Planning ahead for your Bandcamp accounts
Bandcamp (Songtradr) accounts cannot be transferred and have no beneficiary option — here is what you can do while the account is active
Bandcamp Support
Bandcamp Support
(General customer service)
Bandcamp (Songtradr) does not guarantee transfer of accounts after death. Lifetime planning provides options for managing accounts and controlling who has access to them.
How to protect your Bandcamp accounts
Here are 7 steps to protect and manage your Bandcamp accounts while the account is active:
Family sharing
Bandcamp accounts are non-transferable under the Terms of Use except with Bandcamp's prior written consent. There is no multi-user access, team feature, or delegate mechanism for artist accounts, and a fan collection cannot be split or gifted to another account. Labels can manage multiple artist accounts, which is the one structural continuity option Bandcamp offers. Bandcamp takes no ownership rights in the music -- its help center answers the question "Does Bandcamp take any ownership rights in my music?" with "Nope," stating the only rights it takes are the ones it needs to run the service, such as the non-exclusive right to host the music, sell it on the artist's behalf, and display published lyrics and artwork -- so copyright is separate from the account and passes to the estate through normal inheritance. Any change of control over the account itself is a discretionary request to Bandcamp support.
Should you save your passwords for your family?
Some people store account passwords so a family member can sign in later. The practice has three practical limits:
- Two-factor authentication often blocks it. Most accounts require a second factor — a code sent to a phone, an authenticator app, a passkey, or a physical key. A saved password alone frequently does not grant access, and the recovery codes that would are easy to lose or let go stale.
- It usually conflicts with the platform's terms. Most operators prohibit account sharing and signing in as another person, including after a death. Stored credentials are not the operator's recognized access path, and using them can violate the terms of service.
- Operators provide other paths. Where an operator offers a designation tool — Apple's Legacy Contact, Google's Inactive Account Manager, a beneficiary designation — that mechanism grants access the operator recognizes. A password manager's own emergency-access or legacy feature passes credentials through a controlled process. Digital assets named in a will or trust give a fiduciary authority under each state's Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA).
Frequently asked questions
No. Bandcamp charges no annual subscription or listing fee -- it takes a share of each sale instead. Music stays listed without ongoing payments, so there is no renewal for an executor to keep paying and no card expiry that quietly removes a catalog. That is a meaningful difference from subscription-based distributors, where a lapsed payment can pull music down.
Record that the account exists, the email address it uses, and the page URL, and leave that with your estate documents -- Bandcamp has no formal estate process and no beneficiary designation, so an executor who does not know about the account cannot find it. Do not leave a password. Keep the connected payout account reachable by your estate, because that is where sales proceeds land. Note whether your account is still on PayPal or has moved to the new Stripe payout system (bandcamp.com/bandcamp_payments). Back up your master audio files, artwork, and liner notes. Because the copyright passes to your estate through normal inheritance, you can name who should control the catalog in your will or trust.
Recording that a Bandcamp account exists, alongside other accounts, gives a fiduciary the information needed to reach the operator through its official process.
Bandcamp does not offer beneficiary designations, so there is no program-level mechanism for directing accounts to a specific person at death.
Sources
Data sourced from Bandcamp (Songtradr) primary sources (9 pages reviewed). How we research.
Bandcamp Support
Bandcamp Support
(General customer service)
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