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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?

#181

Post by weinzierl »

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.

7digital also removes content occasionally, so be sure to download and archive what you've bought.

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

#182

Post by biorach »

throwaway15968 wrote: post #123
ace2358 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you and everyone on the team. You changed music. Full stop. You gave us what we wanted. Full stop. We love you for your work.

That means the world. <3

Seconded. Bandcamp is one of the few platforms that I really respect. It's done great things for artists and listeners. I'm happy to spend money there.

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

#183

Post by raffraffraff »

Modified3019 wrote: post #20

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 i…

Bandcamp, 7digital, rarely CDs (but I do still have a USB DVD recorder so I can still rip). And honestly, if I find that something is no longer available (like Spirogyra's "Bells, Boots & Shambles") and the composer is no longer living, I'll take it off something like YouTube if there's a decent quality rip available there. In some cases, original recordings aren't great quality anyway.

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

#184

Post by vsnf »

davidgerard wrote: post #175
rendall wrote: post #163

> Game music and classical are the same genre, right? I know that was meant facetiously, but the music in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for one is quite beautiful and made with actual instruments like piano, oboe, violin, guitar. Interactivity is one direction for true innovation in contemporary classical.

This is the sort of thing I meant, yes :-) My kid loves (a) game music (b) classical (c) complicated metal, and I will absolutely hold that these are different faces of the same thing.

The large orchestral scores of many games certainly have deep ties to classical. Parts of the Zelda, Final Fantasy, Dark Souls, etc. But, and this is likely obvious to all involved but said for posterity anyway, not all game music is classical derived. Metroid Prime is electrosynth, Paper Mario is pretty jazzy, and Persona is supremely jazzy with dashes of rock.

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

#185

Post by Washuu »

throwaway290 wrote: post #159
pdntspa wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe but I don't do critical listening on club systems unless I'm checking my own mixdowns. Unless the DJ is redlining (which they shouldn't be if they're competent) the audio should come out of the mixer relatively unmolested. My critical listening rig is a broadcast amp with two passive studio monitors. Should also note I can't hear the different between well-encoded 320kbit and FLAC. But lower bitrates (256kbit a…

I showed a friend once how bitrate and sampling frequency start to really matter when doing stuff like slowing down a lot. But I guess it's not typical in DJing.

I generally record everything in 44khz, but I will record at 192khz if I know I will be doing any time stretching. The high sampling frequency matters for that.

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

#186

Post by xrd »

moab wrote: post #39
ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #19

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" (…

Check out https://rateyourmusic.com/ which is good for discovery, e.g., https://rateyourmusic.com/genre/atmospheric-black-metal/ and the all-time lists: https://rateyourmusic.com/charts/top/album/all-time/g:atmosp... Users also make wonderful charts on this website. also, hello from a fellow what refugee!

I'm very happy you posted this, the information here is really interesting. Thank you.

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

#187

Post by deadbunny »

Modified3019 wrote: post #82
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true Amazon doesn't offer lossless audio downloads, but they're very good quality, and DRM-Free. iTunes downloads are AAC, 250+ kb/s (remember this bitrate is with a more efficient codec). I'm probably opening a can of worms here, but I'm really quite skeptical more than one in a million people could tell the difference between iTunes and lossless in a blind test. Maybe drop that to one in a thousand for Amazon…

For me it’s not about somehow hearing a difference (at least, not anymore, especially at my age. Thought I do remember the days when mp3s had a good chance of sounding tinny from bad encoding, even when done by myself from a CD). Honestly, I probably have a nonzero amount of bandcamp flac files that are actually just mp3’s that were converted, but I’m unlikely to ever know unless I analyze the waveform. For me it’s a…

This is what I do as well. I prefer to have the FLAC files for local playback and archiving then have a script which watches the FLAC folder, converts to v0 MP3 which then gets synced to my phone using Syncthing (because phones have such limited storage these days without Micro SD).

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

#188

Post by vintermann »

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.

Afaik 7digital is the main backing service of a lot of streaming sites like qobuz and Deezer.

7digital is chock full of spam. Spotify, for all their faults, has some people who care about quality on those sort of things (the old Echo Nest people). 7digital and their white-label frontends don't, they're skeleton crew operations.

I hope they understand, they can't run Bandcamp like that. Bandcamp has had problems like this in the past, with people spamming the services with other people's music and pretending to be them. It happened to an old classmate of mine who's a reasonably well known Jazz musician. Someone pretended to be her on Bandcamp for years.

If this roll-up company plans to run Bandcamp like 7digital, there will be a ton more of stuff like that.

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

#189

Post by vintermann »

hatsix wrote: post #88
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.

I work at SongTradr. I know nothing about the acquisition, but can answer any other questions you have. I feel like Bandcamp 100% fits better with SongTradr than Epic.

Well, that doesn't take a lot, because Epic isn't so much a company as a pile of money which doesn't know what to do with itself.

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

#190

Post by pxoe »

deng wrote: post #161
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

> It's perfect as it is. Artist uploads music, people pay for music and download it. Don't change anything. Coudn't agree less. Listen: I love Bandcamp and buy a lot of music there. However, it could be so much better. It is far from perfect. For starters: the collection view. It's as barebones as possible, just a simple grid of stuff you bought. No way of separating albums and tracks (which is why I don't buy single…

on discovery, at some point they turned tag pages from paginated into endlessly scrolling kind, and that's been one of the worst thing one could do for discovery. no longer can you actually browse the catalog top to bottom, you're forced to scroll and start from the top every time. oddly enough, there's still pagination in the Discover section of front page, but it only goes back 200 pages, which really isn't that much (those 200 pages might only go back a day/a month/a year, depending on how active a tag is).

for how much music there is, the discovery tools are kinda lacking. you can't really browse the full catalog. especially for stuff that's previously released, but not "popular enough" to be surfaced in 'best selling' sorts. stuff that doesn't make it into 'new' - which can literally be like 'oh, this released a week ago? it's not new already', and doesn't make it into 'best selling' that really only makes already popular stuff more popular, which isn't doing much for actual discovery of others. there's a lot of music that's out there and just yet to be discovered, and it's being held back by platforms that don't really do anything with it. held back by a catalog that lacks browsing tools and doesn't get more things brought to surface. i'd rather see platforms move on from 'making popular stuff more popular' and 'only ever showing stuff that's new new new', and make an actual effort to make all things discoverable.

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