For a long time at Bandcamp, adding images to merch items was optional. Many people did (and many of those images are beautiful), but many others did not, choosing to instead list their merch simply as “vinyl” or “cassette” with no other product details. We decided to track the performance of these two approaches, and made the not-at-all-surprising discovery that merch items with images sell more than twice as much as those without.
As a result, images are now required for all merch listings on Bandcamp, but we’ve done two things to make it easier to produce those images. First, the Bandcamp App for Artists and Labels makes it easy to add photos of merch right from your phone. Second, if you don’t yet have your merch in hand, we supply the following templates so you can create mockups of your merch, and use those as a stand-in until the real thing arrives:
While you don’t need Photoshop to use these templates, you will need a program that can handle .PSD files. There are plenty of awesome free options out there like Photopea or GIMP, or you can always ask a photo-editor savvy friend to help!
Here are a few samples of images created using these templates:
