Epic Games acquires Bandcamp(variety.com) |
Epic Games acquires Bandcamp(variety.com) |
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.
You, capitalism. Again.
So how do 3D artists go about designing and selling skins to Fortnight players without giving Epic a cut?
Someone should get started on a viable alternative. Is it possible to yield a mvp over a couple of weekends? :P
Wonder what the future holds with this acquisition.
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.)
I'm not sure it exactly fits your ideal, but it's closer than anything else I've seen to how I'd like it to work.
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.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bandcamper/nafpaeh...
I've spent thousands of dollars on Bandcamp. This makes me really, really sad.
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).
- They used to be really into blockchain / smart contracts: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/25/resonate-spoti...
- 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.
> 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.
> no blockchain or such in the works; previous experiments in 2018 hurt the co-op far more than they helped it.
https://social.coop/@hakanto/107889107767011612
So that's cheering!
The brand name now has a ton of cachet — I hope it continues with the acquisition.
I can see Epic building off the infrastructure there for games and in-game collectibles (of which your vinyls are now a part)
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.
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.
That's your opportunity
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.
Now if they can finally make the Android app a decent music player I'll revise my judgment :)
As the lyrics of a contemporary classic goes, "20,000 years of this... 7 more to go."
“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._”
I'd be disappointed if apple had made the purchase, though it would be less out of left field.
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
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.
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."
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.
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.
They ditched the Linux version of Rocket League. That counts as a blown acquisition to me.
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.
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).
Tech is kind of a dark forest now (https://thoughtcatalog.com/christine-stockton/2021/02/heres-...).
I've worked for 2 companies that didn't sell and were obliterated this way.
That's been the state of tech ever since Web 2.0 or so.
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.
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).
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.
Epic lies. It is what they do. They are the epitome of a dangerous megacorp.
Would be interesting to think of acquisitions where this wasn't the case. The only one that jumps to mind is Zappos.
Bleep offers FLAC (even 24 bit WAV).
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.
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.
This is a play to get content and direct relationships with producers, I don't think they will change the business model.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v12/ (scroll down).
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.
It doesn't have a ton of music currently, but the payout to musicians is very good, so it could become more popular in the future.
https://www.junodownload.com/labels/Ruff+And+Tuff+Recordings...
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.
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
It’s sad to see Bandcamp go. Because in tech an acquisition means loss of that independence.
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.
* 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.
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.
Maybe at least they'll add some kind of "Now Playing" feature in Fortnite, that would probably be fun for some people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I fell behind on downloading all of my 426 purchases on bandcamp, but now I feel a strong desire to catch up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
big new release coming this month with artist-side album drafting and merch features
I'm not affiliated, but I've known it for a while. It was known as IndieTorrent back then.
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.
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.
I’m sure bandcamp received a huge amount of customer support messages about this. It’s confusing to most people.
Amazon is a bookstore.
Epic sees Steam and Apple (and Amazon) and knows that the platform is the chokepoint where all the money is.
It's also an easy way to to procure licensing to sell music content in games. I'd be interested to know why they passed up others like SoundCloud.
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.
I respect your long experience moderating HN, so asking mostly with the intent enrich my own intuition. Not a rhetorical question.
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.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I would have, at face value, considered the acquisition a bit odd given Epic's primary product.
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.
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.
Epic will bring nothing good to the service.
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.
I've bought plenty of single tracks from albums. A few of them as recently as this past weekend.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I’ve really enjoying going into their record store / small intimate venu in Oakland, CA.
So you can't be sure if you're looking at a reencoding or a lossy file or not.
Having what is practically a DC offset in your signal doesn't do anyone any good.
There are also full range mp3s, since iTunes by default doesn't apply a hard 20khz lowpass like LAME does.
I mean, why not continue doing what you are doing until the thing that you like actually goes to shit?
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.
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...
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.
Just FYI there's sites that take in What refugees
Also FTR I'm a heavy Bandcamp user and I'm disappointed by this acquisition.
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.
> 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.
https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/111396399928729190...
Although I completely agree with you that it's a shame to see yet another indie source get swallowed up by a big corporation.
> 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 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 can’t imagine anyone wanting to work for or be part of Epic, so that’s my assumption of gobs of cash.
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?
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.
Also could be a source of creative content to generate NFTs, maybe even tie that to licensing of music used in game livestreams.
bandcamp, as a business that just does a thing very well and fairly, is never going to become as big as Google or Facebook.
so, founder/VC/board now require it to be bought out for a huge multiple of revenue and be stripped for parts.
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.
And yet they just don't seem to have any interest in it.
Want an example? Here's Deezer:
https://www.deezer.com/search/%22Arrows%20in%20the%20Gale%22...
Here's 7digital:
https://no.7digital.com/search?q=Arrows%20in%20the%20Gale
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.
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).
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.
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.
I will agree that they're pretty good, however Jellyfin has grown to become better in terms of both licensing model and feature set.
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?
https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/fort-nite-concert-seri...
It’s nice to be a programmer and have options but I wouldn’t work with a company that makes such invasive software.
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.
> Deleted Artist
> Sorry, Strays by Ghost Mice is no longer available. Please contact Ghost Mice for more information.
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.
It's not hypothetical, it's evidence-based reasoning.
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.
As for SoundCloud, either they didn't come to terms for whatever reason, or they didn't try to begin with if marketing considerations favor BP.
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.
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.
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.
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.
rutracker is a pretty open alternative.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Eventually we're going to build software for aggregating related URLs.
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.
I'm more than willing to accept that I'm being naive. All I ask is some actual evidence of this 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?
I think the question is why is there an expectation that Tencent is somehow more nefarious than any other billion dollar conglomerate?
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.
I don't think "blind faith" is fair - I just haven't seen any reason to believe Epic is controlled by Chinese interests.
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.
[0] https://discourse.haskell.org/t/an-epic-future-for-spj/3573
> 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.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/15/21438194/rocket-league-fr...
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.
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).
c.f.: sunk cost fallacy
Not saying that it was user error here, but I haven't noticed any significant input lag when I play it.
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.
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. :)
Good luck if you decide to work more on it!
* 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)
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.
Other than a few UX bugs I haven't had any real issues, so I'm happy with it.
0: https://github.com/lijinke666/react-music-player
1:
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.
https://www.thegamer.com/judge-fortnites-microtransactions-c...
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 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.
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.
There's a reason I haven't played TF2 in years, and it's not because I'm indignant that others didn't have to pay for it.
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.
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.
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.
They made a lot of money.
> it only buys popular software, because it's goal is getting more people locked into it's walled garden Epic store.
The rev stream is royalties from engine use since the free tiers are locked to UE, not EGS.
> 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.
Quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUBG:_Battlegrounds#Epic_Games...
Article: https://www.pcgamer.com/pubg-exec-clarifies-objection-to-for...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/27/17509114/pubg-fortnite-la...
There lawsuits seem a bit empty
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
In SV that's a business model.
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.
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.
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!
There aren't many "startup industrial companies"
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.
Almost, but it's these guys:
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.)
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:
https://blog.bandcamp.com/2022/02/10/the-bandcamp-app-now-su...
Which is pretty incredible as I view that as a core feature of any music player.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Yes I should have been clearer.
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.
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.
I never thought I’d see the day where hacker news, of all places, forgot how this works.
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.
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.
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.