Independent Music Platform Ampwall Launches Signups

A new platform for DIY musicians, Ampwall, launched public signups earlier this month. With artist pages, libraries, e-commerce, and more, the site is aiming to be an independent music alternative to Bandcamp. 

Founder Chris Grigg started building the site in January 2023, devoting nights and weekends to the project around his day job as a software engineer. Grigg also happens to be in black metal band Woe, and had experienced the limitations of current platforms firsthand. 

“There are certain things I want from a platform that Bandcamp can't do for me. I can build these things. It'll be fun,” Grigg says. Eventually, he began working on Ampwall full-time and self-funding the operation with a small team. 

Artists can update their pages with images, band information, and links to press, social media, collaborators, visual artists, and collaborators. Music can be batch uploaded (a feature that costs extra on Bandcamp but is included in a basic $10 annual subscription on Ampwall). Artists can post announcements and blog posts, include metadata about uploads, add lyrics, and set up pre-orders. 

One unique artist page feature is the supported artists section, where bands can link to their other favorites on Ampwall, like a MySpace Top 8. “We have a big dungeon synth community. The dungeon synth artists are all linking to each other through the top artists, so if you hit one, you can discover them through each other,” Grigg says. 

“It creates a kind of long-forgotten facet of discovery. We're used to discovery being, you go to the explore section and you click tags. This is a more organic form of discovery where it's this band likes these other bands.”

On the merch side, there’s the customization and shipping options you’d expect from any e-commerce platform. The major difference is that Ampwall doesn’t want to be an e-commerce platform that focuses on the small percentage of top-earning users to grow. Incorporated as a public benefit company like Patagonia and Kickstarter, they have to consider the impact on society of their work alongside profit. The subscription model (starting at $10 per year for five hours of uploaded music) helps avoid the pressure to take large transaction fees. Grigg says they will actually reduce transaction fees from the current 5 percent (Bandcamp charges 10 to 15 percent) as Ampwall grows. 

“We want bands to keep their money. We don't want to tax bands for their success,” he says. 

The platform’s library is still in its early stages—at the time of writing, the tag “indie rock” pulls up 14 artist results, “shoegaze” has five. But as you can see on the company’s X account, new musicians are joining every day. 

Grigg wants to make sure everyone feels welcome on the platform. “The truth is, I’m a metal guy, our team is metal people. [For] our early users, we drew from our network, our friends, word of mouth—it's coming out of metal. But you don’t have to have an amp to be on Ampwall.” He says that there will be site and branding tweaks in the future to reflect that. 

“We like building cool things. Part of the inspiration [for Ampwall] is that Bandcamp stopped innovating,” Grigg says. “We have big ambitions for our technology. We're 19 months in and they have a 15-year head start. We have a lot of ground to cover, but we've covered a lot of distance so far.”