Published
Wed, Mar 16, 2022, 11:45
- Aquarian, Zola Jesus, Mat Dryhurst and Austin Robey consider the pros and cons of the surprising and controversial deal.
In an unexpected move, video game giant Epic Games recently bought Bandcamp. But what does this mean for the beloved platform and the wider music industry?
On Wednesday, March 2nd, a corner of Twitter went into meltdown when Bandcamp announced that it was, in the words of CEO Ethan Diamond, "joining Epic Games." In the eyes of many, the last bastion of independent music was merging with the creators of Fortnite.
Music industry heads unleashed a flurry of tweets, some furious, others funny. While some took aim at the obtuse language used in the posts (Epic Games' described it as "Bandcamp will become part of Epic Games"), others cracked jokes about producers making character skins.
Prior to the merger, Bandcamp had gone through two rounds of funding as a private company and has, according to Diamond, been profitable since 2012. But in a tech world defined by a constant stream of mergers and acquisitions, some felt it was only a matter of time.
"I wasn't surprised at all," Zola Jesus told Resident Advisor. "Bandcamp has never really been DIY, even if it sells DIY music. They're a startup funded by venture capital, like any other successful platform today. And like any other successful platform, growth is paramount. An acquisition, or going public, was inevitable if they were going to keep growing."
For techno DJ and producer Aquarian, the buyer was the most surprising thing about the deal. "I think like most people, the news was quite unexpected—not so much the acquisition itself, but that Epic, a gaming company of all people, had acquired Bandcamp."
Two lines of critique have emerged about the merger from the music community. Some pointed to issues with Epic Games, which has a less-than-stellar record on how it treats its employees and locking game creators into exclusivity deals.
While many of these concerns are out of date, they convey how betrayed the general public feel by Bandcamp, a platform that has done a lot to support independent musicians and cultivate an ethos of cultural cool, particularly during the pandemic.
One real fear around Epic Games is its move into the games-as-a-service (GaaS) model. While the analogy isn't a perfect fit, under a GaaS model users subscribe to games rather than purchase them outright—the video game equivalent of streaming. Given Bandcamp's recent announcement about continuous streaming, some people are worried that the platform, which the LA Times once hailed as the "anti-Spotify," may be moving closer to its rivals.
But not everyone is against the merger. London artist Mr. Mitch hopes it might improve some much-needed functionality, while journalist Chal Ravens explored how the merger could be Epic Games' "play for the hearts and minds of the next generation of musicians and music lovers" thanks to the possibilities of the metaverse. In a piece titled "But what if it's good," the writer Andrew Thompson provided an excellent summary of the upsides.
Zola Jesus has tried to take a measured approach. "Are they going to do what's happened a million times before in the music industry, where an independent magazine / label / booking agency / venue/ etc is bought only to be shelled out for parts? Or are they going to help Bandcamp further support independent music? Can a corporate entity foster independent music without the music losing its independence? These are things we'll see unfold in the coming months and years, I guess."
The bigger issue, perhaps, isn't about Epic Games as a company, but that the merger represents a further consolidation of the music industry more generally. Epic Games is partly owned by Tencent Holding, a Shenzhen-based company that, through its subsidiary Tencent Music, holds a nearly ten-percent share in Spotify as well as some major labels. As music researcher Cherie Hu tweeted, this leads to an increasingly "incestuous new music-industry landscape."
Speaking to RA, the cultural theorist and musician Mat Dryhurst described this as "platform risk." He added: "When building a following or economy around a centralized platform, that platform can change its focus, or disappear entirely, and that is obviously not ideal if your career or social life has become dependent on it."
There are countless examples of this happening over the past decade, such as Twitter buying, and swiftly closing, Vine, MySpace deleting all music uploaded between 2003 and 2015, and, most insidiously, Flickr attempting to monetize artists' work without their permission.
"The looming questions are always: what happens when a for-profit platform that you spend years building a fanbase on no longer aligns with your values, falls out of favor with fans or simply ceases to exist?" Aquarian told RA. "What good is a thousand, hundred thousand, million fans to an artist if they need permission to access them or lose them if the platform shuts down?"
He added: "Furthermore, what happens if the platform decides that it's no longer in their interests to offer the same service or if they want [to] charge quadruple for people to use it? [...] We've seen this over and over again: Facebook fan pages throttling reach unless you buy sponsored posts; Instagram's constantly changing algorithm hoops; desperate monetization measures from music discovery platforms; sponsored initiatives like RBMA shuttering."
Austin Robey, worker-owner of Ampled and founding member of Metalabel, has been one of Bandcamp's few critics in the past couple of years. He said he saw the merger coming.
"I've always been concerned by Bandcamp's lack of transparency around fundraising and ownership," he told RA. "In 2020, I was uncomfortable with the idea of celebrating a private company primarily owned and controlled by a small number of white men as a sterling example of an imaginative and equitable future. I wanted the community to push back directly against Bandcamp and advocate for greater artist accountability and ask more critical questions, like 'who owns Bandcamp?' You push back and ask uncomfortable questions because you want to protect something you love."
Dryhurst made a similar point. "I assume that the Bandcamp acquisition took place because the people in charge of Bandcamp are aware of things the average Bandcamp user is not. The point is not to attribute bad faith to Bandcamp, but instead to ask whether it makes sense to build followings and economies on digital infrastructure where the terms can change and be so consequential, particularly when alternatives now exist."
As mentioned in this recent RA piece critiquing Bandcamp Friday, the question of alternatives feels ever more pressing now. "I think it's obvious," said Zola Jesus, "at this point [...] we've reached a level of hyper-capitalism that is totally unsustainable."
This reliance on a single platform places a huge burden on private companies like Bandcamp when they've created a service or technology that, as Robey points out, has become "a shared cultural utility." So what alternatives are there for companies operating in this space?
"There's no easy alternative to this currently," said Aquarian, "but an artist led, co-operative platform where we have equity and a say in the operations would be ideal."
Both Robey and Dryhurst take a similar approach, advocating for what Nathan Schneider, a professor of media studies at University of Colorado Boulder, calls "exit to community." As Robey explained, this strategy would see "the founders, through a leveraged buyout, transfer ownership to the Bandcamp workers—or even the artists—to convert Bandcamp to a community-owned cooperative [...] We need to ask tougher questions about ownership. Distributed ownership is the only way to build online infrastructure as public or shared goods. I want to see Bandcamp be a worker-owned cooperative. The workers and artists are much better stewards for the founders' original vision for Bandcamp. Not Fortnite."
In a music industry in which questions of ownership have often been erased, particularly for systematically marginalized populations, "exit to community" feels like an exciting alternative. Dryhurst tempered Robey's enthusiasm, pointing out that the techno utopianism at play may rub some the wrong way. But he also sees this as an opportunity to begin different, and much larger, conversations around ownership and dissemination in the digital age.
"Generally, I think we ought to think bigger," he said. "Bandcamp has been a great service, but I don't think the future of music support is likely to mimic the record store interactions Bandcamp was modeled after in the early '10s [...] A crisis of imagination and fluency in available options for musicians and labels is a significantly bigger challenge for music than Bandcamp disappearing, IMO.
He added: "To look on the bright side, perhaps this cold shower will lead people to consider new options. Fortunately, there are significantly better options available for resilient, idiosyncratic and exciting artist infrastructure now than there ever has been."
Bandcamp and Epic Games declined to comment for this article.