Bandcamp vs Patreon for Musicians: Which Model Fits You

Which one should I pick, Bandcamp or Patreon?

Start with the shape of your income, not the fees. Bandcamp pays you when something sells. You drop an album, run a vinyl pre-order, push a merch bundle, and the money lands per transaction. It's lumpy by nature: big on release week, quiet between drops. Patreon pays you the same amount every month from the same patrons whether you released anything or not. That's the real trade. Sales reward catalog and events. Membership rewards a steady relationship with people who want to keep funding you.

Here's how I'd decide. If your fans mostly want to own your music and merch, and you release regularly, Bandcamp is the cleaner fit. If you've got a core of superfans who'd happily pay every month for access, behind-the-scenes stuff, and being close to the work, Patreon turns that into predictable income. Plenty of artists run both: Bandcamp for the releases and the store, Patreon for the recurring base. The same fan can live on both platforms without any conflict.

How much does each platform take?

Both are reasonable by music-industry standards, but the cuts are structured differently. Bandcamp takes a revenue share of 15% on digital items and 10% on physical goods. On top of that there's a payment processing fee that varies with the transaction size, which Bandcamp says runs an additional 4 to 7% on an average purchase. After both, you typically keep 80 to 85% of the sale price. There's also a 1% PayPal payout fee, but it's capped at $1 USD per payout, so it's noise at any real volume.

Patreon changed its pricing in 2025. If you published your page after August 4, 2025, you're on a flat 10% platform fee on all your revenue. If you were on Patreon before that date, you keep your old legacy plan rate (Lite 5%, Pro 8%, or Premium 12%) and won't see an increase, with one trap: unpublishing your page forfeits the legacy rate permanently, so don't unpublish on a whim. On top of the platform fee, payment processing is 2.9% + $0.30 per standard pledge over $3, or 5% + $0.10 on micropayments of $3 and under. On a $10/month pledge, a new creator nets around 87%.

The percentages are close enough that fees shouldn't be your deciding factor. A few points of platform cut matters far less than picking the model your fans will pay into. Patreon's flat 10% is a touch leaner than Bandcamp's 15% on digital, but Bandcamp has no monthly relationship to maintain, and on physical goods its 10% share is the same as Patreon's flat fee anyway.

When do I get paid, and how?

This is where they split hard, and it matters for cash flow. Bandcamp pays out through PayPal only. By default the money is credited 24 to 48 hours after a sale processes, and you can switch to a single consolidated payout on the 1st of the month if you'd rather batch it. The catch: high-value purchases can sit up to 14 days for manual review before they pay out, and once your sales pass $5,000 USD in a year you have to provide tax information to keep getting paid at all.

Patreon runs on a monthly cycle. Patrons are charged at the start of the month and creators get paid out around the 1st to the 5th, with more payout method choices than Bandcamp: bank transfer, wire, or PayPal. Bandcamp money moves faster per sale. Patreon money is more dependable in timing. If you need to know roughly what's hitting your account on the 3rd of every month, Patreon gives you that. If you want cash within two days of a release-day spike, Bandcamp does.

Canada vs US: payouts and tax forms

This is the part that catches Canadian artists off guard, and it's different on each platform. On Bandcamp, the platform is US-based, so as a non-US seller you have to submit a Form W-8BEN (or W-8BEN-E if you're an entity) to establish foreign status. Skip it and Bandcamp can withhold 30% of your payouts. File a valid W-8BEN claiming treaty benefits and, thanks to the Canada-US tax treaty, that withholding on royalties drops to 0%. The form isn't optional paperwork: it's the difference between keeping all your money and losing nearly a third of it. US sellers earning over $20,000 USD/year get a 1099-K; non-US sellers don't get a 1099-K regardless of earnings.

Patreon handles Canadians differently. Starting January 2025, Patreon reports Canadian creator income annually to the CRA under Canada's Platform Economy Reporting Regime, the DAC7-equivalent rule, covering the prior calendar year. So the CRA already knows what you earned on Patreon. On the payout side, Canadian creators can take a direct bank transfer in CAD for a small flat fee (roughly $0.50 CAD per payout) or a USD wire, where Patreon's fee plus correspondent bank fees can add $10 to $30. The CAD direct transfer is materially cheaper, so default to that unless you specifically need USD.

One thing that applies no matter which platform you use: in Canada, once your total self-employment income (Patreon, Bandcamp, merch, gigs, all of it) clears $30,000 CAD in a year, you have to register for a GST/HST number with the CRA. That's a you-obligation the platforms won't remind you about, and it's easy to lose track of when income is coming from three different places.

The collection society accrual on Bandcamp digital sales

Bandcamp has a line item that surprises people, and Patreon has no real equivalent. On digital music sales (and merch items that include a digital download), Bandcamp collects and remits publishing royalties based on the buyer's location. It shows up on your payout statement as a collection society accrual, and Bandcamp pays the applicable society directly. For a sale to a Canadian buyer, that's SOCAN; for other territories, the local society. It's a deduction from your payout, but it's money flowing to the publishing side that's owed anyway.

Two details worth knowing. The accrual does not apply to physical-only formats: CD, vinyl, cassette, minidisc are exempt. And when a digital item is bundled with merch, the accrual only hits the digital portion's imputed value, not the whole bundle. The mechanics of who collects those publishing royalties and how you make sure they reach you is covered in the direct-to-fan pillar and the royalty side of the broader catalog.

What the income looks like at each

Numbers make the model difference concrete. On Patreon at a new-creator 10% rate, 500 patrons paying $10/month grosses $5,000 and nets roughly $4,330/month, which is about $51,960/year before tax. To clear common targets at that $10 tier (netting around 87%), you need roughly 211 patrons for $30,000 CAD, about 481 for $50,000 USD, and around 961 for $100,000 USD. That's the recurring path: a fixed base of supporters, the same money every month.

Bandcamp is per-sale, so you're counting units instead of subscribers. Say you sell an album at $12. After the 15% digital fee and roughly 5% processing, you net about $9.60 a copy. To gross $30,000 USD on digital sales alone, that's around 3,125 copies in a year. Mix in vinyl (say $20 retail, netting about $18 after the 10% physical fee and processing) and a 50/50 split across 2,500 units nets roughly $34,500. Same ballpark income, completely different motion: one is a recurring base, the other is moving units around releases.

These are direct-to-fan dollars, separate from your streaming and publishing royalties. Run your streaming side through the free royalty calculator to see how the recurring and per-sale income here stacks on top of what you're already owed. →

The deeper version of this math, including how superfan spending compounds across sales, merch, and membership at once, is in the superfan income guide.