Bandcamp or Bannedcamp?

Why am I shadowbanned on Bandcamp, and why does this matter?

You can also find this in podcast form on Substack, on Patreon, or at davidrovics.com/thisweek.

I woke up early yesterday morning as usual, and found a message from my friend and web designer alerting me to the possibility that Bandcamp had disabled my account in some significant way, which I'm calling a shadowban, because I believe this is the most accurate modern term to describe what they're doing to me.

To explain what's happening in a simple screen shot, this is what happens today, and for at least the past week or so, when you search for my name on Bandcamp:

As you can see, neither of these artists is named David Rovics.  These are apparently the closest names Bandcamp can find to the one I'm looking for, which is an artist (me) who has dozens of albums up on the platform, some of which have been there for a decade or so.

If you search on Google for my name and the name of one of my albums or songs along with the term Bandcamp, whatever you're looking for will come up.  But if you search on the platform -- that is, using the search window on Bandcamp itself -- any query involving the title of any of my songs or albums will result in some other artist's song or album of the same name, or some other artist's song or album that has a similar name, or nothing.  I won't be anywhere, unless it's someone who covered one of my songs.

Bandcamp's Help section tells us if an artist can't find their music on the platform, the only explanation is it takes 24 hours before it will generally appear using Bandcamp's search engine, after you post a new album.  Given some of these albums have been up for over a decade, that's probably not what's going on here.

Dozens of people around the world have verified for the past 24 hours that they have the same experience when searching for my name, albums, or songs on the platform lately.  I contacted Bandcamp customer service early yesterday morning, and after 24 hours or so there's been no response so far.

At this point, in the hopes of making sense to all potential readers, it seems like a good idea to define terms here.  I'll do it in Q&A format, so if I'm explaining something that you already know all about, you can skip that part.

What exactly do you mean by the difference between "ban" and "shadowban"?

This is somewhat confusing, because there are a lot of different artists and journalists and others out there who complain about being shadowbanned on various platforms, and they mean different things, any of which may be a form of shadowbanning, depending on how the term is defined.

What many people are talking about when they refer to a shadowban has to do with changing algorithms.  For example, a lot of independent press outlets that carefully measure these things will tell you that from one day to the next they lost half of their viewers who got to their content from somewhere on Facebook, when Facebook changed the algorithm that determines what comes up in your news feed to de-emphasize hard news and politics, in favor of other things.  Whether you happen to support the change in the algorithm -- or the notion of an algorithm-controlled news feed in the first place -- the experience for independent media when this algorithm changed can and has been described as a form of shadowban.

That's not the kind of shadowban I'm talking about here, though.  What's happening with me is much more direct.  It's as if I had changed the settings so that all of my content on Bandcamp was set to Private or Subscriber-Only, but all of my albums have always been set to Public, and that's never changed (they're still all set to Public when I look now).  You'll still readily come up with any of my Bandcamp material using a search engine like Google, but nothing comes up directly on Bandcamp's search function.  

To emphasize the point, for anyone going to Bandcamp and looking me up who doesn't already have albums of mine in their collection, who is just looking for things using the search function, t's just like looking at Spotify after Neil Young had his material removed from the platform.  Just like on Spotify now if you look for Neil, you'll find some collaborative albums one of his songs appears on and other artists who have recorded Neil Young songs, but you'll come up with nothing from his own catalog of albums, they're not there.  It's the same for people going to Bandcamp and looking for me today.

What is Bandcamp?

For me and presumably for most other independent musicians, it's less of a big deal since the rise of music streaming platforms like Spotify.  But despite this, and despite the fact that you've likely never heard of the platform, it's a very significant one in the lives of independent musicians around the world.  

Bandcamp has millions of regular users and hundreds of millions of dollars are involved annually in distributing earnings from digital album sales to artists.  In recent years it has also become another of the platforms through which patrons of the arts can support artists on an ongoing basis, as with Patreon or Substack.  As a platform for crowdsourced artist support, Bandcamp represents a little less than 10% of my monthly earnings as an artist.  (Which, in case it must be said, is a very significant 10% for me and my family.)

Why were you shadowbanned by Bandcamp?

It's in their terms and conditions that they can ban artists as they wish, with no explanation.  Whether this should be the way it is is another matter, and I can't speak to the legality involved because I'm definitely not a legal expert.  But this is apparently what we're all signing up for.  However, there's nothing about shadowbanning, about the existence of the phenomenon, or about doing it to anyone, or how to remove a shadowban.

If you come up on Google, why does it matter if you don't come up on Bandcamp's search engine?

I'm sure I'm not alone in having noticed a long time ago that using the search functions directly on platforms like Bandcamp or Soundcloud doesn't tend to get the results we're looking for as readily as if we just search on Google for whatever we're looking for, adding the search term "Bandcamp" to the query if we're looking for something that we know to be on Bandcamp.

However, as I have learned from many of my fans responding to my posts about what's happening here, and as is pretty obvious if you think about it for a second, people do use the search window directly on Bandcamp when they want to find something on Bandcamp.  Whether it's disabled or not matters for the people searching, and for the artists they're not going to find.  

When people don't find an artist on Bandcamp, they will tend to assume the artist doesn't have their music up for sale on the platform, and they'll look elsewhere for it.  And if they've never heard of an artist, they're certainly not going to find one that doesn't come up in a search query, if they're searching for songs on certain topics or that contain certain keywords.  (Bandcamp makes it very clear when you're uploading an album that you should include lyrics for all your songs in the section they provide for them, because it will help with search queries!  But not in my case.)

Why do you think this is happening to you?  And why now?

Call me paranoid, but it doesn't seem coincidental.  On August 3rd I put up a new album, a live album with an anti-war emphasis, from a concert in 2003, when we were all protesting the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.  The shadowban seems to have gone into effect a week after the album was published.  Also, coincidentally or not, around the same time as the New York Times is calling Code Pink a propaganda arm for the Chinese Communist Party, and lots of politicians are up in arms about corporations with Chinese corporate stakeholders, of which Bandcamp is one (Bandcamp is owned by Epic Games, as of last year, and one of Epic Games' biggest shareholders is the Chinese corporation Tencent).

If you have followed any of the reporting that has come out of Elon Musk's publication of what's being called the Twitter Files, you'll be aware of the government involvement in working with social media platforms to monitor and meddle with various users they have issues with.  Am I on a shadowban list generated internally within Bandcamp management?  Is Bandcamp being instructed by a state actor with a list of artists to shadowban?  And what of those artists who have been actually banned from the platform, rather than shadowbanned?  There are those as well, and from what I have been learning lately, Bandcamp generally doesn't give explanations.

What are the implications for society and the arts with unaccountable corporations banning and shadowbanning artists with no explanation?

Offhand, it seems pretty Orwellian to me.  What if Alphabet/Google/YouTube also decided to follow suit?  And Spotify, too?  At that point, I and any other independent artist in the US would be effectively invisible online, or we'd lose the vast majority of our potential future audience, at least.

Independent artists like me have rarely had much luck with commercial airplay on terrestrial radio, or getting big record companies to promote our recordings, or even getting played by public media platforms like NPR or BBC.  In many ways, the internet has provided much more opportunity for independent artists to be discovered and heard by people out there in the world.  But increasingly, the internet is siloed into a small handful of massive corporate platforms that, for a whole lot of people, effectively are the internet.

For independent musicians, Bandcamp is definitely one of those major platforms, even if this may not be the case for the rest of society.  The implications for my career are fairly obvious.  This kind of shadowban will tend to have a throttling effect on business, keeping people from finding my music on the platform.

The implications for independent artists more broadly is at least as distressing.  If they're doing it to me, who else are they doing it to?  No one that I have found in my searches recently, so they're clearly very selective, and who knows what their standards are.

Is it possible there is a completely innocent explanation for what's going on?

Given the complete lack of communication from Bandcamp about what they're doing, anything is possible.  I'm no IT expert -- perhaps this is a technical glitch of some kind, and even though all my albums are set to Public, nothing comes up in a search the way it does for other artists.  My past experience with government agencies putting me on lists, and with whoever it is who has been trying to destroy my career, contacting anyone associated with me that they can find and denouncing me as a fascist, tells me that something else might be happening here.

What can we do about this kind of corporate malfeasance, assuming that's what it is?

First of all, if what is going on here is indeed Bandcamp acting on the instructions of a government agency, we may be noticing what's happening on Bandcamp rather than on other platforms because other platforms are doing the shadowbanning with more subtlety.

If this shadowban continues without explanation and seems to be just Bandcamp's policy towards me and whoever else, and other platforms aren't doing anything this obvious to throttle my presence online, then I'd certainly at least suggest that anyone who's using Bandcamp as a platform for supporting me or other artists do so on Patreon or another platform instead.  If Bandcamp management ever decides to tell me what's going on or decides to stop shadowbanning me, I'll update this post.

Addendum:

A note on my ongoing shadowban on Bandcamp: a lot of well-meaning people have been sending me screen shots like this one and writing something like, "is the shadowban over? Lots of your songs and albums are here, see?"

These folks can all be forgiven for not recognizing the titles of any of my albums. Who listens to albums these days anyway? But for the record, if you take a look at this screen shot -- and at what comes up when you use Bandcamp's search function to look for my name, the names of any of my albums, or the names of any of my songs -- you'll see that all of these albums and songs are either covers of my songs that other people recorded, or they are albums folks have put out at different times to raise money for one cause or another, that have included songs from me.

I have, at last count, 29 albums, including collectively many hundreds of songs, none of which will come up in a search on Bandcamp. (They will come up if you search for my name or a song title plus the term, "Bandcamp," on Google or other search engines, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking specifically about not coming up on Bandcamp's own search function, on Bandcamp's website or app.)

The one silver lining to this blatant censorship of an artist on Bandcamp's part is that the first song that consistently comes up of mine when you do a search is one of the best covers of any of my songs ever done, by the brilliant Scottish band, the Wakes. Long live the Wakes, and may their covers of my songs continue to come up first in any Bandcamp search, even if I'm eventually un-shadowbanned!

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I still have plenty of free dates for more gigs in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands in November. If you’re from one of those countries and might like to organize a gig, I’d love to hear from you!

Same goes for France, Germany, Switzerland, or Belgium for the month of February, 2024.