![]() ![]() Last year, Epic bought Sketchfab and Artstation, two companies similarly positioned as artist-friendly digital marketplaces. Now resourced with Epic's vast legal team, Bandcamp has a chance to fight this.Įpic has a larger vision for Bandcamp. Currently, users can't buy digital versions music on Bandcamp through its iOS app because Apple won't allow third-party apps to put digital music files on iOS devices. Restrictions on iOS are a problem for Bandcamp, too. Epic didn't quite win its lawsuit outright, but it can now direct users to other payment systems beyond Apple's. For a game like Fortnite that makes all its money through in-app transactions, this caused Epic a huge problem. Epic sued Apple for its controversial App Store policy, where Apple takes a 30 percent cut of all transactions done in the store and through in-app transactions. Whether a dance move is copyrightable material is an open legal question, but Epic's practice of lifting popular dance moves without credit stands in clear opposition to Bandcamp's steadfast protection of artist rights.Ī layer deeper though, there are clear affinities between the two companies. Where Bandcamp has emphasized empowering artists by getting customers to pay a fair price for music (where "fair" is a value decided upon by each individual artist), Epic's Fortnite has stolen artists' works consistently, particularly with the games "emotes" feature that allows a player to purchase the ability for their character to do a particular dance. The dealĪt first glance, it's a perplexing match. Given this, it's time to think about what might fill the gap Bandcamp would leave in the music ecosystem. What does the purchase mean for musicians looking to sell their music online? In the short-term, not much, but in the long-term Epic Games' history and ownership raise serious questions about Bandcamp's longevity. Bandcamp is the world's foremost independent music marketplace, a place where artists as large as Radiohead and as small as my bands (we have tens of fans!) can upload their music for sale and limited streaming. Epic is the publisher of Fortnite, one of the world's most popular video games the creator of Unreal Engine, perhaps the most popular game engine and the owner of a slew of other video game subsidiaries like Harmonix and Psyonix. ![]()
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