Hey friends,
Earlier this month, the online record store Bandcamp rocked the music internet when it announced that the heretofore-independent company had been sold to Epic Games, the North Carolina-based gaming monolith best known as the creator of Fortnite.
Two years into a pandemic that has cratered musicians’ ability to earn a living, the announcement felt like a stunning about-face from a company that people in the biz had started calling the “anti-Spotify”: the rare music platform that allowed artists to monetize their work through direct sales, as opposed to the penurious per-stream payouts that have become the industry norm. (See: our recent episode on Neil Young vs. Spotify).
Through its popular Bandcamp Fridays initiative, where the company forfeited its (already pretty artist-friendly) 10 to 15 percent cut in order to drive more funds to musicians who were stuck at home, Bandcamp established a reputation as a lifeline in an otherwise inhospitable creator economy. And though …
