Last year, the sale of online music sales platform Bandcamp to video game company Epic games seemed to make no sense at all. At the time, It boded poorly for Bandcamp’s future, but until last month, the much-loved platform was operating under a business as usual policy. Still, my Spidey-sense was tingling hard when the news went down last year. Whenever lawyers and corporations are buying and selling music-related businesses, I always fear for the music side of the equation. The first indication that things were heading south was on September 28, 2023, when Epic Games revealed that they had laid off 16% [870 jobs] of their overall workforce. As of three days ago, the other shoe has dropped.
The sale of Bandcamp has been finalized to Songtradr; an online music placement platform. The most profitable portion of the music industry now seems to be placing songs into movies, TV, and ads. Since no one buys music any more. The Man has rigged the game so that “selling out” is now the only game in town. And that’s what Songtradr does. Exactly how an online sales platform that yields 85% of the gross to the artist makes for a coherent fit with the music placement industry is one for the sages to scratch their chins thoughtfully over. But on October 16th, it was revealed that the sale was finalized as Songtradr gutted Bandcamp’s 118 person workforce by half.
Bandcamp had by now attained “venerable” as part of its cachet. The screen grab of the home page today reveals that since its founding in 2007, Bandcamp has paid out $1.19 billion dollars to the artists who sell their wares there. As seen through the lens of Epic Games’ belt-tightning exercise of last month, it may be that there was a fire-sale aspect of the Bandcamp brand to Songtradr. So that the value of the brand might be in a precarious state by now.
The value of the single sales and distribution platform that doesn’t seek to take value from artists, but to instead bestow it, has always seemed like an anomaly in the traditionally amoral at best music industry. Today that feeling has been uncomfortably heightened.
It doesn’t inspire in that when I look at the history of Songtradr, I find that it was formed by CEO Paul Wiltshire in 2014 and has been snapping up companies like Tunefind and 7digital in its aim to consolidate its music placement power. And exactly who is Paul Wiltshire? He’s an Australian born songwriter known for writing and producing mainstream pop for US and OZ audiences. A sausage maker. I’ve never heard of him [or the artists he’s written for/produced] until today, but he now holds the keys to the one platform that has been known to enable musicians to potentially earn money commensurate with the amount of work needed to create it. Heaven help Bandcamp moving forward. If there are things you’ve been eyeing there, act sooner rather than later. The ride will only get bumpier from here on out.
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Post-Punk Monk 
Time for anyone thinking about a Bandcamp competitor to get up and running.
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Michael Toland – What’s obviously needed is a non-profit concern like Last Night From Glasgow to be in charge. And for Bandcamp to be a collective. Until the cash-in motive is removed from the equation from the “owners,” there will always be the idea that all of this work is for a payoff in money. Rather than enabling the process of the work itself.
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I wouldn’t ever count on a non-profit option for distribution in the music industry.
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Michael Toland – Such a thing, by it’s nature, would exist outside of the music industry.
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To quote R. Crumb’s brother: “This is all perfectly goddamned delightful.”
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I don’t stream, I won’t stream. I just don’t want to stream. Whether its vinyl, disc, tape or files, I like owning the music I listen to. Bandcamp has been the only real record store I frequent any longer (unless there is meet up with the PPM ruffians – something that is long overdue).
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Echorich – It looks like it’s you and me against the inevitability of music rental! Even so, I don’t buy that much any more. Bandcamp probably accounts for 20% of my purchases. The platform was fair and useful compared to the others out there. And it spoke to how we experience the music. And…you’re right! It’s past due time for some good fellowship with my friends again. My 60th passed without much hoopla last month. I would have preferred to have planned a little something where the usual suspects were present and accounted for, but there was no surplus budget for that, sadly.
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ooof – I did not frequent Bandcamp, but see this mass rush to the ‘digital’ world in a sour light. I am having problems buying DVDs of shows I like. I’ve taken to scouring used stores in UK and US to get what I want. I don’t stream music – I don’t stream movies. First, my network connection is a PITA and being an American in Germany makes navigating any streaming difficult (I do have a VPN but it’s a race between these streaming vendors and the VPN vendors to block each other – sigh). I also do not like the fine print on streaming anything – I took a copyright class and was shocked to realize the e-books I had bought are merely licenses – it’s the same with streaming music. I purposely download a digital copy to my computer and store it.
The other thing I noticed when listening to a CD versus my e-player in my car – WOW- the quality of the music was so much better from the CD – more fidelity. I am not an audiophile by any means and my aging ears are definitely losing the finer points, but it was very noticeable in the quality (yet another option gone in most cars now).
As for supporting artists, the middleman always gets their cut , it’s just getting larger now. That’s why I try to buy directly from the artist or their website now.
Maybe this is just me getting older and ranting about the changes I don’t like. Nevertheless, this engineer knows that new features and future technology does not always mean a better experience for the user.
By the way – most of my peers here in Europe (my age, etc) don’t like this huge shift either – we also think much of the new music, TV, movies, etc, are crap nowadays as well. The Signal-to-Noise (SNR) has definitely degraded precipitously.
/Rant off
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Deserat – We only began streaming film entertainment once we had stopped attending the cinema; which was a once per month on average event for my loved one and I. Once the pandemic laid waste to us sharing the oxygen in movie theaters, we finally moved to streaming films in 2021. We bought a [small] used flatscreen TV [a dumb terminal so as not to leak our data to their masters] and a network device, which has worked for us. We were trending towards that even before Covid with the streamers supplanting the studios in the last 6-7 years in any case. Many films we were eager to see could only be seen by streaming.
We limit our subscription plans to the two vendors most likely to hit our tastes on the head, and in that I’d already given up for almost a decade of building a film collection on DVD, it’s not been onerous. The costs are comparable to our previously monthly film for two, though I remain keenly aware that the films comes and go on these platforms at the whims of entertainment lawyers; never our friends. And you’re so right about the S/N ratios declining. Many streaming vendors [Disney+ in particular] miss our tastes in film exactly!
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