If you've found your way to Mirlo, you're probably already familiar with Bandcamp, the online music marketplace that many have hailed as the best way to directly support musicians' livelihoods over the past decade. Last month, the music licensing corporation Songtradr, which owns Bandcamp, laid off 10 of Bandcamp's longtime software engineers. Around the same time, Songtradr also shut down their "Songtradr Marketplace" service. At this time, it’s still very unclear what ramifications this will have for the service, though Songtradr has publicly stated they will continue to focus their development on Bandcamp.
Sadly, none of this comes as a surprise to music lovers who have been paying attention to the music industry's recent machinations. When Bandcamp was sold to Epic Games we felt like the writing was on the wall. The following year, Epic sold Bandcamp's assets to Songtradr in a controversial move that resulted in a staff reduction of 50% and the evisceration of Bandcamp's recently formed union. This all happened around the time that the Mirlo co-founders were first getting to know one another—our project took the form that it did in large part because we wanted to start building a robust independent alternative for when Bandcamp inevitably getsworse.
And yet, Bandcamp still works just fine.The Songtradr acquisition will create incentives for vertical integration with the company's other music licensing businesses, especially MassiveMusic, but the core product is valuable both as a revenue source and as perhaps the largest catalog of independently licensed music outside of the major record labels. They still have network effects on their side, which means that as long as it continues to basically work OK, a massive exodus to an alternative like ours isn't likely. And through 16 years of existence, they've fine tuned a lot of their functionality—something we’ve come to appreciate as we’ve been building something similar.
In the time since we've started we've seen dozens of projects trying to compete with what Bandcamp offers—and although diversity is good to challenge the corporate monoculture, musicians without a PR department are struggling to keep their music up on all of them. Sticking to the platform That Still Works Pretty Danged Good is an obvious choice. Still, this recent announcement raises a further sense of unease, uncertainty, and potential precariousness for musicians and listeners. We agree with Tom Hawking's take in The Guardian that "the majority of people rich enough to buy these companies have no concept of value beyond the purely financial, and thus fundamentally misunderstand what they’re buying." Or as former Bandcamp Daily editor jj skolnik put it so eloquently in their beautiful essay grieving the end of their work there, "No matter how much one tries to distill it down to a matter of commodity exchange—there is nothing that can capture the joy of a bunch of freaks making the music they want to make and sharing that in community with one another. This is true no matter how much money is poured into it. Money isn’t what makes it grow."
So what would it look like to do this differently? Is it possible for those things that capital can't value—human connection, artistic pursuit, deep listening—to move us towards something new? Can “a bunch of freaks” keep making the music they want to make and share it with one another on the internet? These are the questions that animate our work with Mirlo.
While the way Songtradr manages their employees feels catastrophic, Bandcamp’s initial value proposition seems to remain a priority. They’re still releasing new features like the recent (albeit sub-par) integration with the Subsonic API. Whether or not this continues remains to be seen: Bandcamp has previously struck public and standards-based news feeds from their feature set several years ago because not enough users were using it. If Bandcamp under Songtradr is willing to step into the niche territory of open API standards, this would be valuable for projects like ours.
Bandcamp’s monopoly spans a very specific niche: independent music released by individual labels and musicians and it remains the most popular place to buy and sell music. But we wouldn’t be surprised if functionality that is useful to people but no longer profitable to Songtradr starts getting removed. Or that it starts using its monopoly status to negatively impact the industry (the tell-tale signs of enshittification). In the meantime, what we’ll keep doing is putting our fingers on the scale in favor of decentralization and cooperation, empowering data ownership and control. Let's keep working together and keep our ears open to new possibilities while we build tools and skills to live into the new worlds the music we love is calling for. If you want to help us fund that work, pitch in on our Mirlo page.
Do you have an idea for something you’d like to work on with us? Please reach out at hi@mirlo.space
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://mirlo.space/team/posts/730