Bandcamp just got sold. Again.

 ANOTHER IMPORTANT MESSAGE for my followers here.

Please read to the end.

Bandcamp has been the sole distributor of my downloads for some time now. They got picked up by Epic about a year ago, and I’ve just learned that they are being sold to Songtrader, an online music licensing and distro company.

How does this change things for me and my music?

Nothing is clear yet. The sale is in process and some details have yet to become clear. But here are some differences.

Bandcamp is all about indie artists and distributing their music.

Artist who use Bandcamp get a higher percentage of download sale proceeds than on any other music platform. Membership is free. Using the platform is so simply that even I, a digital non-native, can figure it out. My time using Bandcamp has been fuss-free, and for someone like me that’s saying a lot.

Songtrader charges an annual fee for artists to use the platform.

They also charge a monthly fee for anyone wanting to download music from the platform (I.e., you need to be a subscriber). So far, I’m not thrilled about that. 

Nothing has been done about Bandcamp artists and their status as yet. Right now, the focus is on streamlining the workplace. To that end, Songtrader has just laid off about half of Bandcamp’s paid workers — with a decided focus on letting go of recently-unionized workers. That tells me that Soundtrader isn’t stoked about unions and would rather not deal with them.

The speed with which this has happened is worrisome.

And I don’t know what I will do if Bandcamp artists are summarily folded into the Songtrader platform.

So I want to ask YOU:

How many of you:

— Buy my music online?

— would be willing to do so if you had to pay to access the platform?

— Buy my music in physical CD form?

— would be willing to pay additionally for postag and handling (as much as $5-10 more) to get future CDs?

I’ve remained devoted to direct access as much as possible. I want to keep my music easy to obtain and enjoy, with as few middlemen as possible. 

I HATE middlemen in the age of “content,” because they make money from what someone else has created, and because music has been reduced to mere “content” in this model. I firmly believe that when the recorded product is finished, the artist should get the proceeds for what they’ve made. 

I’ve been willing to work with Bandcamp because they take the smallest cut for every download. But if Bandcamp goes away — and it sure looks like it might — then I will have few other viable options that don’t reduce my artistic work to a few bytes of online content. That’s a totally different vision of the artist’s creation than I like. And it reduces the amount of paid performance opportunities that will be available going forward, because why pay to hire a musician live when you can just punch up the recording for your listening pleasure?

THIS is what the preponderance of online streaming platforms has done to musicians trying to earn a living by their hard-won craft.

This all comes at a time when I am considering how much I will tour in the future, and how many more albums I might have still in me. So I am following these events closely, and I think you should too.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Thanks for supporting Jewish Music Made by Hand.