Bandcamp

Based on Wikipedia: Bandcamp

The Last Record Store on the Internet

In an era when streaming platforms pay musicians fractions of a penny per play, one website has become an unlikely sanctuary for artists who actually want to get paid. Bandcamp operates on a radical premise: musicians should set their own prices, keep most of the money, and own their relationship with fans. It's a throwback to when buying music meant something—except it exists entirely online.

The platform has become ground zero for a quiet rebellion against the streaming economy. When you buy an album on Bandcamp, the artist might receive ten dollars instead of the ten-thousandth of a cent they'd earn from a stream. That's not a typo. The math is genuinely that stark.

The Founding Story

Bandcamp emerged in 2008, the same year Spotify launched in Sweden. While Spotify would go on to convince the world that music should cost ten dollars a month for unlimited access to everything, Bandcamp bet on the opposite model: that some fans would pay real money for music they actually wanted to own.

The company was founded by Ethan Diamond and three programmers—Shawn Grunberger, Joe Holt, and Neal Tucker. Diamond had previously co-founded Oddpost, an early webmail company that Yahoo acquired in 2004 and used as the foundation for a Yahoo Mail redesign. His background was in building tools people actually enjoyed using, not in squeezing maximum revenue from content creators.

For over a decade, Bandcamp stayed small and independent. They didn't chase venture capital unicorn dreams. They built a sustainable business by taking a modest cut—fifteen percent of sales, dropping to ten percent after an artist crosses five thousand dollars—and letting musicians handle everything else however they wanted.

How It Actually Works

The mechanics are refreshingly simple. Artists upload their music and set their own prices. Want to charge a dollar for your album? Fine. Twenty dollars? Also fine. Want to let fans pay whatever they want, including nothing? That works too. Many artists set a minimum price but let fans pay more, and a surprising number actually do.

When someone buys music, they get actual files they can download and keep forever. Not a license that evaporates when a company goes bankrupt. Not access that disappears when you cancel a subscription. Real files in whatever format you prefer.

The available formats span the entire spectrum of audio quality. On the lossy side—meaning some audio information gets discarded to make smaller files—there's MP3 at high quality settings, AAC (the format Apple devices prefer), and Ogg Vorbis (an open-source alternative). For audiophiles who want perfect copies, there's FLAC and ALAC (lossless compressed formats that preserve every bit of audio data while still being smaller than raw recordings), plus WAV and AIFF for the purists who want completely uncompressed files identical to what came out of the recording studio.

This might sound like technical minutiae, but it matters. Spotify streams at lower quality than even the lossy options Bandcamp offers. For people who care about sound quality—and plenty do—Bandcamp provides access to the actual music, not a compressed approximation of it.

Physical Objects in a Digital World

Here's something that surprised even the people running Bandcamp: by 2020, half of their revenue came from physical products. Not downloads. Physical objects.

Vinyl records, specifically. The format that was supposed to die in the 1990s has experienced one of the most improbable comebacks in consumer product history. People don't just want to own music—they want to hold it in their hands, look at the artwork, flip it over to play the B-side. Bandcamp became one of the best places on the internet to find vinyl, especially from independent artists.

In 2020, fans bought about two million vinyl records through the platform. That doubled what they'd bought the previous year. The growth was so strong that Bandcamp started offering pressing services directly to artists. Instead of musicians having to fund vinyl production upfront—often costing thousands of dollars with no guarantee anyone would buy them—fans could preorder pressings, essentially crowdfunding the production run before a single record got manufactured.

Bandcamp Fridays: A Pandemic Phenomenon

When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down live music in 2020, musicians lost their primary income source overnight. Touring and merchandise sales at shows typically account for the bulk of what artists actually take home. Suddenly, that was gone.

Bandcamp responded by creating "Bandcamp Fridays"—designated days when the company waived its revenue share entirely. Every dollar spent went directly to artists, minus payment processing fees that Bandcamp couldn't control.

The first Bandcamp Friday happened in March 2020. Fans spent over four million dollars in a single day.

This wasn't charity. It was concentrated spending. Fans who would have bought music anyway chose to do it on Fridays when their money went further. The initiative raised more than forty million dollars for artists in 2020 alone and continued into 2021 with additional dates.

The psychology here is fascinating. People weren't spending more money overall—they were being strategic about when they spent it. Bandcamp essentially created a recurring event that focused attention and purchasing power into specific moments. Black Friday for independent music, but without the trampling.

When Musicians Actually Show Up

Bandcamp's trajectory shifted noticeably in July 2010 when Amanda Palmer left her record label and started selling directly through the platform, promoting releases via Twitter. Palmer had famously contentious relationships with traditional music industry structures. For her, Bandcamp represented freedom from gatekeepers who didn't understand her art or her audience.

She wasn't alone. The site became a destination for artists who wanted to route around the industry entirely. Will Toledo released an early version of "Twin Fantasy" through Bandcamp in 2011—an album that would later get a major re-recording and widespread critical acclaim. The platform allowed him to share work directly with fans before anyone in the traditional music business paid attention.

Video game composers found a natural home there too. The creators of Terraria and Minecraft published their soundtracks on the platform, reaching audiences who wanted to own the music they'd heard while playing for hundreds of hours. Gaming soundtracks have become a genuine art form, and Bandcamp became the place to actually buy them.

The Labels Arrive

For years, Bandcamp was primarily individual artists selling directly to fans. That changed in December 2014 when the company launched Bandcamp for Labels, and suddenly some of independent music's most respected institutions showed up.

Sub Pop joined—the Seattle label that signed Nirvana and basically invented grunge as a marketable concept. Fat Wreck Chords brought their punk catalog. Relapse Records added their metal releases. Epitaph Records, home to decades of punk and alternative music, established their presence.

In November 2019, Peter Gabriel added his complete solo catalog. Björk followed in June 2020. That December, the British electronic label Warp made their entire roster available—suddenly you could buy Aphex Twin albums on Bandcamp, or Hudson Mohawke, or Kelela. In October 2021, Radiohead published their discography.

This represented a significant shift. Major independent artists and labels were treating Bandcamp not as a supplement to their distribution strategy but as a primary storefront. They saw what the platform offered: direct relationships with fans, higher margins than streaming, and actual ownership of the customer relationship.

The Ambient Underground

While mainstream attention focused on rock bands and singer-songwriters, Bandcamp quietly became the global headquarters for ambient music. The genre—characterized by atmospheric textures, slow evolution, and sound design that rewards patient listening—had always existed at the margins of commercial music.

Pioneers like Michael Stearns, Robert Rich, and Steve Roach built devoted followings on the platform. But more importantly, thousands of lesser-known artists found audiences for music that would never get playlisted on Spotify or played on traditional radio. Ambient music doesn't fit the streaming model well. Songs might run thirty minutes or longer. They don't have hooks or choruses. They're meant for deep listening, not background noise.

On Bandcamp, none of that mattered. Artists could upload hour-long drone pieces, and fans who wanted exactly that could find and buy them. The platform's browsing and tagging system helped listeners discover new artists in ways the algorithmic recommendations of streaming services never could.

Bandcamp Daily: Music Journalism in the Platform Era

In 2016, Bandcamp launched an in-house publication called Bandcamp Daily. This wasn't marketing disguised as editorial—it was actual music journalism, run out of New York with writers drawn from outlets like Pitchfork, BuzzFeed, The New York Times, Wired, Vice, and NPR Music.

The managing editor was JJ Skolnik, who had spent years writing punk zines before moving into professional music criticism. Under their leadership, Bandcamp Daily developed a distinct voice: enthusiastic about discovering unknown artists, serious about music criticism, and deeply embedded in the communities the platform served.

By February 2018, readership had grown eighty-four percent compared to the previous year. The publication had become a genuine discovery engine, pointing fans toward artists they'd never have found otherwise.

This matters because music journalism has been in crisis for decades. Magazines folded. Newspapers cut their music coverage. Writers who once made decent livings found themselves scraping by on freelance rates that hadn't increased since the 1990s. Bandcamp Daily represented an alternative model: platform-funded journalism that benefited from—but wasn't corrupted by—its connection to the sales ecosystem.

Politics and Principles

Bandcamp has periodically used its platform for explicit political statements, which is relatively unusual for a technology company.

On June 19, 2020—Juneteenth, during the protests following George Floyd's murder—the company announced that for twenty-four hours, they would donate one hundred percent of their profits to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Not their revenue share. Their profits. The distinction matters: they still processed transactions, still paid their expenses, but everything left over went to civil rights work.

In August 2017, the staff of Bandcamp Daily donated all of that day's sales proceeds to the Transgender Law Center. Again, this was explicit political action—supporting transgender rights at a moment when those rights were under significant attack.

Most recently, in response to the Southern California wildfires of January 2025, Bandcamp announced they would donate all proceeds from February 7 to MusiCares, a nonprofit that supports music industry workers in times of need.

These decisions reveal something about the company's self-conception. They weren't just building a neutral marketplace—they were participating in cultural and political movements their users cared about.

The Epic Games Acquisition

In March 2022, everything changed. Epic Games—the company behind Fortnite and the Unreal game engine—acquired Bandcamp. The companies insisted the service would continue operating as a stand-alone marketplace.

Epic had a history of making acquisitions and integrating them thoughtfully. They'd bought Houseparty, the social video app, and various game studios. Their interest in Bandcamp made a certain kind of sense: Epic was building an ecosystem of creative tools and platforms, and Bandcamp fit the narrative of empowering individual creators against dominant platforms.

But the fit was always awkward. Epic made most of its money from video games and their take on app stores. Music distribution was adjacent to their core business at best. The acquisition felt more like a statement of values than a strategic necessity.

Unionization

In March 2023, Bandcamp's employees voted to form a union through the Office and Professional Employees International Union, often abbreviated as OPEIU. This was part of a broader wave of tech worker organizing that included successful unions at companies like The New York Times's tech division and various game studios.

The timing proved significant. Unionization gave workers collective bargaining power at the exact moment that power would be tested.

The Sale to Songtradr

On September 28, 2023, Epic Games announced it was laying off eight hundred seventy people—roughly sixteen percent of its workforce. As part of this restructuring, they sold Bandcamp to Songtradr, a music licensing company most people had never heard of.

The sale was handled poorly. According to reports, roughly half of Bandcamp's employees were not offered positions with the new owner. Staff reported access issues during the transition period—the basic mechanics of running the service became complicated when half the people who knew how to run it were suddenly gone.

In an internal email, Songtradr's CEO Paul Wiltshire wrote that Bandcamp's financial state had "not been healthy" due to increased operating costs over steady revenues. This was a striking claim about a service that had been continuously profitable. The implication was that Epic had expanded Bandcamp's operations—presumably hiring staff after the acquisition—without growing revenue to match.

As of December 2023, Songtradr had not formally recognized the Bandcamp union. The workers who had organized for collective bargaining found themselves dealing with a new owner who hadn't agreed to honor that organizing.

What Gets Lost

JJ Skolnik, the managing editor of Bandcamp Daily, was made redundant in October 2023. With them went institutional knowledge about what the publication was for and how to do it well. Music journalism lost another veteran to the endless industry contractions.

Users and artists expressed anxiety about the platform's future. The concern wasn't paranoid—it was based on observable patterns. When private equity or unrelated corporate parents acquire beloved services, those services often deteriorate. Costs get cut. Features get removed or monetized. The thing that made the platform special gets optimized away in pursuit of short-term financial returns.

Bandcamp had represented something rare: a profitable business that treated artists fairly and built a genuine community. The sale to Songtradr threatened all of that, not because Songtradr was necessarily bad, but because the circumstances of the sale—the layoffs, the lack of union recognition, the talk of unhealthy finances—suggested priorities that might not align with what made Bandcamp worth caring about.

The Broader Lesson

Bandcamp's story illustrates something important about how the internet economy actually works. Building something good isn't enough. Staying independent isn't enough. Being profitable isn't enough. If you become valuable enough, someone will eventually buy you, and what happens next is largely out of your control.

For fifteen years, Bandcamp proved that another model was possible. Musicians could sell their work directly to fans. A platform could take a modest cut and still build a sustainable business. Music journalism could exist without being corrupted by advertising or access. Physical objects could thrive in a digital marketplace.

Whether that model survives under new ownership remains to be seen. The platform still exists. Artists still use it. Fans still buy music there. But the idealism that animated Bandcamp from its founding—the belief that the relationship between artists and fans could be direct, fair, and mutually beneficial—that idealism belongs to a company that no longer exists in its original form.

What remains is a service, a marketplace, a collection of features and files. Whether it's still a movement depends on who's running it and why. The musicians and fans who made Bandcamp special are still there. The question is whether the new owners understand what they bought.