Matt Maggiacomo

Last night, my wonderfully intelligent and principled friend Melissa Anelli posted a link to a story about how PayPal had pulled a fast one on Regretsy, subjecting them to multiple rounds of unnecessary processing fees and preventing them from carrying out a major charitable effort to help needy children. As I watched the internet explode in a wave of anti-PayPal sentiment, I couldn’t help but smile and get excited. I get excited whenever young people get pumped about any issue that involves helping poor people and sticking it to the man. 

This morning I woke up at 6:30am with a sudden realization: the entirety of my online income is tied up in PayPal.

In fact, I can easily offer myself and Lauren up as the ultimate demonstration of PayPal’s ubiquity. Here is a quick outline of our sources of online income and how payments are processed:

Lauren’s Storenvy: The place where she sells her Lauren Fairweather t-shirts and CDs. Storenvy processes all payments via PayPal.

My Storenvy: The place where I sell my Whomping Willows t-shirts and CDs. Again, Storenvy processes all payments via PayPal.

iTunes: Lauren and I both utilize services offered by Tunecore to get our music on iTunes. Tunecore delivers royalties one of two ways: By check or by PayPal. Checks are sent in 7 to 10 days and come with a $3 fee. We collect royalties from three different bands/accounts, so our total in fees would be $9/month or $108/year — or, in household economics terms, three months of electricity. A transfer to PayPal usually takes two days and for whatever reason PayPal does NOT charge a fee for this transaction. To summarize, PayPal is free and takes about one third to one fifth the time that a check takes to be delivered.

Etsy: Lauren has an Etsy shop that she utilizes to sell her Fairweather Friends plushies and other crafts. Etsy offers Lauren amazing branding solutions and a massive pre-existing network of fellow crafters. It is through this network that she befriended the independent metal-worker who made us our wedding rings! Etsy processes all of its payments via PayPal.

DFTBA Records: I’ve recently been signed to DFTBA Records. DFTBA currently uses PayPal to process all of its online transactions. 

We could potentially choose to boycott PayPal, but at the moment this would entail the following:

1. Deleting our Storenvy sites, the establishment of which has streamlined our entire process of selling and shipping merchandise and keeping track of inventory (seriously, Storenvy is an AMAZING service for bands with moderate internet sales, and it’s FREE).

2. Switch our Tunecore payment method to checks, thus accepting a $108/year increase in processing fees.

3. Delete Lauren’s Etsy shop and sell her crafts elsewhere, thus erasing months of work she’s done on branding and disconnecting herself from perhaps the largest existing network of crafters in the world.

4. Quitting DFTBA Records six days before the release of my new album.

The answer is NO. We’re not going to boycott PayPal. And we’re not going to encourage our entire fanbase to boycott PayPal, because in the process we’d be eliminating nearly all of our online income (which represents about 50% of our annual household income).

By deleting your PayPal account, you’re putting the cart before the horse. If you feel strongly about this issue, you should contact online services like Etsy, Storenvy, Bigcartel, etc. and encourage them to offer other payment methods. Some of these services are so big that they really should be accepting payments through a more premium service provider or creating their own systems for accepting credit cards. In the mean time, avoid PayPal when it’s absolutely possible, but continue to use it in those instances when there is no other option. Otherwise, you’re cutting yourself off from a lot of independent artists who truly need every individual order they receive.

Many independent artists like me and Lauren rely on free/cheap services like Storenvy and Etsy to brand, market, sell, and ship our homemade art. Without these services it’s very difficult to cut out and maintain a niche in incredibly crowded industries like music and crafting.

Love,
Matt