This feels like a major blow, as someone who just semi recently (probably around pandemic start) started getting into purchasing flac music from indie artists, Bandcamp was a great source of music. I understand nothing will change in the short term, but long term I am very concerned. Especially as streaming becomes more dominant and companies are less willing to provide flac based music and physical discs (where I can rip my own) continue to disappear.
This feels like a potential last step of true music ownership and that makes me incredibly sad.
That being said if anyone knows of any place to buy flacs of music with great selection would love to know (especially for Japanese music which I generally have to import, thankfully they love CDs).
"Nothing will change in the short term" is the story of every acquisition, almost all of which end up with major changes for the worse at some point. (So yes, I agree with you.)
Historically, Epic's aquisitions are given freedom to do whatever they were doing beforehand, so I wouldn't be worried. Quixel now just gives out tons of free materials and assets, Sketchfab is untouched, Artstation forums don't behave any differently, Hypersense's tech was likely leveraged and used in Metahuman.
People concerned over the "Exclusivity deals" on the game store end aren't looking at the "Developer" acquisitions which have rarely lead to the kinds of ends that, say, Google's Aquisitions have.
Tell it to "Rocket League" or look at what happened to PUBG when they used Epic's engine. Epic only makes those things "free", it only buys popular software, because it's goal is getting more people locked into it's walled garden Epic store. It is not because they are nice. As soon as they believe they have a critical mass of Epic store users you can damn well bet they'll treat Quixel, Sketchfab, and Artstation forums just like the Rocket League linux client the minute there's any more profit to be squeezed out.
>> look at what happened to PUBG when they used Epic's engine
> They made a lot of money.
They reportedly worked with Epic Games on technical support for PUBG features, and Epic Games may've ended up using some of them in their own Battle Royale mode:
> Notably, Epic Games updated their in-development title Fortnite, a sandbox-based survival game that included the ability to construct fortifications, to include a battle royale mode that retained the fortification aspects. Known as Fortnite Battle Royale, Epic later released it as a standalone free-to-play game in September 2017. Shortly after its release, Bluehole expressed concerns about the game, acknowledging that while they cannot claim ownership of the battle royale genre, they feared that since they had been working with Epic for technical support of the Unreal engine, that they may have had a heads-up on planned features they wanted to bring to Battlegrounds and could release it first.
Super Mario RPG did frying pan as a melee weapon back in 1996. Sure it was character locked, a single player game in a totally different genre, etc, but it still means frying pans ere an established video game melee weapon long before before TF2, much less PUBG.
Saying someone copied your work and broke the law doesn't mean that that they did. That's why we have tribunals.
Personally, I'm all against what they did with Fortnite and PUBG - they didn't broke any laws, but the surely reworked Fortnite into PUBG,instead of creating their own thing (it is now). But that's a long shot from saying they committed a crime or that their acquisitions turn up bad.
>As soon as they believe they have a critical mass of Epic store users you can damn well bet they'll treat Quixel, Sketchfab, and Artstation forums
Maybe. But Unity is technically still used in more games and is being just as aggressive in acquisitions between Parsec, Syncsketch, Ziva, and even Weta Digital. It's definitely not going to be a battle won by outspending the competition.
Tim Sweeney has been pretty crystal clear about his feelings disliking walled gardens and monopolies for at least a decade, since well before the Epic Games Store or Fortnite existed. He is very much a tech guy, not some super savvy cutthroat business guy (as is pretty clear when you look at their battle with apple, which made absolutely no financial sense)
This is a good counterargument only if you believe Tim Sweeney will outlive Epic Games. I don't think he will, and I have no reason to believe that Tim's successor will have his mindset or his values.
Can I get a refund for it? I had it on Steam but don't really play it anymore. Is such a service degradation a reason for a refund even if I had a lot of fun and countless hours in it? I don't need the money, but I heavily dislike such practices and want them to at least feel that.
But being a market, Bandcamp's user's are actually artists and listeners, so Bandcamp having freedom to do what they want doesn't mean they can suddenly start giving all their music out for free, unless they change to a Spotify style model of listens = payout.
I wouldn't be surprised if the acquisition is to provide royalty free music to the games industry via Unreal Engine, as was the case for Quixel, but none of this is really good news for artists trying to make money unless Bandcamp plans to pay the artists out of their own pocket for a royalty free side.
All of that is speculation of course, we'll see where it goes. It's just a weird acquisition if it's not for integration I feel.
"none of this is really good news for artists trying to make money unless Bandcamp plans to pay the artists out of their own pocket for a royalty free side."
To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if that's Epic's endgoal. But the music industry is a gargantuan behemoth with paper thin profit margins, and Epic is already struggling enough battling the mobile market (a much more lucrative market where the fight makes sense).
I can't see any significant push like that happening for a decade+. This and the harmonix aquisition are probably just the foot in the door needed for those plans should they want to push one day.
They might focus on streamers, they have quite a bit of issues using music. Their recorded streams tend to have large portions of the stream without sound and it definitely needs fixing. The music industry fees are simply too high for them to pay.
> none of this is really good news for artists trying to make money unless Bandcamp plans to pay the artists out of their own pocket for a royalty free side
I don't see why that's the case? Just give Bandcamp artists the tools to set their own royalty structure (In the same way they price their own songs) and integrate this marketplace into Unreal or wherever else. Self published artists get a source of revenue typically reserved for labels and Bandcamp gets the cut instead of someone else.
That's a fair point. My original assumption was that royalties wouldn't flow back to artists in a meaningful way but bandcamp has been a big advocate of fairness toward artists so that's really a fair take on my behalf.
It's a company that's been successful, while also mired in a variety of legal problems and scandals, often related to how their games are so deliberately addictive.... I don't doubt what you say about their good intentions, I just honestly worry more about any fallout from that kind of business practice leading to an acquisition.
And yet so many modern day startups have no viable exit strategy beyond acquisition- what does that say about the state of the industry, and of founders' commitments towards building a sustainable product?
> And yet so many modern day startups have no viable exit strategy beyond acquisition
Bandcamp was already profitable and has been for years. The pandemic dramatically increased their sales. They were doing fine.
Why did they need an exit?
That is the real flaw of SV thinking: that simply being a profitable, going concern is somehow inadequate. The result is monopoly accretion as small companies are repeatedly swallowed up by bigger ones.
Did bandcamp raise a lot of money from venture capital? The last round listed on crunchbase was a series A in 2010. It looks like management were fine running it more like a lifestyle business.
Yeah, as far as I can tell, they took a seed round and a series A and have been profitable since... 2014? If memory serves?
If you look at their staff growth, it's been very slow and very steady. At the time of acquisition they were sitting in the 100-150 headcount range, which is modest for a company that's almost 15 years old. Given their claim of 207M to artists last year and their touted 18% average rev share, we can guess they were generating around 50M per year gross, which is a very healthy cashflow for a company that size.
Their strategy was clearly not to take over the world, but to carve out a niche and not bother to directly compete with the streaming platforms (which helps to explain, for instance, the incredibly rudimentary mobile player app).
As for the senior management, Diamond had already previously started and sold a company. I'm sure he was doing fine. The same is true of Mark Hall, their VP of Product (who started 5-ish years ago, if I recall). The technical founders I'm less sure about, though apparently at least one of them had already moved on.
I'd absolutely describe it as a sustainable lifestyle business that had a good long-term trajectory. It was never going to be a unicorn, but who cares?
A company with 100 employee isn't a lifestyle business. The term we used to use for that before VC swallowed the world and decided that anything less than a billion is chump change was simply "business". A 100-person company with millions in revenue is a successful medium-sized business.
The only reason it doesn't feel successful and stable today is because we live in a unprotected corporate environment where any of the giant behemoths may anti-competitively crush a smaller business if they so choose to and there won't be any repercussions.
I wouldn't be surprised if the main motivation for Bandcamp selling was simply the fear of being either bought out by someone worse, or crushed by them. (Likely Spotify, which is two orders of magnitude larger than them.)
I love the 'rudimentary' app. It was only recently I noticed a lot of people complaining about it. It was a surprise to me. I can search and find new albums, and I can listen to album from start to finish without any issues, share a track link to a friend, and purchase + download the album for offline. Only feature I would have liked to see is the niche addition of built-in ListenBrainz support. What else was missing?
For me the big one is playlists. I'm absolutely an album listener (call me old school), but I like to build thematic playlists of multiple albums that I listen to in rotation (for example, I have a background electronica playlist I love to use when I'm working), and the player lacks that capability.
Notably, Bandcamp absolutely encourages purchasing individual tracks, so for folks who, unlike me, tend to build mixed playlists, it's even more annoying that this feature doesn't exist.
In fact, they only very recently (as in last month!) added basic queuing support:
Bandcamp is 100% a bonafide operating business. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but perhaps you're seeing that they were just trying to run "Business as usual" and equating that to a lifestyle business as they weren't chasing growth.
I think the most likely explanation is that the founders just got bored with the project as they got older and aged out of their own primary target demographic. You have kids, you start getting regular colonoscopies...all the trials and tribulations of teen and twentysomething indie musicians start feeling less urgent and relevant.
That, and/or they were not interested in running a company that is finally getting too large to feel like a family / tight-knit community. The kind of person who likes running a 20 person outfit is very plausibly someone who gets no joy out of running a 200 person one or even actively hates the idea.
So they sold to someone they liked well enough, or in any case someone they distrust less than others to have the expertise and values to scale the business in a way that doesn't COMPLETELY destroy what made it special
I think it's more so the result of cheap money than some way of thinking. Higher interest rates will curtail a lot of this activity. Might even see a wave of divestitures or spinoffs as companies have to look harder for sources of capital.
The need to "exit" and the obsession with "growth" that occupies the minds of SV founders significantly pre-dates the low rate environment that's dominated since 2008. The only difference is the path: IPO vs acquisition.
Because the people who like to start new companies and take lots of risks generally tend to not like running stable businesses and dealing with FP&A managers, lawyers, compliance and tax experts
> Because the people who like to start new companies and take lots of risks generally tend to not like running stable businesses and dealing with FP&A managers, lawyers, compliance and tax experts
... in SV/the tech industry.
That's kinda my entire point.
Stealing someone else's analogy: If you went to a bank to get a small business loan to open up a coffee shop, and you told them "Yeah, I'm hoping to take a bunch of your money, open a coffee shop, never return a profit, and then sell it to Starbucks", you'd get laughed out of the room.
SV is not a homogeneous thought-entity. Maybe the founders were tired of running it or wanted to move on to do something else. Businesses get bought and sold all the time and don't need to be a lifetime commitment for the founder (it would still get sold or shutdown at that point anyway).
You make a good point, but I wonder what the real world business equivalent of this is? Is it the destiny of every successful café to become acquired by Starbucks one day? (assuming there's not a better comparison I should be thinking of)
Successful restaurants, bars, etc do change owners from time to time as owners retire or simply want a change of pace. I imagine the difference is the amount of money involved. It's possible for an individual to save up several hundred thousand to a million to buy an existing, profitable small business. Less so the hundreds of millions to billion+ a business like this might go for.
Around me in Sydney, there is a major “hospitality group” that’s spent the last 10+ years buying up bars and pubs.
There’s a few smaller operations doing it as well.
The big one, Merivale, seems to have practically unlimited money to throw at interesting or struggling venues. While I really don’t like the changes they eventually make to most places they buy, I have a grudging respect for the business acumen of Justin Hemmes the owner.
He seems to have an uncanny knack for having bought a good sized venue a year or two before, in every area that becomes cool and popular. Often they’ll barely change for a few years, while the demographics around them shift, then one day they’ve suddenly been renovated and there’s a queue of b-grade celebrities all dressed up and lined up around the block waiting to get in every weekend for a month or two.
I totally get that my demographic spends less over the bar than the crowd he’s so good at attracting, but he’s ruined two of my local ex-favourite pubs in the last few years, and over decades he’s turned some of my favourite music venues in things like trashy Mexican restaurant/bars.
But yeah, even as successful as he is in his field, I doubt it’ll get him into the three comma club.
The goal of every venture-backed tech startup is to reach an exit. That's the whole explanation of "why." You can go back in time and ask them "why did you have to take VC money" in 2008 and that might be an interesting question. But once they did, there's no surprise whatsoever that they went for the exit today.
Why do things need an exit strategy, why can they not simply exist and do good work and pay people fairly? Does everything have to exist purely to maximise profit?
>Does everything have to exist purely to maximise profit?
No, everyone is free to start a bandcamp alternative that does not sell out. But the probability of people wanting to "cash out" or trade equity for other things they want is pretty high. And so that is the world that we see, because it is a reflection of what people want.
Sure, but what people want as individuals and makes sense for them to individually do can nevertheless be harmful to society. That is what people are complaining about generally.
I don’t know how to combat the shift to a single monopoly/duopoly in every market though, but it’s definitely going to make our lives worse. Especially with the erosion of private ownership for us plebeians.
The employees who traded compensation for equity probably don't agree. Bandcamp's success is built partially on this trade and at some point it needs to pay off for them. I suppose they could stay private forever and give out profit-sharing bonuses, but I think people go into this expecting an exit.
Some people just want to work at a decent company for reasonable pay, and aren't looking to get filthy rich busting their asses for a FAANG.
Bandcamp is absolutely a company I would've considered working for. I'm long past the point in my career where I care about a lottery ticket. They were profitable, big enough to be sustainable, but small enough to be nimble. The management seemed to make all the right noises regarding their values and motivations.
I'll take that over a massive tech company or a tiny startup any day of the week.
I didn't think it needed clarification, but "they wouldn't be able to hire anyone" does not literally mean they would have zero candidates. It's expressing the fact that they would be severely limiting their talent pool by offering 0 equity in this industry, where equity is one of the reasons people are willing to take a risk on a startup.
> where equity is one of the reasons people are willing to take a risk on a startup.
They're not a startup. They're a profitable, mature, 15 year old company of 100-150 people. Working there isn't "taking a risk", so there's no need to entice people with hazard pay.
And yet those early employees who joined before they were profitable took a risk, and likely below-market rates, and got equity. Because that’s one proven strategy a startup can use to try to find people who can get them to not-a-startup.
I never thought I’d see the day where hacker news, of all places, forgot how this works.
> And yet those early employees who joined before they were profitable took a risk, and likely below-market rates, and got equity. Because that’s one proven strategy a startup can use to try to find people who can get them to not-a-startup.
I was interpreting the original comment that kicked this off ("Would they have ever managed to hire anyone if they didn't?") as referring to their hiring practices now, not 15 years ago when they were first starting up. Granted I may have misinterpreted the nature of their remark.
Obviously back then, yeah, folks would probably have been given an equity stake.
So we're arguing different points.
What I personally don't know is if they were continuing to give out options to new hires to this day. Based on my own experience in a startup-now-going-concern, my bet is "no", given that it would no longer be strictly necessary to entice folks to join the company, but I could be wrong.
I definitely interpreted it the other way, owing to the "would they have ever" part. The original subthread is about their motivation for an exit. The existence of early key employees that got (potentially a lot of) equity is quite relevant to that topic, and the sentiment that it would have been harder to hire people in this industry without offering equity at a startup is not wrong.
Your critique appears to assume that every tech company or startup begins by offering below market rates. That's not universal, and who knows, maybe they had a seed round and were able to pay people appropriately. They were also founded in 2008, it was a different time in the market anyway.
Looking at Crunchbase's list of articles, the earliest news story from May '08 mentions that it was a four-man startup that was completely virtual. Don't know how that lasted, but not having an office certainly frees up the budget to pay people.
My critique assumes no such thing, it just claims it's likely. That's why I used the word "likely."
I certainly hope it's not controversial to suggest that VC-backed startups, especially thrifty ones like bandcamp allegedly is, very commonly offer lower salaries to extend runway and make up for it in the form of equity options. My last startup offer actually gave me a window of salary ranges and let me choose my salary based on how much equity I wanted. The more salary, the less equity.
Who's to say they didn't? As mentioned elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30532741), they were always focused on slow and steady growth and seemed to be more lifestyle business than wannabe unicorn. Not the shop to join if you wanted lottery ticket options. Maybe they didn't.
Because in our current corporate environment where there is essentially no anti-trust enforcement, any small or medium-sized company is vulnerable to being destroyed by one of the giants.
The very term "exit strategy" answers your own question: if you're committed to building a sustainable product, with long-term sustainable profits, caring for your employees and your customers, without any explicit plans to sell off your company to random megacorp, where it will be scrapped for parts, then you're a dumb loser trying to build a lifestyle business and you deserve to be shamed out of Silicon Valley! How dare you waste our precious venture capitalist time with that crap!?
I get it: venture capitalists are interested in the most efficient possible way to loot the economy, and funding non-viable startups until they're so overhyped that some other idiot buys the over-inflated toxic asset from them before it blows is a great way to do that.
Of course speaking out against VC and startup culture on Hacker News is going to get me downvoted to oblivion, so go ahead and mash that down arrow. Don't forget to dislike and unsubscribe!
HN is a lot more jaded towards startups and founders’ games these days. Back in late 2019 there was this thread about a Garry Tan video where the tone of the discussion was fiercely against working for startups, saying it was better to join FAANG or start your own company instead:
Yeah. They also could have IPOed, but either way the fundamental issue is that people looking for long term investments are willing to pay 10x forward earnings. How do you compete with that without getting employees to make major personal sacrifices?
I don't think elsewhere it's called an "exit strategy" to seek financing, be that IPO, Shark Tank, or the much more common and mundane options. I'm not even naively proposing that it's somehow bad to sell a profitable business in this way. I know selling a piece of your business involves diluting your control, but it is nearly always contractually required to not involve an "exit" (in terms of involvement) outside of tech. (Selling it wholesale does in any industry)
I'm just confused by two interlinked things. The terminology of "exit" and the implicit need for an "exit".
To me, the focus on "exit" does imply moving away from involvement with the business (in how the phrase sounds, and most importantly, in how it seems to be most often used). Which to me signifies a culture built around starting businesses and ultimately around becoming a VC yourself. Doing this is not notable, but presuming it is.
So either "exit" is any kind of large financing, and it doesn't involve "exit" in terms of involvement, in which case the term "exit" is strange to me.
Or "exit" is selling control and does imply "exit" in terms of involvement, in which case it's interesting that this is presumed to be the goal of starting a profitable business.
It seems in practice to be just jargon that covers both, but more the latter.
> I don't think elsewhere it's called an "exit strategy" to seek financing
I don't think that's how it is used in this context either.
A lot of early stage money in tech startups is there for the short(ish) term, and they definitely want to get their money out (i.e. "exit") at some point, not build a business over decades.
It's their usage of "exit", and the need to have a strategy for it, which drives the usage more broadly, I think. Agree it can be a bit confusing by confounding the above needs.
Right, it's the focus on "exit" also for founders (who also run the business) that puzzles me.
As for the "exit=financing" association, I made that based on your comment:
> > It's a jargon term not used in the entrepreneurial side of most other industries.
> That's because in most of the industries you are thinking of, you can get traditional financing.
> The need for an exit of some sort follows from the financial structure.
But I think I misunderstood and you were saying something more like that the lack of traditional financing leads to a form of financing that necessitates selling the business wholesale.
Re founders there is a tension: They often want to both maintain control (i.e. equity) and realize some $$ from building the company. A liquidity event of some sort is often seen as the best way to do this, especially if they've been lean on salary for a decade at that point, which is often the case.
Many people are attracted to this industry by the stories of Google/FB/etc early employees walking away with 8 figure sums and retiring after a few years of work. Thus the exit obsession.
When Epic bought the game "Rocket League" they promised not to change anything. At that time it had Windows, Linux, Mac, xbox, and playstation clients. 6 months after they aquisition they killed off the linux client (even for people who bought in-game purchases).
Epic lies. It is what they do. They are the epitome of a dangerous megacorp.
That is because Epic was buying up popular games, removing non-$exploitable$ platforms from them, and securing them behind it's software walled garden. The point of buying Rocket League and then giving away "free" versions of it away was to get people stuck in their walled garden with the hope they'll use it and buy other things. They also ramped up the microtransactions.
I don't like not being able to play the game on my OS anymore, but that's just a tree in the forest of behavior. Epic anti-competitive monopolist behavior is completely transparent if you've been watching from the start. They also attacked companies that created popular games using their engine by copying the games and releasing them for free to undercut their own engine customers (see: Fortnite vs PUBG).
Epic uses their "free" software as a weapon, just like Microsoft did in the 90s.
Which is a big middle finger to those who had purchased the game. And I can't think of a game that didn't have the quality of its player base (and so, gameplay) decline after going F2P (looking at you, TF2).
The costs and benefits around a game going F2P are too numerous to list in a HN comment, but I think it is extremely reductive to call it a “middle finger” just because you spent $20 four years and 500 hours of game time ago.
More people playing the game you like is very good for that game receiving more investment/developer time. Shorter queue times, more revenue for the game in the form of mtx, and gameplay in a competitive multiplayer game should never (this is a big should, but in the ideal) get worse for an existing player because of skill-based matchmaking (something TF2 lacks).
Making Rocket League F2P meant that skilled players could register as many new accounts for themselves as they wanted and "rank up" their buddies in competitive matchmaking. This completely ruins the competitive aspect of the game since it's far too common to join a game and get completely crushed by some grand champion playing on a brand new account, teamed up with his friends.
Another problem it enables is trolls: People make new accounts then join games to ruin the fun for everyone else. Account got banned? No problem: Make a new one. Repeat.
The ranked play aspect of the game was completely ruined after Epic bought Rocket League.
Those are problems, true, but literally every modern competitive ladder deals with the three problems you're describing: smurfs, boosting, and trolls. Overwatch dealt with all three even when the game cost $40!
In return for those problems, the game gets an instant, massive increase in players. Monetization usually increases, since modern mtx are usually much more effective than either subscription or one-time-purchase models.
I'm not saying there are zero problems with going F2P. Obviously there are. But just as obviously, since so many studios have chosen to go that route, the benefits are worth it for the company. If the revenue benefits are worth it, they keep developing the game, keep running the servers, keep fixing bugs, rather than just letting the game die. That seems pretty good.
> Monetization usually increases, since modern mtx are usually much more effective than either subscription or one-time-purchase models.
Are you posing this as not a problem? This makes a game the digital equivalent of cancer: There's a lot of it, it grows fast, but nothing about it is worthwhile or good. It just exists to prey on everything around it.
"Because I paid for the game, and despite the fact I was happy to pay for it and I enjoy playing it, I think everyone else should need to pay for it, too. Otherwise all that enjoyment I had will be undone."
I'm happy to pay for a game I enjoy playing, the game is made F2P, it becomes inundated with Eternal September players, it is no longer fun to play, I am annoyed.
As a long time player I'll say that surfing definitely increased by a lot when it went free to play, it's not entirely sunk cost fallacy. Im high enough now that it's not much of an issue but lower ranks are rife with surfing and even in my diamond 1 games I see them enough to be annoying, at least.
The input latency is noticeably higher when you play like this though. It drove me nuts last time I tried it (using Steam Controller and Dualshock 4 controller). It's a big reason why Rocket League sucks so bad on the Nintendo Switch (input lag).
You sure it's not a V-Sync issue? Most Linux games will introduce input lag with in-game vertical sync, but if you disable it and let your compositor do it's job it tends to shape up just fine.
Not saying that it was user error here, but I haven't noticed any significant input lag when I play it.
There's a Twitter account I can't find right now (help!) which shows the statements companies put out at the moment of acquisition ("nothing will change, ever, we'll always be independent") and the statements they put out a couple of months later ("all your files have been deleted, we've closed the offices, everyone is absorbed into Parent Company, so long and thanks for all the fish").
It's mostly alternative and electronica stuff though. It was founded by Warp records (Aphex Twin, Autreche, Boards of Canada, etc) but it now sells stuff for other labels as well.
Major problem with bleep is I can't redownload purchases years later if my storage/backups were to be destroyed. I've got a pile of old Autechre purchases I can't get access to anymore which is frustrating, but not the end of the world.
Bandcamp has no cap on redownloading my library, and a decent mobile app for the stuff I don't keep stored on my devices.
Bandcamp isn't a perfect platform (they finally added a volume slider after a decade+), but they were a great solution to buying and releasing music for me since the birth of Bandcamp.
I didn't really have an easy way to adjust the volume of a single tab in my browser without downloading an add-on to give each tab their own volume slider.
I've got multiple sources of audio coming from the browser since it has taken the place of so many applications. Generally I'd expect sites that sell/stream music to have a simple volume slider.
I still think Epic will allow download and ownership of FLAC files. They are quite open to ownership of content, I believe what they are trying to build is a stronger moat around their "app store". Longer term I think they will be looking to force Apple/Google to allow 3rd party app stores onto their platforms and in doing so need content.
This is a play to get content and direct relationships with producers, I don't think they will change the business model.
Hopefully they figure out how to let you backup game libraries once of these days. At least in MacOS I still can't back up an install like I can Steam games when moving to a new machine or wiping my current machine.
I've been buying more mainstream artists (who aren't on Bandcamp) from 7digital: https://us.7digital.com/
That said, I didn't spend nearly as much money there because Bandcamp showed a lot more evidence that they cared about ethics and getting money directly to artists. I have no idea how money works with something like 7digital, but I assume it doesn't pay artists as well.
7digital has really gone down hill in the last 2 years. They haven't updated their front page in forever and when they do its very slight. All the albums listed on the front page are from 2019.
Albums disappear all the time and never return, your downloads from your library break when that happens too. So be like me, download immediately and back it up.
I still use 7digital bc it's easier to actually download the mp3/flac, especially on mobile, without a 3rd party app (like Amazon) that makes you download one song at a time (as opposed to a zip of an album)
But it's a rotting, decaying place where new music doesn't get added.
I listen to mostly older shit. So no big deal for me. For now.
Yes, my impression is that 7digital does the absolute minimum. This is the case with basically all streaming services that try to compete with Spotify. I've tried all the big ones except Tidal, which has its own problems for which I refuse to touch it.
I probably can't post more links without getting auto-hidden by HN, but just try the search elsewhere too. Also try the album titles "Fresh Fruit", "I'm Looking for an Angel", "Day Dawn" or "My Car Sounds".
That is one spammer. He releases 300+ albums at once, several times per months, to virtually all streaming services. They all have the same title, and the same generic album art, often a filtered stock image. They're officially "compilation albums". He has been doing this for about a decade as far as I can tell. He uses a different made-up label each time. If you blindly search up any song by one of the classic artists he targets, likely you will get one of his "compilations", and he will get money for every play.
But Spotify is different. Those Echo Nest people have a special hatred of spammers, they kicked him out ages ago.
I'm not saying it's the same company, I'm saying Qobuz almost certainly buys backend/licensing services from 7digital. Most do. Even Spotify used to do it.
Boomkat is also good, different selection than Bandcamp but comparable in size (they definitely have some Japanese stuff that Bandcamp doesn't, e.g. Tzadik's Japanese music line).
> That being said if anyone knows of any place to buy flacs of music with great selection would love to know (especially for Japanese music which I generally have to import, thankfully they love CDs).
For buying FLACs of Japanese music, I'm a satisfied Ototoy[0] user, though I'm not sure if people outside Japan can create an account.
This does not fit your criteria of flacs with wide selection, however I think Resonate is the most interesting pro-artist option out there at the moment, albiet with an extremely limited catalog:
Resonate is nice and I like the fact that it's a co-op, but there is something missing that was present on band-camp, unless I missed it: the possibility to pay for real albums that will be shipped to you, or for you to download the .flac or .mp3 files to add to your library.
It's actually possible to download the files but the price is fixed and it seems to be track by track.
So it looks more like a replacement for Spotify to me.
Qobuz markets itself first as a hi-res streaming service. However, it also offers FLAC purchases without DRM that are yours even if you don't continue to use Qobuz. Their selection is very large and might have more options for more well-known acts.
Would Bandcamp the business model + Bandcamp the website necessarily be difficult to reproduce, particularly in an environment in which the Bandcamp niche just became no longer fulfilled due to changing practices on the part of Original Bandcamp?
I can't imagine the infrastructure to do it is trivial, but I would say the larger burden is network effect. Bandcamp has existed for a long time and I know of indie record labels who use it as their default distribution. I am aware there are indie alternatives (some of which provided in the comments to my first comment). Also disruption of service often results in loss, would someone who is no longer focused on music move there stuff over if things changed dramatically? Would people download in time, etc?
Obviously this is all speculation, bandcamp could continue on as it has been for the conceivable future, but I am less pleased about that future than I was before I saw this news.
Makes me curious about the idea of a nonprofit organization whose purpose is to manage a platform that gives as much money as possible to artists. Perhaps that's a naïve vision, but I feel like a lot of artists would hop onboard if the interface worked, and that could overcome the network effect.
Look at this sideways for a second and you'll see that you just described precisely and exactly the structure and supposed-mission of every performing rights society in the world.
And yet they just don't seem to have any interest in it.
Don't forget the third ingredient: wide adoption by underground artists and listeners. Bandcamp is, in some circles, cool. A new service would need to work very hard to earn that kind of cachet.
It seems like the perfect thing for Facebook (err Meta) to do with their social network. Bands already use Facebook for announcing tours, events, etc. so it would be a logical step to let them sell digital goods/music and give a small percent to FB. But I dunno if Meta actually cares about this business anymore.
I'm not sure about always having Flacs, but a lot of "DJ" specific music platforms like Beatport have the ability to very easily download your catalog as files of various formats. The music curated there is of course leaning toward music you'd use as a DJ but it's pretty broad still.
same here. last week i decided to not renew my spotify subscription for the first time in 10 years and bought some of my favourite albums on bandcamp. sigh
As a chronic music pirate- I love Bandcamp. I've purchased more music through Bandcamp than anywhere else. I'm not going to let myself be bummed by this news until Bandcamp actually changes for the worse. Once again everybody is letting themselves be upset by some hypothetical scenario where the new owners drive the service into the ground.
I don't even really need a hypothetical scenario. All that could happen does indeed suck, but I'm mainly irked about giving my money to Epic after 15 years of loving Bandcamp.
I hope you are right, but the track record for take-overs isn’t very good.
When the original managers leave, you get replacements from the parent company. Or managers who want to “change things” so they can impress the upper echelons. Seen it too much.
Bandcamp was the only music store I was happy to throw my money at. I guess the ol' tricorn hat may be getting dusted off real soon if anything material about the company or the selection changes.
As an OG pirate in my teens and a what elite in my twenties I’ve been spending on average about £50 a month on bandcamp for pretty much all of my thirties.
I do through my purchases and my general encouragement of traffic to the site, if I wasn't a broke graduate student and had the funds to invest in them, without a doubt in my mind I would.
However, even if I am unable to invest in them I see nothing wrong about my expressing discomfort over someone else buying them. I have seen nothing as well that they needed cash to continue operations.
This is absurdly sad to me. I like to own my media (in the most practical sense that current IP laws let me do so). I run a Plex server and use PlexAmp as my primary way of listening to music, and my criteria are always this:
* FLAC or similar, I want this to be a lossless preservation of what was on the best-available source.
* No DRM. No mandated player. Just let me download a dang file.
* "Real" flac: this is technically already covered under the first bullet, but I call it out because I've seen it happen before: if I can open the flac in audacity and see it's obviously just a re-encode of a lossy format that clips the upper and lower frequency ranges off, that's a smell and I don't like it. (I know, most people can't tell etc, but this is less for listening purposes and more for archival purposes).
* Supports the artist!
Now, I'll admit, when push comes to shove, I drop the last bullet point first. So previously, my source for music was:
1. CD's (and I would follow What's guide for making Perfect Flacs)
2. What
But then what shut down and I lost my main music discovery mechanism. Enter bandcamp! Now I've been very happy with:
1. Bandcamp (I buy CDs because I like the artwork and they're cool).
2. CD's (+ Perfect Flac ripping guide still)
Now I'm not sure what to do. Epic has really soured me on their brand already, and I already boycott their launcher and any EGS exclusives. I guess I have to find some other way to get stuff now.
Some people put a 17.5kHz low pass and high pass at 20Hz on the master. It's dumb and you have very few reasons to do it, but people still do it and keep it as default settings in "mastering chains" that get passed around and dropped on random tracks.
So you can't be sure if you're looking at a reencoding or a lossy file or not.
There are definitely good reasons to high pass at something low like 20 Hz. Very low frequency signals eat up a lot of headroom, make speakers work harder, and make it more likely to encounter distortion during parts of the signal path, all for zero audible benefit.
Having what is practically a DC offset in your signal doesn't do anyone any good.
There's definitely good reasons to do it, they're just kind of rare to see in a modern digital stack. DC offset is hard to introduce unintentionally and subsonic content is usually removed early in the mix, not on the master (if they aren't, it's arguable a bad mix).
Yeah, Epic's acquisitions don't really affect the aquired's day to day.
IDK why "protesting a launcher" means disassociating with every single thing a company does. Kind of hard to avoid every single Unreal Engine game, or Blender/Godot or any other company/game they gave no-strings grants to. Or games you played already but are on EGS when they get a PC port.
I certainly understand being skeptical of the "nothing's going to change," which seems almost guaranteed to be wrong, but still, we don't need to lament the downfall before it actually happens, even if we think it's inevitable. If they change the amount of money going to artists, or cripple the feature set, or stop supporting a platform you like, or disable downloads... that's when we lament.
Edit: for one thing, anyone who pops up with a "bandcamp replacement" right now is going to have a very difficult time arguing that their replacement is actually better as long as bandcamp is still exactly the same thing they were emulating.
But there is no gambling in Fortnite and shortly after Epic acquired Rocket League they removed their loot boxes too.
The only gambling there was in Fortnite was in the paid version of the game that nobody really played anyway. The game that is actually popular doesn't have it.
Consider alternatives to Plex (Jellyfin being the main competitor).
With Plex, you may own the media, but Plex, Inc. owns the authentication. You're not allowed to access the service running on your own hardware unless you can log in with a Plex account.
Also: losing What was indeed a massive blow, but there are others still carrying that torch...
Unfortunately, nothing currently beats Plexamp in terms of quality music listening, shuffle, smart playlists, etc.
You can still set up local login for Plex to avoid their auth on your own network or list of allowed IPs. It's not 100% what people want, but it's something.
Navidrome [0] has been a solid replacement for me. It has all the features I want aside from Keycloak/generic oidc integration, and the author is very responsive.
I haven't seen this before, but at a quick glance, here's what I love about Plexamp that's missing for me:
* Similar artists, tracks, etc
* Auto-playing similar after listening to an album
* "sonically similar" tracks/artists - not just some arbitrary decision that some artist is in the same genre, but that the songs have similar sonic profiles
* Artist/track radio based on all of the above
* "library radio": smart shuffling
* artist mix builder: creates playlists based on some artists that you choose (and includes tracks from similar artists automatically)
I have too much music to know what I want to listen to all of the time and I don't want to sit there carefully curating playlists and trying to discover things: Basically, I want a system that's smarter than I am to tell me what to listen to (but with my own music that I own, obviously)
Fair enough, I don't really use features like that as I manually explore artists. I use discogs credit lists + wikipedia entries to find albums based on a particular person or a rhythm section in a time frame.
In navidrome I view the random albums page until I find something I want to listen to. The only algo that I've found to bear fruit is youtube's recommendations, occasionally. I mostly just listen to music on there while working and occasionally it just drops great albums.
Second this. Navidrome is an impressive piece of work. Solid UX, decent core feature set, good performance, trivial to deploy (it's a single statically linked Go binary). I've definitely had some glitches with playback and so forth, so it's not flawless, but it's still very good.
Navidrome uses react-music-player [0], which unfortunately the author has very little bandwidth to maintain it. I've opened an issue about a bug where if you scrub the player to a different timestamp, and then move the mouse out of the tab so it unfocuses, it stutters. The issue got auto-closed as wontfix after inactivity, so yay...
Other than a few UX bugs I haven't had any real issues, so I'm happy with it.
I just checked their demo, do they really completely ignore genres? I can neither find a node for music by genre, nor are they shown in the tables by default.
Oh, nice. Yeah, that ticket addresses the biggest (though not the only) part of genres I’m missing (and no, not just multi-genre). It looks like this part at least might soon get integrated.
As a general note, I find it fascinating that it could be something lagging so far behind, for me playing music is either via artist (maybe, as a secondary sort, album) or via genre, rarely anything else.
I'm only really familiar with RED (I know there are others) but it didn't bounce back even close to What, unfortunately. Perhaps others did significantly better, but I think without a dump of the catalog, it's going to be next to impossible to ever get back everything that What had.
Also FTR I'm a heavy Bandcamp user and I'm disappointed by this acquisition.
RED does not have the amount of users that What had, but it vastly surpasses the amount of flacs it had on the day it went down: 864k 'perfect' flacs vs 1,360k on RED currently.
Would you mind sharing any names? I don’t mind whatever ratio limits exist for new accounts, but I deeply miss finding music through staff picks and the forums
Having experience with these platforms, they wane in comparison to the gem that What was. It wasn't just a repository / archive, it was also a thriving community.
However, we need to move on. These are currently probably the best alternatives, so thank you for pointing these out. It's just What was too damned good.
Part of it is just for fun. I like to collect the CDs. I like knowing the files I have are very faithful representations of the released media. And so on.
I really don't think it's hoarding - the overall data sizes here are small (relative to the fact that a 12TB WD Red is 250-300 dollars on amazon) and it's not like I spend my nights scouring ebay for this stuff. I just make sure I get best-available media while it's still widely and easily available.
Some of it is also that I just don't trust the current system to archive media. Sure, most popular things will be fine. But there's a lot of music that's not quite underground but also isn't popular and I wouldn't be surprised if it became hard to get ahold of the quality standards I have in 10-20 years.
Too bad. It was one of the few good independent websites left. As always, the CEO said they'll remain independent and blah blah blah in the email, but we know how that goes.
Good tip for people on the music side, and something to suggest to them:
1. Set up but do not publish your Bandcamp Subscriptions
2. Add all your music to it
3. Now it's all downloadable in your own user-side Bandcamp library. Check the format: FLAC is best.
Assuming not everyone holds on to masters once they're uploaded.
That already happens with Bandcamp. If the artist removes a song/album, you have no way of downloading it again even if you've purchased it. You only get a license to download the music while it's still available on the website. I've lost a few tracks/albums this way, thankfully I had local copies already.
I haven't had this problem, unless artists can do something that looks identical to this on the face.
I had an artist take "Album 1", "Album 2", "Album 3", and "Album 4", which I purchased through a whole-discography purchase, and merge them into "Album 1-4". It turns out I was able to download the originals anyways.
I purchased a few albums from Ghost Mice, who deleted the albums or their account (and made a new one?). They are no longer downloadable. In the entry in my purchases history, it says:
> Deleted Artist
> Sorry, Strays by Ghost Mice is no longer available. Please contact Ghost Mice for more information.
I haven't had this happen with albums that I can verify are currently unavailable on bandcamp, but I have ran into an issue before where an Artist updated the album with more tracks and a "remaster" which means I couldn't get the originals anymore. Luckily I usually buy the CD and keep it in storage as a backup I can rip from.
Not to mention the inevitable "we have updated our privacy policy" and the proliferation of tracking and fingerprinting on the increasingly slow-and-bloated site.
Maybe at least they'll add some kind of "Now Playing" feature in Fortnite, that would probably be fun for some people.
This really sucks. Bandcamp has been my go-to store for buying music for a long time. No dark patterns, lightweight site, free previews, good terms for indie artists. I don't think I can ethically shop there anymore given Epic's ownership and business practices.
> No dark patterns, lightweight site, free previews, good terms for indie artists
I am with you. One of the biggest draws for me was these what you have described. Their website experience was straightforward and honest.
They are now being acquired by a company that is the complete opposite. We won't have to wait long for Epic's dark patterns and policies to creep into a once great marketplace.
My favourite thing is that they have all sorts of social features so you can really engage with other fans and make lists and explore and do things... but you can also just ignore the hell out of that and buy some music that you like.
IIRC, this is what MySpace was supposed to be in the first place. They made the mistake of leaning into a more general social media audience while Facebook was on the rise, but it seems to me like Bandcamp excels at being what MySpace could have become.
> Bandcamp will keep operating as a standalone marketplace and music community...
40% of which will be owned by Tencent, possibly more in the future based on the whims of Tim Sweeney and the performance of Epic's primary business (Video Games).
Really unfortunate to see an independent source for music become part of a huge conglomerate.
Epic Founder and CEO Tim Sweeney has addressed this a number of times and so far given no reason to doubt it,
> I’m the controlling shareholder in Epic Games, and have been since 1991. We have a number of outside investors now. Tencent is the largest. All of Epic’s investors our friends and partners. None can dictate decisions to Epic. None have access to Epic customer data.
> Tencent is a Chinese company founded in 1998. CEO Pony Ma and the other co-founders played a lot of Unreal Tournament back then, and visited Epic in the early 2000’s. In 2012 Epic was looking to move to online games, and we invited Tencent in as an investor to help us.
> I’ve never regretted it, and the recent anti-China rage doesn’t change that even slightly, as its completely unfounded. Epic has only had positive interactions with Tencent at all levels.
> All of Epic’s big decisions are made here in the USA and as CEO I’m 100% responsible for them. I’m grateful for everyone who has spoken in support. I also read and respectfully consider all dissenting arguments of fact and principle. Just please keep it real.
I think it's naive to think that the opinion of a 40% shareholder has no influence on the CEO. Even if that just presents as a bias in their decision making.
> Although I completely agree with you that it's a shame to see yet another indie source get swallowed up by a big corporation.
For the record, I don't think that Tencent is any more evil than Disney, Sony, or Microsoft in this regard.
> I think it's naive to think that the opinion of a 40% shareholder has no influence on the CEO. Even if that just presents as a bias in their decision making.
I'm more than willing to accept that I'm being naive. All I ask is some actual evidence of this influence/bias.
Given almost literally all of recorded corporate history in the United States, the onus is very much on the other side to continually demonstrate a lack of influence/bias.
Edited to add: I find the blind faith people place in billionaire CEOs insane. Maybe save the empathy for people who need it and treat the obscenely wealthy with healthy skepticism?
There are many American companies that capitulate to Chinese political pressure without even being owned by the Chinese. Tencent owns 2 of the top 5 biggest gaming platforms in the US, but the one that got accused of being too close to the Chinese is now owned by Microsoft.
I think the question is why is there an expectation that Tencent is somehow more nefarious than any other billion dollar conglomerate?
Because in a very literal sense every large Chinese company is not only "in bed with", but a direct extension of the Chinese government, which uses its other tentacles to attack foreign companies it does not control via market manipulation and hacking.
America as one of the largest economies does all these things but in a much more disparate fashion, with the corporations fighting each other and local law just as much as foreign influences, weakening overall effectiveness.
"the onus is very much on the other side to continually demonstrate a lack of influence/bias."
does 10 years of lack of influence count? Like, all Tencent did was try to make some LoL mobile game in china (in Unity, ironically enough). That's the one thing I can't imagine Riot/Epic doing without influence. But that's not really a smoking gun. China, mobile market huge, LoL big IP. No effect on LoL proper outside of the devs working on it.
Tencent don't seem to be the kind of company that cares about sticking fingers in the pudding of what works. They invest in successful companies and help other companies (including Sony and Nintendo) operate within China. At this point it feels like the skepticism is unwarranted.
Forgive a bit of ignorance on my end...what has Tencent actually done? I know they own stake in Epic and I've heard there's controversy, but I don't know what it is.
There hasn't been any evidence that Tencent has influenced Epic, or have the power to do so. Sweeney has defended the rights of players and publishers on Epic to speak out against China and the CCP.
You think the guy who bought a racing team for funsies (and for charity!), the guy with an extensive forge setup in his palatial basement, needs more money?
I know it's hip to be cynical and all, but seriously. Even if he were so motivated by money, could anyone even put together a payout that'd be better than "continue to watch the Steam Store print money, beholden to no one because Valve is a privately-held company held by you"?
>I know it's hip to be cynical and all, but seriously.
I mean, thats many of the comments about this news, despite Epic/Tencent historally ringing true to their words.
>could anyone even put together a payout that'd be better than "continue to watch the Steam Store print money, beholden to no one because Valve is a privately-held company held by you"?
Sure. It's just a middleman storefront, and there are trillionaire tech companies right now (and more in the future). Maybe Gabe leverages Valve and jumps to a whole other industry when he tires of games. Maybe he just sells it all off and turns that into assets to will off (better than giving family a company they can't manage).
Nothing is certain and much larger internet darlings have been turned agaisnt faster.
>I mean, thats many of the comments about this news, despite Epic/Tencent historally ringing true to their words.
I can't meaningfully reply to this because I don't understand your misspelled malapropism (words ring true, not their speakers). You seem to be suggesting that Epic/Tencent tell the truth, which historically I see isn't true (Linux support, Rocket League, etc), so I must be misunderstanding you.
>It's just a middleman storefront, and there are trillionaire tech companies right now
I think you misunderstand Valve, which is currently in the process of releasing a revolutionary console/handheld PC, and its profit margins, which might be healthier than you anticipate.
>Maybe Gabe leverages Valve and jumps to a whole other industry when he tires of games. Maybe he just sells it all off and turns that into assets to will off (better than giving family a company they can't manage). Nothing is certain and much larger internet darlings have been turned agaisnt faster
Moreover, I think you misunderstand Newell himself. Steam Machines, Proton itself, and now the Steam Deck suggest a dedication to pro-consumer practices generally and videogames specifically that don't really map well to the typical bloodless VC calculus that you're trying to understand this situation with.
What's the relevance of the Gates Foundation? Gates didn't sell Microsoft in order to start it, he used his own personal fortune (fine, Warren Buffet helped, but he didn't sell any golden geese to afford it, either).
Gates sold a decent amount of his Microsoft stock to fund the foundation, something Gabe can't really do given the current structure of Valve. They would have to go public for him to do so, sell to private concerns, or something like that all actions which would dilute his control of Valve.
Somehow Neil Young (the guy who bought a model train company for funsies) and a host of his ostensibly-principled contemporaries all decided recently that they needed more money by selling their catalogs, so I would hazard against assuming anyone is immune to the temptations of more money.
Well, why not? Neil Young is 76, Sting is 70, Bob Dylan is 80. At that point it's better to just sell the catalogue for an enormous amount of money to do things with.
Because despite all the problems, there is at least a glimmer of a hope that an artist's estate will act in the interest of preserving their patron's legacy.
GabeN's personal financial stake in Valve likely realizes much more in the way of a) cashflow and b) control than any rocker's relationship with their catalogs.
Newell isn't the ageing rocker, smarting over the unfairness of the contract, he's the old-school cigar-chomping record executive, deigning to allow others to enrich him with their art. If he wants more money, he's just got to wait around for a bit. It'll arrive presently.
I'm having a little trouble understanding the motivation for this move. Did Bandcamp have a poor revenue/profit outlook and were they looking to scale? Was this just an exit for founders? I was under the impression that they had a relatively stable and profitable business, and strongly valued their branding and positioning as independent.
"I can’t imagine anyone wanting to work for or be part of Epic"
creators of one of the two largest third party game engines? A chance for your product to be integrated in a tool used by game studios throughout the world?
You really can't imagine any reason past the monetary to work with Epic?
I think their products suck and are sleazy. I don’t think I’ll ever be in a position where I have the opportunity, and I’d work if I was starving, but I don’t want to work for a company that makes bad products as a result of a bad philosophy.
It’s nice to be a programmer and have options but I wouldn’t work with a company that makes such invasive software.
Are you suggesting the primary reason SPJ moved to Epic Games is because they offered him more money than Microsoft?
Reading the message from SPJ[0] seems to indicate he is excited for the people and projects he will be working on as well as being given the freedom to continue working on education, functional programming research, and continuing to work in the Haskell ecosystem.
Of course large amounts of money are involved for an engineer of SPJ's renown and experience - that requirement exists for any company that want's SPJ's time.
That's what I mean by insulation. Bagging a "famous" engineer is a political and PR move and they get a lot of freedom to define the role, something that most of us can't do
Every one of us can negotiate and hold out for what is important to us -- sure, SPJ may have more leverage than most of us, but it's not required to be at that level to be able to find a place with freedom if that's what you are looking for.
The Metaverse (Epic has hosted music events in Fortnite that have had millions of attendees), diversifying their game store. They've also bought art and 3D asset companies recently.
Presumably game creators will be able to purchase bandcamp music from right within Unreal soon. You already can purchase a variety of things like textures, models, code, etc.
Comedy option? The Epic Games Store will be the new iTunes.
Licensing As A Service is probably a neat thing if it can be done at scale on par with the Unreal Engine Marketplace. But a lot of it boils down to "imagine if we could make IP law straightforward" which is somewhat of a moonshot.
I can never tell if comments are sarcastic are not...
but "fortnite" by epic already had concert/online experiences. They've been pretty fun. Maybe getting band camp allows them access to artists they didn't have before?
The Epic Games Store is barely even functional for video games. They haven't been able to implement table stakes features like reviews and a shopping cart, despite promising them for years now. Going wider and increasing its surface area even further doesn't really sound like a winning move.
User reviews are in the pipeline and shopping cart was added last year. And I doubt there were technical barriers that kept them from making this. Just a matter of other priorities on the store not immediately visible to western eyes (e.g., they have aggressively pursued regional pricing for the last 18 months).
From the Epic side - they have to be looking at selling music in-game as a source of additional revenue. You'll be able to buy cassette tapes or virtual vinyl for your characters boombox. Of course there will be a matching dance you can also buy but maybe there will be a discount bundle.
I don't know anything about Epic Games, but as a huge fan of Bandcamp, this feels like a bit of a drag.
There's something about Bandcamp that seems exactly right. It's an open, fair and creative way to discover and publish music, that is really distinct from the rest of the music business.
I'm struggling to see how that fits into a gigantic video game company. If it has to pull in so much money that it "moves the needle" at Epic at all, I don't see how it can remain anything close to what it is today.
Every time a small successful tech company gets swallowed by a behemoth, I feel sad. Bandcamp was one of the good ones. If Panic ever gets bought, I'll straight up cry.
An ecosystem thrives by having a variety of organisms of different species and sizes interacting. The tech business ecosystem increasingly looks more like a giant pasture of uniform grass being grazed by half a dozen aging tumorous cows.
For what it's worth, Panic appears to be one of those smaller indie developers similar to say Bare Bones Software or the Omni Group. I think those are sustainable non-startup software shops that can exist and persist on their own.
Many companies can exist and persist on their own until a behemoth decides they shouldn't.
It's not about "can this business get enough users to be profitable?" it's about "will some huge corporation decide to put them out of business because the cost to do so is a rounding error for them?"
At any point in time, Apple could decide to ship a nice FTP client with macOS, add web language support to XCode and Panic is dust.
Creators of Unreal Engine, one of the two de facto 3rd party game engines in the industry, created way back in the 90's. You very likely played some game or 6 that was made using it. Also the developers of several games themselves like Gears of War, Unreal Tournament, Infinity Blade, and Bulletstorm.
But I guess more recently people would call them "The creators of Fortnite", that free to play battle royale that usurped PUBG as "the face" of the genre. They also have a PC game store that is relatively recent and under some ire from consumers for reasons that'd take a whole essay to fully explain.
As a middleman between games and developers, the reasons to purchase a music vendor is numerous. Time will tell what they do with it, but most of their previous aquisitions are hands-off.
Thank you. Ok, I guess have heard of them then. I played Unreal! And I've heard many mentions of the Unreal engine.
> but most of their previous aquisitions are hands-off
Thanks.
Given the immediate negative reactions that people have to this news (see the countless "what is a bandcamp alternative?" posts going around right now), I wonder how it will impact one of Bandcamp's most important assets: their Daily blog. From what I can tell, the blog posts are largely written by independent music journalists. The topics are all over the place (in a good way), and they are fun, personal ways to discover music. Will we see some of these core writers leave (on their own volition)? Likewise, will the direction of what is highlighted in these posts shift to align with other Epic assets?
On the technical end, there are plenty of legitimate complaints about Bandcamp's app. I would imagine Epic = more resources for the app, for better or for worse.
My negative reaction is related to Epic's microtransaction (aka gambling, often aimed at children) and DRM use as well as being 40% owned by Tencent so your puchases now will help fund genocide.
The original story was that Fortnite had lootboxes for a few years (in that time where most of the industry was trying it out after Valve and Blizzard saw success). Fortnite is where the "lootboxes are gambling" debates really hit the high gear.
sometime in 2019 that random aspect was removed, however. To my knowledge, there is still a rotating shop of skins to purchase with premium currency. But you know what you are getting now. It's not too much different from how free MOBA's monetize their games with a bunch of cosmetic skins.
Thanks, I'm glad they aren't doing the random aspect now. Microtransactions are still a horrible way to design games but at least it is something if you know what you are getting. However, even if gambling isn't exactly the right word for the current situation there do still seem to be more recent stories about kids running up quite a bill on Fortnite. They still seem to be trying to get kids to spend as much money as possible. A quick search finds that this came up in Epic vs. Apple:
I mean, mine too. I’m very disappointed and worried about this. I’m less worried about the possible tech changes than I am about supporting a crappy company that I hate.
If you think of Epic not as a videogame company but as any other multi-billion dollar company that exists to "Maximize return for our investors by any means necessary," It makes sense. Take a company that is making money and has a large user-base, then "increase profits" (usually to the detriment of everyone involved except the company).
Maybe change of ownership won't significantly affect Bandcamp's operation, but my limited consumer-facing experience with Epic — via its game store — has given me such a bad taste that I'm not keen on using any storefront service managed by Epic.
And this is despite the vast majority of my Epic game library being free (literally hundreds of games) or deeply discounted — the storefront is really that bad. For example, when AWS went down a couple months ago, both the store app was non-functional. Apparently, the game store depends on S3 for game thumbnails and other metadata, and its caching is...non-optimal. I think I could've accessed my games by running their executables directly from file explorer. But 4 years in, this kind of slapped together design decision — on top of EGS still being bare bones compared to Steam — seems indicative of poor management.
Obviously, Bandcamp as a relatively mature storefront is not in the same situation. And remaining alive and sustainable probably outweighs what negatives Epic might bring as owner.
Bandcamp isn't really great as a store either. They don't have a real shoping cart, only client side stuff that can fail and empty your cart and/or make the entire site stop working until you clear cookies (support's response is just "oh yeah, that happens"). It seems unlikely that Bandcamp isn't sustainable from an ordinary business perspective considering that they have been voluntarily giving up their fees one day a month to support artists.
"when AWS went down a couple months ago, both the store app was non-functional. Apparently, the game store depends on S3 for game thumbnails and other metadata, and its caching is...non-optimal."
I don't see that as some kind of dealbreaker. Just an unideal choice for a consumer who may want everything to be offline and cached. The storefront is very likely some electron wrappper for their website, so I wouldn't be too surprised if their thumbnails were stored on some other server. Steam isn't too different in regards to that architecture (just not using AWS, since they preceeded that).
Games are available offline as of some year+ ago so that outage should not have affected your ability to run games.
That's a pity. Bandcamp is my go-to for getting DRM-free FLAC files straight from the artists. The site was a little crusty but they were a huge benefit as a tech-friendly independent music community.
My only complaint about the site is its nearly-useless search feature, which uses some deranged fuzzy full-text logic that is almost guaranteed not to return the result you want.
Oh, and there's no "open in app" feature on the site, or a "copy URL" feature in the app.
Otherwise, I share the sentiment that Bandcamp itself is (was) a great place to buy indie music in high quality, and that this feels like the beginning of the end.
The search is laughably bad. Searching for an exact album title, when that album is on a label’s page, will often have no results. Luckily search engines know what’s up!
I wouldn't be surprised if Bandcamp shuts down entirely in the next 2-3 years, to be replaced by some limp attempt at an integrated Epic music/streaming/gaming platform.
This is Epic, not google. They've only had 2 aquisitions "shut down", both of which were game studios. One being a studio that became independent again, People Can Fly (Makers of Outriders).
From a dev perspective of someone who's worked with several Epic tools I'm not immediately worried about what seems to be more of a technical acquisition. Historically they do seem to actually leave their subsidaries hand-off, integrating their tech into Unreal instead of absorbing it entirely. I imagine the extend of the ramifications here include some way to expand Unreal's Asset store to include music or SFX (which artists can opt into offering on the asset store).
Well, crap. Bandcamp was the perfect place for hosting my music. Hopefully Itch starts hosting music if they haven't already. I'd switch immediately. Are there any other good places to host low-budget indie music?
Soundcloud doesn't count because I get at least one spammer interacting with my tracks every single time I upload something. It's got to the point that I've started only uploading things secretly and sharing the private links with the people who will actually listen to the music.
Edit: I'm gonna experiment with self-hosting on Funkwhale. We'll see how that goes.
I know that everyone is commenting that this is the end of their independence. But, Epic Games has been really good to everyone they've acquired. Quixel is a great example. They protected Improbable when it was under licensing attack by Unity and they gave away $25 mil to help fund development for them when they didn't have to. They've given out lots of no strings attached megagrants when they didn't have to and they receive no direct revenue from. Those grants have helped independent open source 3rd party tools like Blender and Krita with no strings and no required oversight from Epic. And, some of those megagrants helped Unity and not Epic, e.g. the dialogue tool, but they didn't take backsies on their grant. They designed the grants to help the entire game industry and not just them. They have a very lawful good alignment as a company. They're an example of a really decent parent company IMHO. Also, Epic has a really solid financial foundation from Fortnite and their Unreal game engine so they're easily able to give independence to their subsidiaries without nervously micromanaging. Bandcamp is awesome so I hope I'm right.
I didn’t know about these acquisitions, I really hope you’re right.
At the moment, I’m heartbroken because of this. I’ve been using Bandcamp for a very long time now and it has been the single best thing to happen to independent music and musicians in the modern age. For me, one of its best features was the fact that it barely changed in all that time. It seemingly never chased the metrics that drive similar platforms to reinvent themselves constantly, so it’s always been a reliable, predictable partner. It’s the only product like it that I can think of where I can say that I truly believe that our interests are (were) aligned.
Now? It seems like a matter of time until their flashy front-end revamp, their new profit share agreement, a DRM option, a proprietary music player to compete with Spotify. I’m going to hope that their commitment to not changing dramatically holds true, but almost every acquisition starts with an email like this, so I’m not holding my breath.
And one of the worst parts, Bandcamp’s dominance is so thorough and its users so loyal that I’m unaware of a true competitor in their space. I’m not sure what I’d do if they did get progressively crappier.
Maybe Epic's strategy is to fight Apple/Steam (Marketplace monopolies more generally)?
They're already fighting Apple/Steam w/ gaming, maybe they're looking to have a music store already. I think undercutting fees charged by either could be a big win in their eyes.
I use all three and Epic is by far the worse software. Their platform requires root access on machines. It starts up when I don’t want it. It acts like malware. It also pegs my cpu at 100% at unpredictable times and download lots of data.
It’s good that someone is fighting Apple and Steam, but I wish some better company would enter the fight. As it is now, I’d be sad if Epic won.
GOG is much better when it comes to games, although there are a very small number with issues (there is one they sell that is effectively only multiplayer and won't run without anti-cheat software installed, also GWENT is an online microtransaction thingy but there since it is made by CDPR). Almost everything works completely offline. The website isn't perfect but not that bad (quite a bit better than Bandcamp) and you can download from the website or use a client.
I think it's interesting to note that Bandcamp has the same quarrel with Apple that Epic does. Doesn't (or didn't) their app have a brief explanatory note about why they have to send you to the browser to make a music purchase that was a subtle complaint about Apple's shitty policies?
Yes, “music purchases are not available on your device” or some such. Apple’s terms forbids them from saying it’s due to Apple’s policy. Furthermore the Apple policy forbids them from directly linking to the website purchase page.
I’m sure bandcamp received a huge amount of customer support messages about this. It’s confusing to most people.
This seems like an odd move for a gaming company. But I wonder about its implication for streamers who deal with DMCA takedowns for playing copyrighted music. Perhaps a scheme where partnered streamers are granted limited license to play music from across Bandcamp while they stream games from the Epic Store.
For a lot of indie games, it's not uncommon to see the game soundtracks available for download on Bandcamp. Part of me wonders if they could potentially integrate soundtrack bundle downloads with the Epic Store a little better.
I'm assuming that, while the store will also remain separate, there will be at least backend ties into the Unreal asset store. Could see them trying to work with some music creators to set up licenses for people to buy to add their music to Unreal games.
If you have a platform that artists allow purchasing of their music through, you can extend it to allow customers to sell/license songs in their games (developer) or buy snippets of song in Fortnite (gamer).
Sound Cloud would achieve these features too, and I am certain they considered more than just Bandcamp, as well as kept everyone under NDA during the shopping around.
I think of them as primarily a gaming tools company.
Fortnite and other games are really just Unreal Engine advertisement vessels that got successful in their own right and now serve that purpose plus making lots of money on their own.
If so, did those people not build (and thus own) this platform? Is it not their right to sell it to others? I am not asking this so much to challenge your statement, as I agree that it's darker, but to demonstrate that clearly the platform delivered value to music consumers like myself, and perhaps we as music consumers should be willing to compensate the folks who build "glue" like Bandcamp more in order to provide such a great service in the future.
If Bandcamp saw people who bought music on Bandcamp as consumers, then Bandcamp didn't understand the people who used it, and this might be for the best.
>If Bandcamp saw people who bought music on Bandcamp as consumers, then Bandcamp didn't understand the people who used it
If they DIDNT see people who bought music as consumers, they'd be shut down instead of acquired. It's still a business, not a charity case. It costs money to host music and pay the payment processors for the ability to let people use credit cards.
People who want some truly decentralized form of music hosting/publishing would be better off going back to the limewire dys than expecting a steady, supported website provide all the expected niceties.
Conversely, if Sweeney saw users as participants, for lack of a better word, this might be for ... the good?
For whatever you have in mind, the question was basically whether you see the users as the owners. I thought it is a misleading question because it is riffing on a legal notion of property and possession, without clearly characterising that property, leaving open any illegal aspect to be pointed out if that was your moral basis of the argument. And indeed, one could attempt a hyperbolic retort in which it should be definitely illegal, say, to change a running system. Or how is leninist marxism for a debatable mindset. Understandably you have rejected that debate. Of course the users are an integral part of the platform, and it's a consequential facet of the culture that some are already feeling sold-out.
Eventually it's kind of subjective, when everyone values the entity differently.
Why prefer a third-party article rather than the original announcement? Presumably for neutrality? My gut instinct is to prefer the original announcement because it seems more of a primary source. How do you weight primariness vs neutrality?
I respect your long experience moderating HN, so asking mostly with the intent enrich my own intuition. Not a rhetorical question.
It's because corporate press releases are so lame [1]. They don't give relevant background, they're saturated with dystopian smarm ("Since our founding in 2008, we’ve been motivated by the pursuit of our mission"), and they're ultimately all about spin. I don't mean to pick on particular cases—it's across the board. You'd think the smarter people at some of these companies would realize how well they'd stand out by not writing that way, but that's surprisingly rare.
You're right to reference HN's 'original source' rule ("Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), because this is an exception to it. The reason we have exceptions is that there's a higher organizing principle on HN, namely that we're trying to optimize the site for curiosity [2]. Optimizing means that when there's a conflict between that rule and any other rule, the curiosity rule wins.
Funnily enough the curiosity rule is an instance of itself because it often produces decisions that are counterintuitive, yet at the same time are surprisingly clear. This case is one of the clear ones—it's obvious that corporate press releases don't serve curiosity, and in fact they're largely intended to smooth away anything that people would be curious about.
Thanks for explaining this. When I noticed the URL change I was surprised but this makes sense. It would be great if we could pin the original source link as the top comment though. Frustratingly Variety doesn’t seem to link to it anywhere in their article and it’s nice to have the official release along with the commentary.
>You'd think the smarter people at some of these companies would realize how well they'd stand out by not writing that way, but that's surprisingly rare.
it's all about CYA. Better to be "smarm" than create any opening for a legal storm that ruins the entire acquisition, or tanks any public shares from the news.
I'm still not too sure if the "curiosity" rule applies to this new link, however. Half the article is just quoting the source and another 40% just quoting the CEO's on how happy and great the oppurtunity is. Not much real analysis or introspection unless the audience had no idea what a Bandcamp is.
That's unfortunately better than 80% of modern jounralism, but I digress.
The technical co-founder (Joe H.) left at the beginning of the year, went to Disney Imagineering. He has had a very impressive career (was an engineering manager at Apple in the 90s).
When shopping for content around didgital platforms, the #1 decision that I take into account is how much of my purchase price actually goes back to the creator. Bandcamp seems to give the best cut for music, aside from directly purchasing from an artist's website, and Epic's acquisition might end up being a net positive for getting new users & overall growth. Personally I think it's a good fit and look forward to their success.
It's boilerplate stuff, but my only experience with Bandcamp is buying a couple FLAC quality albums from artists that are too small to be signed onto a structured record label, or don't want to have additional middlemen between them and their fans. Was thinking something akin to Patreon with a well-functioning desktop app that goes beyond only having music offerings, like live shows or additional interviews with the band. Though other comments saying artists may need to have an exclusivity agreement in place to get this revenue sharing arrangement may be valid, the overhead of having to go through the traditional record label/publisher model is essentially rent seeking with providing no additional value.
It's my experience that when a buyout occurs, product quality usually suffers.
I wonder if there is a directory if beloved companies whose quality goes down after a buyout.
This past weekend, I was lamenting with a friend about how two US craft beer breweries we loved were bought out, and how they stopped producing their interesting niche beers in favor of more profitable ones. Their restaurant menus got bland too.
Not good in my book. I've been a huge fan and proponent of the platform since 2017 and have made over 600 purchases since. Mostly digital but also plenty of shirts, patches, an even physicals of select albums. My only gripe was the somewhat wanting android client which has just been fixed up (playlists and queuing).
I like it because its a simple and focused hub for artists and fans. The social interaction of the site fells like a perfect balance of presence and connection without any noise. You can see who purchased an album and leave an album review but unable to directly message users. User profiles are simply their collection and a 400 character bio that can contain links. Another plus is the simple web design they employ gives access to the mp3 if you scrape the album page. As a plan 9 user without a modern browser this made it easy to play the music by writing a script that scraped the album page for the mp3 links and fed those into play(1) creating a simple bandcamp player.
IMO Epic has already brought something good: not getting bought by Apple or Google. Whether they can refrain from bringing something bad remains to be seen.
I haven't been in an active band for over a decade, but back when I was bandcamp was the only way we ever got money online. We had it set to optional to pay, and we would randomly get $5-30 from people around the world. It wasn't much, but it always felt nice.
I also like the way they handled payments to artists, I'm not sure if they still do it this way, but back then your first 9 payments would go directly to your paypal, and the 10th would go to theirs. And they would balance it out to keep it where they only took %10.
This is one my concerns. They will lose touch with the little guys. Also, I have several musician friends and I only buy their music from Bandcamp or straight from them. Some prefer not to even bother with CDs/Vinyl and just point people at Bandcamp as preferred vendor as they get a good cut of the money. They seemed to be like a company that wasn't controlled strictly by slick marketing (and empty promises) and bean counters.
Everyone here is really gloom and doom about this news but as much as I love Bandcamp, they have made some decisions that really made me not want to use the platform. For example, if an artist releases a free song as part of an album, it is not possible to add that song to your library without purchasing the whole album. This makes no sense when I only like and want to purchase say 2 or 3 songs off the album. This alone made me uninstall the Bandcamp app and just go back to Spotify.
That's not Bandcamp's fault. Whoever listed the album configured it that way. There are settings for artists (or labels or whoever) to allow people to purchase single songs, or require that they buy the entire album.
I've bought plenty of single tracks from albums. A few of them as recently as this past weekend.
Either I didn't explain it correctly or you didn't read what I said entirely.
If an album has a free song or single, you cannot add the free song to your library unless you purchase the whole album. Even if you are allowed to purchase individual songs on the album.
In general they don't add free stuff to your library, they just let you download it. I can't recall any free album that could be added to my library (I don't personally mind, I just download stuff anyway). There used to be a $.50 minimum to add something to your library but I think they might have dropped or reduced that at some point (you do need to pay something, though).
I don't think Bandcamp's policies were ever going to work for everyone, but I appreciate them, and am a pretty active customer and user. I may have to reconsider that now if Epic starts "improving" the service.
This is tragic for all the many, many reasons everyone else has outlined (DRM, Tencent, etc.), but for me the biggest blow is the loss of the last commercially viable (profitable!), but independent champion of underground and truly independent music.
Say all you want about the freedom and quasi-independence of self-publishing to the various streaming corporations, etc., but for years now, the underground scene has thrived on and been virtually exclusively supported by Bandcamp.
It's like every independent artist in the world just got signed to a major corporate label all at once, minus the benefits to the artists. I recognize that's hyperbolic, but fuck me, I feel physically sick over this.
If anyone wants to build an alternative/replacement/FOSS tool—whatever kind of remedy for this tragedy—I would eagerly partner up and design it (can't code well, sorry).
It'd be reasonable to structure the development company as a non-profit, to prevent an outcome like Bandcamp's.
I think it may be possible to build the marketplace in a purely FOSS-y way, but it would be illegal to operate it with the wrong configuration values. I'm thinking in particular about the accounting functions, such as earmarking x% of each sale for royalties, and ensuring they go to/from the correct bank accounts.
In other words, one could plausibly release the code as FOSS, but the interface would depend on a set of corporate entities that are configured a particular way, so it would be of limited value to the median person.
It would definitely lower the barrier to entry for people to fork the business, though, which is probably a good thing for the median person.
---
I'd also be down to contribute as an engineer, if such a project already exists with momentum or if somebody wants to start it!
They have 277 albums listed, almost nothing, and it doesn't sound like they are really ready to be a full Bandcamp replacement but maybe they will be able to turn into something artists want to use.
I took a poke around; it looks like the source code is a little dead and incomplete (e.g. I see mentions of paypal, but no imports of paypal libraries or targeting paypal apis).
Some of the text (like business rules) are genuine insight/wisdom-mines, though. It might not be overly useful to fork this stuff, but it is definitely useful inspiration! Major props to the authors for open sourcing big chunks of their work and perspectives.
Thanks for the summary. I wish them luck with the more open approach and hopefully they will publish more at some point.
I only looked quickly but the part about artists and labels is not sufficient. On Bandcamp, individual albums can be listed by an artist but on a particular label with a small link to the label. It appears in the list of albums for the label and for the artist. This dynamic is very important for finding indie music and, as far as I can tell without being in the industry at all, artists often want to work with different people on the production as well as marketing side and everyone benefits. It often isn't the case that artists pick one label and stick with them for a while, they may have one or more that they release with more often but also do one off releases with other labels and self publish some albums or tracks. I don't know how it works behind the scene but I assume artists generally don't want all the labels that they release on to be able to edit everything, the labels should be restricted to editing the album released on that label unless additional permission is given. Of course, it makes sense for indiehd to start with the simpler cases (and it is wonderful that they are so open about what they are doing) but hopefully they are working on the more complex relationships needed to support the indie scene.
Yeah, I built out some models for this as a weekend project, based on my limited knowledge as a bandcamp consumer.
It's a surprisingly-complex domain!
Simply modelling all of the relationships is a fun experiment.
i.e. so-and-so is the producer and advertised co-artist, so-and-so is both an individual artist but also a member of bands X and Y, bands X and Y are part of the super-group Z; label A is a subsidiary of B, which was a subsidiary of label C from 2012-2016, was independent from 2016-2017 and is a subsidiary of label D from then until now.
Now, think about building RBAC on top of this, like you're hinting at!
No small feat, to be sure.
edit:
The main rabbit-hole I dove down was revenue-sharing, so that labels and artists can be paid out immediately, without the latter needing to wait for some settlement layer governed by the label. It turns out Stripe allows you to implement this fairly easily, and with limited fuss!
Even if the label chooses not to use this process for some reason (I wonder why!), you should be able to model out revenues for all parties, and show the artist(s)/song-writer(s)/label(s) what they should have had in gross and post-tax earnings for any given period in time.
You can even show the music consumer what % of each purchase will go to the various parties involved in producing the music, which might help in steering people towards indie labels or artists. Kind of like nutrition facts for music. :)
Showing what % goes to the various parties would be nice, although that can get even more complicated if you break out things like royalty payments for sampled music or individual band member portions. And without some kind of enforcement mechanism some people will just lie about it while it might be hard to get anyone to sign up if there is a penatly for incorrect information, unless it is an optional thing. Also I noticed the indiehd FAQ mentioning transfer fees can eat up most or all of a payment when sending small amounts of money, so the amount received also depends on how much they make in any particular period. I also once had a small label ignore or forget about Bandcamp for maybe a year and a half after I ordered a CD from them, I'm guessing some kind of email issue that caused them to not receive notifications, but any information that could change is unlikely to be kept up to date (as always :/). Direct payments or at least accounting sounds like a good feature, there do unfortunatly seem to always be people trying to rip off the people doing the actual work (I've heard of that being a significant issue in the game industry as well).
Was Bandcamp draining money or something? Were they not profitable?
I hate this. Why does everything need to roll up into other companies. I don't want anything Epic is bringing to the table, and every interaction they've had with open platforms as a business has been negative as far as I can see.
I hate how much consolidation is going on right now.
This makes me happy for the Bandcamp employees who will hopefully get a good payout for their hard work but sad for what Bandcamp will become in the future under Epic.
I’ve really enjoying going into their record store / small intimate venu in Oakland, CA.
- Looking at their forum now, they say that they are not currently using or planning to use blockchains, but it seems like their founders aren't actually opposed to it, so I'm not sure they'll be able to hold the line against it: https://community.resonate.is/t/the-unreasonable-ecological-...
They have a lot of discussion of how they'd like to try to achieve the effects of NFTs without actually using blockchain tech, which, uh... feels like flirting with disaster to me. Seems like they don't quite get the core issues and are in love with flashy technology and complex financial structures.
I don't really think a coop is a "complex financial structure" itself, but I am hoping that democratic control aspect can forestall the blockchainification. That might be naive.
> how they'd like to try to achieve the effects of NFTs without actually using blockchain tech, which, uh... feels like flirting with disaster to me
To be fair, the "you need to pay for a license to have your otherwise unassociated digital music file be legal" copyright situation is the bizarre NFT-like thing that we all take for granted.
Resonate has been around for a long time and hasn't gained any kind of traction, even with independent artists and labels. Would love to see them succeed but their identity/reason for existence seems to change regularly.
Hard to say how it'll shake out given that I think there's only now some public consciousness around Spotify's model not being great (I remember people talking about Taylor Swift refusing streaming like she was insane). Still, whether it's them or someone else, I like the idea of stream-to-own, so I'm a little hopeful.
I really hope this is just one bad move and doesn’t point to a larger, inherent flaw in the business models of smaller, indie companies. With Bandcamp now gone, there’s one less case study of truly free consumption and ownership in an increasingly rented/“streaming”/subscribing world.
Ideally I (and I'd assume other commenters) would have preferred to see bandcamp remain independent. It's not like there's a huge need to scale up quickly or provide large partnerships. Bandcamp was an effective way of paying small independent musicians with a good overall website which should have given bandcamp a reliable revenue source. Acquisition likely means the website will get worse, artists will be driven of onto other platforms (i.e. harder to discover ones), and if there's alternative financial incentives then small artists will likely end up making less (e.g. track streaming revenue).
I'd be disappointed if apple had made the purchase, though it would be less out of left field.
I too would have prefered seeing bandcamp stay independent but they were a privately owned company so that would have required a huge amount of idealism (which eventually wanes) or ambitions to compete with spotify. You can‘t always get what you want.
Hard agree, I really hate the trend of businesses having to have "an exit", be it IPO or get swallowed by one of like 6 behemoth companies. I love a good "we know who we are and are happy being it" success story which I thought Bandcamp was.
If you don't sell, it's likely the large companies trying to buy you will copy you and use their piles of money to undercut you out of business (and if they don't, any VC backed startup can try).
So you either survive as small and unnoticed, or become big enough to be interesting (and then bought or killed unless you achieve absurd growth).
Dont get me wrong, I am not happy at all about this silicon valley „winner takes it all“ mindset.
Let me explain how i see things. Bandcamp is for djs and indepenent music lovers. Although djing has managed to evaded streaming so far, it is almost inevitable to come. I am sure the folks at bandcamp were very clear about that and were looking to find a way to deal with the situation.
Bandcamp is almost as old as Web 2.0. That's why people are so confused about this. Why does a profitable 15-year-old company need to sell? They didn't say in the post, so all we can do is be frustrated.
Can you really own music? See i have been collecting vinyl for 20 years and know about the pleasure it can provide. But with digital files scarcity, age, smell, looks, condition no longer matter. There is nothing left to „own“. The only thing you own is your hard disk.
I don't care about the tactile aspect of a particular album (as opposed to the "feel"/"UX" of a particular format in general, which I do find fun) or piece of media.
I care about one thing, and one thing only: an irrevocable right to experience a particular piece of media where and when I please in the original form it was released, subject to natural degradation of the physical medium. Now that music is digital, I expect the "when" to be "at any point in my life, starting from when I purchased it", and the "where" to be "any device with the ability to play music".
Streaming is essentially asking for permission to re-experience a piece of media every time I want to do so, and Spotify's and YouTube's answer is often "no". My music library is simply a necessary evil that facilitates security against their whims.
But strangely, better metrics for artist compensation somehow don't lead to better artist compensation. I've never heard a testimonial from a band about how much better the spotify compensation model is, but I've heard dozens of testimonials and articles about artists to whom spotify pays pennies while bandcamp pays their bills.
> It's not like there's a huge need to scale up quickly or provide large partnerships
Is "good enough" compatible with "capitalism"? Even ignoring the money aspect of things; you mention the website getting worse but I'm not sure the website has fundamentally changed (for better or worse) in a decade. Their iOS app isn't even compatible with ipads, it's locked to a phone aspect ratio with massive black bars surrounding it. Yet one could make the argument that things were "good enough" tech wise. Bandcamp (in my opinion) was a product/company that was good enough. But there's doesn't seem to be societal incentives to keep companies like that around in today's world... or maybe you just don't hear about them lol
While that would be worse, being acquired doesn't have to be the only choice. The main reason everyone liked Bandcamp is its independence. That independence translated into an excellent marketplace which was great for users and artists. The preference is that Bandcamp continues to be Bandcamp, not part of an umbrella.
Hope that explains it a bit. I'm quite sad and pessimistic about this. We'll see how well our reactions fare in about 2-3 years.
Not supporting linux as a gaming platform is a down to earth decision. It's reasonable, whether necessary or not. As a linux user, I see a difference between the expectation of Linux plus driver vendors to support games and a game vendor to support linux, when it is often depending on a busfactor of 1.
>Not supporting linux as a gaming platform is a down to earth decision.
Why should I care? It was supported before Epic bought them and Epic decided to axe it. My experience with Psyonix post-Epic is far worse than pre-Epic, which is exactly what the thread is about.
As long as you don't care to point out if and how wine support is far worse, why should anyone care what you care?
There's a difference in semantics whether they violently "axe it" or carefully decide "Not supporting linux" any longer. If you do not care about the difference then because you do not understand the decision any better than I do. Arguably, the decision for selling-out will have a similar motivation as the one against linux, so I find your before/after distinction a possibly misleading false dichotomy.
There is no indication that the motivation is the same for bandcamp. Pretty much everyone in this thread is agreeing that they see bad omens, sure. I just don't agree that Epic is to blame for that.
Not everything has to be a buy out. Why can't a business just be a business and make some money for the owners and provide a service for the users and grow organically (or not). I know HN crowd often see that as an unnatural business model but it has worked for small business for eons.
I don't care who you are, when you get an offer for millions and millions, I'm sure you'll quickly sing a different tune. I'm sorry, but this kind of thinking is just silly. It's always easy to say this kind of thing from the outside.
Sure but not everyone is driven strictly by profit. I prefer to stay naive to not being motivated only by profit in my life decisions. Yes, I've made decisions that turned down large sums of money to maintain my happiness and sense of being a moral human being.
Somebody breaks into my house and tracks mud all over the floor, and the response is, "well, would you rather they killed your dog? It could have been worse."
I'd rather it remained independent, but if it was a choice between Apple and Epic I'd pick Apple. Of course, Apple would never buy them because they have iTunes. Since you raised the comparison, what do you think Epic is going to do? How do you think being dragged into Epic's war against Apple is going to impact Bandcamp as a service? It clearly isn't being bought so that it just continues as is (despite the promises). It's going to be used as a weapon, which means it's going to have to change. That change is likely to increase costs. Ultimately the day will come were "We are sorry that Bandcamp doesn't meet our customers' needs" [it no longer meets our needs of making enough money, because of all the shit we added] "And so we are adding new features to improve your experience" [ads, tracking, selling your data, subscriptions, increased price].
For me I'd rather it just remain independent. It already does what it does well enough. There aren't any obvious features that would improve the site for me, just a lot of further monetization crap for users who fall for that stuff.
what all these "disappointed commenters" wanted was for Bandcamp to continue to provide an excellent service, charging enough to stay in business and grow at a reasonable rate while allowing artists, who did the vast vast vast vast majority of the effort represtented by each sale, to profit and - unironically - connect with fans.
everyone wanted things to stay as they were, i get that. but i fail to see how that could have been more than a simple wish for anyone not owning any stakes in bandcamp.
peolpe wanted bandcamp not to give in to uber-capitalism and expect them to fight an uphill battle against spotify and the likes. That is a bit much to ask for in my view. They are forced to move towards streaming. What if pioneer comes up with a seamless spotify integration tomorrow? Usb ports would quickly become a rarity on dj equipment. i get that you like to „own“ your music and have it on your hd- but you also expect to be able to re-download things if you loose your files, right? so you are basically expecting bandcamp not to change in the future and that is out of touch with reality.
This is a big out-of-left-field move. About 12 years ago I rebuilt a record label's site, and bandcamp integration was a big part of that effort. A founder there helped get everything working.
The brand name now has a ton of cachet — I hope it continues with the acquisition.
I am glad I only made physical purchases through bandcamp now. I don't really get what Epic Games isn't going to do with the company besides make it more hostile to artists.
actually this is a good angle, people might not be giving credit to bandcamp's social aspect. every album has a list of people who purchased it, and you can go to each person and see what albums theyve collected. You can even curate/hide albums in your collection basically choosing what to recommend.
I can see Epic building off the infrastructure there for games and in-game collectibles (of which your vinyls are now a part)
I find the social graph stuff frustrating, even though I generally like Bandcamp (fingers doubtfully crossed). Using the app or the online streaming requires an account that can't be opted out of the social graph, and this makes your Bandcamp profile publicly searchable by username, a thing that is completely unnecessary to both the use of the service and the goal of music discovery.
This appears to be the first company they are acquiring that is outside of the video game industry. This may start a new era for Epic Games. I wonder what direction they are going to take? I'd guess a new player in the multi-media field, but I really dont know.
Why would they shut it down? Discontinuing a successful social app during Covid times doesn't make sense at all. Bandcamp seems to be too big to be closed like that though.
Given the Unity acquisition of WETA, I thought Epic Games's next acquisition would be to buy a movie or FX studio to compete - that is, if they aren't building their own. I think the end result of these acquisitions is that the line between making a game and a movie will no longer exist. Sometime in the future, everyone could build and render their own Star Wars in Unreal or Unity.
> This appears to be the first company they are acquiring that is outside of the video game industry.
ArtStation also falls outside the core videogame industry and would seem to be similar to Bandcamp, insofar as its a two way marketplace connecting artists with fans.
I am surprised slsk did not appear prominently in this discussion as alternative to share, own, collect lossless music. Is it due to its nature? It is certainly something of the past in terms of userbase but I can't imagine any of the services mentioned coming close to replacing bandcamp.
It's been fascinating to see a wider audience being introduced this way to the behemoth that has been absorbing so much in the past years and hearing Epic being described as a "gaming company", it's like saying Amazon is a bookstore: sure it started this way, but it's already so much more now.
They already try to own the entire pipeline for 3D creation, not just for games but anything 3D.
They don't see Fortnite as a game, but as a platform (Errant Signal had a good essay on that topic two years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNukmNDq60Q) and it's only been more visible ever since, acquiring key tools like Sketchfab, RealityCapture, Quixel, and Artstation.
I make music and sell it on Bandcamp as a way to raise funds to donate to nonprofits. It’s been a reliably honest website, and a fantastic source of both music and validation. Although it’s really tempting to speculate otherwise, I really hope they stay the same.
Big Corporations always ruin the good stuff. It was a good site with good content and fair practices. Alas bandcamp we hardly knew ye. I hope the owners made out like bandits I guess, they put in a good effort for a long time.
This is incredibly disappointing. I bought quite a bit from bandcamp, to both support the platform and the artists, and I don't think epic should be the middleman in that transaction. Thanks, I hate it.
Is it just me, or does this seem like a rather lateral move to get into more of the "marketplace" like Epic has been doing recently? Is there some grand goal that I'm not seeing here?
Bandcamp is one of the few sites still in existence that allow you to purchase things without making an account. I expect this will be the first feature to go. So long, Bandcamp.
It would be very hard to do this without taking VC money (server costs alone must be massive) - and to take VC money means you're most likely going to be hard on the metrics, which is the opposite of what Bandcamp did and what has made Bandcamp unique up to now.
"So sad" "I'm disappointed" Ok but everything like Bandcamp will always go away because it's not efficient enough. If it exists today, it's treading water! It is on borrowed time! Bandcamp was like a character in a video game with 1HP and a temporary shield called "Startup." Bandcamp is to the way capital works as life is to mortality. Nothing workable will ever exist at scale unless our species is completely overhauled.
Does anyone know Bandcamps funding situation? Did they need an exit like this? Or can people not run businesses long term for profit anymore?? Such a shame. If you think Epic will just leave them alone you just need to read the corporate speak in the first paragraph of the announcement:
“I’m excited to announce that Bandcamp is joining Epic Games, who you may know as the makers of Fortnite and Unreal Engine, and _champions for a fair and open Internet._”
This is a bummer, but I'm getting giddy at all of the opportunities for indie devs to rebuild the web. It's a guarantee anything acquired is going to get destroyed in the mid to long-term and people will be thirsty for something that isn't a corpo-nightmare. Even more fun is the opportunity to do that with decentralized data.
Could I please get an overview of Epic's bad practices and decisions? Currently my frustration from this is rather unfocused—and mostly comes from Bandcamp being a couple heads above everyone else in terms of user-friendliness and having outstanding selection: from Gruuthaagy, Jungle Death and Mamaleek to big names.
My main gripe is their willingness to support systems that are functionally gambling directed at children. I also didn’t love their attempt to essentially “weaponize” their young teen fortnite audience when they got into that dispute with Apple a few years ago over in-game purchases transferring from their end to the iOS version.
>“Fair and open platforms are critical to the future of the creator economy,” Epic Games, best known as the company behind battle-royale game “Fortnite,” said in announcing the pact.
So how do 3D artists go about designing and selling skins to Fortnight players without giving Epic a cut?
My immediate thought on this was that we could see in-engine asset stores promoting music from artists and potentially even having predefined contracts for easy of integration? Like, this could be a pretty good thing if it's handled properly
It's difficult to understand how an indie focused site will sell to a big generic company. They obviously know that Epic is going to have different culture even if they say the contrary. So probably making money or exit was the priority here.
This makes me sad. Hopefully, new, inovative and non-VC funded solutions will fill the void. I recently discovered the stream2own service Resonate. Really cool stuff, but the catalog of artists is currently small (~3500 indie artists).
Wow. Did not see that coming. I love Bandcamp, tho strangely stagnant as a product, but I loved its chill communal vibe and lack of tryhard tech for techs sake.
Wonder what the future holds with this acquisition.
Totally not thought through, but it seems like it could be good if once a company hits a certain size they have to increase their difficulty level and only grown from the inside, no acquisitions.
Not sure if it's a good thing pals, I'm a big fan of bandcamp and I have a really nice collection there, should i expect some drastic changes to the platform?
I can't help but think we never solve "how to pay musicians" until we first jettison the absurdities, specifically "paying for downloads."
Start with the assumption; mp3s are free to create and copy, and there is no point in pretending that this isn't simply how it is, and should be considered a universally good thing. Even streaming a song a second time is stupid.
Now that we've accepted this, how can we collectively figure out some way for me to send money to my favorite artists so they keep doing their thing?
(And I say this as someone who does fairly regularly pay for digital downloads.)
Me too, but I use it in a way I know many music artists wouldn't be happy with.
I don't care about "personal rewards", but I do care that my contribution makes a tangible difference to what the artist might be able to do. Basically, if they're already doing great, I won't be gilding their lilies, no matter how much I love them.
this will be my new goto example for why VC is a cancer for businesses that can and should be cash positive almost immediately and could instead just choose to be "run well at a reasonable growth rate" instead of betting everything on number 17.
I don't yet know if it's any good, but I'm looking into Funkwhale right now, which was originally created as an open source alternative to Grooveshark. It is, however, explicitly designed for music under free licenses (whether creative commons or something else), so it's not an option for many artists.
Another option I just came across is https://codeberg.org/simonrepp/faircamp which sets out to be an open source Bandcamp clone, conveniently enough. It does appear to have payment options, but I'm unsure whether they're actually functional since I haven't tried it myself yet (but I plan to).
It's really sad to see these almost "public goods" platforms be acquired by other companies, which will probably turn them in something else at some point because their vision isn't the same.
This could probably be avoided by using different strategies. For instance, if Bandcamp was an NGO of some sort, or has a social contract attached to it, etc. it could have terms for not being acquired.
