What does Bandcamp’s sale to Epic Games mean for independent music?

Because the announcement on Wednesday that on-line music distributor Bandcamp, a central hub for impartial artists and labels promoting digital and bodily media, has been bought to Epic Video games, the gaming big chargeable for Fortnite, Gears of Warfare and the Infinity Blaze sequence, musicians and followers have been expressing concern that their beloved platform is on its approach to changing into one other sufferer of multinational consolidation.

“Truthfully, this sucks. half the cash i make off music comes from bandcamp, and even when issues are fantastic for the subsequent few months, this will solely go in worse instructions,” wrote singer Mel Stone in a single extensively quoted tweet.

The sale was introduced on social media by Bandcamp CEO Ethan Diamond, who wrote that the corporate would function as a stand-alone entity inside Epic’s ecosystem. Diamond, who didn’t disclose a sale worth, will proceed in his position.

Within the assertion, Diamond, who based the corporate in 2008, tried to guarantee the legions of Bandcamp devotees drawn by the platform’s artist-first mannequin and its month-to-month Bandcamp Fridays occasion, when the corporate waives its share of gross sales to sign its allegiance to the plight of struggling artists.

Noting that artists promoting on Bandcamp will proceed to obtain what he characterizes as “a median of 82% of each sale,” Diamond emphasised that “the services you rely on aren’t going anyplace, and we are going to proceed to construct Bandcamp round our artists-first income mannequin.”

Promoting to Epic, he continued, will enable Bandcamp to broaden internationally and additional spend money on improvement throughout the platform, together with design, cellular apps, merchandizing instruments, vinyl manufacturing and livestreaming initiatives. Diamond described Epic as “champions for a good and open web,” possible a reference to Epic’s 2020 lawsuits in opposition to Apple and Google for antitrust and anticompetitive conduct associated to the tech giants’ in-app fee programs.

“Epic and Bandcamp share a mission of constructing probably the most artist-friendly platform that permits creators to maintain the vast majority of their hard-earned cash,” mentioned Epic Video games in a press release accompanying the acquisition.

Regardless of the businesses’ assurances, artists-rights activists nervously contemplated the repercussions of the sale, which comes on the heels of criticisms of audio streaming chief Spotify over its affiliation with podcaster Joe Rogan and its fee charges to artists and songwriters.

“Too few corporations have an excessive amount of energy in each a part of the music enterprise,” wrote the Washington, D.C.-based artists-rights group Way forward for Music Coalition in a social media thread, including that “some within the music neighborhood have actual frustrations with how Epic has handled music licensing up to now.”

Epic Video games is flush with money resulting from “Fortnite,” the favored multiplayer recreation launched in 2017. Working with a so-called “video games as a service” mannequin that generates income by means of ongoing micropayments, “Fortnite’s” success has enabled latest investments together with the 2021 buy of Harmonix, the creator of the favored “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band” franchises. Epic’s gaming improvement platform Unreal Engine, which was developed by Epic’s founder Tim Sweeney, has advanced right into a high-tech device utilized in tv sequence together with “The Mandalorian” and “Westworld.”

All that technological would possibly stands in stark distinction to the standard indie enterprise that Diamond created to allow seamless on-line transactions between artists and followers. A beloved platform that earned its early buyer base by means of its indie rock and experimental music choices, its progress was financed by a single, modest infusion of enterprise capital throughout its early ascent. In keeping with Diamond in a 2020 interview, Bandcamp has been worthwhile since 2012.

Bandcamp’s workplaces in Oakland host a efficiency with Christian Scott Atunde Adjuah.

(Salihah Saadiq)

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In 2020, as COVID-19 shut down nightlife and the live performance enterprise, musicians directed their consideration to Bandcamp, which by then had constructed an infrastructure to assist gross sales of merchandise, vinyl and different codecs. In response, that platform initiated the Bandcamp Fridays marketing campaign, whereby, on the primary Friday of every month, the platform eliminates its share of all gross sales. All informed, notes a ticker on the location’s homepage, “Followers have paid artists $890 million utilizing Bandcamp, and $207 million within the final 12 months.”

“It’s sophisticated,” says Kevin Erickson, who heads the Way forward for Music Coalition. “Usually, musicians have felt like Bandcamp has been a dependable ally and has stepped up in some vital methods in the course of the pandemic. There’s concern about the place which may change sooner or later.”

He provides, “We would like corporations to do effectively by doing proper by musicians, and if Bandcamp below the brand new possession is ready to persist with the rules which have led it to the success that it enjoys now — and scales the scale of the viewers — that will be a web win for lots of musicians.”

In 2012, Epic founder Tim Sweeney bought 40% of the corporate to Tencent, the large Chinese language multinational media agency. Tencent additionally owns a ten% stake within the Common Music Group, the phrase’s greatest file firm, and 4 China-based music apps which have a mixed listenership of greater than 800 million individuals.

Noting the convoluted possession constructions, musician Damon Krukowski of the Union of Musicians and Allied Staff wrote, “Wait Epic is 40% owned by Tencent who’ve stakes in… Spotify and the key labels. Did we simply lose our impartial digital file retailer,” he puzzled.

“The stakes that Tencent has within the file labels and in Spotify are usually not controlling stakes — or something near controlling stakes — so the diploma of affect it will possibly exert is minimal,” says Mark Mulligan, media and know-how analyst and co-founder of Midia Analysis, which tracks the streaming business. However, he notes, Tencent’s bigger stake in Epic Video games implies that it may exert extra direct affect on monetizing Bandcamp’s platform.

A Bandcamp touchdown web page.

(Bandcamp)

“Bandcamp and Epic Video games are each fandom corporations, and so is Tencent Music,” says Mulligan, including that two-thirds of Tencent Music’s income “comes from non-music. It comes from all of the methods of individuals expressing themselves.” He provides that Epic permits Fortnite gamers to donate a portion of the cash they spend within the recreation to their favourite streamer, a fan-driven initiative that awards excellence. “Epic Video games and Tencent each perceive, as does Bandcamp, the significance of individuals having the ability to determine themselves by means of fandom.”

In 2020, Diamond informed The Occasions that he and his cofounders had been “keenly conscious of the vital position Bandcamp performs within the livelihoods of many musicians, and that’s a duty we take very significantly.”

As artists on social media digested the information, many expressed a way of resignation, one finest captured by Canadian indie musician Allister Thompson. “Properly, irrespective of how issues find yourself, one factor’s for certain: the fear with persons are responding en masse to the Bandcamp sale signifies simply how traumatized artists are by having the soccer continually yanked away from them.”