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

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

#91

Post by bombcar »

rectang wrote: post #53
7373737373 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'd cite the Apache Software Foundation. * Unlike many other tech foundations, it's a 501(c)(3) charity, which dramatically limits the ability of industry titans to buy influence — since donations are tax deductible and thus cannot be used to unduly advantage any commercial entity. * The Board of Directors is elected by the "Membership", which is primarily comprised of individuals who have contributed the most toward…

It can work and there are some organizations run that way.

But just because something is a charity with a Board of Directors doesn't mean it can't be looted in various ways. It's happened before and will happen again.

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

#92

Post by sensanaty »

And once again the money hungry sociopaths are going to ruin a perfect platform that does exactly what it's supposed to and not an iota more on chase of that elusive "infinite" growth, something that only children below the age of 5 and apparently people with MBAs believe to be something actually attainable.

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

#93

Post by bombcar »

samtheprogram wrote: post #22
lucasgonze wrote: post #12

Epic owning Bandcamp never made sense. Getting Bandcamp off the books is likely to make the business look better to investors.

Bandcamp is profitable. How would selling at what's likely a loss from their purchase price going to look good to investors?

Investors like to see a company buying up tangentially related businesses, it's good for business!

Investors like to see a company divest themselves of non-core-competency sections of its portfolio, it's good for business!

Investors are sheep.

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

#94

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

hatsix wrote: post #90
pdntspa wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a DJ on mid-range monitoring hardware and I can definitely hear the difference with apple's encodes vs FLAC, at least on their older encodes. I am not 100% sure its the compression protocol (could be differences in mastering since streaming has different requirements) but the attentuation on bass and watery-sounding cymbals stick out like a sore thumb in the right listening environment I only buy music on itunes…

then you should check out SongTradr's other recent acquisition, 7digital.com... not only do they have flac, but many have 16 and 24bit available.

There's no difference in the data that will be delivered to you DAC using flac or whatever the non-compressed version was.

flac is a lossless format. If it started as 24 bit wav, nothing is lost when you get the flac version of that. it's just smaller.

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

#95

Post by slantedview »

throwaway15968 wrote: post #24

Throwaway, but I work at Bandcamp. We're all very frightened and don't know what the future holds. We were told that some, but not all, will get offers from Songtradr and it may be up to a month before we receive an offer. It's pretty depressing.

Best of luck! I hope it all works out for you and everyone there, but it might be prudent to be prepared either way.

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

#96

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

JohnFen wrote: post #62
Kye wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lossless is mainly for mixing/remixing, not listening.

I disagree. As a listener, the lossy encodings I've heard are fairly annoying, especially in the higher frequencies. I haven't heard every lossy encoding, of course, and there may be an actually good one that escaped my attention.

There's no evidence that more than a very small percentage of humans (if even that) can differentiate between reasonable bit-rate pyscho-acoustic (lossy) compression and the source material.

Double-blind tests have made this abundantly clear.

If you really can hear a difference, you've either got particularly poorly compressed files, or are in a tiny minority of us.

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

#97

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jerhewet wrote: post #51

https://bandcamp.com/jerhewet Very sad. Bandcamp was wonderful ... while it lasted.

As of right now, it's the same as its always been.

I understand the inclination to pessimism, and it may well be very well grounded, but we should perhaps try to be optimistic and aggressively activist at the same time.

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

#98

Post by hatsix »

manicennui wrote: post #7

Ugh. I wasn't happy that Epic owned it, but they didn't seem to be doing anything to harm it yet. I don't know much about Songtradr, but I don't trust a company that is focused on licensing and not creation.

SongTradr's main business focuses on earning money for musicians. We aren't in the business of owning music and then licensing it, we're in the business of connecting musicians with companies that want music. some of it is advertising, some is YouTube/content creation, and some is for streaming (https://pretzel.rocks, which is how I joined the company).

We support the artists by finding diverse ways for them to monetize their music. I've purchased a dozen albums on Bandcamp. All of the artists are already on pretzel (our content acquisition team works hard, especially on internal referrals), but I look forward to simplifying the process down to a simple click (right now it's DDEX and spreadsheets)

I'm not a fan of our marketing, but it's more aimed at content licensees, not licensors.

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

#99

Post by Nition »

doublerabbit wrote: post #34
meindnoch wrote: post #25

I beg you, can you please not fucking ruin it? It's perfect as it is. Artist uploads music, people pay for music and download it. Don't change anything. Don't add new features, don't enshittify existing features, don't make design changes, don't do anything. Bandcamp is done, no need for any further changes, just put it in a cabinet and let it run. Thanks, Someone who've spent thousands of dollars on Bandcamp

Greetings and thank you for expressing your valued concern. We wish to emphasize our commitment to customer feedback in our ongoing enhancements. Allow us to assure you that you will enjoy our latest AI music generation suite as well as an cutting-edge state-of-the-art next-generation AI album cover generator. In tandem with these remarkable enhancements, we will be sprucing our algorithms allowing you to expand your…

You forgot to mention that you're ending the DRM-free direct download option, don't worry because you can listen to any of the music you've purchased any time in our newly updated website or app! It's now EVEN EASIER to take your music anywhere! No more copying files or worrying about backups!

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

#100

Post by hatsix »

JohnFen wrote: post #37

This makes me very nervous. Bandcamp is one of the few great sources to buy new music and support artists rather than labels. I hope that it doesn't get ruined.

I work at SongTradr, and while I'm not involved with the acquisition, I wouldn't expect it to drastically change for end users. I hope that we'll drastically improve things for musicians, offering them more ways to earn money from their music.
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