Bandcamp Was Supposed to Be Dead by Now
After the company's sale to Songtradr triggered a tidal wave of bad press and bad vibes, the platform has quietly continued to do its own thing, and seems to be doing just fine.
Two years ago, things weren’t looking good for Bandcamp. The company, once hailed as “the heroes of streaming” and “the anti-Spotify,” had just been sold for the second time in 18 months, and the transition to its latest owner—Songtradr, which most independent music fans had never even heard of—had been bumpy, to say the least. Aside from only offering jobs to half of the existing staff, the new bosses also immediately faced accusations of union busting, as the layoffs appeared to disproportionally hit members of Bandcamp United, an employee union that had officially formed in 2023, and at the time of the sale was in the middle of negotiating with the company’s previous owner, Epic Games.
Echoing a sentiment that dominated the music discourse at the time, Philip Sherburne penned a piece for Pitchfork entitled, “Is Bandcamp As We Know It Over?” In a Guardian opinion column, Tom Hawking said, “I shudder at its corporate takeover,” while a WIRED article described the platform as being “in limbo.” Although Songtradr made an effort to calm people’s fears, proclaiming that things like Bandcamp Friday and the platform’s editorial arm, Bandcamp Daily, would continue into the future, those assurances were undermined by 404 Media reporting which revealed that J. Edward Keyes—the company’s editorial director, who had survived the mass layoffs—had not only opposed the formation of the Bandcamp United union, but had publicly accused his fellow employees of “cosplaying as Amazon warehouse workers.”
The vibes, simply put, were bad, and considering the central role that Bandcamp already held within the independent music ecosystem, many of the platform’s biggest users and supporters began to openly imagine doomsday scenarios. Here at First Floor, I wrote a piece called “Bandcamp Anxiety,” in which I wrote the following:
… hope for the best, but it’s probably not a bad idea to begin preparing for the worst. If you’ve bought music on Bandcamp, download those files and store them somewhere secure. If you’re an artist, start thinking about how you might preserve the audience you’ve built on Bandcamp (e.g. start a newsletter, a Discord channel or something else) and how you might continue to sell music and merch if the entire platform someday goes kaput.
Was that level of freakout warranted? Considering that Bandcamp is not only still up and running, but in many ways is now even more entrenched as the default outlet for online sales of independent music, it’s fair to say that worries about the platform’s imminent demise were overblown. Yet the conversation around Bandcamp has undeniably shifted during the past two years; unbridled enthusiasm for the company is now significantly harder to come by, and several upstart competitors have emerged, some of which openly market themselves as Bandcamp alternatives. It’s unclear whether any of these competitors will eventually gain significant traction, but they all face a significant roadblock: despite all the layoffs, all the bad press and a new corporate owner that’s ultimately said very little about its intentions for the platform, Bandcamp has proven to be a lot more resilient than people anticipated.