It is in the past absolutely! @peter just wrote a post about it if you want to know more
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Thank you… yes, that’s the post I read 
Good to hear it’s not the way forward…
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Further reading and analysis on the subject:
First let’s point out that this article was written by someone from the team that did the amazing job of analysing Bandcamp data for these two articles which have been key in my own analysis of the various powerstructures and logics supporting the industry of streaming and buying digital music as a whole :
These two studies are crucial and I encourage anyone to read them.
What they lack however which I think is kind of usual with solely economics based analysis, is a political analysis of WHY the patterns they’re describing are happening. This lack of a political lense then leads to a weird conclusion when it comes to the closing arguments about how Bandcamp could/should grow. Typically when it comes to analyse why Bandcamp has “calcified” since its inception instead of expanding with the wealth of features describes in “but what if it’s good” and the “chaos bazaar” (such as “being able to click buy on Bandcamp when you listen to something on the radio” for example).
From that point on, I could make a long list of the things I think are wrong with the analysis of the “good” aspects of this acquisition, and why I think they’re misguided, but I will instead focus on the one that I think matters most :
“This epochal reversal can’t happen if major labels continue to hold out, and they will continue to do so until they have a platform that both can and actively tries to accommodate them. I see no reason why Epic wouldn’t try to do this; when your in-game concerts include Travis Scott and Marshmello, the tendency is naturally to push those artists toward releasing music through the music company you own.”
Here we reach the usual logic of “music” needing “the music industry” and therefore “the 3 big multinational corporate labels” to really define its future as a whole. And basically what we’re saying is Bandcamp needs the Majors.
It’s my personnal assessment that Bandcamp is better off without them, even if it means struggling for exposure because of it and because of the concentration of power pushing against them.
If the writer has the honesty to point out that “All of this is wishful thinking, literally, in that these are all things I wish are true.” they also point us towards this pretty usual social democrat vision which I think has caused so much harm :
“Crises require a set of uncomfortable responses. They necessitate that one, as Venkatesh Rao puts it, be slightly evil. The candidate whose piety keeps them from bringing up their opponent’s missing emails is the one who loses. It is not an exaggeration to say that the world Spotify wants is one in which art has no home. If Bandcamp has responded in a way that smells of moral compromise, it may spell the end, but it may also mean they’re on the right track.”
What it states is basically that we should be looking for our benevolent and enlightened tyrant, because we’re fighting even worse evils. It’s an age old political principle that has proven to be ill guided times and times over but it’s a seducing narrative that pitches forces of equal power against each other and feels relatable, and us workers, creators, coders as basically betting on a winner from the side of the ring. And in this particular instance we’re supposed to believe Tim Sweeney and Tencent are our champions.
To be absolutely clear, I hold no grudge about anyone getting some Epic money sometimes, either by selling their games on the platform, or using Unreal (an incredible software which I happen to sometimes use myself for personnal work in the 3D field), whatever, it’s a tough industry and anyone individually has some hard choices to make.
However, pitching that a company that was entirely aligned in terms of financial goals with its creators (the ONLY business model of Bandcamp was selling music which incidentally meant their only way to make more money was to help their user base make more money), is now better off as part of a conglomerate where it becomes just an asset amongst 50 others makes absolutely no sense to me, with all the goodwill in the world.
And at the end of the day, because I knew that Bandcamp needed musicians to thrive to make a profit, I knew that the 15% of my money that went to the platform would structurally HAVE to be put to good use in one way or another. But now all I know is 15% of that money gets split between Tim Sweeney, Ethan Diamond and Tencent, and it’s up to them to decide what to do with it. This is not a projection, it’s a cold hard fact, and it’s pretty depressing.
All of this is to say : Our cooperative model has never been this legitimate and beautiful, we really have an edge over a lot of the competition in ethical terms if we are to build the best platform we could build.
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