![]() Union members argue that to stay artist-first Bandcamp needs to retain its workers, with their repository of knowledge and their commitment to the site’s mission. ![]() Musicians including psych rocker Damon Krukowski and power pop songster Ted Leo have taken to X to blast out their support. The union has launched a petition for fans and artists to back those demands. WIRED protects the confidentiality of its sources.īandcamp’s union is demanding that Songtradr offer jobs to all current employees, recognize the union, and continue the negotiations begun with Epic. Using a nonwork device, contact this article's author at or securely via Signal on +1 41. “So of course we're trying to remind him that employees have a lot to do with what Bandcamp is about,” says Pope, the union organizer.Īre you a current or former employee of Epic Games or Bandcamp? We'd like to hear from you. Wiltshire’s quoted remarks made no mention of Bandcamp’s workers, though. In an interview with Billboard this week, Songtradr CEO Paul Wiltshire said Bandcamp was “a great platform as it is” and that “there’s not a need to change it,” adding that the company planned to add new music licensing opportunities for artists. Nahmiache provided a statement saying “Epic is committed to running the event as planned” while the sale is finalized, and that Songtradr plans to continue Bandcamp Fridays, as well as maintain the platform’s artist-first revenue sharing and its music guide Bandcamp Daily. “We're all here because we love artists and we want to create a space for them to succeed.” “None of us are here randomly just because we need a job,” says Barringer. Traffic typically spikes on those days, hauling in extra money for artists, but some staff are concerned that their inability to perform basic tasks could derail the event, harming fans and artists. Today is Bandcamp Friday, a monthly event that started during the early days of the Covid pandemic in which the platform waives its usual cut of transactions so that nearly 100 percent of revenue goes to artists. It’s not great timing for Bandcamp to be in stasis. ![]() He found a minor bug this week but couldn’t access the program he needed to fix it. "It's not a platform or a portal, it is a painstakingly hand-crafted community.Barringer, the Bandcamp software engineer, says that a handful of engineers are still performing the critical tasks needed to keep the site running, but otherwise they can’t commit new code. ![]() "Bandcamp isn't Bandcamp without the people who build and maintain the website-we are the people who made this website the platform it is for artists," said support specialist Ed Blair in a Bandcamp United union statement about Songtradr's acquisiton. I've got no objection to giving artists a framework for licensing their music, but I simply don't trust the aspiring emperors of the metaverse to be good stewards of commentary on interesting field recordings. Songtradr says that Bandcamp's current offering won't change, but Bandcamp's current offering includes music recommendations and artist profiles, and half of its editorial team was just laid off-clearly opinions differ on what makes the site what it is. It's not a platform or a portal, it is a painstakingly hand-crafted community. That could mean more money for artists, and would be a valuable addition to Epic's suite of resources for developers, which is why the Unreal Engine maker still plans to work with the site through Songtradr. It's an anomaly: a tech startup that seems to actually be about what it says it's about-giving artists a way to sell music to people who like music-rather than the first phase in, say, a scheme to control all of the world's audio files.Įpic and Songtradr, meanwhile, see in Bandcamp a giant music collection that they can make licensable. Please don't ruin Bandcampīandcamp lives on, wounded by the sort of hubris that would've prevented it ever being good in the first place. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said last month that he hoped Epic could transition Fortnite into "a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators" without layoffs, but now sees that his plan was "unrealistic."įacebook did roughly the same thing: saw an opportunity to expand during the pandemic, said "metaverse" a lot, and then announced that it had made a big mistake and laid off 13% of the company. Alas, what looked like reckless spending-hundreds of millions on exclusives, a lawsuit against Apple, the purchase of a literal mall-has turned out to be just that.
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