It's awesome that @bandcamp is forgoing its share of the revenue today. It's also worth thinking about the reasons why the company is willing and able to do this. daily.bandcamp.com/features/bandc…
Most of the big digital services were designed with mass markets in mind, while @bandcamp is more niche-oriented, and that's reflected in the service design & business model.
There's no surveillance or advertising component to Bandcamp that drives the company to prioritize growing the user base over sustainable revenue generation. Bandcamp's hybrid streaming/download model was profitable while many of the big streaming services were not.
Crucially, Bandcamp did just one round of VC funding in 2010 and have stayed relatively small. Rather than providing massive returns to investors or attracting the attention of private equity, they've stayed focused on serving artists and indie labels and listeners.
While others prioritize algorithmic discovery, Bandcamp invested in humans doing actual music journalism, including writing about work that isn't intended to scale, music that most people probably aren't going to like, but that resonates with a specific community.
Bandcamp in some ways embodies an earlier, more idealistic conception of what the internet could be for culture--rejecting one-size fits all economic approaches, facilitating diverse expression. So why is it such an outlier?
There are smart, idealistic music-loving people working at nearly every music company we've ever talked to. But their ability to make decisions that are driven by what really best serves audiences and artists can be limited by a few things.
1) ideology: some startups begin with an idea of what artists need, and then spend years trying to convince them how great the service is. Bandcamp, in contrast, has maintained a commitment to iteratively asking artists what they need and has been responsive.
2) relatedly, investment models that assume a goal of mass-scale growth with multiple VC rounds are the dominant mode for technology investment right now, but these models drive incentives not well-suited for cultural markets and cultural diversity.
3) ownership consolidation in every part of the music industry and every adjacent industry has made it harder for smaller businesses with niche approaches to gain a foothold. This is a regulatory issue; the FTC and DOJ have allowed too few companies to have too much power.
4) YouTube. There's no polite or diplomatic way to say this: It's hard for niche music services to get off the ground when so much of the music is available on YouTube for free, either unlicensed, or with below-market terms that Google extracts with its massive market power.
YouTube won't give small-scale rightsholders access to tools that prevent unwanted uploads of their music, or they condition access to those tools on acceptance of YT's bad licensing terms. That's a big reason why we don't have a dozen services like Bandcamp.
This is all a good example of why antitrust and anti-monopoly work is a big component of how we think about music policy in 2020. We need healthy markets that serve workers and consumers, systems that work well for small and medium-size businesses.
Conservative antitrust folks would say that Bandcamp's success proves that there's no real problem with market entry--everything's fine, revenues are up! Progressive antitrust folks would have us ask: what are music industry workers saying?
We're all going to have to do a lot to rebuild our industry after this pandemic. Let's commit to centering music workers' needs, and holding all their industry partners accountable (yup, even the companies like Bandcamp who've been generous allies).
Ok, time to go buy some music! /thread
