It wasn’t a good omen when the corporation Epic Games acquired Bandcamp. It became evident Bandcamp’s future was in danger when Epic Games laid off hundreds of employees and sold Bandcamp to Songtradr, «an American B2B music platform that claims to facilitate brands, content creators, and digital platforms in their use of music for licensing purposes», oh, dear… Not to mention Bandcamp’s Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off in the process.

It’s supposed to be busineess as usual at Bandcamp, but they’re operating the whole site with half their staff, «most of the support team is gone now”, and workers are just trying to ‘keep the lights on’ with who’s left after the layoffs.

It was only a matter of time before alternatives started to appear. Bandcamp is one of the few ways you can directly contribute to artists online, in contrast to the predatory streaming services. So it’s an important place for artists to get support from their followers.

One of these alternatives is jam.coop:

«a new online service that allows musicians to connect with and sell music directly to their fans. We plan to have features similar to other services, such as Bandcamp, but with a crucial difference: jam.coop is a co-operative run by and for the benefit of musicians and the people who build the platform. We’re not for sale and never will be.»

The software development company working on jam.coop already operates as a worker co-operative, owned and run by the workers. You can already start selling your music on jam.coop, if you’re interested, send an email to chris@jam.coop. Check out the artist pages to see some of the music already available. They’re currently working on a lot of stuff, including support for record labels… 😉

Find more information, see their about page.

jam.coop

• Noticias
• Bandcamp, jam.coop