In late September, as part of Fortnite creator Epic Games’ decision to lay off nearly 900 employees, the company parted ways with beloved music distribution platform Bandcamp, a peculiar portion of its portfolio that it obtained in early 2022. Now, downsized by half and under a new roof, Bandcamp finds itself on shaky footing.
Bandcamp was sold to Songtradr, a B2B (business-to-business) music licensing company. Less than 50 percent of Bandcamp employees were given job offers by Songtradr, while Epic laid off the remaining employees – including the recently formed Bandcamp union’s entire eight-person bargaining committee. Of the 67 Bandcamp employees laid off, 40 were in the union bargaining unit, according to the union.
"Obviously Epic knew who was on the bargaining committee; we had been bargaining with them,” Ed Blair, a former Bandcamp support specialist and contributor to the platform’s Bandcamp Daily publication, told Aftermath. “Songtradr has publicly said it was only given certain information about employees, and [who got offers and who didn't] was based on that information. It just doesn't add up to me. There are people on the bargaining committee who were in incredibly good standing and had been part of the Bandcamp community for a very long time. There were new people who had quickly become an integral part of the company. It is very hard for me to understand the math, unless the math was union busting."
Songtradr told worker-owned news outlet 404 that it had no access to information on who and who wasn’t in the union. An Epic spokesperson told Aftermath that “Epic only laid off the individuals who did not receive offers from Songtradr. We were in no way targeting committee members or any specific groups.”
Bandcamp United has filed a complaint against Songtradr with the National Labor Relations Board, claiming discrimination on the basis of labor activity following layoffs that workers feel disproportionately targeted the union.
Now Bandcamp United has scored a victory, with multiple bargaining sessions – the most recent of which lasted 12 hours – leading to a tentative agreement with Epic over severance. Previously, laid off Bandcamp workers would have received six months of severance, but only if they weren’t given a job offer from Songtradr. Those who did receive an offer basically had the option to either take the job or navigate the choppy waters of unemployment sans severance. The union has not yet disclosed the details of the agreement.
New Bandcamp owner Songtradr has publicly committed to maintaining a “business as usual” status quo at Bandcamp, but the question remains of what happens to Bandcamp United after severance bargaining ends. Songtradr has yet to recognize Bandcamp’s union – it did not reply to Aftermath’s request for comment on the matter – and even union members aren’t certain what the future holds on that front.
"As far as Songtradr is concerned, the union doesn't exist,” Will Floyd, a former software engineer at Bandcamp, told Aftermath. “They didn't take the employees, they didn't take the union. As far as OPEIU, the larger union we are under, is concerned, they would very much like to see Bandcamp United continue under Songtradr. But who knows how that'll shake out? We keep track of who is still with Songtradr and who's supportive of the union – to try to get to the point where there's enough support at Songtradr to rekindle the union. ... But Bandcamp was still a pretty independent entity under Epic, and we were able to unionize solely at Bandcamp. I don't know how Bandcamp will be structured under Songtradr and whether it would require a union of Songtradr or whether it could still just be a union of Bandcamp."
Second verse, same as the first
Once fully independent, Bandcamp is now on its second round of ownership-related upheaval in as many years. Former employees say that under Epic, however, Bandcamp operated more or less like it did pre-acquisition. Sure, Epic integrated Bandcamp into Fortnite by way of an in-game radio station that played independent artists curated by Bandcamp employees, but otherwise the company was largely siloed from day-to-day Epic operations.
“I've learned that's very weird for an Epic acquisition,” said Blade Barringer, a former senior software engineer at Bandcamp, who added that just a “handful” of Epic staffers were involved with Bandcamp on a daily basis. “A lot of Epic's other acquisitions were immediately folded into the Epic Slack and all the Epic infrastructure."
"The big things within Bandcamp that changed and got prioritized were just around legal compliance, taxes, and things like that – kind of boring stuff," said Floyd.
Former Bandcamp employees say Epic seemed intent on taking Bandcamp to a new level – giving it the resources and infrastructure to begin working not just with the independent artists and communities that had turned it into a music industry darling, but also bigger names. Barringer said his team ended up doing a lot of compliance work while also connecting with performing rights organizations to find ways to strike deals with artists whose contracts with licensing groups previously wouldn’t let them work with Bandcamp.
"We were working on ways to allow that to happen – to bring in these bigger artists that otherwise weren't allowed to sell on Bandcamp,” Barringer told Aftermath. “I'm sure that project is now not dead in the water [exactly], but I would guess it's being pushed back a ways in the scramble to keep the lights on."
An Epic spokesperson concurred with this overall assessment of Bandcamp’s place within the company, saying that Epic “invested in the Bandcamp infrastructure to help it scale; as part of Epic Bandcamp continued operating as a standalone marketplace and music community, which we committed to when we acquired them.”
Epic, in its push to turn Fortnite into a frontrunner in the race to build the metaverse, also stood to benefit from this arrangement.
"Epic was really looking forward to learning from Bandcamp about its creator economy as Epic is building its metaverse stuff that's theoretically being powered by people making stuff within it," said Barringer.
But perhaps the biggest boon for Epic in all of this had little to do with Bandcamp’s future prospects. Instead, Epic seemed very interested in the company’s history with Apple and Google, both of which Epic was suing on antitrust grounds following its unsuccessful attempt to circumvent app store fees by letting players buy V-Bucks, an in-game currency, directly in Fortnite.
"If you take it at face value from what leadership said, we were aligned in our desire to support the artist, right? Bandcamp takes a significantly smaller cut than other marketplaces,” said Floyd. “Internally it was pretty clear that part of what Epic wanted out of us was another thing for their lawsuits against Google and Apple – another example of unfair market practices. Bandcamp in the past had a tenuous relationship with those marketplaces where we don't want to or, at times, have not sold music through the apps on those stores because we would have to take a bigger cut, which would mean taking more away from the artists. So we would direct people to the website if they actually wanted to purchase anything and just use the apps to listen [to music]."
Epic ultimately, in most ways that matter, lost its suit against Apple in 2021. An appeals court affirmed that decision in April of this year, which led Epic to request a Supreme Court review of the case in September. The case against Google is ongoing, with Epic managing to score a temporary injunction in 2022 that allowed Bandcamp to continue operating on Google’s store without being forced to adopt the company’s payment system. Years after the suit was first filed, Epic v. Google court proceedings began earlier this month. Bandcamp CEO Ethan Diamond and COO Joshua Kim are set to give testimonies.
Former Bandcamp employees speculate that what happened – and what’s happening – in court might’ve been one of several nails in the coffin.
"If you’re Epic and you win that fight, then you're suddenly making bank on iOS and Android,” said Barringer. “If you don't win it, though – like they lost their Apple lawsuit – and that's the reason you bought Bandcamp, then you spent a lot of money on Bandcamp, and you lost your lawsuits. You're paying legal fees [on top of that]. You've lost a lot of money. Then it makes sense to eject the thing that didn't actually help you the way you thought it might.”
In a statement to Aftermath, an Epic spokesperson said, “Epic and Bandcamp were mission-aligned on providing artist and creator friendly terms and fighting Apple’s and Google’s anticompetitive practices that hurt consumers and developers. However, Epic’s lawsuits were not the reason for the purchase of Bandcamp.”
Bandcamp divided
Now down half its staff and in a period of transition to a company expected to intertwine operations more directly than Epic, Bandcamp is on wobbly legs. Blair explained that Bandcamp isn’t just unique in terms of its artist-first focus, but also its structure. Without key employees, daily operations stand to suffer.
"Most of the support team is gone now,” said Blair. “Our support team is specialized in a way that no other support team I've been on has been. We handled everything from copyright issues to tax issues to writing all of the help docs, writing all the internal help docs. A lot of us were heavily involved in accessibility efforts. We were involved in trust and safety decisions. We did a lot of stuff, and it takes about 6-8 months to train one of us. And now [they] don't have any of those people."
According to Barringer, Bandcamp is “basically pulling in engineers to do the support team’s work while they figure out what they're going to do [with that] long term.”
“You cut the lowest-paid people, and you’re giving the higher-paid people the lower-paid people’s work,” he said. “They’re not able to do the work that they were hired for. It’s just kind of a mess.”
"It's not just us [who got let go],” added Blair. “It's people who are working on payments, people who are working on other engineering things, a portion of the editorial staff, a portion of the staff involved in running our vinyl crowdfunding program. There are all these people with years of experience and a tremendous amount of investment in the platform."
Laid-off Bandcamp workers are heartbroken because, to them, this was more than just a job.
"Workers at Bandcamp truly believed in the artist-first mission, and it was what we wanted to keep alive,” said Floyd. “There were so many people at Bandcamp who were musicians themselves, or knew musicians or operated labels or made vinyl for people. I worry that this multinational corporation swooping in to buy Bandcamp and lay off half the staff maybe doesn't fully understand what Bandcamp was. … I've said it before and I'll say it again: I would have worked at Bandcamp until I retired, happily, if it stayed the way it was while I was there."
"I'm just heartbroken about it. I really felt like I'd found the place I was going to retire," said Barringer. Barringer explained that in the tech world, workers tend to move around a lot, but at Bandcamp it was common for engineers to stick around for years, even a decade or more. "It wasn't perfect, but no place is. It felt like the mission for artists was strong enough, and the voice I could have to improve things at Bandcamp was good enough that it was a place I wanted to be – and I wanted to be long term. I'm just mad that I didn't get longer to be part of that."
Numerous artists have made it clear that the feeling is mutual.
"God this is frustrating,” indie band The Mountain Goats wrote on Twitter following the layoffs. “Bandcamp was an unalloyed good in the music business. Its editorial staff built on decades of aboveground and independent music press knowledge to make something awesome in the music world. Instead, Songtradr. May they sleep badly and ache in their bones."
“While selling music on Bandcamp is still better than watching penny fractions trickle in from Spotify and [YouTube], claiming that firing half your staff, many of whom have been longstanding, beloved members of our community, is just ‘business as usual’ is unbelievably idiotic and cruel,” wrote Deerhoof, another popular indie band.
Former employees agree, though, that some way or another, Bandcamp – and its artist-first mission – will carry on.
"The people who are still at Bandcamp also all believe in the mission of Bandcamp,” said Barringer. “They have in the past made noise when something wasn't right. Part of the point of forming a union is to be able to be more effective at making noise when something seems to be happening that doesn't feel artist-first. I have every confidence that the people who are still there are going to do what's right and speak up. If Songtradr reveals themselves to be a mustache twirling villain, if they try to do something that the workers do not feel fits in with the artist-first mission statement, they are going to fight back on that. It's not just going to happen because Songtradr wants it to happen. No, they gotta get buy-in from the workers."
