busybee fluffy rambles

For quite some time I’ve had my music site hosted by Bandcamp, since it was a pretty low-friction way to get my discography up and online, albeit with some annoying limitations. Previously I had the main domain host a “micro-site” for whatever my most recent release was and then used a subdomain for the actual Bandcamp page, but updating that got to be obnoxious and nobody really cared about the microsite thing anyway.

There’s a bunch of reasons, though, why I’m going to go back to running my own site, and hopefully downplaying Bandcamp as My Main Music Presence online. Here’s some of the reasons.

Today is Bandcamp Friday. That makes it a very good time to support independent musicians.

Right now I could use a bit of cash, as I’ve been hit with some unexpected expenses and I don’t have much of a safety net regarding money I can access right now. So, if you have any interest in my music, right now is a very good time to buy some of it. Or my whole discography, even. I have around two dozen releases each in a wide variety of genres, almost all written by me.

Caught up on my collections of:

• Posy
• Nicky Flowers

Added the discographies of:

• James Hastings
• our dear friend, the medic

So, hey, Bandcamp is a great service that a lot of musicians and fans rely upon for fair distribution and sales of music. It is a really great thing.

Unfortunately, Bandcamp’s owners decided that having a sustainably profitable business wasn’t Enough for them and sold it to Epic Games a year ago, with the idea that it’d become a money-printing factory that does All The Licensing.

And that didn’t pan out, so a week ago Epic re-sold Bandcamp to Songtradr, which is basically an A&R pay-for-play scam with the trappings of respectability. Here’s a video Benn Jordan did on the topic (focusing on a site called Taxi but Songtradr is the same basic thing):

Now Songtradr is blocking the Bandcamp union from actually being, y'know, a union. They aren’t honoring the union terms, have locked workers out of critical systems, are completely ignoring the collective bargaining power of Bandcamp as a company and are doing all sorts of heinous shit.

However! This is not a time to boycott Bandcamp! All that does is make Bandcamp less valuable and gives Songtradr more sway over them, while disproportionately impacting the musicians who rely on it. Please look to see what the union is requesting in terms of support and solidarity. There’s a lot you can do to show your support.

Independent musicians thank you.