The Tax Man Cometh…

Like many independent providers of digital goods, we’ve been somewhat sideswiped by the new changes to EU VAT. Unlike many, we were aware of the upcoming changes but were under the belief that Bandcamp would be able to pay the charges directly on our behalf; this is currently not the case.

We believe that Bandcamp are doing everything they can to ease the burden and look forward to their proposed solution later in the year. We equally do not begrudge paying tax where it is deemed to be appropriate. However, the removal of exemption limits means that every sale we make within the EU will be eligible for the new tax, require tax returns to be completed and potentially mandate the capture of information about our customers. We are here to make music, not complete tax returns.

Many of our peers are therefore removing music from streaming sites because of this change. We don’t want to.

As of today, all of the Ordo’s musical offerings on the Bandcamp page have either been moved to streaming only (for a number of high-profile releases that took still-to-be-recouped investment to create) or free download. Once Bandcamp are able to deal with the VAT charges on our behalf, we will return to a small-charge download model. Unfortunately, this change means that the amended releases will no longer appear our our supporters’ pages. We apologise for this and are not entirely sure why this is the case. However, we feel that making sure the music is still available to be enjoyed is the most important thing.

We hope you agree. Many thanks.

EDIT: Bandcamp now administrate payment of the relevant taxes so Ordo Pestilentia releases are now being made available as digital downloads, as the physical copies sell out.