Epic Games Acquires Bandcamp

We are living in a year of acquisitions. Microsoft is in the process of acquiring Activision Blizzard, Sony is acquiring Bungie, Take-Two is acquiring Zynga, and now Epic Games is acquiring…Bandcamp.

Yes, the music store/streaming platform is now under the umbrella of Fortnite and Unreal Engine manufacturers. why? That is something anyone can guess. The move is related to the publisher’s purchase of Rock Band and Fuser developer Harmonix last November with the intention of creating more music-focused content for Fortnite. It’s unlikely that Bandcamp will figure out these plans in any way, but something strange has happened.

If you are a Bandcamp subscriber wondering how this will affect your service, the company’s co-founder/CEO Ethan Diamond remains essentially the same and may continue as appropriate as Epic helps expand Bandcamp’s functionality and availability. issued a statement promising that Most of them reward independent music artists. You can read some of his posts below.

Bandcamp will continue to operate as a standalone marketplace and music community, and I will continue to lead our team. The products and services you depend on will not go anywhere. We will continue to build Bandcamp around an artist-first monetization model (where artists make an average of 82% of all sales). Depending on how the music is presented, Bandcamp Fridays will continue as planned, and Daily will continue to highlight a variety of amazing music on the site. But behind the scenes, we’ve been working with Epic to expand and drive development internationally across Bandcamp, from basic features like album pages, mobile apps, merchandise tools, payment systems, search and discovery capabilities to new initiatives like vinyl printing. We are working together. and live streaming services.

So there it is. It’s far from buying a giant mall, but when printing money like Epic, this move is a “why not?” It belongs to the category. It will be interesting to see what happens if Epic wants to remotely use Bandcamp for anything related to video games, or call the platform itself.