Songtradr Acquires Bandcamp From Epic Games ⇥ songtradr.com

Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games:

As we shared earlier, we are laying off around 16% of Epic employees. We’re divesting Bandcamp and spinning off most of SuperAwesome.

Nicole Carpenter, of Polygon, says about 830 people will be without a job. I feel bad for them.

Songtradr bought Bandcamp:

Bandcamp is an online music store and community with over 5M artists and labels where fans can discover, connect with, and directly support the artists they love. This acquisition will help Bandcamp continue to grow within a music-first company and enable Songtradr to expand its capabilities to support the artist community.

Songtradr will also offer Bandcamp artists the ability and choice to have their music licensed to all forms of media including content creators, game and app developers and brands. This will enable artists to continue to own and control their music rights, and increase their earning capacity from Songtradr’s global licensing network.

I hope Songtradr will be as hands-off as Epic Games was.

I suspected Epic acquired Bandcamp last year as part of its competition arguments against app marketplaces. Indeed, less than two months after it bought the company, it was using it in a complaint (PDF) against Google.

It seems notable to me that Bandcamp workers recently unionized, and that performers in video games might strike if studios do not comply with their reasonable requests, like a “set medic to be present at dangerous stunts, just as on film and television sets”, according to Danielle Broadway at Reuters.