The music industry isn’t exactly kind to upcoming groups and artists; breaking into such a competitive market can be a challenge even for the incredibly talented. This also obstructsfan engagement in terms of monetary support; it’s hard to network when nobody can find your address. Bandcamp is the indie music cave of wonders, an app with countless artists selling their work and merch directly to fans. It’s a haven for independent music creators, who can post, share, and generally sell their content, with the site taking a 15% cut of each sale — pretty reasonable.
Bandcamp also provides a prosperous platform for the sale of merch, physical CDs, vinyl records, T-shirts, and more. Collectors and vintage enthusiasts can order a legit vinyl record that comes complete with the digital album for convenience! The founders of Bandcamp know this, having created it back in 2008 as an independent alternative to Myspace, which snowballed into an integral cog in the indie music machine. The app seemed too good to be true, putting the power of e-commerce back in the hands of the creators and their followers, that is, until it sold out.
Epic Games, the owners of Fortnite and the Epic Games Store, purchased Bandcamp back in 2022 amidsta fierce legal battle concerning monetizationon the Apple Store and Google Play Store. Both had removed Fortnite from their shelves becauseEpic breached its contracts, and the gloves were off. Bandcamp’s co-founders justified selling with the usual bluster about expansion and broadening the service’s reach. Epic claimed that Bandcamp would be used to aid game developers with music production and trading, framing the shady transaction as a magnanimous gesture of goodwill.
It was an embarrassingly obvious ploy; Epic wanted to leverage its new ownership of Bandcamp against Google and Apple. When Bandcamp underwent its shady sale and subsequent change of management, users were ensured that Bandcamp would still act as a standalone platform and continue to put artists first. The problem is Epic didn’t actually do this; it never intended to run Bandcamp with any kind of reverence or respect. In the end, Bandcamp did not shake out to be the smoking gun that Epic needed.
This is where Epic hastily pawned Bandcamp off to Songtradr, a music licensing service that supposedly helps artists get picked up by the larger music industry. The platform serves to open doors for its users and potentially get them licensing agreements, which sounds good on paper but goes against the independent open-source spirit Bandcamp used to represent. Bear in mind the people whose livelihoods depend on their e-commerce conducted on this app can feel like they are being jerked around and treated like afterthoughts — much like a record label would treat them, come to think of it.
The cherry on top? Epic and Songtradr saw all of this uncertainty and thought the best way to remedy the situationwas to axe 50% of Bandcamp’s original workforceplus 16% of Epic’s remaining staff for good measure. The departure was framed as a simple casualty of transition by the companies, with Songtradr claiming they were keeping the business healthy. But given their failure to recognizeunionization within Bandcampalongside damning accounts from former employees, it’s hard to see this chain of events as anything other than shortsighted
As a lover of music, it’s clear how these antics display a blatant disrespect for consumers and artists, where we could possibly lose a vital asset for purchasing niche music and an irreplaceable tool for physical preservation. Bandcamp’s creators saw no wrong in selling to the infamously shady Epic Games, who then chose to gut the service the instant it outlived its usefulness, ruining people’s livelihoods just to make a petty point, all the while insulting the indie-sphere and its fans with its flippancy.
Frankly, if I were a frequent user of Bandcamp for a sustainable income, I probably wouldn’t stick around for much longer. As good as the site is, security is valuable, too, and indie artists have enough to worry about without the floor possibly crumbling from under their feet.
As for Bandcamp, it’s still open for business and providing the services we know and love, but the effects of Songtradr’s leadership and the deepening uncertainty it perpetuates risks dragging the famous app’s reputation into the mud. While it’s likely that Bandcamp will be around in one form or another for some time, it’s unlikely that indie music’s safe haven will be the same again.
