The Decline of Bandcamp

I recently became familiar with the term “enshittification,” which basically is when you have something really good that everyone loves and then people want to make short-term profits off it and they ruin it by handing it over to venture capitalist idiots. This has come up with what has happened to Lonely Planet, the legendary travel guidebook company. I am going to Spain in January to celebrate turning 50 (christ….) and I was going to buy the new book and all the reviews were like, what the fuck is this. Gone is the good information and it is a picture book with a few questonably reserached details in it. People were outraged. Well, doing some research on what happened here and…yep, venture capital.

Now that is happening to Bandcamp.

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.

Friend of the Blog Burning Ambulance, who not only buys on it but releases albums on his own label there, has more.

Everyone loves Bandcamp. It is great for artists. It is great for small labels.

But honestly, why wouldn’t this happen? Of course it is going to happen. In this world?

This leads me to another point–you have to own physical copies of your media. You just have to. Otherwise, you are reliant on corporations to control your art. And who the fuck is dumb enough to do that? Well, lots of otherwise really smart people. I get that it is convenient to have everything digitized. And while still I have a lot of CDs and occasionally buy new jazz CDs since sometimes that’s still the best way to get them (plus buying at live shows), the vast majority of my music is digital of course. But I have it all backed up on multiple hard drives, which is physical enough. Meanwhile, I have a huge bookcase stuffed with DVDs and I buy all my books since I hate reading online or on a tablet anyway.

None of this is to say that I consume media the right way. Read on your tablet if you want. What it is to say that is that if you are reliant on a corporation to allow you to access to art, well……good luck to you on that one! Anything good in this world is going to be gobbled up and shat out by venture capital without new laws against that kind of thing that probably are never forthcoming. Use the technologies while they are good. But if you care about any art, you really do have to own it in one physical form or another. If not, you will probably lose access to it at some point.

Figure it’s only a matter of time before this happens to Criterion too. It’s too good a product not to be ruined by techbros.