Bandcamp

While I have used Bandcamp as both a music publisher and music consumer, I don't really have the fanatical attachment to it that I see from some corners of the internet. That's probably okay. I do fundamentally believe that a Bandcamp model of "long tail" artists and music producers, as well as labels and collectives, is the way forward for the capital M Music Industry. Or rather, it seems that said industry will only stratify into 10 artists with a billion views on Spotify/YouTube and a billion artists with 10 views on Bandcamp. Deezer's new royalty terms are a particularly odious step in that direction: they pay anyone with less than 500 listeners or 1000 streams per month at half the rate. This reverse Robin Hood model is literally stealing from the most vulnerable artists in the ecosystem to give to the richest.

I was a bit uneasy when Epic Games bought Bandcamp in March 2022. But I calmed down, because I rationalized that they were simply looking to have more User Generated Content in their portfolio.

Now Bandcamp has been flipped again. After just 18 months, Epic sold the business to Songtradr. Songtradr is in the business of providing licensing and cleared songs and samples to media creators, from social media all the way up to ad agencies and more. It's pure speculation (but I'm not a journalist, this is just my garden), but I wouldn't be surprised if Songtradr just wants to take all the Bandcamp music and put it in a zipfile and add it to their licensing corpus. They're probably working with their lawyers to figure out a way they can do that under Bandcamps existing TOS right now. Michael Donaldson even theorizes that the mess of uncleared samples and covers on Bandcamp already will cause Songtradr a lot of headaches. I can see a world where they try to get artists to attest that their songs are unencumbered or face personal liability.

And of course, Songtradr has turned around and immediately laid of 50% of Bandcamp's staff, in the name of efficiency. Tom Hawking at The Guardian writes about some of the ways this belies the goals and incentives of a company that cares more about cash than culture.

Altogether, it is not really a great time to be an artist on the Bandcamp platform. There are millions who love it, and who trust it, and who even use it for their income (I must confess that ~30% of the revenue I've ever made as a musician has come from Bandcamp). But I think the writing's on the wall as it were. Bandcamp may or may not have a future at all, and it is unlikely that the future it has is going to be as well in alignment with the interests of its artists and fans as it was in the past.

The key point is that it's not a certainty that Bandcamp will become hostile to the users it serves. Rather, the imperative is to cultivate backups and alternatives now, before the day comes when everyone wakes up to having to sign some contract or pay some gross fee and there's nowhere else to go.

So what are we to do?

Andrew Roach writes about The Uncertain Future of Bandcamp, and with his normal enthusiasm and forward thinking, he proposes grabbing a bunch of his friends and writing a complete turnkey alternative from the ground up. I'm exhausted just thinking about it, but it sounds awesome. He explicitly states that he's not interested in competing with or replacing any other alternative solutions that may pop up, or may already be in progress, which I think is really smart and graceful.

My solution is to build Rainfall, a tool that lets you upload songs and create a Faircamp website through a GUI (without having to install Rust or navigate the command line on your own computer).