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Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

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Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#461

Post by BaseballPhysics »

toastal wrote: post #430
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as far as I can tell, they took a seed round and a series A and have been profitable since... 2014? If memory serves? If you look at their staff growth, it's been very slow and very steady. At the time of acquisition they were sitting in the 100-150 headcount range, which is modest for a company that's almost 15 years old. Given their claim of 207M to artists last year and their touted 18% average rev share, we…

I love the 'rudimentary' app. It was only recently I noticed a lot of people complaining about it. It was a surprise to me. I can search and find new albums, and I can listen to album from start to finish without any issues, share a track link to a friend, and purchase + download the album for offline. Only feature I would have liked to see is the niche addition of built-in ListenBrainz support. What else was missing…

For me the big one is playlists. I'm absolutely an album listener (call me old school), but I like to build thematic playlists of multiple albums that I listen to in rotation (for example, I have a background electronica playlist I love to use when I'm working), and the player lacks that capability.

Notably, Bandcamp absolutely encourages purchasing individual tracks, so for folks who, unlike me, tend to build mixed playlists, it's even more annoying that this feature doesn't exist.

In fact, they only very recently (as in last month!) added basic queuing support:

https://blog.bandcamp.com/2022/02/10/the-bandcamp-app-now-su...

Which is pretty incredible as I view that as a core feature of any music player.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#462

Post by hamburglar »

activitypea wrote: post #443
MattRix wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tim Sweeney has been pretty crystal clear about his feelings disliking walled gardens and monopolies for at least a decade, since well before the Epic Games Store or Fortnite existed. He is very much a tech guy, not some super savvy cutthroat business guy (as is pretty clear when you look at their battle with apple, which made absolutely no financial sense)

This is a good counterargument only if you believe Tim Sweeney will outlive Epic Games. I don't think he will, and I have no reason to believe that Tim's successor will have his mindset or his values.

Do you think bandcamp leadership will live forever if it remains a “lifestyle business”?

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#463

Post by ska »

dundarious wrote: post #453
ska wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Right, it's the focus on "exit" also for founders (who also run the business) that puzzles me. As for the "exit=financing" association, I made that based on your comment: > > 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 s…

> But I think I misunderstood

Yes I should have been clearer.

Re founders there is a tension: They often want to both maintain control (i.e. equity) and realize some $$ from building the company. A liquidity event of some sort is often seen as the best way to do this, especially if they've been lean on salary for a decade at that point, which is often the case.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#464

Post by hamburglar »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #455
heleninboodler wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't think it needed clarification, but "they wouldn't be able to hire anyone" does not literally mean they would have zero candidates. It's expressing the fact that they would be severely limiting their talent pool by offering 0 equity in this industry, where equity is one of the reasons people are willing to take a risk on a startup.

> where equity is one of the reasons people are willing to take a risk on a startup. They're not a startup. They're a profitable, mature, 15 year old company of 100-150 people. Working there isn't "taking a risk", so there's no need to entice people with hazard pay.

And yet those early employees who joined before they were profitable took a risk, and likely below-market rates, and got equity. Because that’s one proven strategy a startup can use to try to find people who can get them to not-a-startup.

I never thought I’d see the day where hacker news, of all places, forgot how this works.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#465

Post by duped »

munificent wrote: post #305
duped wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people put a 17.5kHz low pass and high pass at 20Hz on the master. It's dumb and you have very few reasons to do it, but people still do it and keep it as default settings in "mastering chains" that get passed around and dropped on random tracks. So you can't be sure if you're looking at a reencoding or a lossy file or not.

There are definitely good reasons to high pass at something low like 20 Hz. Very low frequency signals eat up a lot of headroom, make speakers work harder, and make it more likely to encounter distortion during parts of the signal path, all for zero audible benefit. Having what is practically a DC offset in your signal doesn't do anyone any good.

There's definitely good reasons to do it, they're just kind of rare to see in a modern digital stack. DC offset is hard to introduce unintentionally and subsonic content is usually removed early in the mix, not on the master (if they aren't, it's arguable a bad mix).

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#466

Post by [deleted] »

hamburglar wrote: post #464
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where equity is one of the reasons people are willing to take a risk on a startup. They're not a startup. They're a profitable, mature, 15 year old company of 100-150 people. Working there isn't "taking a risk", so there's no need to entice people with hazard pay.

And yet those early employees who joined before they were profitable took a risk, and likely below-market rates, and got equity. Because that’s one proven strategy a startup can use to try to find people who can get them to not-a-startup. I never thought I’d see the day where hacker news, of all places, forgot how this works.

[deleted]

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#467

Post by JaimeThompson »

revolvingocelot wrote: post #425
JaimeThompson wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people expected Gates to do something like the Gates Foundation?

What's the relevance of the Gates Foundation? Gates didn't sell Microsoft in order to start it, he used his own personal fortune (fine, Warren Buffet helped, but he didn't sell any golden geese to afford it, either).

Gates sold a decent amount of his Microsoft stock to fund the foundation, something Gabe can't really do given the current structure of Valve. They would have to go public for him to do so, sell to private concerns, or something like that all actions which would dilute his control of Valve.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#468

Post by BaseballPhysics »

hamburglar wrote: post #464
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where equity is one of the reasons people are willing to take a risk on a startup. They're not a startup. They're a profitable, mature, 15 year old company of 100-150 people. Working there isn't "taking a risk", so there's no need to entice people with hazard pay.

And yet those early employees who joined before they were profitable took a risk, and likely below-market rates, and got equity. Because that’s one proven strategy a startup can use to try to find people who can get them to not-a-startup. I never thought I’d see the day where hacker news, of all places, forgot how this works.

> And yet those early employees who joined before they were profitable took a risk, and likely below-market rates, and got equity. Because that’s one proven strategy a startup can use to try to find people who can get them to not-a-startup.

I was interpreting the original comment that kicked this off ("Would they have ever managed to hire anyone if they didn't?") as referring to their hiring practices now, not 15 years ago when they were first starting up. Granted I may have misinterpreted the nature of their remark.

Obviously back then, yeah, folks would probably have been given an equity stake.

So we're arguing different points.

What I personally don't know is if they were continuing to give out options to new hires to this day. Based on my own experience in a startup-now-going-concern, my bet is "no", given that it would no longer be strictly necessary to entice folks to join the company, but I could be wrong.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#469

Post by Apocryphon »

hamburglar wrote: post #464
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where equity is one of the reasons people are willing to take a risk on a startup. They're not a startup. They're a profitable, mature, 15 year old company of 100-150 people. Working there isn't "taking a risk", so there's no need to entice people with hazard pay.

And yet those early employees who joined before they were profitable took a risk, and likely below-market rates, and got equity. Because that’s one proven strategy a startup can use to try to find people who can get them to not-a-startup. I never thought I’d see the day where hacker news, of all places, forgot how this works.

Your critique appears to assume that every tech company or startup begins by offering below market rates. That's not universal, and who knows, maybe they had a seed round and were able to pay people appropriately. They were also founded in 2008, it was a different time in the market anyway.

Looking at Crunchbase's list of articles, the earliest news story from May '08 mentions that it was a four-man startup that was completely virtual. Don't know how that lasted, but not having an office certainly frees up the budget to pay people.

https://gigaom.com/2008/05/07/bandcamp-clubwiki/

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#470

Post by crtasm »

kregasaurusrex wrote: post #389
Ruthalas wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on what makes it a good fit? I'm curious what your thought is. I would have, at face value, considered the acquisition a bit odd given Epic's primary product.

It's boilerplate stuff, but my only experience with Bandcamp is buying a couple FLAC quality albums from artists that are too small to be signed onto a structured record label, or don't want to have additional middlemen between them and their fans. Was thinking something akin to Patreon with a well-functioning desktop app that goes beyond only having music offerings, like live shows or additional interviews with the…

Artists can live stream on Bandcamp now: https://blog.bandcamp.com/2022/01/27/bandcamp-live-is-now-op...
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