I can't tell you how often I see this same story play out: a young, starry-eyed songwriter asks on socials about where to sell their new release. Typically, they ask something like, "is it still worth it to post my new songs on Bandcamp?"

To which people typically respond in one of two ways. Either they say something like "no, don't bother, it's all about streaming these days," which is sort of true, but also misses the point, which is that some users still want to buy actual hard-copies of the song, and buying through the Apple Music app creates inconsistent file resolutions, because the M4A spec is not consistent; or they say, "yes, Bandcamp is my favorite thing, and I love how they support indie musicians," which is also sort of true, but misses another point, which is that there is little or no comparison between the Bandcamp of today and the one we had just before private capital did all it could to kill the employee unionization efforts that were going on. I talked about this a little bit on one of my recent recent broadcasts of The Weekly Catch, but the reason I know is that I've been very connected to Bandcamp since starting my own page there almost 2 decades ago now.

Bandcamp was founded in 2008 by Ethan Diamond, along with programmers Shawn Grunberger, Joe Holt, and Neal Tucker. It was created as a direct-to-fan platform for independent musicians to sell music and merchandise, and in the early days the curation was really impressive, the genre discovery was multi-layered, and my favorite thing, there were periodic compilations that got released to support causes they believed in. For example, Maya Hawke contributed her song "Rose and Thorn" to the 2022 Bandcamp charity compilation Good Music To Ensure Safe Abortion Access To All. The project raised over for abortion access non-profits, including the Brigid Alliance and Abortion Care Network. These kind of compilations would be released often many times in a given year and they would be active for only 30 or 60 days, as a way of encouraging buyers to jump in and support the cause without hesitation.

Here is an important breakdown of what happened, from a listener-owned Bandcamp competitor known as Subvert.fm:

In March 2022, Bandcamp shook the independent music world when it announced that its founders had sold the company to Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite, leaving the fate of the platform — and that of hundreds of thousands of musicians who had come to rely on it — up in the air. A year and a half later, Bandcamp was sold again, this time to music licensing company Songtradr. Following the sale, Songtradr laid off half of Bandcamp’s staff, including most of the union’s bargaining team. It was the second time that the company had changed hands in just 18 months, creating even more uncertainty and anxiety.

Bandcamp’s acquisition left musicians and music workers with a familiar feeling of betrayal and concern. How did this happen? Wasn’t Bandcamp supposed to be the “good guy”? To many, Bandcamp had been the last bastion of independence in a recorded music landscape that had long ago left underground and emerging musicians behind. Now it had become another corporate asset, tied to the streaming giants it once marketed itself as against.

So, beyond the questionable morality that is the hallmark of privately-funded SaaS growth strategies, you can really tell the difference if you were lucky enough to have any experience with Bandcamp before the doomed sale to Epic Games. What was once a delightfully handcrafted indie music experience that did a great job of pulling a given user into complex genre-specific funnels that encouraged engagement and discovery, now we have a milquetoast experience that does not hold a candle to the obsessive engagement patterns of platforms like TikTok and Instagram. It's almost like Bandcamp is dying a slow slow death on purpose. The competition got even deeper, and Bandcamp just decided to take its foot off the gas. Which makes sense if you think about the fact that their owner now is Songtradr, who focuses on streaming versus other kind of distribution models. Judging by their mission statement, Songtradr is clearly focussed on 'scalable music license solutions.' So why would they care about this peripheral vertical that has anemic growth and is completely unrelated to licensing writ large?

Songtradr's mission is to revolutionize the music industry by maximizing the value of music for all through technology, creativity, and transparency. They aim to empower artists and rights holders while providing brands and agencies with efficient, data-driven, and scalable music licensing solutions.

And in the end, this story just feeds into what we know now about the process of enshittification. The raison d'etre for private capital is to find products like Bandcamp, make millionaires out of the founders, and exchange that boutique sense of user engagement for a tighter grip on market share. It's not about the features, nor is it about user experience. The forces of private capital will happily degrade their own product if that serves some larger financial goal, even if consumers receive nothing from the exchange. The cynic in me says the equation was quite simple: the financial interests that were previously invested in the original Bandcamp, saw the beginnings of a union and decided to cut the whole thing loose, probably only in anticipation of some hardship that could be imagined as emerging from the union bogeyman. Maybe they decided, just like Starbucks and Amazon before them, to crush the unionization effort as an example to others. The two sales in 18 months served as simple enablement for the trajectory that had already been designated: the union gets crushed, Epic gets a small cash infusion, and Songtradr can write off the expense as a market play to force more users into the world of streaming by abandoning the Bandcamp platform. It's a win for everyone except the employees and the customers. Sound familiar?

Bandcamp is dying a slow death for the same reason that we no longer have light rail in most markets, and the same reason that mainstream movies, music, and media have all been allowed to degenerate for so long. Quality is not the point. It hasn't been for at least two or three decades.

So what do we do? How do we push back? I certainly don't have to tell you that we are at a crossroads in this very moment, where the US-led western Empire is at an inflection point. The next weeks and months will see a lot of change, I fear. All we can do is keep telling the truth to whoever will listen, that we are at a crisis that cannot be addressed with simply more of the status quo. Much of the power that we have as individuals relates directly to our spending habits. Buy local. Resist. Reuse. Create and support your community. The time may yet come where having a solid relationship with your neighbors makes all the difference. And above all, lead with Love. It remains the most potent antidote we have against institutionalized cruelty.