For independent musicians and the fans that love them, Bandcamp has been one of the few economic success stories of the past decade: a direct-to-consumer marketplace for artists and labels to sell physical releases, merch, and digital downloads to listeners, at rates far exceeding streaming platforms’ paltry payouts. As the site proudly notes, artists on Bandcamp collectively earned $193 million in the last year alone, and Bandcamp has paid out a whopping $1.19 billion since its founding in 2007. Thanks to key elements—a strong editorial arm; social features that facilitate sharing and discovery; and Bandcamp Fridays, a monthly initiative, launched early in the pandemic, where the site forgoes its revenue cut for 24 hours—Bandcamp established itself as a crucial and widely beloved platform with a unique focus on niche styles and underground communities.
Roughly 19 months ago, however, Bandcamp’s founders sold the company to Epic Games, the software developer behind Fortnite. It didn’t bode well. What did a video-game company need with a music retailer like Bandcamp? How could it possibly make use of it, much less make it better? (Bandcamp is beloved, but that’s not to say that it’s perfect.) Skeptics waited for the other shoe to drop.
Late last month, it did: Epic announced it would lay off 16 percent of its workforce and sell Bandcamp to Songtradr, a B2B music licensing service. Songtradr promised what sounded like business as usual, but following the acquisition, Wired reports, Bandcamp employees were shut out of critical systems and given little guidance about future plans, leaving workers in a “really destabilizing” position, as one employee put it. Even more ominous was a statement from Songtradr’s chief marketing officer: “Based on its current financials, Bandcamp requires some adjustments to ensure a sustainable and healthy company that can serve its community of artists and fans long into the future.”
This week, the layoffs came down. Roughly half of Bandcamp’s staff got the ax. A departing software engineer tells me that cuts were spread out “fairly evenly” across all departments except for customer support and editorial, which were hit harder. This former employee estimates that only three support specialists were retained. A current employee tells me that the editorial department kept three editors and a designer, and that Bandcamp Daily, the site’s robust music publication, will continue on. Bandcamp’s former executives, meanwhile, “all vanished on September 28, and no one has heard from them since,” says the ex-employee.
What does this mean for Bandcamp? For one, cutting costs by gutting customer support doesn’t seem like a very sustainable path for a platform that logs tens of thousands of transactions totaling more than half a million dollars of sales per day. The company claims to have been profitable since 2012, but even if Bandcamp was bleeding money, and making cuts was necessary to restore the bottom line, Songtradr’s opening moves don’t seem like the tactics of a company that understands what it has purchased.
This week’s outpouring of grief and rage on social media is a testament to the fact that many, many people—fans and musicians alike—see Bandcamp as more than just a store. They see it as part of the culture, a crucial lifeline for scenes where love, not money, is the main driver (yet money is still kinda necessary to pay the bills). It’s notable that not only does Bandcamp sell vinyl, cassettes, and CDs; a big part of its business is digital downloads. Bandcamp customers love music so much that they’re willing to pay real money for a non-material format that the rest of the market long ago left for dead as it moved to a subscription model.
Bandcamp’s editorial operation has long supported this niche ecosystem, so gutting the editorial department suggests to me that Songtradr doesn’t care about Bandcamp’s original vision. (An editor specifies that out of an editorial staff of five, two were laid off and three were retained.) Kneecapping Bandcamp Daily would represent a major loss for online music discourse. It’s one of the few publications left that puts significant resources into covering obscure artists from around the world. (Full disclosure: I contributed a handful of features and reviews between 2014 and 2018.) Not only does it support a number of freelance journalists; as Robert Beatty, a famed designer of album covers for Oneohtrix Point Never and Tame Impala, noted, it’s one of the only music publications that commissions illustrators for editorial work.
When Pitchfork reached out to Songtradr for comment, a spokesperson sent a reply that said, “Over the past few years the operating costs of Bandcamp have significantly increased. It required some adjustments to ensure a sustainable and healthy company that can serve its community of artists and fans. After a comprehensive evaluation, including the importance of roles for smooth business operations and pre-existing functions at Songtradr, 50% of Bandcamp employees have accepted offers to join Songtradr.” They did not specify which former Bandcamp employees were offered positions at Songtradr. The comment continued: “We are committed to keeping the existing Bandcamp services that fans and artists love, including its artist-first revenue share, Bandcamp Fridays and Bandcamp Daily.”
In the absence of a more detailed statement from Songtradr, we don’t know exactly what the company’s plans are for Bandcamp. Prospects don’t look good. To begin with, a business-to-consumer retailer like Bandcamp doesn’t seem like a natural fit for a B2B company like Songtradr. When it made the acquisition, Songtradr hinted vaguely at the possibility of synergy across the two platforms, noting that Bandcamp artists would be able to license their music to a wide variety of clients “and increase their earning capacity from Songtradr’s global licensing network.” But even here, the two companies’ philosophies appear fundamentally at odds. To Songtradr, which licenses mood music to advertisers and content creators, music is an add-on, an extra, a Pavlovian trigger to help brands sell more chalupas. To Bandcamp, music is unique, unrepeatable, the be-all and end-all—it’s everything.
There are reasons to doubt that Songtradr will be able to pull off its business goals. Founded in 2014, the Santa Monica company has raised roughly $101 million in financing, much of which it has put toward an aggressive strategy of mergers and acquisitions—that is, driving growth by bringing other companies under its umbrella. CEO Paul Wiltshire claims that the company nearly doubled revenue in 2020, but Songtradr’s revenue appears to have flattened out for the past three years. So far, the company’s communications regarding its acquisition haven’t been totally on the level. When announcing this week’s job cuts, Songtradr said that “50% of Bandcamp employees have accepted offers to join Songtradr.” In fact, only half of Bandcamp’s employees were offered employment in the first place; the other half were summarily let go.
Bandcamp is so central to the business of independent music that it’s tempting to see it as too big to fail, yet its failure is a real possibility. “Nationalize Bandcamp” is a Twitter meme, not a political program; not even Bandcamp’s union was able to help save employees from this round of layoffs. And if Songtradr did implode—or, perhaps worse, strip Bandcamp for parts and discard the rest—the consequences could be catastrophic for independent music. Whether the death of Bandcamp came in one fell swoop or as a result of a thousand cuts, artists and labels would find themselves deprived of both a crucial income stream and their extensive mailing lists of supporters. Digital download sales would stagnate. More power would shift toward the major streaming platforms. And for listeners, it would become that much harder to discover strange, singular, unpopular new music outside of established scenes and communities.
We don’t know what is going to happen, but now is the time to begin imagining and building new alternatives. First of all: Anyone worried about losing their Bandcamp collection might want to try Batchcamp, a Chrome extension for bulk-downloading all of their Bandcamp purchases, before it’s too late. The next thing fans can do is to reaffirm their support for record stores: local shops, online retailers like Rough Trade, Boomkat, Bleep, Beatport, Qobuz—you name it. Of course, that alone wouldn’t be enough to make up for the loss of Bandcamp, should it fall; a de facto monopoly, Bandcamp is too entrenched, too central to the business of independent music in the 2020s. For that very reason, we desperately need a host of competitors, a vibrant ecosystem to diversify the market and encourage innovations that will improve the current situation for artists, labels, and fans alike.
Bandcamp is hardly the only crack in the dam: It seems like things are getting worse wherever culture collides with the market. Following an acquisition by Rhode Island’s inMusic, storied synthesizer company Moog Music recently slashed jobs at its Asheville, North Carolina, factory, noting that “offshore partners” would be picking up some of the slack. There are complaints that Discogs, the Wikipedia-like database and online vinyl marketplace, is increasing seller fees, which some have theorized might be a means of pumping up revenue in anticipation of a sale.
Cultural theorist Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe the agonizing process by which online platforms shift their focus from end users to maximizing value for their shareholders. It’s a crudely effective concept capable of capturing everything from the declining quality of Google’s search results to the way your Instagram feed is full of Reels you never asked to see. (Let’s not even get started on the rot at the heart of whatever Twitter is now.) When Bandcamp’s founders sold the company to Epic, that should have been the first sign that the platform belonged to someone other than its users. Songtradr’s layoffs and promises of synergy with its music licensing business are the next indicator that the ugly specter of enshittification may be nigh. The saddest thing is, aside from a benevolent billionaire sweeping in and buying up the site, or building out an alternative, there are no easy answers here. It’s another reminder that the independent music ecosystem is far more fragile than anyone would like to admit.
Editor’s Note: This piece has been updated to include a comment from Songtradr sent to Pitchfork.
