forest for the trees.

And yet we are part of the world. We are part of humanity and we just as active here as agents of change as anyone in an urban center. There is always a risk in retreating to a place of peace like San Miguel de Allende, that you lose your edge and your power. But that is far from what is happening here.

In fact, what is happening is conjuring the past to create the future.

Sir George Martin’s vision on the island of Montserrat

Our recording studio’s “live room” is an exact replica of AIR Studios Montserrat’s live room. This iconic recording studio that was built in 1978 and ceased to operate in 1989, had a short history but changed culture. Artists that are now considered legendary traveled to this island in the Caribbean – in the middle of nowhere – to create. To understand it, is to understand Troubled Clef Studios and its vision.

Sir George Martin was the legendary producer of The Beatles. But he did much, much more that most people forget. Sir George was an agent of change. In the early 1960s, he founded the Association of Independent Recordists ( or “AIR”) as he would embrace the acronym. AIR was a collective of recording engineers who had previously been on staff at various media companies. They were generally poorly paid – on salaries – and Sir George took the risk of creating the concept of a producer.

While the C-Suite at the media companies were living large, the staff were often not. The staff not only recorded the artists, but added value and involve themselves in helping the artist to flourish. They might offer arrangement ideas, or suggestions. Sometimes they were invited to be co-writers on material. Often they played the role of psychologist, because they knew what was required to unveil the art from the artist. These things were above & beyond the norm of the role of a recording engineer, Sir George felt that the producer needed to be a stakeholder in the final product.

He was one of the first to float the idea of “points” on a recording, where a small percentage of royalties for the final recorded product was directed to the producer. He left his employment to be an independent producer, and the rest is history. He found four scruffy young musicians in Liverpool (The Beatles) and produced their albums. He helped them discover their greatness and we are blessed to have the final recorded product from that era that changed what we think of modern popular music.

After the demise of The Beatles in the late 1960s, Sir George took his new found fortune and built a large recording studio in London. AIR Studios, as he named it, was the center of activity throughout the 1970s in London and featured the best technology & talent of the time. It, however, suffered from being in a busy urban city. The reputation and legendary status that he held brought all the right but often the wrong elements to the doors of AIR London. The paparazzi would camp out at the front of the studio – waiting for a celebrity to walk in. The stress was enormous and it affected art. It affected the creativity.

Years later, Sir George found himself on a flight in which he saw an article in the back of an In-Flight magazine about this magical island in the Caribbean called Montserrat. He embraced a mission of finding a solution for a place in which artists could create without the stress & distractions that had built up around London at the time. He floated an idea of building a recording studio on a ship and had to go out into the ocean to isolate the artists but that came with the issues of noisey diesel engines that was the enemy of the recording studio.

He thought that maybe an island that was naturally isolated and far away could be the answer. He discovered the island of Montserrat and he and his wife fell in love with it. Despite the logistical challenges of building a world class recording studio there, he prevailed and with his loyal team, they built a place that art could once again flourish. The beauty of the island life allowed for the creation of iconic albums from his clients. The Police, Dire Straits, Duran Duran, Rush, Elton John, The Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney and countless others all went there and recorded. But ultimately nature reclaimed it. In 1989, a hurricane wiped out much of his studio and home. Even though it could have been saved, the desire to do it waned. This was the time of the compact disc, changes in musical styles that moved away from the 1980s to Grunge and the post-punk revolution. However Sir George held onto his land and his property. But in 1995, the final nail in the coffin for AIR Montserrat came when a volcano on the island erupted and a massive catastrophy claimed much of the island – with the studio being cut off from resources and forced into what they call “the exclusion zone”.

To this day, the studio still stands but as a termite infested shell. It can never be recovered due to the toxic nature of a post apocalyptic eruption. And so it was entombed.

But the idea of a paradise for the creation of art still remained.

Technology & music

The one thing that is often forgotten is that the renaissance of music of the 1960s, 70s and 80s came because of technology. Prior to Sir George’s work in Abbey Road Studios in London in the 1960s, recording was done with one or two tracks. There were microphones in big rooms, but no multi-track tape recorders. The artists would perform together and be recorded – they were the mix of sounds in real time that was captured. Eventually the likes of Les Paul and his creation of the multi-track tape recorder emerged. Some studios took risks on it in the 1960s and eventually the 4 track studio was created. Then the 8 track and finally the 24 track studio became the defacto standard for recording in the 1970s as the technology progressed.

This meant that you could have many microphones separately recording. Many musicians isolated and separated but then to bring it all back together in a mix of sound that resulted in the records that we know and love today.

The technology was an empowering and enabling tool. It spawned a new era of acoustic exploration, and ushered in effects units, synthesizers, samplers, distortion, compression, EQ, etc. that all became tools of the sound recordist. And the production of media that could hold, in perpetuity, the recordings made with this technology became mainstream. Vinyl long playing recordings (or “LPs” as we would refer to them) and turntables and Hi-Fi systems became affordable. Now everyone could experience the music in its glory. This moved into the digital age in the 1980s with CDs.

Technology is a double-edged sword. As a tool, it allows a proficient sound recordist with a talented artist or band to create a brilliant recording. However if the recordist is not properly trained or has no connection to the music that they are recording, it runs the risk that the tool controls the end result. This routinely creates neutral results – since those using the tool rely solely on the tool to do the work, rather than their vision and technique, everything sounds the same because the same tools are doing it. This is further amplified with more technically advanced things such as artificial intelligence, in which the tool does ALL the work including the creation and the musician is no longer relevant.

The entire point of creating an environment for musicians to flourish is to understand the human experience, our doubts, fears, hopes, loves, anger, and all the other emotions that make us human. To synthesize that, or remove it entirely, is the antithesis of this and why most modern recording studios are shutting down and going away.

Sir George knew that technology was a tool – but a tool that humans must use. And that, like a hammer in the right hands, can create great furniture. But in the wrong hands, is a weapon of destruction.

When I hear people complaining that everything sounds the same these days, or that there isn’t any risk taking in music anymore, or that music has lost its edge, I know why. The technology (the tools) became the focus and the human using it became submissive and irrelevant. Sir George coined the term “producer” in the 1960s because he knew the role that he was playing in creating the likes of The Beatles. But today, that term has been pasteurized and homogenized and no longer means anything. Musicians think they are “producers” because they produce a recording on their laptop. DJs think they are producers because they produce a mashup of sounds for a club. Some engineers still hold on to the traditional definition of the term that came from Sir George, but they are all threatened by the tools doing their job for them.

And yet here is the dilemma. Humans need to create art because humans consume it. Not machines, tools or technology. If those things are not used by humans to create something that culturally represents who we are, then we are doomed. Art is the one thing that we have that really represents who we are as a species. It allows communication of feeling and sensitivity that you can’t successfully synthesize.

Sir George knew the balance between technology and art, but ultimately backed the humans that created the art. He created a safe place for them to create the best recordings of their lives in the Caribbean. It may not have lasted more than 10 years, but it was legendary.

Carrying on the tradition

Troubled Clef Studios is the vision of Myles Wakeham, and opens in 2026 in San Miguel de Allende. This is a place of refuge and solace for musicians to get back to who they are – humans. To have a safe place where the human experience can be explored in music. Not to run away from it, but to run into it.

In the shadow of AIR Montserrat & Sir George’s vision, Troubled Clef partnered with those still alive who built AIR Montserrat and created legends. We hunted far & wide all over the world for the right technology – both the latest tools that could be used for the creation of music, but similar technology to what existed in the past that created legends. Some things are museum pieces, and other things are modern day items of wonder.

All with the vision of supporting the human. We don’t avoid the struggle that it takes to create great art. We embrace it. We don’t defer the creation to AI. We confront it head on, and we make it comfortable.

San Miguel de Allende brings its power to the process by creating a place away from the stress of the modern world. The lower costs of living here compared to modern urban cities means that one can stay longer and really find the art they are looking to present. The restaurants and cafes, the beautiful architecture, the history, the people… It all is part of the story. Much in the same way Sir George found the jewel in Montserrat, we found the same in San Miguel de Allende. We are standing on the shoulders of the giants that came before us, and we are part of history. This is something we want Mexico to be proud of, and that it can stand on the world stage alongside such great studios as Abbey Road, AIR, Albert Studios, East/West, Blackbird, etc. and be a destination for the creation of art.

If you believe in these ideals as we do, join us. If you believe that art needs a future that isn’t defined by the tools but by the humans, join us. If you ever ask why music has become passe and doesn’t reflect the human story anymore, join us. Troubled Clef Studios offer an affordable destination studio experience for those serious about their art and changing the world with it.

We have many, many clients and I generally get the same feedback – “We are not making any money from our recordings” or “The money is made in touring – not in recording” or “We are relying on performance royalties to provide for us for the future”.  I’m going to explain why all of these approaches are flawed and will never lead to a secure and financially successful life for any musician.

First, we don’t live in a world as it was in the 1970s, 80s or 90s anymore.  There are no such thing as “records” sold in stores.  Sure, you might find the odd nostalgic vintage record store in your town.  But ask yourself this – who goes there?  Maybe some audiophile with $10,000 invested in a sound system like it is 1988 again.  But they are probably not your fans.  They probably don’t go to your shows.

As I write this (September 2025) the fans are getting all their music essentially for free.  They are paying a monthly subscription fee to a service, and to them that is music.  You are probably one of hundreds of thousands of artists that are in that server somewhere – hoping to be discovered.  The fans are not interested in you, per se.  Their attention is fickle and not very long lasting.  This is the dilemma.  For an artist to survive financially, they have to build a vendor-customer relationship with a fan.  The customer loyalty will then flow to their next creation, and the one after that.

Know your endpoint

Loyal fans are out there.  The problem is finding them.  So the worst thing you could do to yourself is to put all your hopes & dreams on a massive ocean of “content” in which your art is devalued.  That is Spotify.

You will never be famous on Spotify.  Let’s face it – those artists who are dressed up at The Grammys are underwritten by big marketing agencies.  That’s what record labels have become.  They are marketing agencies with the sole goal to take their intellectual property (their copyright library and catalog) and sell it to the highest bidder.  That generally is sync licensing or some other form of broadcast. 

Musicians thought they could end-run this game by focusing on performance rights organizations (PROs) to have their back.  In the days of broadcast radio, that empowered the likes of BMI, ASCAP, SESAC, etc. to collect royalties on behalf of the copyright holders.  We trusted that they had our backs – we never knew what went on behind the curtain, but they did provide us with quarterly checks.

Let’s get real – first, no one uses checks anymore.  Second, no one listens to radio in any meaningful way anymore.  The Internet has become the protocol of communication of everything.  The device you have that connects to the Internet is your way of receiving sound.  If you are particular about how good things sound, you may supplement your phone with some nice headphones or earbuds.  Maybe you connect your phone to your car and Bluetooth it to your sound system in the car.  But audio quality is not there.

In order for the big data centers to get that audio into your ears, they have to compress it.  They want the smallest amount of data size possible so that they can push out more and more without having to pay or invest in more bandwidth.  The wizards who found a way to compress audio to MP3 format did so at the expense of the entire record industry.  A CD with its 44.1khz, 16bit stereo audio went the way of the dinosaur in favor of low grade MP3 files.  It seems that quantity won over quality.

But now quantity has become the meaningless quest of more, more, more.  It isn’t that you have something you care about as a collection.  It is that the price of a 24TB hard drive is half what it used to be, so you can fit more “stuff” on it.  Or that your ISP is offering you 1Gb/s Fiber Optic connections compared to the 100mb/s you used to get years ago.  More, more, more.

This is the musician’s customer.

The endpoint therefore is being able to have it all with convenience.  You don’t want to wade through the petabytes of data to find something that will move you.  You want the computer to do that for you.  By classifying each song as “content”, the data center can use the metadata and other listener’s preferences to profile it, and then profile you, and find matches.  We call that playlisting.

You rely on playlists to find you that new band or artist, and without it this whole hoarding of content thing is destroyed.  Therefore you need a software application on your device of choice that can play the music, but can integrate with the backend server platform to do all the heavy lifting for you by way of playlisting, suggesting “You might also like…” and pretending to build a relationship with a community of listeners.  Truth is that you have relationship with a database and some functional code on a server, that retrieves bytes of data and pushes it to your by way of some Internet connection.

This is the endpoint that the musician has to understand.

The income from recording

In 2025, on a planet with 8.2 billion people on it, you might be surprised to know that 68% of them have access to the Internet.  They could be your fans.  They could be your loyal following.  So it is natural that artists want to reach them all.

Reality check – you won’t.  Most don’t speak your native language and don’t like what you are doing.  That’s ok.  They don’t have to.  What you want to reach are those that do like what you do, and are willing to pay you money to enjoy it.

We seem to think that back in the days when record labels actually made CDs, that everyone made money.  They didn’t.  Only a very small few that received income from labels did, and most of them hired an army of lawyers to keep the labels honest.  You probably know all the stories of how artist X was screwed over by their label, or their management, or their publishing.  They were one in 10,000 that actually had a contract of some form put in front of them to sign that had some money referenced on the pages.  Most never got that.

Income was made by dealing with smelly club owners who hoped that you would bring in enough punters and they’d sell a lot of alcohol.  If you did that, you might be invited back to play again.  If you didn’t, you were cast aside to go and look for another club to play in.  That hasn’t changed.  In fact it has become the primary source of revenue for most musicians.  In order for the club owner to sell more beer, the musicians had to target their customer – the audience and play what they wanted to hear, rather than what the musicians wanted to create.  This has led to a world of regurgitation of the “oldies” and cover bands.  Clubs are basically Wedding Singer bands who play the standards.

That’s exactly the place I personally prefer to avoid.  And so for someone that loves to hear new and interesting artists, I will never go to those places to hear them.

The other issue is the basic rule of economics – you won’t get rich if you don’t “scale”.  If you have to exert energy every night to play in front of an audience, you are no different to the bards of medieval times.  They traveled from village to village to play to the new audience, but there is one of them and one night per day that they can play.  The costs of transport, accommodation, instrument lugging, assistants, etc. has to be born by the artist first and after those costs are paid, what they make is their income.  Let’s remember this – It is not what you earn…. It is what you keep.  You have to pay for all the costs first, and that means you find yourself on some never ending treadmill of touring in order to just survive.  Most can’t hack this over a long time.  And they have nothing substantive to show for this level of toil either.  Maybe the odd show recorded on some smart phone, or if you had a sound engineer that could record what was played, but it is generally lost forever to memories that will fade and an audience that will quickly move onto the next thing.

This is not sustainable.  You must record and get your recordings to the masses. That’s the only way you have any hope of making a decent living in this business.

What about songwriter royalties?

The old days allowed those that wrote the songs to make some money.  If you were lucky enough to be a participant in that world, you may still have payments rolling in from PROs now.  But that’s because the back catalog of what was created back then is worth a lot to record labels that don’t make records anymore. 

The problem is that for a new writer, they don’t have that to work with.  I speak with so many artists that are so protective of their copyrights to their music, but in fact that is like being protective of air.  Sure, we need it and we value it, but it is everywhere and good luck trying to sequester it.  It is also highly debatable if the creation of something actually was original.  We hear things in our world and we mentally react to those things, and they take form in new songs, etc.   But everything is based on something that was there before it.  The chance that you use synthetic instruments in your products means there is a 75% chance you are using a sample of an instrument that someone will claim to be theirs and only theirs in the future and try and bring down your world with some frivolous lawsuit.

And then there is AI – the automated means of doing the same thing.  You put your music out on some platform, and some bot is learning from it, trying to imitate you and probably doing a better job at the end product than your budget can afford with recording studios.

The days of making a living from PRO royalties are done for the newer artists.  So planning some return on investment model with that is a road to failure and frustration.

Avoid Spotify

 For many, their goal is to release on Spotify and quickly.  But this won’t work either.  First, Spotify pay artists for their work based on a pooling of artists, and then sharing a small amount to a large audience.  Some think they can game the system.  There are many services that will hack the Spotify algorithms for you by creating artificial listenership of your music.  But if the AI of Spotify detects some unusual spike in listeners, you can get blacklisted very quickly.

This gets worse too.  Because everyone relies on playlists and suggested algorithms to be heard, if you appear on a playlist that one other artist is trying to game the system, chances are the entire playlist will be blacklisted and your tracks removed from Spotify.  Spotify has no real security either – there is no two factor authentication to connect and anyone can upload anything.  That means others can pretend to be you, or can poison your catalog of art on Spotify by uploading and stating that they are you, or that they collaborated with you, and you have no idea who they are.  But if they have artificial listeners, then you lose.  They take you down and you have little recourse.

This is worsened by the fact that distribution services like Distrokid, CD Baby, etc. sell a product that is supposed to make this easier for you, but it also makes it easier for the bad actors too.  Again, they don’t secure their services like a bank account.  There is no security tokens on most of them, and no Google Authentication. 

The final nail in the coffin of Spotify is the measly amount they pay.  At $0.003 per stream (and that’s on a good day) even a popular artist can’t pay the rent with this.  So what do they do?  They get back in the tour bus and keep touring.  They are more willing to deal with smelly club owners than some faceless data center that won’t return their calls, or answer their emails.

The only attraction to Spotify is that this is where the audience is.  But that’s a fallacy.  The audiences there don’t care about artists.  They pay their $12.95 per month for the all you can eat buffet of “content”.  They don’t care about any individual artist.

The answer

It is better to have 5% of something than 100% of nothing.  You don’t need to be huge with the 68% of the 8.2 billion people on this planet with an Internet connection.  You likely won’t, and the costs and frustration to do it is a myth.  I’ve seen individual artists spending over $100,000 on an album to try and do this and it never works out.

The key here is to think more like a small business than think you are some big You Inc. corporation.  You don’t have the investors to be that, so don’t try.  Start small and create quality.  That’s how small restaurants do it.  That’s how the craftsmen and women do it.  Find a way to be sustainable.  Keep your costs low, but invest in things that actually will make you money.

Small businesses make their money at small markets.  Like Farmers Markets or trade shows.  They look for a marketplace that won’t take all their profits, but has an audience of customers that are built in. And they build a mailing list of past customers that might want to visit them when they appear at the next market.  They respect the customer by not attempting to spam them, but they are actively out there prodding the customer to be on their radar.

They also do what they can to bring the customer back to them.  That means they have invested more in having a great website or Instagram profile.  They work social media strategically – they don’t use it to spout their individual opinions that would alienate their customer base.  Businesses that have done that generally go bankrupt.

The key here is to know the endpoint.  You don’t go through all of this effort if your endpoint is Spotify.  That won’t end well.  And you also don’t want your endpoint to be your next show at Club X because you can’t scale that.  Ideally you would have the customer go to your website and pay you money to get your music.  But you can’t stop them copying it, and you probably don’t need the added expense of printing CDs and dealing with fulfilment services to get them to the customer.  The customer wants the product immediately, and waiting a week for a CD to arrive isn’t going to cut it.  And that is assuming that all of your customers have CD players – fun fact:  They don’t.

Remember the endpoint.  They have a smartphone and some headphones.  So you have to produce a digital product that can get to them.  But you don’t want it devalued.

There is a way (drum roll please…).

Bandcamp

This service has been around for decades, and has some excellent applications for smartphones, a great web browsing experience, etc.  Even a nice Apple MacOS client that I’m listening to right now as I write this.  It’s in the App Store.  It’s on Google play.  It costs nothing.  There is no monthly subscription fee here.

But for the artist, it is a marketplace not unlike the Farmers Market experience.  There you can sell digital downloads of your work.  You can use it to market to your customers automatically.  When you release a new album, they will notify your customers.  There is a lot of “drive though traffic” too.  Bandcamp will suggest your music to others that actually have money in their pocket to buy it.  You can use it to sell physical media like CDs or Vinyl if you are so inclined.  And they only take about 20% of the total revenue for the service.

The good news is that there is a paywall.  You can release samples of your music for free, but have the customer pay for the entire album.  The transaction experience for the customer is frictionless.  A simple credit card or PayPal purchase experience.  Something they are all used to, and you get your share of the sale shortly afterwards.  You can sell merch there too, if you want.

The other great news is that all the hard work that we in the recording business go through to create the best sounding version of you in the studio can be downloaded.  FLAC, AIFF, WAV, etc. are all supported.  When you download the album you bought, you choose the format you want it in.  For those of us with money invested into nice sound systems, this works.  And you know that your listeners will experience you in the quality that you hoped they would.  Not some disappointing compressed sound that isn’t the best version of you out there.

Sure, there are always those that will find some flaw with Bandcamp.  But I would ask the old Dr. Phil question here, “How’s the alternative working out for ya?”

Unless you are your own record label pressing CDs, and you have a customer base that still want them, good luck.  I’ve not met anyone like that.  Digital is the only way music is communicated now.  That’s ok – just make sure you have a paywall up so that your hard work isn’t devalued and that you build that loyal customer base who will buy what you have done, and also what you will do in the future.

If you give up, no one wins.  If you think that being a musician is about playing in the clubs 300+ nights a year, you will burn out.  If you think that you will become magically rich because of some songwriter credits or PRO payments, this ain’t 1985 anymore, Dorothy.