Bandcamp, Epic & Me
Posted on March 2nd, 2022
Filed under: Music News — Karl Olson @ 10:44 am
Okay. So in case you missed it, Bandcamp was just bought by Epic Games. Long story short, it doesn’t look like anything is going to change here any time soon at Bandcamp according to the hagiographic press release/blog post they made about it.
As such, I’m going to let things ride for now. Like many of you, I have major concerns about the cut that Bandcamp takes going up the chain to Epic & its major investor Tencent, but honestly, I was never happy to deal with PayPal all the time either. That’s always kind of been a trade off with e-commerce, though the history of Bandcamp’s new corporate parents rightfully gives many people pause. If you’re among them, I understand and support you 100% if you no longer want to support artists via Bandcamp. However, so long as Bandcamp isn’t making artists and listeners do anything that seems any different to the current deal here, it is probably still the best place to support me and any other musician who offers music through that platform, for better or worse.
Conversely, should being on Bandcamp ever force me or y’all into a deal that’s harmful, in whatever form that could take, then I will fold up shop here, or should that some how be an even greater risk, I will heavily encourage everyone to shop elsewhere by any means available to me. I’ll redirect the ultraklystron.com domain too, and I’ll post another update like this with my next steps if things go sideways due to Epic/Bandcamp.
Still, I want to thank you all again for supporting me via Bandcamp since 2009. I hope we all can continue that, and if not, I’m right there with you all. I’ve been through this often over the past 20 years ago with mp3 dot com, amp3 dot com, ampcast, myspace, etc. If this is another loss, at least I can tell you with some certainty that someone, somewhere will eventually find that to be an opportunity to do something good for us all again.
Unrelated: is anyone familiar with selling albums on itch.io? Contact me.
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