Never have we seen anything like what happened at Bandcamp. A company scratched out their existence — really carved out a whole niche for itself — with a profitable if low-margin model that became an indispensable part of the modern music ecosystem.
Then the founders sold the company to a high-flying game studio to use as chum in their suicidal lawsuit against Apple and Google. A year later it appears to be transforming into a click funnel for a music licensing start-up.
It’s been a wild ride, leading many of us to wonder what Bandcamp could have been, and what Bandcamp should have been. It was the closest thing we had to a pro-artist platform. But imagine that in its perfect form. What would the perfect pro-artist platform be like? What would it look like? Who would run it and what would it do for us?
You’d like it to be reliable, of course. Clicking buttons should take you where you need to go and getting paid should be a simple and consistent process. Fees should be straight-forward and rational, not extractive. It should act as a bridge to fans and not a barrier: you should be able to collect your fans’ email addresses, for instance, and contact them off the platform if you wish — something that set Bandcamp apart from Beatport, Traxsource and other music platforms that could let artists do this, but don’t.
You’d like it to be innovative and understanding that a modern musician’s cash flow is dependent upon but doesn’t solely stem from recorded music. That means merch. You’d like to be able to take pre-orders for vinyl but also to drop a quick remix and have it for sale instantly. It also means support — something like Patreon that could enable fans to support artists even when they don’t have a product for sale.
You’d want it run by people on the independent artist’s side. I think we’ve seen enough of venture capital-driven platforms that spend a billion dollars convincing artists of their purity and then extract billions more while fucking them over. Maybe you’d want something of a “non-profit” sensibility. A site run as a co-op, even.
Facebook and Twitter and Amazon are big because they paid to get big. The “viral sensation” that builds a multi-million person user base is lubricated with ungodly amounts of cash. It’s not merit. It’s money. It’s always been money.
I’m here to tell you that such a site actually existed. It was here the whole time. You probably never heard of it and I didn’t either, until I heard that they were shutting down for good.
Ampled described itself as a “Patreon-like platform for musicians,” but completely owned by workers and the artists on its platform. Unlike Bandcamp, Ampled wasn’t for sale: it was structured as a cooperative or “co-op,” created explicitly to serve the interests of its members. The company was funded by a small investment from an accelerator program of less than $20,000 and loans from friends which did not cede ownership or control.
We know these things about Ampled’s financing because they published their numbers. Compared to the black box finances of other music platforms, Ampled engaged in radical transparency, outlining employee salaries and monthly expenses down to the cost of software license (they even appeared to be using the free version of Slack.) Expenses were paid by membership dues — a sliding scale for artists of either 7%, 10% or 13%. Anyone could become a member if they had 10 or more supporters, after which they received voting power and the ability to determine how Ampled was governed. Fans could support artists with whatever amount of money they wanted to access posts that artists could make public or for supporters only. Payouts were issued within 2 days of being paid.
In addition to their financials, Ampled also published their user metrics. They had nearly 4,000 users supporting 335 approved artists and pulling about $5k monthly. The average user was sending about $7/month to their favorite artist.
These numbers give some insight into the sudden decision by Ampled to shut down. Bandcamp’s latest owners have claimed the company has plunged into an unprofitable direction, though their evidence for this amounts to a guy you’ve never met before saying “Bro trust me.”
Ampled’s board of directors stated that the company was facing a “combination of challenges — primarily from burnout and a lack of resources to hire full-time workers.” The financials back this up: Ampled was being run by just one salaried employee. This is incredible: even the most basic Patreon clone has to deal with a load of maintenance and upkeep problems that would bury anyone else. Part of being sustainable meant that Ampled seemed to be hiring based upon revenue collected rather than work to be done.
The problem with that is one that will be familiar to almost anyone working in the underground music scene, whether it’s a start-up platform or a label or club night: you spend so much time maintaining the business you have that anything that goes into marketing and growth is almost an afterthought, to be done when the “real” business of putting out fires and trimming the weeds is through.
One of the prevailing myths of the internet is that any good service will see mass adoption, any good content will go viral and anything worth people’s time will be discovered. That’s not true. It’s never been true. The reason “everyone” is on Facebook is because Facebook paid for it: they used a drip of venture capital and an IPO and several years running at a loss to push their brand until word of it reached critical mass, from your grandparents to your uncle using it to post selfies of himself storming the capitol. Facebook and Twitter and Amazon got big because they blew through billions of dollars to get big. The “viral sensation” that builds a multi-million person user base is lubricated with ungodly amounts of cash. It’s not merit. It’s money. It’s always been money.
When you understand that the myths of Silicon Valley “growth hacking” are bullshit, a lot of things come into focus. Social media sites get big from huge drops of investor cash. They turn against their users because of those same investors. They stay big because they can buy out anyone that might challenge them. Companies that don’t go along with this — like Ampled, like your label, and like Bandcamp itself until two years ago — are often dubbed quaint little boutique platforms or even outright failures because they don’t reach a billion user threshold. “Nobody’s on them,” an artist with 85 Twitter followers sniffs. Despite seeing the reality in their own career, they still believe the myth that good things are rewarded with success because they’re good. But it just doesn’t happen that way.
Ampled has promised to publish a record of lessons they learned, both for their current users and members and for “the next Ampled.” And there’s every indication there might be another Ampled, or several more. In 2022, the site open sourced their code, enabling anyone to use it as the basis of another, better Ampled. The knowledge passed on by the founders will likely be a fascinating read, particularly if they confront the dilemma of staffing a pro-artist platform on a sustainable basis while also somehow also allocating sufficient resources to invest in employees and in growth and enlightening artists and fans about one of the best artist platforms in existence before it shuts down.
