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Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

variety.com

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Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#361

Post by stonith »

smileybarry wrote: post #326
stonith wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> look at what happened to PUBG when they used Epic's engine 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.

>> look at what happened to PUBG when they used Epic's engine > 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 bat…

I'm well aware of the lawsuit. It went nowhere.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/27/17509114/pubg-fortnite-la...

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#362

Post by paularmstrong »

banana_maker wrote: post #316
paularmstrong wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, nothing currently beats Plexamp in terms of quality music listening, shuffle, smart playlists, etc. 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.

Navidrome [0] has been a solid replacement for me. It has all the features I want aside from Keycloak/generic oidc integration, and the author is very responsive. 0: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome

I haven't seen this before, but at a quick glance, here's what I love about Plexamp that's missing for me:

* 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)

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#363

Post by palisade »

I know that everyone is commenting that this is the end of their independence. But, Epic Games has been really good to everyone they've acquired. Quixel is a great example. They protected Improbable when it was under licensing attack by Unity and they gave away $25 mil to help fund development for them when they didn't have to. They've given out lots of no strings attached megagrants when they didn't have to and they receive no direct revenue from. Those grants have helped independent open source 3rd party tools like Blender and Krita with no strings and no required oversight from Epic. And, some of those megagrants helped Unity and not Epic, e.g. the dialogue tool, but they didn't take backsies on their grant. They designed the grants to help the entire game industry and not just them. They have a very lawful good alignment as a company. They're an example of a really decent parent company IMHO. Also, Epic has a really solid financial foundation from Fortnite and their Unreal game engine so they're easily able to give independence to their subsidiaries without nervously micromanaging. Bandcamp is awesome so I hope I'm right.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#364

Post by tomcatfish »

zormino wrote: post #136
dazzawazza wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I look forward to not being able to download my purchases :(

That already happens with Bandcamp. If the artist removes a song/album, you have no way of downloading it again even if you've purchased it. You only get a license to download the music while it's still available on the website. I've lost a few tracks/albums this way, thankfully I had local copies already.

I haven't had this problem, unless artists can do something that looks identical to this on the face.

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.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#365

Post by ska »

dundarious wrote: post #303
ska wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't think elsewhere it's called an "exit strategy" to seek financing, be that IPO, Shark Tank, or the much more common and mundane options. I'm not even naively proposing that it's somehow bad to sell a profitable business in this way. I know selling a piece of your business involves diluting your control, but it is nearly always contractually required to not involve an "exit" (in terms of involvement) outside of…

> I don't think elsewhere it's called an "exit strategy" to seek financing

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.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#366

Post by chx »

cauthon wrote: post #338
antris wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now I'm not sure what to do. Just FYI there's sites that take in What refugees

Would you mind sharing any names? I don’t mind whatever ratio limits exist for new accounts, but I deeply miss finding music through staff picks and the forums

orpheus and redacted are the big ones. Getting in, of course, will be a challenge.

rutracker is a pretty open alternative.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#367

Post by jmbylsma »

Dubhead wrote: post #307
siver_john wrote: post #22

This feels like a major blow, as someone who just semi recently (probably around pandemic start) started getting into purchasing flac music from indie artists, Bandcamp was a great source of music. I understand nothing will change in the short term, but long term I am very concerned. Especially as streaming becomes more dominant and companies are less willing to provide flac based music and physical discs (where I ca…

> 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). 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. [0] https://ototoy.jp/top/

I can attest that, as an American, I was able to create an Ototoy account and purchase an album I have been trying to find for years. Thank you!!

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#368

Post by munificent »

Apocryphon wrote: post #321
munificent wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time a small successful tech company gets swallowed by a behemoth, I feel sad. Bandcamp was one of the good ones. If Panic ever gets bought, I'll straight up cry. 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.

Everyone's forgotten that monocultures are bad. 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.

Many companies can exist and persist on their own until a behemoth decides they shouldn't.

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.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#369

Post by sickcodebruh »

palisade wrote: post #363

I know that everyone is commenting that this is the end of their independence. But, Epic Games has been really good to everyone they've acquired. Quixel is a great example. They protected Improbable when it was under licensing attack by Unity and they gave away $25 mil to help fund development for them when they didn't have to. They've given out lots of no strings attached megagrants when they didn't have to and they…

I didn’t know about these acquisitions, I really hope you’re right.

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.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#370

Post by palisade »

sickcodebruh wrote: post #369
palisade wrote: post #363

I know that everyone is commenting that this is the end of their independence. But, Epic Games has been really good to everyone they've acquired. Quixel is a great example. They protected Improbable when it was under licensing attack by Unity and they gave away $25 mil to help fund development for them when they didn't have to. They've given out lots of no strings attached megagrants when they didn't have to and they…

I didn’t know about these acquisitions, I really hope you’re right. 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 platform…

Of all the companies they could have been acquired by we're probably lucky it was Epic.
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