Today, Epic Games—of Fortnite fame—announced the acquisition of Bandcamp. If you aren’t familiar with Bandcamp, it is the website that most independent, unsigned, and generally not-major-label musicians prefer to sell and promote their music online. Most of the revenue from sales on Bandcamp actually goes straight to the artists—82%, in fact. Bandcamp truly makes artists feel like they are in a community with the site, too. When the pandemic struck, Bandcamp began instituting “Bandcamp Fridays” on the first of every month, when they waive their share of revenue entirely to favor its artists. In short, Bandcamp is a breath of fresh air in a landscape that is unfavorable to any musician who isn’t a household name. Or, at least, it was.
As an—ahem—professional musician myself (for example, I play this guitar solo on the Rick and Morty soundtrack), I can talk about this very personally. Before I talk about why my peers and I are freaking out on Twitter right now, though, let me paint you the environment in which we’re presently inhabiting.
By now, you’ve probably read that Spotify offers a mere .004 cents per stream to its artists (if they’re listening on a subscription). Apple Music is hardly better; YouTube is even worse. Point is, when you buy a subscription to any of these services and stream on them, most of your money goes to the company. 30%, in fact. The rest is split up between the artists you listen to, but with the more popular artists getting a disproportionately bigger chunk of your change. This is called the “pro rata” system. According to NPR, “The pro rata model disproportionately privileges top artists and labels, and leaves little chance for even midsize artists to get a fair shake.” Please note “midsize artists” still get millions of listens. The result? “Countless working artists in the United States can’t feasibly make a decent living in this new world.”
I can tell you this from my personal experience, and from the experiences of countless peers. And this doesn’t even take the pandemic into account. Musicians are contract workers, after all. If we lose a gig, that income is gone. An article from the New York Times in 2020 which describes a top-of-her-game violinist on food stamps is very emblematic of what musicians have been experiencing.
Welcome to the fun world of the arts! Hooray!
Bandcamp is not the sole solution to the economic conundrum of the artist. I don’t know of anyone making rent from their Bandcamp sales. But it has at least been the one resource for streaming and selling music that, in the words of ISLR researcher Ron Knox, “has been a noble and sometimes successful attempt at recreating the brick and mortar record store online. It’s too important to lose.”
This isn’t to say we will lose Bandcamp into the maw of the tech greed. There are, indeed, a few signs for hope. Epic Games, like Bandcamp, stands outside the industry norm for only taking 12% of sales on its store. By contrast, platforms like Steam (and Spotify) take 30%. And Bandcamp’s CEO assures everyone in a blog post that Bandcamp and Epic share “share a vision of building the most open, artist-friendly ecosystem in the world.”
Plus, it’s worth remembering that Epic recently tried to sue Apple to allow third-party payments through apps bought in the App Store. They didn’t exactly win, but this familiarity with the issue could potentially benefit Bandcamp users. Right now, the Bandcamp app is only for streaming the library of music you’ve already bought. It would be excellent for everyone if you could buy music right in the app. Users have also long sought the ability to use Bandcamp to make playlists.
But there are some omens that the acquisition may not be all Sunshine and Rainbows, as both companies are making it seem. Because what if the Bandcamp app allows you to stream music you didn’t buy? That’s not Bandcamp—that’s Spotify. The basic concern is that Epic will turn Bandcamp into its own personal music streaming platform. Right now, Bandcamp isn’t a “competitor” to Apple Music or Spotify. It’s an alternative model.
The “you stream it, you buy it” model is precisely what The Point of Bandcamp is for so many artists. Right now, artists have control over how people stream our content on Bandcamp. Open and free streaming is an option, but not mandatory. An option exists to not allow anyone to stream an album without buying it first, or to only stream a single. You can also set a bar of, say, three streams before the listener has to buy the album to continue listening. I’m personally quite fond of that last option.
And, of course, a potentially threatening corporate overlord hovers ever higher. A company called Tencent has a 40% share in Epic Games. As this article points out, Tencent and its affiliate Tencent Music own a total 9% share in Spotify, which the company achieved only after trying to buy it outright. Tencent Music specializes in user-generated content, like karaoke and live-streaming apps. Still, the direct thread to a company so interested in Spotify is … itchy.
The current digital atmosphere has led independent musicians onto one platform: Bandcamp. If artists’ revenues receive yet another cut on yet another platform, there is presently not an alternative marketplace for us to turn to.
“Artists should never put all their hopes on one platform,” celebrated composer and pianist / Grammy nominee / Harvard professor Vijay Iyer told The Mary Sue when reached for comment. “The winner is always capitalism.” (Coincidentally, Iyer was featured on Bandcamp’s front page on the day of the announcement. “Feels a little like being punked,” he quipped.)
On top of a pandemic’s worth of lost opportunities and a popularized digital marketplace that disadvantages us, artists have years of experience backing up a skepticism that this acquisition will advantage the community. Among independent artists and independent labels alike, there’s a lot of confusion and concern.
“Bandcamp will play an important role in Epic’s vision to build out a creator marketplace ecosystem for content, technology, games, art, music and more,” Epic’s statement says. I really hope that marketplace continues to champion those creators above all else.
(Image credit: Epic Games)
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