With the recent acquisition of Bandcamp by Epic Games and the apparent question about taxes and fees and who gets charged what, I can’t help but be reminded that all things digital are inherently ephemeral. As in the physical world, nothing on the internet is permanent, much as it might seem to the contrary as digital media has become the lens through which one’s life is increasingly experienced, be that any number of social apps, online messengers, streaming services or other music stores. So what happens when Bandcamp goes away?

I’m just old enough to remember doing school work before the internet was really a thing. I was there on Napster on my dial-up, I was there in IRC channels, I was there on Soulseek. I’ve seen the rise of Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music and all the sundry other moneygrabs and exploitations that artists experience. Bandcamp, admirably, has at least made some moves against this — one could point to Bandcamp Friday and, more generally, their market position as a music store rather than a streaming service to back that claim up — but still. It’s another on the virtual pile.

Never have I been an early adopter of technology, but I have a Bandcamp collection. I just added three records to it, in fact. I use it every day to stream, to listen, to download music, even just to find a release date for an album or to grab a convenient jpeg of the cover art. It has become an indispensable tool for the way in which I currently experience and interact with music, and across the sphere of genres, I don’t imagine I’m alone in that. One could argue that since 2008, it’s helped reshape the way in which people who pay specifically for albums or other releases do so. It is an ecosystem where bands, labels, fans and others coexist, and that’s before you get to its editorial wing, its social aspects (I can follow you, you can follow me), and its intentions toward being a platform for livestreaming.

So what’s the next thing? I look back in my dude-of-a-certain-age way at MySpace. It’s laughable now, but MySpace was not only an encouraging outlet for bands to share their music, but a near-revolutionary direct social engagement with their fandom as well, something that neither Facebook nor Instagram — owned of course by the same company — or even YouTube have been able to do nearly as well, however dominant they’ve otherwise become through video sharing and embed capabilities. MySpace was that home, and now it’s abandoned. I don’t know who owns it — someone, I’m sure — but it is a name, a placeholder and that’s it.

What if the same thing happens to Bandcamp? Where does my digital ‘collection’ go? Am I to believe that a host server will always exist somewhere that I can access via a still-running app even after the ‘doors’ of Bandcamp are closed? Doesn’t seem reasonable. So then, are my purchases and access to this music a lease? And if Bandcamp disappears tomorrow; all that music I bought and haven’t downloaded onto a hard drive is gone?

I’m sure there’s a clause somewhere in some terms of service that I never read that explains this, but I’m curious how the notion of ownership of music can coincide with a platform that’s able to so readily disappear, like a foundation made of sand. Nobody’s going to shut down your turntable, or your CD player, or your tape player — so if you made those purchases, cheers — and you can still find records that are 100 years old at thrift stores if you know where to look and don’t mind wear and tear.

But as pristine as Bandcamp is now, I have a hard time feeling like it’s as secure. Not in the not-getting-hacked sense (that security is an illusion at the best of times), but in the being there sense. How can Bandcamp live up to the standard of having a record on your shelf for the longer term?

And what happens after it’s gone?