The music site Bandcamp is beloved and unique. I shudder at its corporate takeover | Tom Hawking

The prospect of something so valuable becoming just another strip-mined corporate wreck inspires genuine grief

It's hard to overstate how genuinely beloved the music retailer Bandcamp was by music fans before this week. The site was a place where music was valued for its ambition and artistic merit, not its commercial potential; a place where artists could sell directly to fans with minimal overhead (and, on Fridays since the beginning of the pandemic, none at all); and home to a thriving editorial department, whose contributors wrote from a place of passion and knowledge about the music they loved. The site represented some measure of hope for musicians looking to realize any sort of value for their work, given the pittance that streaming sites pay: setting aside payment processing fees, every dollar realized from a Bandcamp Friday sale represents 31,250 average Spotify streams.

All that went up in flames with the news that Bandcamp's parent company - Epic Games, which only acquired Bandcamp in May this year, a sale that itself raised concerns for the site's future - was selling the company. The purchaser was something called Songtradr, which issued a statement announcing that 50% of Bandcamp employees have accepted offers to join Songtradr". (As Bandcamp editorial contributor Marc Masters noted drily, this is quite a way to say you laid off half your staff".)

Tom Hawking is a Melbourne-born writer based in New York City whose work examines the intersections of politics and culture