The best Bandcamp code tool for new artists (2026)
Full disclosure: we make one of these tools. GetMusic publishes this page, so we are biased. We have tried to earn your trust anyway by ranking by what fits you, saying plainly where a competitor is better, and putting GetMusic below it when it is.
If this is your first release, you have a problem the other buying guides on this site do not cover. You have codes and nobody to give them to. Bandcamp hands every account 200 free download codes, and a tool that turns those into a tidy link is useless if the only person who clicks the link is you. So this list is sorted by one thing: whether the tool brings anyone to the codes, or only serves them to people you send.
We run GetMusic, and GetMusic is the only tool here with a browsing audience built in, so it is first. That is a bias worth stating plainly. It is also worth stating what we will not claim: we are not going to tell you how many people visit a genre page in a week, or that listing a release produces fans. What we can describe is the mechanism, and then you can run it on one release for free and judge the result yourself.
The other four picks are there because at some point you will have a list, a Discord, or a subreddit that knows you, and at that point a free link tool becomes the better deal.
TL;DR
- GetMusic — first release free — the only option here where fans find the release by browsing rather than by you sending them
- Sharing by hand — free — Reddit, Discord, a forum; where the first few strangers come from for most people, with no tracking at all
- Band.codes — free, unlimited — a solid link tool with a small community feed, better once you have somewhere to post it
- Bandcamp's own tools — free — where the codes come from; fine once a mailing list exists, blind before that
- PUSH.fm Reward Links — free — not a Bandcamp code tool, but a way to start a list from zero if you are also on streaming
1. GetMusic
- Best for
- A first release with no list behind it, on Bandcamp, where the goal is a few real listeners you can name.
- Price
- First release promotion is free, up to 100 codes. Each additional release is a one-time $10. Fans never pay.
- Where fans find it
- Genre pages at /bandcamp, the explore and popular feeds, notifications to fans following the genre, and queued social posts.
Here is what discovery means in concrete terms, because the word gets abused. You paste your Bandcamp URL. GetMusic builds a release page from it with the tracks, art, and tags. You upload your codes and each one is validated against Bandcamp before it is shown to anyone. The release then appears on the genre page that matches its tags, for example /bandcamp/electronic or /bandcamp/ambient, and in the ranked explore and popular feeds. Fans who follow that genre get a notification. Social posts for the release are queued. A fan who likes the look of it claims a code without creating an account.
What discovery does not mean: a promise of any particular number of claims. Feeds are ranked, so a brand-new release is competing with others in its genre, and how it does depends on the release and the page. What you do get, whatever the count, is a claim log with who took each code, when, and where they came from. For a first release, five claims you can name beat fifty you cannot. Where GetMusic loses: it is Bandcamp-only, and the second release costs $10 when free tools exist for the link-serving part.
2. Sharing by hand
- Best for
- An artist already active somewhere, a genre subreddit, a Discord, a forum, where posting a few codes is a normal thing to do.
- Price
- Free.
- Where fans find it
- Wherever you post them. Nowhere else.
Second place for a reason that has nothing to do with software. If you are already a participant in a genre thread or a Discord channel, posting three or four codes there is cheap, direct, and sometimes it works. Nothing in this list stops you doing that alongside a tool, as long as the codes you post by hand are not the same codes you loaded somewhere else.
The downsides are the obvious ones. No tracking, so you will never know whether a code was redeemed by someone who played the record or someone who collects codes. Posted codes can be reused anywhere, so a public post effectively retires that part of the set. And it does not scale beyond the communities you are already in. Keep the hand-posted share small, a handful, and put the rest somewhere that reports back. Our note on how many codes to give away covers the split.
3. Band.codes
- Best for
- The second and third release, once there is a list or a community to post the link in.
- Price
- Free for artists and labels, unlimited releases, donation-supported.
- Where fans find it
- A small community feed of releases, plus wherever you post the link. Genre browsing is limited.
Band.codes is the free, long-running link tool for Bandcamp codes, and we recommend it to plenty of artists. Upload codes, get a link, customise the embed, track redemption counts. Fans grab a code with no sign-up. It has a community feed, so there is some chance a stranger sees the release there, but genre browsing is limited compared with a dedicated discovery site and we would not plan a first release around it.
For a new artist it sits third rather than first because the link is only as useful as the places you can post it, and the reporting is a count rather than people. When the list exists, it becomes the obvious free choice and stays free however many releases follow. If you are deciding between it and GetMusic for release two, the side-by-side comparison lays out the tradeoffs without the sales voice.
4. Bandcamp's own tools + Mailchimp
- Best for
- Later, when a mailing list exists. Right now, it is where you generate the codes and nothing more.
- Price
- 200 free codes per account, 1,000 more per $500 in sales, more for purchase on the Tools page.
- Where fans find it
- Nowhere public. Bandcamp has no browse page for free codes; the codes go wherever your email goes.
You will use this regardless, because the Tools page on your release is where codes are generated and exported as CSV. Bandcamp documents mail-merging that CSV through Mailchimp or Constant Contact so each subscriber gets a unique code. That is a good system for an artist with two hundred people on a list. It is a dead end for an artist with none, which is the whole premise of this page.
Reporting is a redeemed count per set, with no claimer identity and no source. So for a first release the practical advice is: generate the set, export it, and hand the file to one of the tools above. Come back to the mail-merge approach when there is a list worth merging. Setting up an email tool for zero subscribers is a week you will not get back.
5. PUSH.fm Reward Links
- Best for
- An artist whose release is also on streaming and who wants to start collecting emails from day one.
- Price
- Free plan with unlimited smart links, pre-saves, and Reward Links, 1 GB storage, access to collected emails. Premium is $5/month.
- Where fans find it
- Wherever you share the link. There is no discovery audience inside PUSH.fm.
PUSH.fm is on this list with a caveat: it is not a Bandcamp code tool, and it does not track Bandcamp codes. What it does is give you a free Reward Link, where a fan completes actions such as following your socials, sharing, or signing up to a newsletter, and in return unlocks a download, a secret message, or a hidden URL. The free plan includes access to the emails you collect, which for an artist starting from zero is the asset that matters most.
So the use case is the list, not the codes. If your release is also on Spotify or SoundCloud, a Reward Link is a free way to turn early interest into email addresses, and those addresses are what makes Band.codes or Bandcamp's own mail-merge useful later. It brings no audience of its own; fans only arrive from links you share. For the full picture, see the PUSH.fm alternative page.
What we'd do today
- Before anything else, run Fix My Bandcamp on your release page. It is free, and a fan who claims a code lands on that page next.
- Generate a set of codes on the Bandcamp Tools page. Not all 200; start with a smaller set and export it as CSV.
- Submit the release to GetMusic using the free first promotion and upload most of that set. Note the date.
- Hold back a handful of codes and post them, one or two at a time, in the one or two communities where you are already a known name. Different codes from the GetMusic batch, always.
- After thirty days, read the GetMusic claim log. If it shows claims from genre browsing, you have the beginnings of a list of real people. If it is quiet, the page or the release needs work before any tool will help, and Band.codes for the next one costs nothing.
Frequently asked questions
List your first release for free and see who claims it
One release, up to 100 codes, no charge and no subscription. The claim log tells you who showed up, which is the thing a first release most needs to learn.
Written by Chuck Blake, founder of GetMusic.
GetMusic is a Bandcamp code distribution platform, so this page has a bias and says so. Competitor features and prices were checked against each company's public pages in October 2026; if something has changed, tell us and we will fix the page. More about who we are is on the about page and in GetMusic by the numbers.