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Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

variety.com

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Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#471

Post by od1nos »

22c wrote: post #340
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

I'm only really familiar with RED (I know there are others) but it didn't bounce back even close to What, unfortunately. Perhaps others did significantly better, but I think without a dump of the catalog, it's going to be next to impossible to ever get back everything that What had. Also FTR I'm a heavy Bandcamp user and I'm disappointed by this acquisition.

RED does not have the amount of users that What had, but it vastly surpasses the amount of flacs it had on the day it went down: 864k 'perfect' flacs vs 1,360k on RED currently.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#472

Post by hamburglar »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #468
hamburglar wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ye…

I definitely interpreted it the other way, owing to the "would they have ever" part. The original subthread is about their motivation for an exit. The existence of early key employees that got (potentially a lot of) equity is quite relevant to that topic, and the sentiment that it would have been harder to hire people in this industry without offering equity at a startup is not wrong.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#473

Post by hamburglar »

Apocryphon wrote: post #469
hamburglar wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My critique assumes no such thing, it just claims it's likely. That's why I used the word "likely."

I certainly hope it's not controversial to suggest that VC-backed startups, especially thrifty ones like bandcamp allegedly is, very commonly offer lower salaries to extend runway and make up for it in the form of equity options. My last startup offer actually gave me a window of salary ranges and let me choose my salary based on how much equity I wanted. The more salary, the less equity.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#474

Post by gen220 »

joveian wrote: post #414
gen220 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be reasonable to structure the development company as a non-profit, to prevent an outcome like Bandcamp's. I think it may be possible to build the marketplace in a purely FOSS-y way, but it would be illegal to operate it with the wrong configuration values. I'm thinking in particular about the accounting functions, such as earmarking x% of each sale for royalties, and ensuring they go to/from the correct bank ac…

indiehd.com mentioned elsewhere doesn't look like it is nonprofit but does have an at least mostly open source store: https://indiehd.com https://github.com/indiehd They have 277 albums listed, almost nothing, and it doesn't sound like they are really ready to be a full Bandcamp replacement but maybe they will be able to turn into something artists want to use.

I took a poke around; it looks like the source code is a little dead and incomplete (e.g. I see mentions of paypal, but no imports of paypal libraries or targeting paypal apis).

Some of the text (like business rules) are genuine insight/wisdom-mines, though. It might not be overly useful to fork this stuff, but it is definitely useful inspiration! Major props to the authors for open sourcing big chunks of their work and perspectives.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#475

Post by Semaphor »

andrewzah wrote: post #456
Semaphor wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just checked their demo, do they really completely ignore genres? I can neither find a node for music by genre, nor are they shown in the tables by default.

It does show genres if they're set in the files' metadata.

Found it now. Certainly looks like a second class citizen

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#476

Post by andrewzah »

Semaphor wrote: post #475
andrewzah wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does show genres if they're set in the files' metadata.

Found it now. Certainly looks like a second class citizen

AFAIK genre support (or maybe support for multiple genres) for a song was added relatively recently. Work is being done for genres, though.

0: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/issues/850

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#477

Post by Semaphor »

andrewzah wrote: post #476
Semaphor wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Found it now. Certainly looks like a second class citizen

AFAIK genre support (or maybe support for multiple genres) for a song was added relatively recently. Work is being done for genres, though. 0: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/issues/850

Oh, nice. Yeah, that ticket addresses the biggest (though not the only) part of genres I’m missing (and no, not just multi-genre). It looks like this part at least might soon get integrated.

As a general note, I find it fascinating that it could be something lagging so far behind, for me playing music is either via artist (maybe, as a secondary sort, album) or via genre, rarely anything else.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#478

Post by joveian »

gen220 wrote: post #474
joveian wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

indiehd.com mentioned elsewhere doesn't look like it is nonprofit but does have an at least mostly open source store: https://indiehd.com https://github.com/indiehd They have 277 albums listed, almost nothing, and it doesn't sound like they are really ready to be a full Bandcamp replacement but maybe they will be able to turn into something artists want to use.

I took a poke around; it looks like the source code is a little dead and incomplete (e.g. I see mentions of paypal, but no imports of paypal libraries or targeting paypal apis). Some of the text (like business rules) are genuine insight/wisdom-mines, though. It might not be overly useful to fork this stuff, but it is definitely useful inspiration! Major props to the authors for open sourcing big chunks of their work…

Thanks for the summary. I wish them luck with the more open approach and hopefully they will publish more at some point.

I only looked quickly but the part about artists and labels is not sufficient. On Bandcamp, individual albums can be listed by an artist but on a particular label with a small link to the label. It appears in the list of albums for the label and for the artist. This dynamic is very important for finding indie music and, as far as I can tell without being in the industry at all, artists often want to work with different people on the production as well as marketing side and everyone benefits. It often isn't the case that artists pick one label and stick with them for a while, they may have one or more that they release with more often but also do one off releases with other labels and self publish some albums or tracks. I don't know how it works behind the scene but I assume artists generally don't want all the labels that they release on to be able to edit everything, the labels should be restricted to editing the album released on that label unless additional permission is given. Of course, it makes sense for indiehd to start with the simpler cases (and it is wonderful that they are so open about what they are doing) but hopefully they are working on the more complex relationships needed to support the indie scene.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#479

Post by branon »

bobsmooth wrote: post #401
branon wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider alternatives to Plex (Jellyfin being the main competitor). With Plex, you may own the media, but Plex, Inc. owns the authentication. You're not allowed to access the service running on your own hardware unless you can log in with a Plex account. Also: losing What was indeed a massive blow, but there are others still carrying that torch...

Emby is pretty good.

Emby unfortunately decided to take their code closed-source a year or two ago. Jellyfin is the resulting fork.

I will agree that they're pretty good, however Jellyfin has grown to become better in terms of both licensing model and feature set.

Re: Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

#480

Post by gen220 »

joveian wrote: post #478
gen220 wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a poke around; it looks like the source code is a little dead and incomplete (e.g. I see mentions of paypal, but no imports of paypal libraries or targeting paypal apis). Some of the text (like business rules) are genuine insight/wisdom-mines, though. It might not be overly useful to fork this stuff, but it is definitely useful inspiration! Major props to the authors for open sourcing big chunks of their work…

Thanks for the summary. I wish them luck with the more open approach and hopefully they will publish more at some point. I only looked quickly but the part about artists and labels is not sufficient. On Bandcamp, individual albums can be listed by an artist but on a particular label with a small link to the label. It appears in the list of albums for the label and for the artist. This dynamic is very important for fi…

Yeah, I built out some models for this as a weekend project, based on my limited knowledge as a bandcamp consumer.

It's a surprisingly-complex domain!

Simply modelling all of the relationships is a fun experiment.

i.e. so-and-so is the producer and advertised co-artist, so-and-so is both an individual artist but also a member of bands X and Y, bands X and Y are part of the super-group Z; label A is a subsidiary of B, which was a subsidiary of label C from 2012-2016, was independent from 2016-2017 and is a subsidiary of label D from then until now.

Now, think about building RBAC on top of this, like you're hinting at!

No small feat, to be sure.

edit:

The main rabbit-hole I dove down was revenue-sharing, so that labels and artists can be paid out immediately, without the latter needing to wait for some settlement layer governed by the label. It turns out Stripe allows you to implement this fairly easily, and with limited fuss!

Even if the label chooses not to use this process for some reason (I wonder why!), you should be able to model out revenues for all parties, and show the artist(s)/song-writer(s)/label(s) what they should have had in gross and post-tax earnings for any given period in time.

You can even show the music consumer what % of each purchase will go to the various parties involved in producing the music, which might help in steering people towards indie labels or artists. Kind of like nutrition facts for music. :)

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