Bandcamp Does a Girl Boss
The indie music platform's purchase by the studio that brought us Fortnite shows the insatiable allure of speculative value. And growth baby!!!
hi vibers.
The universe provides. This week I was facing the ghastly prospect of a blank substack week and thus an early failure at my attempt at consistency and professionalism. I was racking my brain, but everything felt either too heavy or too petty given, you know, *motions around* And then an email came into my inbox from Bandcamp that was so strange and so specifically, hellishly 2022 that I thought, “well, well, well . . . if it isn’t my brand!?”
They were emailing to share some big, big news: Bandcamp, the most ethical and appreciated indie music distribution platform (low bar), is being purchased by Epic Games, the studio that brought us Fortnite.
Now in all honesty, I, unlike so many of my peers, am not a Bandcamp connoisseur. But I have always been aware of the platform and appreciative of it from afar. It’s simplicity and earnestness seemed to me its greatest asset. You see, Bandcamp allows artists to sell their albums at a price. Revolutionary! Game changing! A revelation!
But seriously, in our streaming era, the simple act of assigning a concrete monetary value to art and requiring that value in exchange for access to that art is notable. On Bandcamp, the value exchange between consumer and artists is not some calculation of penny-percentiles per streams as tabulated through what these streams represent of the total pie of music streams globally (yes, Spotify’s economic model is really that inscrutable). On Bandcamp, fans listen to previews from a project and then, if they are so inclined, they can listen to the whole project for a price. 82% of the money paid goes to artists, the rest: to Bandcamp.
Bandcamp was doing by all accounts well with a thriving user base of both listeners and musicians. On their website they claim that they’ve paid nearly 1 billion dollars to musicians and small labels since their inception in 2008. And “Bandcamp Daily,” Bandcamp’s editorial division, offers some of the best (and last) music writing on the internet, with a team of smart and well-rounded writers sifting through the platform and highlighting the best new music it has to offer.
As many outraged commentators on twitter wondered: why change a good, small thing like Bandcamp? Sure, they weren’t on track to be Google, but why should they be? Bandcamp was offering a service, doing it well, and sustaining a small, thankful group of artists. Is there really no room in *tech* to have something as simple and good as that?
In his statement announcing the deal, Bandcamp CEO Ethan Diamond said that Bandcamp had been approached before about acquisition, but they only wanted to be acquired if the interested party “believed in [Bandcamp’s] mission, were aligned with [their] values, and not only wanted to see Bandcamp continue, but also wanted to provide the resources to bring a lot more benefit to the artists, labels, and fans who use the site.” Apparently, the folks that have hooked the globe’s tweens on cartoon shoot-em-ups checks those boxes?
Now so much here is speculation, but the move is prompting some folks to do some digging and to read the tea leaves, and they’re not liking what they’re seeing. Tencent, a major Chinese technology firm, is a 40% owner in Epic and a 10% owner of Spotify, in addition to its substantial stakes in Universal and Warner Music Groups. That financial reality, and observations of Spotify’s music business practices has led some to worry that the move to purchase Bandcamp will mean the “Spotification” of the simple platform.
And it’s not just paranoia. Among the features Bandcamp has noted the acquisition will help them improve is their mobile experience, merchandising tools, search, and crucially, their discovery tools. Words like “discovery” may sound glimmery on their own, but how does one “do discovery” exactly? The whole concept of Bandcamp as it stands is that exploration of music is limited. You cannot simply poke around and listen to whatever your heart desires like paid users can on Spotify. On Bandcamp, you can only listen to select tracks from an artist until you pay up in exchange for the entire project. As Ron Knox noted, if Bandcamp wants to “improve discovery,” then there is the real chance that they shift those content restrictions and allow greater access to music without the necessary payment. Many Bandcamp users have wanted playlists for example, where users or editors of Bandcamp daily could compile and share music from across projects. But the concept of playlists is contradictory to Bandcamp’s strict and simple model. Unless you are literally buying each album that’s featured on a playlist, it would erode the model that requires purchase for consumption.
The financial connections that now exist between Spotify and Bandcamp also increase the likelihood that Bandcamp will take on similar behavior in terms of profiting off our data. As scholar Eric Drott argues, Spotify makes a healthy sum by selling our data to advertisers. On Spotify, we can listen and listen to our hearts desires for a relatively cheap price. But that low price is offset by the rich data we are disclosing to them; every play, every saved song, every playlist we make is data that they can be used to infer shockingly intimate details about our life (not to mention their venomous privacy policy that tracks GPS, etc.). The reality is, Spotify can discern what you’re feeling moreso than even Google or Facebook can. You know, stuff like what times of day you’re sad based on what you listen to and when, what you like to listen to when you study, and thus when you study. One can easily imagine the kinds of pop up ads each of these data points inspire and why they would be of immense value to advertisers.
For Bandcamp and Epic, the low-stakes simplicity of buying and selling of music is fine, but the speculative allure of data money (yaaaaaas) is just so much more delicious. They may be exiting the hard cash exchange of music-for-money for the amorphous speculative economy where our data becomes predictive models through which we all can then be targeted. Yes, they may expand the scope of what you can listen to on the platform, but at what cost? Because “discovery” in this context is not a wide-eyed curatorial term, but a data driven concept: discover, stream, listen all you want, but this is all behavior which they can turn into a product for advertisers via the data they collect from you.
And maybe Epic is the perfect partner to merge the craven impulses of big tech with the supposedly wholesome intent of Bandcamp. Because in the scheme of things, Epic is our woke, girl boss monopolist. In Epic’s statement announcing the deal, they highlight that both Bandcamp and Epic believe in the importance of “fair and open platforms.” They go on stating that “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.”
All of this is just gestures to the broader moves of Epic, who’s seeking to build an entire ecosystem of markets that it owns. They are so intent on this that they have even gone to legal war with Apple over its App Store. Though they largely lost their case, Epic was arguing that the Apple App Store is a monopoly, and its 30% take of all App Store purchases, including subscriptions, was essentially a tax on developers. Epic wanted its own App Store to be downloadable on Apple products and they wanted their own payment system outside of Apple’s, and they attempted such a move, resulting in the full removal of Fortnite from the App Store, a relegation that still remains.
So, if you can’t beat em, build it. Bandcamp is entering the sphere of one of the world’s great gaming monoliths who wants to not just make games, but to build its own metaverse market for . . . well, we don’t know. But they already have millions of users on their platform making purchases of cool outfits and weapons that can wear and use on Fortnite and now, well, I guess those same tweens can make easy-in-app purchases of indie noise rock? All we know is Bandcamp, our little engine that could, has now been subsumed into a monolith, and the intentions of said monolith is far grander and broader than our friends who are selling cassettes. Be it big data and or a big new marketplace to counter Apple’s hegemony, we have traveled far outside the terrain of our fun little music.