This genuinely made me laugh. Thank you, sir!
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There’s Unreal too. A not entirely insignificant component in video game production.
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Well… at least peak Vice didn’t acquire BC to look on the positive side of things.
I was terribly upset this morning by reading these news… Did some research for the comments, including various Reddit threads and Hackernews. Overall impression that would not be a disaster (new owner company has a reputation of fair player), but so far no certainty. Press-releases are very vague and company ignored direct questions about future of Bandcamp daily, etc.
Fingers crossed… I would not like to release on archive.org, damn it
Bandcamp workers are organizing:
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with the new pricing model I’m pretty sure Epic shot themselves in the foot hard, looking at the unreal communities people ditching it real fast…
Petition here:
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So you can also say that Epic made an (epic) mistake by buying Bandcamp as it was never their “core metaverse” in the first place.
And by that, also that bandcamp sold itself to such a company.
I hate it hat these platforms always need to be sold because “this is better for the artist / adds new experiences / joins forces” blablabla BS.
In the end it is always about a few people wo don’t give a s%#t about their platform and are just selling it for the 
.
The only way bandcamp will retain is when they become fully independant again, and this is very unlikely. It’s a sad day.
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I don’t blame them, though. If a megacorporation offered me enough money for my product that I could retire comfortably while young, I’d absolutely jump on that.
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I don’t get what the big houses see in Bandcamp. Profit margins must be narrow; the brand is known for its social conscience and community spirit which are anathema to profit.
In an ideal world it would become a cooperative (or similar), owned by the artists (perhaps even by the fans too) and labels that produce the content. We should start a movement, and a fund, preparing to take ownership when SongTradr realise their mistake.
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Totally agree.
I would surely get shares.
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If I was bandcamp I would start doing retail stores - they don’t realise they are their own record company in many ways, and there’s content on bandcamp that just isn’t anywhere else. At the least they could start to stockpile merch and so forth in warehouses, and start to have a global physical presence in the real world. I would love to be able to go to a bandcamp shop for real and not have to deal with all the postage, shipping costs, wait times, pre-order malarky
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They do have a physical store location in oakland ca, although I think it is actually more of a venue space than a store. I think the main downside of doing physical location merch instead of direct to consumer is you basically have to mark everything up 50% or take a huge hit on any profits you are making on it as an artist. Maybe there is a way they could make it work, like an opt in option where bandcamp store just made more generic merch based on your releases and you would get a cut, but in my experience platforms that do similar things (like tshirt design sites) take something like 90% which means only the top 1% of artists really get anything worth while out of it.
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I believe the reason for the sale to Epic was because it is fairly profitable all things considered. Especially when compared to something like a startup making consistent losses on the idea of total monopoly of a market. Bandcamp have (some would say accidentally) done the opposite and dominate a niche to the point that no one else has really bothered to compete. They probably benefit from a legacy tech and (what appears to be) a slack approach to growth. Tech companies pour cash into their software, where Bandcamp’s website is largely unchanged from 10 years ago or more. With little to no R&D as such, every sale would add up to profit at this point, even with their small cut, simply because it’s effectively a payment portal and not much else. As you say it probably wouldn’t take much to upset that either via inviting big artists or going down the streaming route. I’d be interested to see the figures but there are a few articles out there along the lines of “why does Spotify not make money when Bandcamp does?”
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yeah, I hear you. I just think they are poised to take a risk and go for it. like virgin or something. maybe not on that level. but pushed in the right way, it could definitely launch, and actually become the focus of the music industry? you know what I mean? its every businesses goal to be the best isn’t it? otherwise why meander along just being half arsed. personally tho I think the name band camp isn’t great, you immediately just think of that one time, at bandcamp. but mainly I think the current model sucks because the shipping is pushed onto the consumer - and this is per item, not like a pallette of things. maybe if you live in the continental US or the UK you just don’t notice stuff like this. But my experience with the shipping of things from Bandcamp has always been delayed, cancelled, or terrible, with apologies from the artist or label. I basically won’t order anything physical on bandcamp anymore because of this
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The physical stuff is a sideline, surely, compared to digital sales?
That’s the value of BC to me - I run a small label. Having the infrastructure there to slot into is just so much more accessible than having to create and maintain a dedicated website which people will struggle to even find. It’s a good business niche for them - they don’t have to do that much except keep the servers online. Which is why it will be disappointing if the management manage to screw up what should be a pretty bulletproof business (now they have a quasi-monopoly) by overreaching or changing it too much.
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I was under the impression that Epic bought bandcamp to help with their legal battles against apple and google to try and reduce the high commission rate those companies charge for online sales. Epic needed to show that it was still profitable to run a digital store with lower commission rates (like the 10-15% that bandcamp charges). Epic couldn’t use their own online store as an example (which I think charges 12%) because it wasn’t actually profitable. So they bought an online store that had a history of being profitable charging lower commission rates. I guess they don’t need it for their legal battles anymore so they are selling it. Dont think any of it had anything to do with music or whatever BS they were saying the reason was.
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Yeah I hear that, shipping internationally from the US is pretty bad… only time since the pandemic was a small japanese record shop ordered a small bulk order and I sent the tapes to there guy in LA who bundles up a bunch of indie artists stuff to send over to the shop in japan. But yeah personally I don’t feel happy charging people more in shipping than the cost of the product so if they figured out a way to help artists with international distributions it would be great, often times I even end up netting 0$ on a merch sale internationally because even charging outrageous ship prices its hard to predict a flat rate and I generally will just accept not making money on the sale.
I think you’re onto something here. 
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