- Bandcamp was wildly successful and basically printing money in a sustainable fashion
- Bandcamp's owners got bored with being sustainably profitable and sold the company to Epic Games, makers of Fortnite, who had aspirations towards turning it into a licensing clearninghouse for Fortnite music
- Worried about the future, Bandcamp's employees started the process of forming a union, which was overwhelmingly supported by most employees as well as most of the many thousands of musicians who sell their music on bandcamp
- Epic, being ownred by high-powered capitalist-brained investors, needed to turn around and make this acquisition a source of exponential growth, and couldn't, so
- Epic decided to recoup their investment by flipping it over to Songtradr, an also-ran music distributor whose mainline profit center is a scammy pay-for-exposure A&R "service"
- Songtradr's very first act was to lock all Bandcamp employees out of the systems while they figured out who could stay and who would be laid off
- The union was like "Wait, uh, we have a union, you can't do that"
- Songtradr laid off over half the company, including everyone who was organizing the union
I took a somewhat different direction and started building Bandcrash, which focuses on being a really good encoder and tagger and providing a means of easily publishing your stuff on itch.io (an independent games-and-tools-and-assets-and-books-and-whatever-else shop) as well as uploading it to things like Gumroad and Ko-Fi where you can provide files to download and a price to download them for. It currently uses blamscamp as its embedded player (since it's what was convenient and easy to integrate at the time) although I'm going to eventually move to scritch or to make a choice of embedded players or whatever.
Anyway, me being me I originally built it as a software library with a basic nerdy command-line tool, so nobody was using it, so for the last few weeks (ever since part 5 above) I've been crunching on finally building a GUI for it, which I finally released a beta of last night. It has a ways to go but it's at least usable now, and makes it much, much easier to list your albums for sale on itch.io in particular.
Another system that's been in development since step 2 is faircamp, which has gotten a lot of attention. I haven't tried it out just yet but it looks like it does some similar stuff as Bandcrash (such as encoding your album to a bunch of formats and building a player) but it's also a nerdy tool to actually run, and it builds a (very nice!) static website and kind of handwaves payments in a way I'm not terribly comfortable with. But some folks are really into it.
Anyway. Worth knowing what's going on in the world of independent music and ways of keeping it independent.