Following the news of Bandcamp being purchased by Epic Games, indie game platform itch.io is expanding to aid in the distribution of indie music too.
A developer working on itch.io, named Tornado, announced that they’ve spontaneously created a free, open-source music player called Scritch, with a built-in web editor to allow creators to upload, customise, and distribute their work.
Inspiration for this comes from the news that Epic Games purchased Bandcamp, but it appears to provide more features than Bandcamp currently does, from what we can see.
After the news with Bandcamp and other platforms, I realized musicians could totally put their albums on @itchio. The only thing missing is a media player…
So I built one!Scritch is a simple, fully customizable media player designed for music artists 🎵 pic.twitter.com/2Fv9YP2lzj
— torcado (@torcado) March 28, 2022
Epic Games, which also own Fortnite and Unreal Engine, announced the takeover in a blog post recently, stating that “Bandcamp will play an important role in Epic’s vision to build out a creator marketplace ecosystem for content, technology, games, art, music and more”.
Scritch seems to be the answer if you’re looking for an alternative to Bandcamp. From the website, “Scritch editor is a tool made to streamline that process, seen above. You can drag and drop an entire album of audio files and the editor will automatically set everything up for you to download and upload directly to itch or anywhere else.”
The statement continues, “The editor also allows you to customise the look of the player and preview the changes immediately.”
So if you’re starting your music career and looking for a simple and accessible alternative for music hosting and distribution, itch.io might be your answer.
Check out the demo provided on itch.io, which features music from their own indie game, Heck Deck.
