Bandcamp is now for Videogames
I’m excited to announce that Bandcamp is joining Epic Games, who you may know as the makers of Fortnite and Unreal Engine, and champions for a fair and open Internet.
Bandcamp will keep operating as a standalone marketplace and music community, and I will continue to lead our team. The products and services you depend on aren’t going anywhere, we’ll continue to build Bandcamp around our artists-first revenue model (where artists net an average of 82% of every sale), you’ll still have the same control over how you offer your music, Bandcamp Fridays will continue as planned, and the Daily will keep highlighting the diverse, amazing music on the site. However, behind the scenes we’re working with Epic to expand internationally and push development forward across Bandcamp, from basics like our album pages, mobile apps, merch tools, payment system, and search and discovery features, to newer initiatives like our vinyl pressing and live streaming services.
Honestly, this sounds like sh*tty news. Epic Games has proven they will do anything they can to screw over anyone that isn’t their shareholders, cutting off old servers for amazing games just to get folks to move to a new one and suing anyone that runs open-source servers to keep the game alive. And let’s not even get into the bull***t they had with Apple, that wasn’t about sticking up for the little guy, but a near trillion-dollar company deciding they wanted to keep all the money for themselves and saying it was unfair to have to pay — all the while forcing others to pay for their own development tools.
Here is the original interview with Bandcamp founder back in 2008 introducing the concept to the world:
Bandcamp is a free hosted publishing platform for musicians, taking the technical challenge out of setting up a site — transcoding music into different formats, streaming audio, analytics, payment processing, and so on.
Band websites are often pretty bad, hacked together by a friend of the band with Flash and Dreamweaver, or worse, by the record label. There are exceptions, but mostly, it’s a sea of Flash intros, popup windows, mystery navigation, and 30-second sound clips.
Bandcamp is trying to change that, giving every album and track its own page with clean URLs and semantic markup, with the accompanying SEO benefits. Even before launch, they’re topping Google results for many searches for song titles of participating bands.
https://waxy.org/2008/09/bandcamp_launch/