Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bandcamp has been sold to Songtradr. What does this mean for the musicians?

rocknerd.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 254 posts

Re: Bandcamp has been sold to Songtradr. What does this mean for the musicians?

#11

Post by codetrotter »

mgkimsal wrote: post #4

> Songtradr is talking up using its licensing prowess to give opportunities to Bandcamp artists — including licensing on Epic games. So... Epic sells bandcamp, a profitable business unit, to another entity which will then sell bandcamp assets back to ... Epic. ?? And Epic's competitors. Why would Epic go out of its way to support a company that is supporting its competitors?

If they had plans to use Bandcamp for Epic assets, did it work? If not then I guess that’s a good reason to sell it to someone else.

Re: Bandcamp has been sold to Songtradr. What does this mean for the musicians?

#13

Post by wnevets »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #2

> Bandcamp is good, it’s profitable and sustainable and it basically works. If they're profitable then why do we need to play these games? Why can't we keep a good thing going?

> If they're profitable then why do we need to play these games?

Because that isn't enough we must have infinite growth.

Re: Bandcamp has been sold to Songtradr. What does this mean for the musicians?

#14

Post by dylan604 »

7373737373 wrote: post #10
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #2

> Bandcamp is good, it’s profitable and sustainable and it basically works. If they're profitable then why do we need to play these games? Why can't we keep a good thing going?

Is there a list of organizations/platforms, like lichess.org that have/will never sell out?

how can you have a list of something like "will never"? a list of people claiming "will never" but never is a really really long time, and nobody can predict the future.

Re: Bandcamp has been sold to Songtradr. What does this mean for the musicians?

#15

Post by rodgerd »

slg wrote: post #3

Epic bought Bandcamp less than 2 years ago. No one had any idea why at the time and now they are already selling it, almost certainly at a loss. This is the type of situation that would cause senior leadership heads to roll if there was any justice in the world, instead 16% of employees get laid off.

Turns out that growth based on an assumption that your model of "slot machines for children" is not infinitely exponential and cannot subsidise "free games on PCs to compete with Steam while trying to dictate to Apple how they build their products".

Re: Bandcamp has been sold to Songtradr. What does this mean for the musicians?

#16

Post by tmountain »

7373737373 wrote: post #10
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #2

> Bandcamp is good, it’s profitable and sustainable and it basically works. If they're profitable then why do we need to play these games? Why can't we keep a good thing going?

Is there a list of organizations/platforms, like lichess.org that have/will never sell out?

How could someone predict that? What litmus test could possible evaluate organized groups of humans resistance to greed?

Re: Bandcamp has been sold to Songtradr. What does this mean for the musicians?

#17

Post by 7373737373 »

tmountain wrote: post #16
7373737373 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a list of organizations/platforms, like lichess.org that have/will never sell out?

How could someone predict that? What litmus test could possible evaluate organized groups of humans resistance to greed?

Lichess, legally, is now a charitable organization

https://lichess.org/terms-of-service

Re: Bandcamp has been sold to Songtradr. What does this mean for the musicians?

#18

Post by Kye »

I don't know who needs to hear this, but you can download all the music you uploaded by starting a draft of a Bandcamp subscription service (after buying something to create an account and profile if you don't have one). All your albums will be added to your personal collection. I suggest FLAC.

edit:

Magic trick: open one (1) album. Change it to FLAC. Download.

Now FLAC is default for the others you open.

Re: Bandcamp has been sold to Songtradr. What does this mean for the musicians?

#19

Post by ye-olde-sysrq »

I've posted something to this effect before but I'll post it again. I'm terrified someone is going to enshittify bandcamp.

I used to be a huge what fan, primarily for discovery. Never would've known I liked atmospheric black metal if not for them.

When they closed, I didn't really have enough "in" in the scene to know where other refugees went, so I just shopped around for anywhere else that would let me get "real" (in the what sense of real - decent encodes from raw source material that have the full spectrum and aren't just FLAC encodes of "high quality" mp3's). I don't pretend to be able to hear the difference, but I like it for archival purposes. I have plexamp transcode the audio anyway when I'm on mobile.

Turns out most people don't give a shit so most places don't offer flacs. Except bandcamp. Plus they pay artists fairly, which ended up being as important to me as the flacs as I came to support indie bands for whom selling on bandcamp was a huge lift. I like seeing CDs literally come from residential addresses in Sweden. I like supporting the random 1 dude making awesome metal out of his basement.

Re: Bandcamp has been sold to Songtradr. What does this mean for the musicians?

#20

Post by Modified3019 »

Make sure to archive your bandcamp collection, which you can do with the following script: https://github.com/easlice/bandcamp-downloader Other downloaders only target the openly available mp3 files.

I have a straightforward guide on how to get up and running on windows here: https://github.com/easlice/bandcamp-downloader/issues/21

You should always archive your collection anyways. One negative thing about bandcamp is that artists/labels/bandcamp can remove anything at anytime for any reason, so things you paid for can straight up disappear. This was very disappointing to discover. Note that sometimes things are set as hidden, rather than outright removed. This info may be outdated, as the relevant support page seems to gave changed from the last time I looked at it.

Because of their no DRM policy and full on downloads, not just streaming, Bandcamp has basically become the only place I’ll buy music outside of CDs.

I’m happy enough to hand artists money if it’s easy and I can archive a lossless copy, but if they start fucking around with things, I’ll go right back to doing what I was before. That said, if they fix the outright removal of paid things problem, and start treating “artist” as first class instead of “label” in searches and links, I’ll be singing their praises.

Post reply on HN