The Ampwall Team

Hello, friends! Continuing our tradition (?) of sending a message right before a holiday, we’re here for wish you Happy Holidays, Happy New Year, and thank you for being with us.

This is a word-heavy message. The tldr: Ampwall had a tremendous year of updates, growth, and friends. Our community is growing, our team is growing, and we are filled with confidence. Thank you for being a part of it; we couldn’t do it without your support. We hope you will continue to be with us throughout in 2025 and beyond. If you haven’t signed up yet, you can do so from https://ampwall.com.

Ampwall’s 2024 in review

In January 2024, I was the only person working full-time on Ampwall. There was exactly one user: me. There was exactly one band: mine. There were a handful of sales: to my friends, mostly. But that changed quickly.

We made a lot of friends

Ampwall’s invitation-only alpha test started in January and our first users joined. We spent the majority of the year continuing the alpha test and along the way something magical happened: bands and artists kept showing up and loving it. More contributors joined our team — I’m now one of twelve!

Our public beta test launch in September was our biggest news of the year, of course. Since then we’re up to almost 500 subscribers, more than 1800 users (!) in the system, more than 700 bands and artists, 1500 music releases, 9300 tracks, and 700 sales.

Our Discord, open to every subscriber and any user who’s spent as little as $1 (it’s an anti-spam thing) is taking off. We have more than 300 members with more joining all the time. Through our Discord, we get constant feedback, thoughts, and bug reports. But almost more importantly, people are making connections, getting encouragement, and feeling the support that comes with being part of a community.

We joined Bluesky. It’s fun! You can say hello to us here if you haven’t yet.

Ampwall artists are making real money. We’re seeing increased sales volume very month, with more music releases and especially exclusive merch drops.

A trend we saw early is continuing: buyers choose to cover Ampwall’s low transaction fee (5% + PayPal VS Bandcamp’s 10-15% + PayPal) a whopping 80% of the time, leaving only PayPal fees. Fans are taking note and recognizing that if you want to support artists directly, Ampwall is the best way to buy music and merch from bands online.

We did a lot of work

We had a huge year of platform updates. If anything, the thing we’ve done the worst job of is sharing the news about the great stuff we’ve built! Every single aspect of Ampwall was rebuilt and the overall breadth of the platform expanded dramatically. On a core level we now have…

• A completely rebuilt UI for Artists, Music, and Merch. Ampwall today is completely unrecognizable compared to a year ago.

• A new rich text editor to add links and text customization (sizes, bold, italic, etc,…) to item descriptions, bios, and blog posts.

• A brand new navigation system that improves the experience for mobile, desktop, and especially users who manage multiple artists.

• A new production infrastructure that will let us scale up, release faster, and keep our costs way down. Our monthly expenses are ~1/5 what they were at the start of the year.

• Our mission manifesto that explained why we do this and how we see things differently acted as an AHA! moment for many people and helped share our vision.

• Our content policy against LLM-generated content is an industry first. To my knowledge, Ampwall has the most artist-friendly policy against AI content of any platform. Read it here under “AI Content”.

If you’re releasing music and merch, you have more tools.

• Music release preorders with fulfillment/release scheduling.

• Free downloads with reusable links that can be set to expire after a fixed number of consumptions or time-based.

• Pay-what-you-want downloads.

• Scheduled music and merch release notifications, a PR-friendly approach that works around your schedule.

• Exclusive audio embeds so you can give specific websites priority when premiering your work.

• Bulk audio upload.

• Showcase, our unique experience for announcing albums and sharing private links, perfect for pitching to labels.

• Shipping price groups for EU sellers.

• A new friendly Artist Page Setup experience.

• Enhanced page analytics.

• Users can be marked as members of bands. These links appear on artist pages and user profiles — a new avenue for organic discovery.

• Supported Artists, our take on the MySpace Top 8, lets you create prominent links between your pages or your friends or just people you respect, another great tool for discovery.

• Press links section on every music page so reviews, interviews, and articles don’t live and die by the whims of social media algorithms.

• Mailing lists that don’t require subscribers to have Ampwall accounts.

We started work on tools for music communities — not just people making sounds but also the fans and supports that keep independent music alive.

• Follow Artists and receive email notifications when they release music and merch. Blog post notifications coming soon!

• Lists, our innovative and fun curation tool for music releases.

• Search by artist name and tags, the start of our Exploration tools.

• Discord integration. Our wonderful Discord community is now more than 300 people strong. It has a feed of new music additions that also tags members to help friends find each others’ work.

• User profiles with an image and bios.

• Lyrics on the audio player.

• Share buttons all over the place with QR codes that you can save and print out.

• Supporter comments on music releases.

• Artwork credit links on every music and merch page.

We’re releasing major updates going to many of these areas in the coming weeks, too.

We have a lot of plans

We have ambitious goals for 2025.

We will continue to iterate on the experience of bands and artists, including new features for collaborative releases. We will add seats to the table, opening Ampwall up to crucial members of music communities who have so far been excluded from every other platform. We will release our first entries into features for labels.

We’re especially motivated to improve the individual fan/supporter and listener experience. In pursuit of that, we will invest heavily in tools for music discovery, curation, collaboration, and community connections.

Fundraising?

A tricky issue we still haven’t cracked is fundraising. Ampwall is still 100% funded by our team and our revenue from subscriptions and sales. The good news is our subscription strategy now generates enough revenue to cover our server and cloud costs! Subscriptions also help us keep spam and abuse off the platform.

We explored fundraising opportunities in 2024 and, frankly, things did not pan out. Our commitment to our mission, incorporation as a PBC, refusal to hitch our wagon to AI and crypto, and preference for steady sustainable growth does not make things easy. In 2025, we will continue seeking options to fundraise. If you or anyone you know is interested in helping us with this, please reach out to me via [email protected].

In the meantime, the best way to support our mission is to by signing up as a user from https://ampwall.com and creating a yearly subscription.

Ampwall will only improve

I am immensely proud of what we built so far. Even in our beta testing state, Ampwall is now the most complete and best competitor to Bandcamp in the world. We are also the only one of the emerging Bandcamp competitors that can sell merch, making us the only comprehensive alternative.

And we did it in two years with $0 outside funding. Can you imagine where we’ll be 12 months from now? Can you imagine 5 years?

Thank you

I am consistently awed by the outpouring of support we receive from our community. From the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for your encouragement, trust, and patience. I hope you’ve enjoyed our sporadic mailing list updates and, if you’re a user and/or in our Discord, we hope that we’ve made this complicated year a little brighter.

From everyone on the Ampwall Team, we hope you have a wonderful start to 2025. We’ll see and hear you soon.

Best,

Chris Grigg
[email protected]

In case you didn't notice, we completely rebuilt Ampwall's navigation system. It launched weeks ago and I simply forgot to post about it. Surprise! Or not a surprise since maybe you saw it.

We introduced the last version of our nav early in 2024. It used a vertical column along the left side of the page to present Artist Administration navigation. Other interactive elements relating to the user -- cart, user profile, search -- were at the top left corner, the idea being to keep dynamic interactive elements centered on the left side of the page. On mobile, the left-hand bar moved into a bottom-of-the-page menu and those same user controls went down there as well.

The last version of the nav was quite cool looking but feedback indicated that it needed work. Users reported it wasn't very discoverable since the buttons lacked text labels. Users with shorter screens (like 13" MacBook Air) reported icons were missing, which would have necessitated overflow logic. We also heard that having things like the user icon and shopping cart on the left side of the screen wasn't where most users expected them to be.

The different versions between desktop and mobile caused challenges for us in the code since were maintaining multiple versions of navigation. Having a bar on the left side of the page but only for logged-in Ampwall Subscribers required some challenging grid logic.

None of this was insurmountable, of course. We worked through a lot of challenges and we could have continued iterating on our nav! We always expect some amount of evolution of features, especially something ambitious like our nav design. But in this case, we decided to go in a different direction entirely.

Our new nav is a complete rebuild. It does a few things.

First, we moved Search, User Profile, and Cart to the top right-hand corner of the screen. There are other conditional items that appear there, like “Join us on Discord”.

Second, we move the Artist Administrative controls to a secondary nav bar that sits underneath the primary nav. This continues the approach of having a strong separation of User Stuff and Band Stuff — the two bars are essentially independent. But by using a single horizontal bar, it reads a bit more easily (especially thanks to the addition of labels next to icons) and it lives in a space where users are most used to seeing navigation elements.

Third, it simplifies the architecture of the entire page by removing the conditional grid logic that would force signed-in subscribers’ content to accept a margin of around 48px on the left side of the screen. The new page layout is substantially simpler from a code perspective thanks to this.

Fourth, pleasing both users and software engineers, our desktop and mobile views share 100% of the same components! You get a consistent navigation experience across all viewports. The Artist Admin controls collapse into a menu as they overflow à la GitHub, which lets us potentially add more options as needed. (We are trying to slim them down, tbh.)

Where the engineering is concerned, the new nav isn’t all that complicated. Ampwall is built with Next.js and our nav is a combination of server- and client-rendered content. The server feeds in data like whether the user is signed in, info about the user to populate menus, list of Artists (“Distros” in Ampwall data model parlance) to present, and then client components render the interactive bits like Menus. The secondary nav menu that creates an overflow menu uses simple screen measuring logic to determine overflow and then enables items in a menu. There’s a little jank on mobile that I want to investigate here but for the most part it’s working well. I went mildly YOLO on this and launched it without a feature flag, just one big cutover from old to new with a single deploy, because the effort to build a separate path with a flag would have extended build time in a way that I didn’t think was reasonable. Good decision? This time, yes, it all worked! But in general we do try to use feature flags for any substantial changes.

So that’s about it. I know this would be a lot more interesting with pictures. We’re going to work on that soon.

Want to talk about this more? Reach out on Ampwall’s Discord! We have a new #codewall channel specifically for our large community of artist + software engineers. You can also find me on bsky as @subvertallmedia.com.