Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

There's been an interesting revelation and nasty development in the sale of Bandcamp by Epic Games to Songtradr. Approximately half of the staff have been dumped. And it turns out that the sale was an ASSET SALE with "no legal requirement to retain employees or recognize the union". Wow, what a weasel way to operate! I mean, I've heard of a company shedding assets in bankruptcy reorgs, but that's not what's going on here!

Late stage capitalism or what?

From the LA Times article: "Songtradr has not officially recognized the Bandcamp United union, which had been demanding Songtradr extend an offer to all employees and provide severance packages to those who declined to stay on board. Because the transaction was an asset sale, Songtradr had no legal requirement to retain employees or recognize the union."

So the name moves, the assets move, and almost all of the people are gone. One thing that I found confusing was one article said that Bandcamp had 830 employees, then this LA Times article says "A representative for Songtradr told The Times that 60 of Bandcamp’s 118 employees were offered the opportunity to retain their position, and that 58 workers had accepted."

Seems to me that this is fertile ground for another big company to swoop in, recruit all of these suddenly displaced people, and restart Bandcamp under a new name with fresh funding. I, not being a billionaire and successful businessman, will not be doing this.

The Slashdot article summary references a San Francisco Chronicle article that first complained that I was using an ad blocker. When I unblocked the article, it then wanted me to subscribe. Fortunately someone on Slashdot pointed to the LA Times article which just wanted ads unblocked. I then went back and re-blocked the Chronicle.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2023-10-16/bandcamp-layoffs-songtradr-epic-games

https://slashdot.org/story/23/10/17/0226239/bandcamp-slashes-nearly-half-its-staff-after-epic-sale

Epic Games, makers of the Unreal Game engine - a very impressive property - and of the Fortnite game, a very popular game, have bought the extremely popular music site Bandcamp.

While pledges were made to keep Bandcamp independent, this isn't likely. First off, corporate talking heads lie. Second, why spend money buying a property if not to monetize it. What's the point? Epic does not have a good game store, Bandcamp's store is very efficient, popular, and they have apps for iOS and Android. That's something that Epic could really use, i.e., monetize.

But then there's all that music....

IF it stays....

The comments on Ars are universally negative. No one there likes the idea, and musicians there are hugely bummed at the announcement. The question will be whether they jump ship. There aren't many other places where they can go that are like Bandcamp. A sufficiently motivated group - if they could get the funding - could create another Bandcamp-like site, but could they keep it going long enough to build up a large enough musician base to become viable? Would they pay the content creators enough to keep them?

One thing that made Bandcamp popular with small bands is their payout vs streaming services. From the article: "Diamond [Bandcamp CEO] hints at his company's value by suggesting "$890 million" in payouts to musicians since launching in 2008. If you'd like to understand how rapidly Bandcamp has grown, consider that the company's last lifetime payout estimate, from September 2020, was $584 million. That's pretty good growth—especially for a service that favors à la carte full-priced album purchases, as opposed to cheaper, buffet-style music subscription services.

Though many digital download storefronts cull as much as 30 percent of sales, Bandcamp famously demands less: a default 15 percent figure for digital media sales, which drops to 10 percent after an artist exceeds $5,000 in annual revenue. And Bandcamp insists it will continue running its "Bandcamp Fridays" promotions, which skip Bandcamp's cut of digital sales on the first Friday of every month (though the company still takes fees on those days from sales of physical items like CDs, records, cassettes, and shirts).

You can listen to tracks, pay what you want for individual tracks, download as MP3 or as lossless FLACs. You can find some really esoteric stuff there. I've used it as a source for background music before and have spent some bucks there. Right now I have it open to listen to an Arizona Renaissance Festival hurdy gurdy band that I'm not going to get to see perform live.

Nothing will change immediately, but I will be surprised if in 3-4 years there isn't a diminishment of what Bandcamp is now.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/03/epic-games-begins-to-show-its-more-than-games-acquires-bandcamp