Import Your Bandcamp Catalog

Moving a catalog by hand is the worst afternoon in music admin: download each release, re-upload it, re-type the tracklist, chase the artwork, and hope the mailing list survives the trip.

The Sleeve Bandcamp importer does it for you. It's a free Mac app. You download it, sign in, tick what you want, and it moves your releases and your mailing list into Sleeve.

It's included with every Sleeve account, including the free plan.

Before you start

• The importer is macOS only. There's no Windows version.
• Download it from sleeve.fm/bandcamp.
• You'll sign in twice, once to Sleeve and once to Bandcamp. Both happen inside the app.

What comes across

Your releases. Each one is recreated in Sleeve with its title, tracklist, artwork, description, and pricing. A release Sleeve already holds is skipped, so running the importer twice doesn't produce duplicates.

Your masters, not the stream. The importer downloads the lossless files Bandcamp holds for you, not the 128k streaming preview.

Your barcodes. A UPC or EAN set in your Bandcamp editor is carried over. One that fails validation is left off and named in the log, so you can fix the digit instead of going looking for which release lost it.

Your mailing list. Bandcamp subscribers arrive as Sleeve contacts. The subscriber count is shown before the import runs, so you know what you're about to bring over.

Running the import

1. Sign in to Sleeve. Enter your email and the six-digit code sent to it. If your account manages a single artist, that artist is selected for you.
2. Sign in to Bandcamp. The app opens Bandcamp's own login in a browser window. Your artist page is identified from the account, so there's no URL to paste.
3. Choose what to import. Releases are listed individually with a checkbox each, alongside your mailing list and its subscriber count. Everything is selected by default, so untick anything you'd rather leave behind.
4. Run it. Progress is shown per release. If one fails it's logged and skipped and the run keeps going, so a single bad release doesn't cost you the whole import.

Nothing publishes on its own

Every imported release arrives as a draft. It isn't on your page, isn't in your feed, and isn't visible to anyone until you publish it yourself.

That's deliberate. A catalog import is a big change to your page, and you should get to look at it first... check the artwork came across cleanly, fix a description, set what's public and what isn't, then publish on your own schedule.

To publish: open your artist dashboard, go to the Music tab, and work through the drafts.

Your imported contacts hear nothing until you write to them

The Bandcamp importer sends no email on arrival. Your subscribers are added quietly, and the first thing they hear from you is something you wrote.

This is different from importing a list by hand, which sends a one-time welcome email so subscribers know why they're suddenly hearing from you. With a Bandcamp import there's no welcome message step, so it's worth publishing a post within a week of importing... that post becomes the introduction.

What it does to your Bandcamp page

Nothing. The importer only reads. It doesn't edit, unpublish, or delete anything on Bandcamp, and your page there is exactly as you left it. Nothing about this is a one-way door: you can run the importer and decide later.

Your Bandcamp password never reaches Sleeve

The importer runs on your own computer, not on Sleeve's servers.

When it needs your Bandcamp account, it opens Bandcamp's own login page in a browser window. You sign in to Bandcamp there, so your Bandcamp password is never typed into Sleeve software. Captcha and two-factor authentication work exactly as normal, because the login is happening on Bandcamp's page and not on a copy of it.

The app reads the session cookie that login produces, and nothing else. That cookie isn't written to disk and isn't sent to Sleeve.

Why it's an app and not a web page

Bandcamp offers no API for catalogs or mailing lists, and downloading your lossless masters requires a signed-in session. Running that session on your own machine is what keeps your Bandcamp credentials out of Sleeve entirely. A web version would mean handing us the session instead.

Getting help

If an import fails, or something arrives looking wrong, reply to support@sleeve.fm and include the log the importer produces. We read every email.