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

241–250 of 254 posts

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

#241

Post by xoac »

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.

That type of processing is super common in DJing, but the understanding of how it interacts with lossy files is not.

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

#242

Post by CodesInChaos »

joveian wrote: post #236
CodesInChaos wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is bandcamp watermark free?

No, not for a while. As I understand it they didn't have one at first but after some asshole used it as a backup (since they let anyone upload "music") and made a blog post about it they added one. Quite possibly they wanted to anyway and it was just a convenient excuse.

Do you have a link?

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

#243

Post by rglover »

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.

Hadn't heard of SongTradr but I'd agree. Huge opportunity for underground musicians to get their music licensed for commercial stuff.

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

#244

Post by hamburglar »

manicennui wrote: post #227
hatsix wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mon…

Every company has rationalizations about how they are helping their customers, and one can hardly blame artists for doing what they need to do in order to survive, but I doubt most of them dream of having their work used by big shitty brands.

I know a few that have recognized how hard it is to make a living as a musician and, as an adaptation of sorts, wholeheartedly jumped into the world of “sync licensing” (or is it synch?), where they are actually focusing on writing music specifically to appeal to the commercial needs of “big shitty brands.” It makes perfect sense to me. It’s a way to use your skills to help someone else do what they want to do. It’s not like I’ve had the luxury of building whatever software I want for most of my career. It usuall comes down to what some product marketing douche is convinced will make money.

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

#245

Post by hamburglar »

JohnFen wrote: post #220
hatsix wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hope you're right. I'm scared nonetheless, though. It doesn't help that SongTradr characterizes itself as a "music licensing platform". A part of my fear is that they'll try to "improve" the service. In any case, I'm just afraid. Hopefully, time will show my fears were unsupported.

Best case scenario in my mind is that bandcamp stays almost entirely the same, except artists get some additional settings on their music metadata that lets them turn on “offer my music for licensing on SongTradr” and set prices and terms. Nothing different at all on the bandcamp fan-facing experience, but it makes the music suddenly show up in licensing searches on some other b2b UX and is just another no-brainer income stream for the artist.

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

#246

Post by hamburglar »

hatsix wrote: post #133
colesantiago wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

famous last words... i'll check back in a year and see how bandcamp has been gutted by songtradr.

From what I can tell, Epic did the gutting today, and it's left to us to pick up the pieces. It doesn't make sense to me, letting everyone go before the acquisition, why not let the acquiring company figure out what to do with the employees. It stinks of internal politics. Songtradr has done a good job with previous acquisitions, including mine. I'm no longer working on that product, but it's doing well. I don't agre…

Based on the bandcamp employee throwaway that commented earlier, I wonder if epic just wanted credit for cutting a lot of jobs to make shareholders happy. That “16%” announced is a big number that would be less attention-grabbing if it didn’t include all of bandcamp.

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

#247

Post by joveian »

CodesInChaos wrote: post #242
joveian wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not for a while. As I understand it they didn't have one at first but after some asshole used it as a backup (since they let anyone upload "music") and made a blog post about it they added one. Quite possibly they wanted to anyway and it was just a convenient excuse.

Do you have a link?

Thanks for asking, because it turns out I was wrong :(. I should know better than to rely on my memory these days. If you download the same FLAC file twice it won't be the same (possibly unless the two downloads are within a few days) but I just checked and they do decode to the same WAV. I haven't checked multiple accounts but when trying to find the article I thought I remembered I found someone saying they had checked and found them to be the same (not that long ago). I'm not sure if the FLAC or other specific file downloads are ever exactly the same between accounts, possibly not and they record the generation timestamp or such, but it seems the audio itself is not watermarked.

The backup thing did happen, though:

https://medium.com/@__Tux/using-bandcamp-as-a-backup-solutio...

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

#248

Post by bensecure »

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?

If they paid more for it than its worth, than they lost money the instant they bought it. If they sold it to a company that thought it could increase the value of bandcamp by owning it, then they might have gotten more for it than it was worth when they owned it, hence increasing their own value (or at least making a valuation which was previously potential concrete).

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

#249

Post by TomSwirly »

hatsix wrote: post #126
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

if you digitized at 24 bit, then 16 bit is technically compressed. with flac, the waveforms aren't compressed, but the amplitude is, so audio buffs claim they can hear more separation. I can't hear it, but I also can't taste the difference between coffee bean origins, but I know people who can.

FLAC is a lossless encoding. You can reverse it and get a bit-for-bit identical WAV file.

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

#250

Post by hatsix »

almatabata wrote: post #219
hatsix wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe a stupid question but if songtradr focuses more on B2B licensing of music could't they hammer out exclusive deals and remove the music entirely from end customer catalog? I mainly think about licensing it to other streaming services. People have already mentioned that some music disappeared from the catalog because artists pulled it. I wonder if this acquisition would make it more common.

Sorry I missed this from before.

While it's entirely possible, I've never heard of this specific thing happening. Companies want music that is popular. They might pay enough to make music exclusive in the B2B licensing, but they don't want music that nobody can listen to. The only thing I could think of is if a movie/game wants to buy out an album as their soundtrack, but again, I've not heard of this actually happening, at least pulling back a release.

Likely music disappearing from Bandcamp is likely because the artist signed with a Label and the Label wants exclusive ability to market the artist's music.

Post reply on HN