It’s hard to overstate how genuinely beloved the music retailer Bandcamp was by music fans before this week. The site was a place where music was valued for its ambition and artistic merit, not its commercial potential; a place where artists could sell directly to fans with minimal overhead (and, on Fridays since the beginning of the pandemic, none at all); and home to a thriving editorial department, whose contributors wrote from a place of passion and knowledge about the music they loved. The site represented some measure of hope for musicians looking to realize any sort of value for their work, given the pittance that streaming sites pay: setting aside payment processing fees, every dollar realized from a Bandcamp Friday sale represents 31,250 average Spotify streams.
All that went up in flames with the news that Bandcamp’s parent company – Epic Games, which only acquired Bandcamp in March last year, a sale that itself raised concerns for the site’s future – was selling the company. The purchaser was something called Songtradr, which issued a statement announcing that “50% of Bandcamp employees have accepted offers to join Songtradr”. (As Bandcamp editorial contributor Marc Masters noted drily, this is “quite a way to say you laid off half your staff”.)
Songtradr framed the layoffs as a necessary evil: “Based on its current financials, Bandcamp requires some adjustments to ensure a sustainable and healthy company.” Whatever the state of Bandcamp’s finances, it’s clear that Songtradr has some adventurous views on the meaning of “sustainable” and “healthy”, because it’s hard to see how such bloody cuts can allow Bandcamp to survive in anything resembling the form so many people knew and loved.
The key assets that distinguished Bandcamp from its competitors were the very things sacrificed this week: its commitment to ideals beyond the prioritization of profit, the editorial staff who functioned as human discovery engines in an age of algorithms, and, above all, the respect Bandcamp commanded from music lovers and musicians alike.
It’s no accident that none of those assets have easily quantifiable dollar values. The great Mark Fisher argued in Capitalist Realism that “neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense”. For “ethical”, we can increasingly substitute “cultural”: artists’ real incomes have been declining for decades, valued by the market at a fraction of the worth it places on swashbuckling CEOs or venture capitalists.
It’s not surprising, then, that it seems the executive class neither understands nor cares about culture. In the worst cases, it celebrates its ignorance as a virtue, and more generally, it sees “content” as just another line item: look at CEO David Zaslav canceling a bunch of already-completed TV shows and films in the wake of the Warner Bros/Discovery merger, purely so their costs could be written off.
This is why when culture-focused sites like Bandcamp become corporate playthings, the results are almost always bad: the majority of people rich enough to buy these companies have no concept of value beyond the purely financial, and thus fundamentally misunderstand what they’re buying. Look at the shell of what was once called Gawker and is now G/O Media, where the current owners have pretty much been at war with staff since day one and where, at last count, seven of the company’s 10 editors-in-chief have resigned in 2023.
One reaction against the increasingly hyper-capitalist media hellscape has been the increasing unionization of media workplaces, which has gone down predictably badly with owners. And, sure enough, it also appears that the Bandcamp sale provided the opportunity for some good old-fashioned union-busting: as SFGate reported last week, Bandcamp’s employee union has been gutted by the layoffs: “Every member of the union’s eight-person bargaining team was laid off … and in sum, 40 of the bargaining unit’s 67 people lost their jobs.”
It’s hard not to join the dots between the unionization and the layoffs – an impression heightened by the vehemently anti-union heel turn performed by editorial director J Edward Keyes, who remains at Bandcamp. (Full disclosure: I’ve written occasionally for Bandcamp, but not in years, and never directly for Keyes. I met him once and found him perfectly pleasant.)
Of course, no company can lose money consistently and continue to exist. (Unless it’s a tech company, obviously.) But neither should every executive decision be made in such a way as to squeeze every last drop of blood from a company, especially if that squeezing is done at the long-term expense of the welfare of the company itself.
The language of capitalism might have softened from the sort of slash-and-burn machismo that characterized the 80s and 90s, when CEOs like Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap and Jack Welch were celebrated for hacking away every last bit of “fat” until only bone was left, at which point they’d collect massive bonuses and move on to inflicting misery on another company. But fundamentally, capital remains inherently unable to recognize any value beyond the dollar sign – a metric that is in turn unable to reflect the value of concepts like diversity in music and media.
Years ago, the Quietus ran an excellent essay arguing that the increasing impossibility of making a living from art would ensure a future wherein being any sort of artist would be the preserve of the independently wealthy dilettante. That future feels closer than ever, which explains why, to anyone who feels that a healthy culture is the sign of a healthy society, the thought of a site as unique and valuable as Bandcamp becoming just another strip-mined corporate wreck has inspired genuine grief.
Tom Hawking is a Melbourne-born writer based in New York City whose work examines the intersections of politics and culture
This article was amended on 27 October 2023 to clarify that Epic Games acquired Bandcamp in March 2022, not May of this year
