So many great companies die this way. Bought by a big corporation with no idea what to do with all their money, neglected, then sold to some monopolist that doesn't give a damn outside of squeezing the market.
It's true. Except it was the people in charge of the great company that sold it to the big corporation / monopolist in the first place. Bandcamp was doomed when it was sold to Epic -- everybody knew that. They knew that doing that was bad for the product and bad for the company and they did it anyway, because they didn't and don't give a damn.
So what should they have done? Continued running the company until the day they died? Then what? Converted it to a non-profit/co-op/etc. and effectively donated 90% of their net worth and tens of millions of dollars (a tall order for most people)?
Your response seems disproportionate, maybe you read a bit beyond what I actually wrote?
To respond to your question anyway: I don't really like telling people what to do (don't tread on anyone and all that) but if it was up to me to choose what they did, then not selling the company to Epic, or any other hungry hungry corpos, would have been a default stance.
Considering how successful the platform is/was -- and the excellent financial situation they apparently were in for the last decade -- it seems like selling the company to Epic (a random and unnatural fit) would be a gamble at best. There's a negligible chance that it could have ended well for the artists or the users but I'm sure it's ending well for some of those involved.
Also, yeah, convert your business to a not-for-profit or hand it down to the employees when you're dying / done with it. That sounds like the sort of thing that makes the world a better place, which is commendable.
Being a founder and being the CEO of medium/large company (or even the head of the board) are very different jobs and skill sets. As we've seen with Flexport as the owner you can't simply hire on a CEO and focus on other things without likely severe issues. So eventually those founders sell the company to someone else for either the money or to have time to focus on other things they enjoy more.
Another victim of modern tech acquisitions. I hate it. I hate seeing another service potentially dying because it was bought out by a big tech company that actually didn't give a rat's ass about the service. Google has done it to so many great services, some of which that I really loved. The worst thing about Bandcamp is that it's a platform for smaller artists to sell their music, which affects them in a way other tech acquisitions don't.
Also, what?
> “Based on its current financials, Bandcamp requires some adjustments to ensure a sustainable and healthy company that can serve its community of artists and fans long into the future,” says a statement provided by Songtradr chief marketing officer Lindsay Nahmiache. It says the company will be extending job offers to Bandcamp staff over the next few weeks as the sale is finalized.
Since when does Bandcamp have financial issues? Or is it just not profitable enough and now Songtradr wants to squeeze it for all they can?
> “Based on its current financials, Bandcamp requires some adjustments to ensure a sustainable and healthy company that can serve its community of artists and fans long into the future,”
This is interesting. Bandcamp's website says they've been profitable since 2012.[0] If that's still true what other adjustments might be needed?
> “Based on its current financials, Bandcamp requires some adjustments to ensure a sustainable and healthy profit margin to cover the cost of being bought by its new owner.,”
ooof. Bandcamp is the only place I know of that provides an actually user-friendly experience for buying music. They've seemed maybe a little too good to be true in this modern age.
Shades of mp3 dot com, which was once the Bandcamp of its day but now is owned by CBS Interactive and has been basically become a parked domain. I hope it doesn't go the same way.
ETA:
Of course, history doesn't repeat itself, it just rhymes. Mp3 dot com embarked on a music locker project that basically got it killed by the RIAA, and Bandcamp didn't repeat that mistake.
Notably, artists on bandcamp often belong to smaller record labels. I'm not sure to what extent the RIAA deals with it at all, so I wonder what the existential threat could be.
Saw this coming from a mile away when they were first acquired. I legitimately can't remember the last time a megacorporation's acquisition of a smaller company ended well.
Wow I had not heard about the acquisition by Epic, I was heartbroken, but this Songtradr seems much more likely than Epic to leave Bandcamp what it is.
Not transferring the employees (and their union) though is very worrying, I hope they'll step back on that.
I found out that Songtradr had also acquired 7digital, my go-to general music store (the only vast drm-free store with decent privacy policies that I could find)
We need an alternative from Bandcamp that is a co-op fediverse kind of system.
I know there is people working on making alternatives like ninaprotocol.com but it's tainted by web3/crypto selling the songs as collectibles NFTs. Not even lossless.
I haven't checked in on it in ages, I thought it was doing what it always did, I really wish a service would just stick to what it's good at. Catalogue my vinyl and give me the opportunity to interact with fellow enthusiast
> customer support specialist ed blair and software engineer Blade Barringer
Weird editing here—one name in lowercase?
> posted on X (formerly Twitter)
Speaking of editing—oh my, are we going to do this parenthetical forever?
> Barringer, the Bandcamp software engineer, says that a handful of engineers are still performing the critical tasks needed to keep the site running, but otherwise they can’t commit new code. He found a minor bug this week but couldn’t access the program he needed to fix it.
This is interesting! They're locked out of the tools for committing code, but have production access? (SSH?)
But if they are trying to demonstrate their necessity and want to form a union, not doing those critical tasks may be a better idea? If the company is not showing interest in supporting you, don't support the company?
Speaking of editing—oh my, are we going to do this parenthetical forever?
X isn't a brand, it's a foundation of our alphabet and used for many different things in society. So yes, we will do this likely until it's no longer used. Thank elon for that.
Perhaps the endpoint of this will mimic the moment Prince changed his name to a symbol and instead of using the symbol, media settled on calling him The Artist Fromerly Known As Prince, or TAFKAP.
So, Twitter is now X but when we tire of explaining away the inherent confusion of a single letter name, we'll converge on calling it TWFKAT.
When someone types "posted on X" in no way does anyone think someone posted something to a letter. They know it means X the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. So, really, there's no need to keep doing this parenthetical.
That isn't necessarily true, it takes a long time for everyone to know something.
It doesn't cost you much to glaze over the parenthetical but helps a lot for the couple of readers who won't understand.
Especially since Googling still doesn't work, here are the results in order: the Twitter handle, the film, the app (The X app is the trusted global digital town square for everyone. With X, you can: - Post content for the world to see and join public conversation), the movie a few times, the band, a bunch of pictures and finally Twitter is rebranding.
Note the handle and app don't mention Twitter except in an unhelpful way.
Pretty sure the actual one is the last link on the first page.
As far as I can tell, it has music file storage gated behind a paywall (or not, plenty of music is offered for free), a few very basic functionalities like liking/wishlisting albums, and “following” musicians (fwiw… not sure what’s the value of that… a personalized feed?) and… that’s pretty much it? I guess the front page, which I assume boost sales a little bit for the included musicians?
It's not Spotify, it's not a social media site, it's a simple no-frills store where you can just buy music with no dark patterns or manipulative bullshit. The simplicity is the value proposition.
IMO, Epic's grand vision is to be an all-in-one solution for any sort of media, from video games to complete CG movies. It's seems straight forward to see how a audio related business fits into this, and also straight forward to see how it ultimately wasn't really the right fit.
While you can find a some of the big names in specific genres on bandcamp, it’s always struck me as more of a place for underground and tiny artists. The genre breakdown categories tend to be pretty good, and you can find some interesting stuff that’s not easily found elsewhere. Sometimes I’d just go into a specific genre and start listening to anything that caught my eye. I usually found it much better than streaming platforms, that just continuously recommend the same stuff I’ve heard time and time again, but just didn’t have in a playlist. I do have a problem with their mobile app though: It doesn’t allow you to change the sort method, so you end up seeing a lot of stuff you’ve already seen before.
To be honest, I don’t use it as much as I used to. Nowadays, I’ve mostly found YouTube channels that upload and curate various rare and underground content for specific genres and that’s how I do most of my new (and new old) music discovery.
This is what streaming services have done to artists - the idea of "paying an artist for their music" is such an alien idea to some people that it ends up phrased like this.
It's damn weird. I get that most people just want a radio, but it's getting harder to just buy music, to keep.
Apple music is slowly erasing iTunes, the media management aspect of it seems to be slowly breaking down, currently all my album art is completely messed up on my iPhone.
There seems to be a bug where adding your music to up next adds it to a random place in your playlist.
It's so prevalent, I thought it was a feature I didn't know about. It's been years. This makes the platform almost unusable.
It's pretty amazing to see such fundamental usability issues never get fixed. It's astonishing to see in flagship software from a major company. It just doesn't work at all in a basic sense.
This is about the only time I'll defend the modern idea of "NFTs".
I want to show off the albums I bought to the world, ideally with some way to prove that I really spent money on them.
The albums are comparable to NFTs (though fungibility is arguable in both cases), with the caveat that the Bandcamp system is entirely centralized. If the company goes bust, so does my collection.
Though I appreciate that their ethics kept them from doing it, if anyone should've jumped on the NFT wagon, it should've been them. This would've detached the proof of ownership from the company and allowed a secondary market to exist (also important, should the company stop existing/change terms).
I think there are systems like this like last.fm/audioscrobbler that already scratch this itch by logging every song you listen to. So you can show your interest in an artist by listening to them.
I don’t want to buy an NFT to “show off albums I bought” as this seems like no real new value to me. I can already show off these albums I listen to (much better than just bought I think).
This probably relates to whether you put more value on money or your time.
Personally, I don't want to collect all music that I listen to (which I can do for virtually free through streaming services). I also find the likes of last.fm cool, but for different reasons.
I'm looking for the digital equivalent of a CD/vinyl collection, which these are not.
