Background, I work in diligence for software aquisitions.
There are a lot of assumptions on this thread. I don't know the answers in this case (not sure if anyone does?) but I think it is naive to assume that Bandcamp was wise to be employing all these people. While acquisitions tanking a company with stupid decisions are super common, it's also super common for companies who are trying to look like they are growing (for future funding or acquisitions) to have way too much staff (and thus, high a burn rate) instead of running a sensible, profitable business. It is not necessarily a good thing that they have tons of employees - sometimes it's entirely motivated by putting lipstick on a pig in order to look like a runaway growth success thing.
Songtradr is in the music infrastructure business. I think it's quite possible they are cleaning house to make Bandcamp a more viable business that is actually focused on their core business. Doesn't seem impossible to me that Bandcamp was way off base trying to make too much written content when really, it's about selling music.
But I'm spitballing here, anyone know more about whether Bandcamp was bloated?
So we work for private equity mostly, and they are in the business of buying and selling steady growth, profitable businesses, as opposed to VC/bubble stuff, so our expectations are a lot leaner. But at a guess, I think we'd expect that to be a 40-50 person company. 118 seems high.
The app is tiny, it has changed very little in who knows how long. Infrastructure is obviously the big thing, so there would be a solid size infra team. Then standard business, product, marketing stuff. I just can't see that warranting more than 50 people unless it's raking it in. Sounds like they could be wasting money on marketing initiatives that may or may not be worth anything at all. Six full time writers seems pretty out there given the questionable ROI of those articles.
Obviously, take this with a huge a grain of salt as this is a guess based on being a frequent user of the app, and having done about 60 diligences and been a part of another 30 or 40 in review capacity. But it seems significantly oversized on what I normally see looking at business that have to be run sustainably. For whatever that's worth!
EDIT: someone had a good point that bandcamp takes international payments, which is complex. So I would revise my first WAG up based on that for sure. Thinking further I would probably guess 50-60 people - which is about what I guess it is after the layoffs. Still a total WAG, but slightly better informed...
Your view of bandcamp seems like a cartoonishly perfect representation of a consultant’s perspective with very little understanding of what the company actually does beyond the balance sheet. It’s the kind of no-skin-in-the-game perspective that ruined Boeing, and it’s why most folks absolutely abhor private equity.
Bandcamp has been successful because of the trust they have within the internet music community. It’s not a very complicated product, but people buy music there because the whole thing feels like it’s a part of the music scene, not the tech or business scene. Given that the Daily is well regarded in that community, I highly doubt those six writers, who were likely paid significantly less than the median staff member, were the problem here. Even if they didn’t have the purely trackable ROI, they were a huge part of the platform’s only moat: its goodwill with the artists and listeners who used it.
I would also add that Bandcamp was pretty publicly profitable prior to their sale to Epic. Given that they didn’t significantly grow the staff after the acquisition, they would have had to make huge blunders in a very short period of time they owned it. So at this point we’re talking about laying folks off purely for better looking numbers, not really for sustainability.
You are making some wildy off base assumptions. I'm not a finance guy, I'm a hacker. We do technical diligence. I was a developer for 20 years and am doing a music and CS phd right now. I've slung code in over a dozen languages, I'm the open source developer of Scheme for Max and the csound6~ port to Max, an electronic composer, and a gigging musician. I am currently bootstrapping a music education product in Python, Javascript, C++, and Scheme. You would be very hard pressed to find someone as embedded in the problem domain of bandcamp who also does acquisitions related work.
So I use bandcamp all the time, I have purchased tons of music on it, and the articles have not made any difference to me as a user at all. The only thing I care about is the band I'm purchasing from! I use bandcamp for three reasons: lossless audio, no DRM, fair payments to the band. None of those are at all relevant to their article efforts.
As for most people abhoring PE, believe me, I am under no illusions about our clients. But most software company exits are now PE deals (something like over 75%), so while people might like to make public noises about hating PE, they sure like to sell their companies to them.
Apologies on misunderstanding your role here, most of the speculation on this thread has been related to finances and staffing so I made an assumption there when I shouldn’t have.
> I have purchased tons of music on it, and the articles have not made any difference to me as a user at all
n=1, but that’s true of my perspective as well so perhaps it’s a wash. I do think the editorial staff were more important to some genres than others.
> they sure like to sell their companies to them
I might suggest that this is a case where upper management’s desires directly conflict with the people making the noise (staff and users)
> while people might like to make public noises about hating PE, they sure like to sell their companies to them.
I suspect that there's not a lot of overlap between people who publicly fume about good companies being ruined by profit-hungry buyers, and people who start companies explicitly so they can flip them to profit-hungry buyers and ditch.
Does anyone still start businesses with the intention of building and maintaining a really excellent product/service in the long term? Do any of them hold on to that ideal after a few years?
>Does anyone still start businesses with the intention of building and maintaining a really excellent product/service in the long term? Do any of them hold on to that ideal after a few years?
Define "a few". You can't expect most company owners to want to continue running that company for decades on end; eventually, they want to do something else or retire. So at some point, they have to sell. Who's going to buy an existing company that's profitable? Someone who's "profit-hungry" usually. If the company is just a passion project, no one buys it and it just goes under when the owner gets tired of it.
> You can't expect most company owners to want to continue running that company for decades on end
That's not actually weird, though. The idea that everyone should be expected to change jobs every few years is very recent.
> Who's going to buy an existing company that's profitable? Someone who's "profit-hungry" usually.
I didn't think this needed specifying, but there's a large difference between the goals "Create a great, enduring service and make a profit doing it" and "generate as much short-term profit as possible regardless of long-term consequences."
Inheritance assumes that the founder's kids actually want to run their parent's company. Many times, they don't, so they sell. Running a company is a pain in the ass, so it's understandable many people don't want to be bothered.
There's a middle ground between giving a company to your kids and selling it to someone who you know will suck it dry for short-term gains. You can also give (or sell) it to someone that you know and trust to keep it sustainable.
Who? Where do you find this person? Do you have any experience in running a business and selling businesses to others?
And why do people assume that the kids are going to run it well or the same way the founder did? If anything, it seems like the kids of highly successful people are usually spoiled brats, and nothing like their parents. Did Bill Gates' kids create any successful software companies?
The first paragraph was a direct response to your "you can give it to someone you trust" claim.
The second paragraph wasn't related to your response, it was related to prior posts by others and just an add-on for the discussion at large (in case anyone's even still reading it, which I doubt).
And if the loan doesn't get paid off? That city/state is now in a huge hole, having spent money that could've been used to build schools and maintain roads on buying companies off their retiring owners.
In any case I don't see why you would need the detour via local government? A bank could lend the money to the group of employees just fine.
It doesn't have to be the choice between "sell to profit-hungry buyer's and ditch" and keeping a company forever.
Sometimes people just want to do something different with their time after running their business for a long time and a PE deal is the easiest and most structured way of doing that.
Sure. But (assuming you'd reached sustainable profitability, as BandCamp reportedly had) you can choose whether you sell to someone who intends to maintain what you've built, or someone who you know will suck it dry for short-term profits.
> So I use bandcamp all the time, I have purchased tons of music on it, and the articles have not made any difference to me as a user at all. The only thing I care about is the band I'm purchasing from! I use bandcamp for three reasons: lossless audio, no DRM, fair payments to the band. None of those are at all relevant to their article efforts.
Just to add a conflicting opinion, I love the articles and often use them for music discovery and purchases. Of course, the primary function is to purchase music from known entities but the discovery part keeps me coming back. In terms of ROI, to me the articles seem like a pretty smart marketing move…without them I would not have discovered all kinds of artists and made numerous purchases.
I'm sure you're right and some do find bandcamp through them. The really hard part is quantifying that though. Does it generate enough business for six writers? If it does, awesome, and I'm totally wrong.
My guess is the big content initiative was someone's brain child, and once companies get past a certain size, it's very hard to pull the plug on a leader's baby. Until the company changes hand and the next set of leaders want to eat the previous young and put their own babies in there.
> Bandcamp has been successful because of the trust they have within the internet music community.
Hahaha I don’t think that they have as glowing reputation as you think. I’ve heard creators complaining about lack of transparency, lack of communication, poor customer service, arbitrary decision making with no reason given, etc.
They could be trusted by a bunch of people to probably screw things up less than alternatives and to at least be -trying- to care about the community, while still having made more than enough mistakes to generate a bunch of justifiably unhappy people.
Think about how e.g. your favourite hosting provider nonetheless has a bunch of unhappy ex-customers.
(I'm not asserting what -is- the case here, mind, just trying to flag up a part of the possibility space that I've seen quite a few times over the years)
I work with the parent commenter above and have overseen 500+ tech diligence projects. We get to see a whole company's tech operations, so our views aren't necessarily just "consultant in a suit".
> Your view of bandcamp seems like a cartoonishly perfect representation of a consultant’s perspective with very little understanding of what the company actually does beyond the balance sheet.
And your comment reads like a typical HN armchair technologist.
> It’s not a very complicated product,
Yup, here we go. Classic "I could build this in a week".
>and it’s why most folks absolutely abhor private equity.
Actually it's not. Much of PE is what is driving people to start companies, because it provides a reliable exit path. I know many tech founders who are grateful PE exists, otherwise they would not have the capital available to them to grow their companies. People typically abhor large cap PE which focus on financial engineering. Many growth PE firms (the ones the parent and I usually work with) are value focused, which means focusing on profits (EBITDA) and growth.
> Bandcamp has been successful because of the trust they have within the internet music community. It’s not a very complicated product, but people buy music there because the whole thing feels like it’s a part of the music scene, not the tech or business scene. Given that the Daily is well regarded in that community, I highly doubt those six writers, who were likely paid significantly less than the median staff member, were the problem here. Even if they didn’t have the purely trackable ROI, they were a huge part of the platform’s only moat: its goodwill with the artists and listeners who used it.
To provide an opinion from a user of the platform with "no skin in the game" regarding non-technical aspects of the platform, the social presence of Bandcamp was a significant portion of its appeal to me. I did not (and generally do not on other platforms) regularly seek out new media, and instead tend to rely on on various social media feeds and suggestion algorithms to help expose me to new music. I used to follow Bandcamp on multiple platforms until their acquisition by Epic, when I stopped following them for ideological reasons. The headlines/titles/posts that Bandcamp produced up until that point were far more alluring and generally attractive than any other music platform that I also followed, and their articles were generally of a significantly higher quality than others as well, with a large focus on the artistry present.
I discovered several artists through this form of interaction that I otherwise wouldn't have, and haven't since I began avoiding Bandcamp after their acquisition. I can't imagine that layoffs are targeting purely technical staff (as technical staff are the backbone of the observable functionality of the business), and I fear that the strategy taken by Songtradr will result in a tremendous detriment to the marketability and external usability of the platform. This cost-cutting measure seems to signify either a terribly-fated problem regarding changes to the company, or yet another act of private capital tearing down its competition. Given that Songtradr is in the market of licensing music, I am strongly influenced to believe the latter; using a buyout to cripple _the_ commercially-successful indie music platform (which serves as a competitive and independent means of releasing and licensing and distributing music) seems like a logical way to further capture a part of a market that has historically been dominated by media giants that use legal precedence to dominate.
Interesting little aside for those reacting to the fact that it's PE who pay our bills. While the world of vampire PE certainly exists, most of the time the clients I interact with are genuinely concerned with how to make the business better. And we are far more frequently telling acquirers to spend top dollar on new hires than advising on who to cut! The expectation is that the company needs investment, and that they will get 20% year over year growth for about five years. While the bad rep of PE certainly came from somewhere, in my expereince over the last five years of working in the field, I would way rather be at a profitable, sensible, PE owned company than a VC funded "disruptor" gunning for the big IPO or google acquisition. Our world is positively normal compared to the FAANG scene. We see people who have been at at the companies for 10 to 15 years all the time.
Seriously, I feel like a broken record when I say "Hire a top drawer test automation engineer to lead the company in how to run QA properly - this should be a senior developer" etc.
"Hire a top drawer test automation engineer to lead the company in how to run QA properly - this should be a senior developer"
Trouble is, they are few and far between and PE doesnt know how to find them...they only understand money they dont understand talent. Furthermore, when they do stumble upon talent they dont know how to leave it alone and won't trust it.
PE mistakenly tends to think that they are there for more than just what they are...money.
They need to understand that they are just people with money. The same way I understand that I am just a techie that produces things.
I bought a loaf of bread today, but that doesnt make me a baker or an expert in baking or running a bakery.
Same applies to PE. Just because they buy businesses and invest in them, doesnt make them experts in whatever they buy.
You are misunderstanding the dynamic. I mean, sure, that sometimes happens, but usually if they pay us for a report, the recommendations are shared. Either with the target company or the portco buying the target. So what we say is going to the CTO or VP Eng.
Very frequently what we are doing is providing an outside voice with a direct line to the top to recommend things the CTO or VP Eng already knows and wants to do. I have had many technical leaders personally thanks us and say how relieved they were to have diligence done by real hackers, and how much this was going to help.
Some do, that is becoming more common. There is, understandably, a huge variety of approaches from funds. Some are very hands on and have on staff technical folks who were previously CTOs or VP Eng, others are hands off and just take care of finance.
Any "profitably" run PE company is being sold for parts and its wiring is being stripped. Good job being better than a charlatan startup. Your employer provides nothing of value to society.
This is just completely and laughably wrong. You have no idea how many companies are now owned by PE, and the vast majority of them are run as solid, sensible businesses for five years and then sold again. You have bought into some caricature of what the PE world means.
I wonder if it's also simply selection bias, they only see the failures, because the successes are invisible. I know some tradespeople who set up their own practices and sold it to PE, and the practices are running similarly as before.
Of course if they are doing really well, than their infrastructure/scaling problem could be the big issue (and thus the big expense), and it could be at the point where improving those margins is worth throwing developers at it.
I have also seen some eye watering monthly AWS bills where it makes total sense to hire a bunch of devs to bring those down by even a few percent.
Accounting, human resources, sales (different than marketing), managers, security, operations, analysts, C-Suit, customer service, etc not including technical teams developers, sprint masters, qa, analysts, data warehousing, networking, support, devops, thought leaders.
Yeah, we know all that, I mean that's literally what we do. But I can tell you that I have seen companies with the same feature scope range over an order of magnitude in seats. There's a lot of overhiring in this business.
We often look at private companies going from initial bootstrap to their first exit, and I'm telling you, those are a whole different ball of wax. They manage to do a shit ton with not very many people.
You really don’t need a ton of staff dedicated to those things in a 100 person company. This is still a small business by most measures. A C Suite? It could be a sole owner still at that size, though it is stretching the margins. Roles tend to be less differentiated in small companies, and many of those functions are filled informally.
That being said, 118 still sounds pretty lean for the scale they are operating at.
Bandcamp was profitable. Clearly songtradr thinks they can be more profitable. Assuming average comp of $100k x 60 employees x 1.3 for taxes and additional expenses thats about $7.8MM revenue.
Songtradr just did a series D in 2021 for $50MM and recently acquired 7Digital for $23.4MM. I couldn't find a statement on how much it cost to acquire bandcamp, but it seems this might be motivated by Songtradr being cash poor and not wanting to dilute further.
"But within this discrepancy lies a paradox: Bandcamp, as comparatively threadbare as it may seem, with about $20 million in net revenue in 2022, is almost certainly profitable—based on the fact that the company has stayed lean and taken on no new funding since 2010"
Interesting, thanks for posting. So what could also be going on is "synergies" as they call them. It is quite possible that Songtradr has staff/functions that they think they can share across the acquisition. This happens a lot when a portco (what Songtradr is to whoever owns them) buys an adjacent company.
Of course it's also possible that that it's specific places (i.e. the content) that are being gutted as they aren't seen to be worthwhile.
The things is that once a company sells, it keeps the name, but can instantly become a different company as far as culture goes. If we want to complain about bandcamp being crappy to its people, the finger should be pointing at the owners (whatever round it was) who a) made the hires and b) made the decision to sell. You are throwing your employees to the wolves when you do that. Once you've sold, the decisions are now ultimately made by a new entity with new priorities (for better or for worse).
This is one of the reasons I advise any younger devs I talk to to understand their employer's ultimate game plan. If the employer is hoping for an exit in the period during which you plan to work for them, you should be under no illusions that your job is safe or will stay the same, and you should be getting compensated accordingly. This is the cost of working in the gravy train - we get the high salaries, but we also get the uncertainty that comes with working in a business where exits are so frequent. The two are connected. (And I have been on the employee side during an acquisition twice now, so I've been there.)
> You are throwing your employees to the wolves when you do that. Once you've sold, the decisions are now ultimately made by a new entity with new priorities (for better or for worse).
At its heart, tech is adapting to change and uncertainty through the fusion of creativity and process. Job changes are just another input.
Bandcamp has (or had) 118 people. Their business is music, not a chat app, so it will have different needs, both technical and non-technical. Maybe their engineering team is slightly larger than WhatsApp, but not by orders of magnitude.
Now maybe their business model was flawed (I heard it was profitable, but perhaps not profitable enough). But otherwise 118 people for a global brand-recognized business is pretty lean already: I have worked for medium sized businesses around the same headcount you have never heard of, which don't even operate outside their home country.
It’s all about the evaluation chart you take. It’s easy to pick random criteria to justify any of the following claim. Humanity is bloated. Mammals are bloated. Multi-cellular organisms are bloated. Eucaryote are bloated. Life is bloated.
Because it's a different business? No one needs to run anything. Bandcamp offers an easy way for musicians to have a fairly customizable online presence with a flexible pricing model, a merch store, and, importantly, plug into a larger platform's discoverability mechanism.
yeah but when i talk to artists, they tell me they love the process of creating music. they don't have the money or interest for procurement, warehousing or customer support. They just want feedback on their new beat...
Every band is eventually faced with making a tough decision:
1) Do it for the love of the music.
2) Become a business.
Some bands are lucky enough to do both - not most. Survivorship Bias is key here, and the overwhelming majority of bands do not make any money or perhaps even lose money chasing their passion.
"Just getting feedback" is cool when you're in it for the love of music. For the rest - you do need a way to market yourself, sell merchandise, promote your next show, sell downloads or CD's, etc.
Even then, I think Bandcamp fills the niche for musicians who want to continue doing it for the love of music and want to better serve their community. E.g. they can offer downloadable lossless music for free.
The vast majority of profession artists I know and love have a Bandcamp account. Maybe in the early stages musicians just want feedback on their new "beat". However, at some point they want to have a professional looking profile with releases that they can sell, with a community they can reach out to, merchandise they can roll out at their own pace, etc etc.
You are probably talking to very early stage musicians who would enjoy using Soundcloud over Bandcamp for feedback reasons.
I mean, the big difference is I have used bandcamp and it took me about 5 seconds to figure out how it worked… I read all your info pages and I have no idea what Kuky is. The stock images with all the latin words make it seem like it is just a scam.
our platform facilitates micro transactions with minimal fees because we take away the bank burden as much as possible. We focus on the creators, as long as they create great content people will reward them. platforms turn to crap when people find the need to sell other things. why should i sit through amazing youtube content only to be sold nordvpn? surely the community can do better with micros transactions.
We’ve built a micro transaction engine that helps reconcile payments really quickly & cheaply. This means that creators from anywhere around the world can create amazing content & reward each other instead of having to sell merchandise. We’ve tested the model with two labels so far & we’ve seen it even promotes collaboration “can I pay you for this tune to remind in my track”. This could never happen on any other platform & we think it’s something special.
Why do you think it's a good thing for companies to run at maximum efficiency? Have some slack, spread the knowledge around, let people go on vacation, have a bench, have replacements. Have a world that's more than capital owners and slaves.
It's a SaaS. That's a 10 person team at maximum efficiency. They could be a lifestyle business with 30. They've still got 50% more headcount to reduce.
100 person companies are really small. Some local car dealerships have 100 employees. I think these layoffs are more about redundancy at the buyer than the people not being useful at Bandcamp probably.
A global, international marketplace with about 100,000 sales totalling $3.5 million day. If you can swing serving that from a couple hundred petabytes in your living room then go ahead.
Ah good point! I didn't think about international payments in my first WAG - you're right that that would certainly need some people. So I would up my initial guess based on that, like maybe up another 25-30%, but that would still land us at around where songtradr is going if they are laying off 50%.
Yes I used it, it looks like a website from 2004, clearly their core competencies can not be about building their own file upload, payment etc. but creating Customer Friendly Sexy
Branded landing, working with labels etc. which they failed to do with 100 ppl
Ah yes, the halcyon days of 2004, when websites were all…minimalist?
Bandcamp has been one of the most functional and user-centered designs on the web for a long time now. They asked for far less commission on sales, and they provided options for downloading music in FLAC and even WAV formats, and were well ahead of the curve with “pay what you can” pricing. I have been a musician all of my life. I used Bandcamp exclusively to distribute my music online, and every musician I have ever known prefers it over every other option—by wide margins. Part of what we liked was how little it engaged in feature-creep and bloat.
This website from 2004 is more usable than many of the websites from 2023, it is clearly working well enough (or I guess those other websites aren’t doing their jobs right.)
What are you talking about? They work with a ton of labels. The landing page is tailored to discovery... they are long past the sexy branding stage, having millions of users and being the most loved independent music platform.
there's certainly operations that are leaner than that. a little down the thread there's people saying they could build bandcamp in a weekend, which is probably fanciful but also not completely off base. just on a pure technology level, bandcamp seems like a 3-4 developer sort of project. so they've got ~110 people running sales and support?
Counterpoint: https://simonrepp.com/faircamp/ already exists and is a self-hostable FOSS Bandcamp clone. Does it clone every feature? No. And it definitely has taken longer than a weekend to get to where it is. But it's a one-man passion project that clones enough to be a viable enough replacement for amateur musicians that I jumped to it immediately when Epic bought Bandcamp.
While a very nice project, Faircamp doesn't come close to offering what Bandcamp does. It's self-hosted, requiring the artists to have the technical knowledge to both customise the platform and run the infrastructure themselves, and it doesn't support any payment options other than a barebones liberapay implementation.[0]
It's also most importantly not a single trusted entity that people can trust with their payments like Bandcamp is.
Infra. The "non-functional" requirements are going to be expensive and need a solid team. Scaling, reliablility, availability, dealing with huge amounts of bandwidth and storage, all that crap. I'd guess a dozen infra people minimum.
Can’t you outsource all that to AWS? Bandcamp seems like an extremely simple site to me. It has some customizable artist pages, static file hosting for large music files, a web music player, and some e-commerce features for buying music.
I wouldn’t call it “one person and a weekend” simple, but the site has been around since 2007. A dozen people could have built it fairly comfortably from a basic site at the start to the scaled up version of today. 118 people just sounds like “hiring for the sake of hiring” to me.
Yes you can, but it gets very expensive in a hurry if you have a ton of load. So one justified place for head count is to bring down AWS bills. At the beginning, it makes sense to outsource it as much as possible, and later, a developer's salary to move the needle on your million dollar AWS bill is a no brainer.
I have no idea where they are in that scale of course.
prior to this, bandcamp was owned by Epic and lord only knows why they bought them or what their bigger plan was. i also have no idea how much they staffed up under epic rule since they went from a small business to being owned by the fortnite money man. Entirely possible it's something like:
1. bandcamp is a sustainable normal small-to-medium business growing healthily
2. Epic has tons of fortnitebux and is feuding with apple so they buy bandcamp as some kind of tangential play should they end up as a big alternative store on iOS. so they could have a music store offering (to compare to itunes? not that apple gives a crap about itunes anymore??) in addition to an app store?
3. the money music stops and everyone races for a seat. bandcamp is left hanging.
4. epic sells bandcamp to whoever just to get it off the books so they can focus on fortnite lootboxes
5. songtradr or whatever their name is tells the union to pound sand and cuts bandcamp down to a core team because they're planning to just gut the product and transition all these indie artists over to whatever platform they were running before. This is a music IP company. I don't think they want to handle B2C purchases or provide streaming music. They just wanted to buy a big pot of artists and IP to add to their collection.
This may have been a last-minute accelerated deal process where Epic would have all but shuttered Bandcamp if a buyer couldn't be found, before they needed to announce massive layoffs to assuage investors. Songtradr is given an opportunity to see the deal, wants to ensure Bandcamp's survival in its current form (because its demise would hurt the entire ecosystem Songtradr depends on).
But Songtradr isn't given time to put together a transition plan or identify the exact legal path to deal with the union (especially given that they're in an entirely different country with different labor laws!) and not expose themselves to liability. So they announce conditional openness to the acquisition (per the link above, the transaction hasn't closed yet), and this at minimum gives Bandcamp a stay of execution while they identify next steps.
Now, they've identified at least one next step - how much of the current Bandcamp costs they can carry during the transition - and that's 50% of current staff. A tough call to make, but if the alternative was shuttering the service, a very justifiable one.
Epic is private, Tim Sweeney owns >50%, and their only real rival in the game engine space had recently torpedoed themselves which caused a large amount of gamedevs and even some publishers to swear off Unity.
That's largely a distinction without a difference while Epic still owned (owns? seem deal isn't closed yet) them. If Epic is in peril, Bandcamp is in peril since they owned Bandcamp up until recently, and we know Epic is in financial trouble because of the Epic Games Store.
Their entire minimum revenue guarantee scheme to lure over indies and publishers is apparently extremely expensive for Epic and the store has yet to turn a profit on the whole. Before, they could run it off of Fortnite profits alone. That said, Sweeney has admitted that well is basically running dry and it's why they've been doing layoffs and the like everywhere.
If a company is in trouble, the first thing on the line are the subsidiaries and Bandcamp is a questionable acquisition on the Epic rep sheet, being a music store for a company whose main business is making videogames and selling a gaming engine to people. That means it either goes under or is sold off because it's seen as an irrelevant "aside" subsidiary.
Was anything in danger of shutting down before Q1 2022? All time tech market highs were ~3-6 months beforehand and presumably the acquisition negotiation took time.
Self-replying to retract the above. From https://www.404media.co/bandcamps-entire-union-bargaining-te... it seems that Songtradr leadership had explicit knowledge of the members of the union bargaining team, lied about it, and laid every single one of them off. I no longer think it likely that Songtradr is operating in good faith.
They would have to do what any union does - leverage worker power. If the majority of Bandcamp engineers agreed to halt work until x demands are met, it would drive Bandcamp as a service into the ground. Tech workers also hold the keys to everything - they could take the site down, lock up the music, etc.
They maybe can’t prevent it, but they could leverage BC/Epic/whomever into providing some kind of decent severance for those left out in the cold. In theory.
bandcamp was owned by Epic and lord only knows why they bought them or what their bigger plan was
this is incorrect. in addition to whatever lord you are speaking of, I also know. (unless you meant me, but even then, I think others share this knowledge.)
Epic bought Bandcamp to use it as a weapon in various lawsuits against Google and Apple over their pricing models. Bandcamp joined a suit against Google over its Play Store pricing in particular.
it didn't go anywhere, because Bandcamp already qualified for media app pricing, which rendered its role in the suit meaningless. but that was why Epic bought Bandcamp.
On point 5, bandcamp doesn’t own any rights to the music on the site. The artist agreement is limited to the service of selling music, if that changes the artists can revoke their agreement.
Pretty sure there's value in owning a platform where small independent ("undiscovered") artists release their work and where listeners go to find that work. In particular, it seems likely that having the metrics and historical data could give SongTradr insight into which artists seem likely to catch on, etc.
That would be the worst move Songtradr could make here. The ability to distribute your music while maintaining the rights to it is one of the main reasons - hell, if not the main reason - artists and labels (and fans like myself) love Bandcamp. Making such a change would, to my mind, royally piss off the entire community and, in particular, the artists that make the platform as successful as it has been. I can only imagine the negative press that such a move would generate.
Move their music off it. It happens a lot. If a band's earlier Bandcamp album gets picked up by a label, they will insist on exclusive distribution, so the band will remove it from BC.
If Bandcamp were to try such a move they would destroy the value of their business overnight. Retroactively changing the agreement with your customers about their IP is the best way to permanently destroy trust.
It would be a more dramatic overnight loss of customers than Unity. It's entirely laughable, and given that laws restrict the licensing and royalties of music, it might not even be legal.
Labels can only write up contracts giving them rights because they pay for studio time (given them a financial buy-in to the creation of the music) and pay advances against royalties. Not so for indie distributors. I don't know if there are specific applicable laws, but it's absurd enough that everyone would immediately drop Bandcamp.
Music royalty rates, for physical records, radio and internet streaming, are also determined by a panel of judges: the United States Copyright Royalty Board.
Not saying they won't try, but there are enough label-represented bands on Bandcamp that they would obliterate their back catalog (along with any network effects they're enjoying) overnight.
Technically Bandcamp is a very simple payment and file host.
A small team can quickly copy how it works and get all the artists to move platform if they were to shoot themself in the head. Right now this doesn't happen because Bandcamp functions and exists and has a reputation for musicians.
Lose that, all the artists start looking for a new home and someone will make an alternative quickly.
In corporate environment, people really must be fooled by two numbers: head count and budget. This is true for other walks of life, too.
I initiated and lead a platform in Financial Service Industry which lead to massive productivity gains. Through standardized processes we could use an inhouse build No Code editor instead of individual app development. Costs went down from 1.5 Mio to sub 10k USD, time to market from 4 1/2 month for two dev teams to a couple of hours for a non-developer per app.
Reaction: "Dude, you are destroying careers. We get paid and promoted by budget and head count. We artificially inflate budgets and projects so that we get promoted."
I was stunned. We could do so many other things with the free capacity or help build value for the company.
Lesson:
People are sometimes able to comprehend abstract stuff ("Software can be used to automate processes and can scale. It serves 1000+ customers worldwide 24/7. We have 10 people employed."). Mostly decision makers sadly prefer power ("Woooha, your company has 1.000 devs?! How cool, you must feel like superman!")
Lesson still not really comprehended, but somehow ingested.
If the top line is also growing fast, and you have a good story on the unit-economic, part of the narrative is that you can eventually reduce costs and increase margin. It is hard from the outside to distinguish between Amazon style "we are investing all our profits back into R&D so we can take over the world" and "We are bloating our team to grow at all costs and don't know what levers to pull"
> It is hard from the outside to distinguish between Amazon style "we are investing all our profits back into R&D so we can take over the world" and "We are bloating our team to grow at all costs and don't know what levers to pull"
Considering Amazon was building physical warehouses, buying land, literally delivering to people, executing deployment of AWS which Netflix was famously using, all while being a publicly listed company with audited public financials I think Amazon’s style is easy to distinguish from the outside.
It really doesn't sound easy to me to tell this from the outside. What if the R&D investments are all garbage? It is hard to scale an engineering org effectively, it can take off and start building some microservice fortress that never yields any business value if it has the wrong leadership.
You also know from using Amazon that they were near flawlessly executing 2 day shipping across the US with prices competitive with Walmart and other successful retailers.
They also had a pricing advantage against incumbents due to not having to collect sales tax in all states until 2016.
It’s mostly the verifiably not losing money part though so you knew they weren’t overextending, and they were delivering what people wanted.
A lot of the time IPO investors, both public and institutional, value company cash on hand at more than $1 per dollar during an IPO. An extra 500 million in the bank might make the company IPO for a billion dollars more.
Peloton is an example of a company that did a huge unnecessary fundraise before IPO. I'm sure it makes a bunch of numbers and ratios look better on paper. Psychologically, I think it also helps companies lock in evaluation closer to their IPO Target for when people look back at the history of the company.
It's pretty similar too the idea of inflating employee head count. You can say "we made $10 million with only 10 employees last year. Wait until you see how much money you're going to make now that we have a hundred employees"
You want to sell when you can show growth because that justifies a higher multiple. If you're cutting people, it means you don't have enough growth opportunities to use those people for. It's the opposite signal.
You might need to sell, which may change the calculation.
Honestly, it's all over the map. Depends on the reason for sale and the reason for purchase. They are looking for "synergies" and a very common one "you already have this thing, so you can cut it out of this company after you acquire and use yours". It is very possible that Epic had plans that involved hyper-growth, now realized those are not going anywhere, and is happy to demonstrate that a chopped up Bandcamp is a good deal.
I have literally done diligences where part of our role was to weigh in on how much could be slashed, which is not very pleasant, but like I said, when the growth was dumb in the first place it can be the right call.
When a company isn't profitable you hire developers to build a product which can make you profitable. When a company is profitable, you fire all the developers and start collecting dividends.
A founder friend confided in me years ago, "It is MUCH easier to raise more money than it is to fire someone... I just keep raising and hiring and eventually everything will get done"
No surprise that this approach was very much a "Low-Rates Phenomenon"
Legally perhaps, but firing people particularly en mass is hard to do right, unless you don't care and you are just prepping for a fire sale.
You can lose people who might be key contributors. You can destroy morale in the rest of the company. Everyone else knows they might be next, so they will leave first chance they get. Finally, it signals to the market you are in trouble (hence why a lot of companies are doing it now: better to be just one more company doing layoffs when everyone else is doing it).
> I think it is naive to assume that Bandcamp was wise to be employing all these people
It probably was stupid, but stupid isn’t illegal, and companies will hide behind that fact to issue mass layoffs (which can be even stupider when they result in an inoperative team).
The financial argument behind a layoff is today made more irrelevant when the employees are smart and creative enough to be the key to company success. Good employees won’t take stupid, no matter how legal stupid is.
> sometimes it's entirely motivated by putting lipstick on a pig in order to look like a runaway growth success thing
The same can be said for the CEO and Board who created the mess. Except they get a big payoff no matter what, and have much larger leverage over the lives of the employees.
I think your right about them focusing on the wrong thing. Content writing instead of sales. There music discovery is horrible and they don't push any of their artists. I mean they only make money when their artist do. You would think that they would promote them better or have a Spotify like interface to push they artist music.
is this because employee growth is easily verifiable? Put another way, don't companies ask for accounting statements etc to figure out if the target company is worth acquiring? (context - I have no idea how one company accquires another, so this is a noob q)
> Background, I work in diligence for software aquisitions.
It shows. I don't see lay-offs from this perspective. Instead, I think about each of the employees impacted by the company's reckless behavior. Did the employees have any say in this matter? No? Then who cares if the job they were there to do was unimportant in the first place? That is absolutely the fault of the company.
Your stance is not effective when treating human beings like human beings and not some `num_workers` configuration in some kubernetes yaml.
Your calculation falls apart if you are comparing it against no business - which is what happens when a non-sustainable business eventually runs up against economic reality. The whole business of not-profitable companies growing for years and hiring people on imaginary future money is tech industry magic beans shit. It's divorced from the reality of the rest of the world where people have to really work for a living and don't get paid our astronomical salaries.
I work as a consultant in tech diligence, but previous to that I worked for many many years for small, profitable, Normal Businesses. And the company I work for is a normal business that watches the bottom line and doesn't over hire because we have to be profitable. If you go work for a magic bean company that doesn't think being a sustainable business matters, you are, unfortunately, part of a ponzi scheme that can fall apart any time.
I hated my life when I worked at this style of company.
When I worked at (a beverage company), one of the unfortunate realities was that the company did not really compete to make their money. The profit at the entity I worked at was completely based on the price of ingredients that was set by a parent company. We could have reduced complexity and improved efficiency by large margins easily, but it didn't matter because the parent company would have clawed back a larger share and pumped their profits, while our efforts were of no benefit.
In this aimless zombie corporate mode, they hired people without much thought, and everyone was busy looking busy (8 hour meetings were common for "developers"). However, if you are doing something for real, people don't see any point in helping you out; so even if you really do want to improve things (in my case, I wanted to help the poor souls on 2ch who had to work on the weekend because of poor internal communication that prevented hand-offs), no one wanted to lend a hand.
Since profit is not a big deal, and everyone simulates being busy, no winds up in charge, and the inmates run the asylum. If you are the guy in the unimportant job, you suddenly realize it is a bullshit job and are constantly in fear of your job vanishing. Moreover, since you cannot accomplish anything, it is nearly impossible to find a new job when the company inevitably encounters reality.
> I think about each of the employees impacted by the company's reckless behavior.
The "reckless behavior" in the above quote was not committed by the acquirer, but by whoever was responsible for leading + growing Bandcamp off this cliff.
In the same way you want to treat humans like humans, you need to treat businesses like businesses – i.e., if you're not making money or growing revenue fast enough to justify hiring the marginal employee, as a hiring manager, you're gambling with the prospective hire's career in pursuit of a collective gain.
If you're an employee joining an unprofitable company, this is part of the package and should be really clear in the interviewing/onboarding. If it isn't, again, the blame falls at the feet of the CEO, ultimately.
I'm really bummed. I love Bandcamp. It's the only place I can buy music FROM THE MUSICIAN with very little overhead, and download a high-quality lossless track. Amazon only lets me buy crap-quality MP3s. Apple is opaque about it, putting either lossy AAC or lossless ALAC in the same M4A containers. >:(
The only good alternative is Qobuz, which is frustrating to use and charges absolutely massive overhead.
But unfortunately it feels like Bandcamp keeps getting screwed over somehow or another. Most people these days want to stream, not to buy and download. :(
I too loved Bandcamp for its sane approach to acquiring new music; unlike "most people" I refuse to use the streaming-only services, and insist upon buying albums and listening to exactly those selections I choose (and I prefer to listen to albums in their entirety, even today).
Perhaps I'm just old and set in my ways, but choices made by others, especially algorithmically generated "options maximizing my engagement", hold no attraction for me whatsoever. Losing such freedom of choice would be painful in the extreme.
I also refuse to use streaming services, and prefer to curate my own music - but for me, it's less about algorithmic suggestions, and more about actually owning the things I've paid for.
A streaming service or an artist can pull music from a service (see Neil Young), but they ain't going to be reaching into my hard drives and pulling the mp3s out of it.
I am all in on owning things as well. To the point that I'll buy Blu-Rays where I can too, rather than sign up for an extra streaming service.
With music in particular, I definitely see discovery as a problem though -- particularly these days when "radio" isn't really a thing (at least for me). Spotify might be able to fill that gap, but I haven't really tried yet.
I'm also worried that "owning digital things" is going to become harder and harder as time goes on, but I haven't quite been able to put my finger on what the tipping point for that is going to be.
Yeah it seems like it's going in that direction. The new generation seems fine with streaming services, now. I worked for a few customers who want to retain their physical music in their homes with a media devices and stream it to all their devices in the home. Slowly but surely many home entertainment devices that store music have been slowly removing those features in favor of streaming services. This has been making it very hard for people to retain physical copies of their music without some sort of custom solution that has to be maintained.
For me, I refuse to use music streaming services, I rely heavily on my digital music collection most of which comes from Bandcamp. Bandcamp is the last bastion of physical digital music where there is direct interaction between musicians and music lovers. If it dies, we are screwed. If its possible, id actually like to see it be supported from donations like Thunderbird is if it was possible. I don't like the idea that it relies on commercialism.
Ownership is indeed the other reason I don't do streaming. I pay for a track or album, download it, and it's mine.
I do see this capability disappearing in coming years, however; especially with growing use of "AI" tools to, say, craft ever more complicated barriers to avoiding rent-seeking.
I used to leech Mp3's with the best of them, trawling through blogs enmasse before music was consolidated by giant aggregators. DI.FM is different though, its a streaming service, curated by humans (who are the worlds best DJs), has a sustainable buinsess model and lets you download streams.
Its very intersting how my music taste has evolved over the years, the more genres and types i was exposed to, the more i discovered. Nothing beats going to a concert you dont know anything about and having the night of your life. Im one for nostalgia, no doubt, but i think listening to the same song, in the same tone, over and over again, is a simplistic view of music and ruines its potential magic. Music and moods are instrinically linked. What happens if i was to listen to my favourite rockband, but instead mixed into chillout music that ebbs and flows over 5 or 10 hours. I get to hear the songs i love, in different ways, evoking different emotions and memories. I find that extends the life of music, not run it into the ground, dulling all those memories that triggered your love in the first place. I kissed that girl for the first time listening to this song, fades if you listen to that song everyday.
Spotify is automated radio, warts and all. Popular amoung the consumerist sheeple, often coupled with tv and shopping subscription technoligies. Society has always had this cross section of music interest, chinstroker outlets always existed at fringes, hardly able to survive in the world they helped create. Music sells. Captalists like to sell things people love to buy. A victim of their own success. Such is the harsh reality of this economic system, things just cant be done, they have to be done to death, then revamped and rebranded and the cycle goes on.
> I used to leech Mp3's with the best of them, trawling through blogs enmasse before music was consolidated by giant aggregators
That's not the only alternative. I've never done that.
> Its very intersting how my music taste has evolved over the years, the more genres and types i was exposed to, the more i discovered.
I couldn't agree more! But streaming services (or old-school radio) doesn't work well for me when it comes to discovering new music. I get that plenty of people find that a great path and more power to them.
But for me, streaming services are like radio you pay for, and music radio has never been a thing of value to me at any point in my life.
And, financially speaking, "radio you pay for" makes no sense to me. If I'm paying money, I want to have the music available to listen to any time I want, on any device I want -- not just when a DJ decides it's time to play it, or only when I have an internet connection.
But don't get me wrong -- I am not saying that streaming services are stupid and shouldn't exist. I'm just saying that they don't provide value to me, personally.
I too listen to albums in their entirety and don’t interact too much with autogenerated content.
But I was on Apple Music and now I’m on Spotify. The amount of new albums I get to listen to would put a massive dent in my bank account if I was buying them as I go.
I still purchase Vinyl and the odd CD, but that is reserved for my top must have records. A flat rate for music just makes sense to me, and allows me to check out and discover so many more new artists than in the old days, where my music taste was much narrower and confined to more mainstream “classic” rock and the like.
For the few albums that are there sure, it works. Unfortunately the vast majority of the time there isn’t anything there. Most artists just aren’t on bandcamp. Or the artist is on there but only a subset of their albums are. Even if I started using it more, it would be so rare, as I’d need to go use Spotify or my own physical/digital collection most of the time, which means when the album ends I’m more likely to keep listening on the current platform, not think to switch back to bandcamp to see once again if the newest Metric album is suddenly there, or if any albums apart from one are there etc.
Also the amount of similarly named artist/albums that are tributes or fan “sequels” or straight up just the same named artist a a little bit of friction to make search.
Bandcamp exists in an odd space where unless I’m willing to have my music choices heavily restricted it then it loses out to traditional a-la-carte purchasing of albums whether physically or on digital storefronts, or to just using a streaming service. If I was a young kid in primary school again, it would still lose out to pirating music as well I think.
Just to offer a counterpoint - there's so many indie and small bands I've found while listening to Pandora. Most or all of which I would have never discovered otherwise.
Sure, maybe they don't pay as much as me buying the CD would for the artist - but I likely would have never found them any other way. Now, they get something every time I listen to their songs.
I would, however, enjoy much higher quality audio. Even with the top tier Pandora plan, it's still MP3's, albeit high quality MP3's.
I tried a couple streaming services a while back, and them rather annoying. I've discovered a lot of good new bands through Bandcamp, just reading about related bands in genres I like. The annoyances of the various streaming services just push me away, and yes, potentially to my own detriment in missing out of artists I might not discover any other way.
This is an interesting point, actually. I rarely play music in the background when I'm doing other things -- but I listen to a lot of music. When I do, I put an album on and listen to it with my full attention. In other words, I listen to music like other people watch movies.
It was only in the last few years that I learned that I was unusual in this.
That's how truly good albums shine, specially if you do it in the dark, you can travel to different worlds :) But yeah most people don't have the patience.
Can I safely assume that you also listen to some albums multiple times to get to know them? If so I'd like to know which are some of your favorites.
> Can I safely assume that you also listen to some albums multiple times to get to know them?
Absolutely yes. Like with good books and movies, you can't really appreciate music fully on a single listen. And a lot of music reveals wonders only after you've become very familiar with it.
Also, with some of my favorite artists (Kate Bush comes immediately to mind, but she's not the only one), I often dislike their music on first listen. It's only after sitting with it a few times that I fall in love with it.
It would take too long to list my favorites, but here's what I've been listening to over the past week: Martina DaSilva, Oriana Curls, Yello, Frank Zappa, early Pink Floyd, miscellaneous Venezuelan salsa bands.
I once went to a "blind concert" (basically a pitch black theater) where they played Atom Heart Mother, I didn't know that album but I was a big PF fan, and it was a wonderful experience.
Atom Heart Mother is a wonderful piece of work. The albums I've listened to in the last week were Obscured by Clouds and Meddle.
> Like Zeta?
I'm actually new to the genre and still finding my way by listening to single songs from different groups to figure out the ones that appeal to me the most (that's why I didn't name a specific band). I hadn't come across Zeta, but they look like the right sort of thing. I'll check them out. Thanks!
Meddle is one I listened to religiously for a while. I do find that I can get obsessed and then "burnt out" with a particular album or even band. This happened to me with PF, I can still listen to them, but not with the same focus.
And that's not entirely a bad thing, because it makes me value more the (few) bands or composers who stand that test.
Salsa is wonderful to explore, in particular if you're able to find a good group to watch live :)
Can you explain why you are so opposed to streaming? I actually do both and own a few hundred lossless albums as well. Usually if I think something is moderately good, I'll purchase a lossless copy (unless I buy a CD of it, which I'll rip to my collection). However streaming is a more modern version of radio to me when I don't want to dig around playlists. I'll find new music I like from whatever spotify or apple music serves up if it's new to me, quite often. Just curious.
Im the total opposite, I don't want to own music (some things sure) but streaming services allow me to use the music I like to listen to wherever I want. I can make playlists and organize how I want it even make my own "radio stations" for different moods.
There is no way I can and will buy the amount of metal music I consume lol.
Also the algo that suggests new music is awesome! I learned about a lot of new bands just by using that feature.
Alot of the time, you can just email their booking email asking to buy their album with cashapp et al and they'll gladly take your money and ship you a zip file of MP3's, assuming the band/artist is small enough.
And you could replace Dropbox quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
funny thing: i recently happened into the solution to that age-old question of "how do i transfer some file(s) between two computers in the same room". i now run an anonymous FTP server on my laptop, open to the LAN. prior to this Dropbox _was_ one of the solutions, but recently i've used that FTP server for the job several times with both Linux and Windows users.
In a directory as a lazy way to transfer a file (especially to my phone).
It is not encrypted, and I wouldn’t be that surprised if it was also vulnerable in some ways, but it sure is easy (and it is only for lan, and pretty brief).
Magic Wormhole is great, but sometimes unbearably slow for bulk transfers. (I imagine the public relay server used for the common NAT-to-NAT case is sometimes overloaded.)
(dig, dig, dig... where did I get that... music... found it!)
http://magnatune.com (correct, there is no 's' there... that's odd in today's world)
> Since 2003, we've found and recruited the very best independent musicians and shared revenue 50/50 with them. Much of our music is exclusively available here. Nobody has spent the time to curate a collection like we have.
They've got some interesting licensing (as in lack of royalties)...
Though... Not entirely sure anymore about this. It feels like it is just running as a zombie site that's paid up (no news in the past decade)... but it's still running and streaming.
Funny to see Magnatune mentioned, HN is probably the only place I would ever see that. You got me out of lurking as I had to share.
The founder and CEO of Magnatune is John Buckman. Per his Linkedin he is still the CEO of Magnatune, in addition to some of his other projects like BookMooch and iLicenseMusic.
Magnatune is certainly in zombie mode, as Buckman started an espresso machine company that really took off and gave him notoriety, Decent Espresso. It uses an Android tablet to control and the app he wrote is written in Tcl/Tk. It's a fascinating project and how I became familiar with him and his previous endeavors.
I hope this won't result in Bandcamp going to shit, but I have to say I'm pretty worried. It's the only place I buy music. Band releases album -> I buy it. When I'm looking for new music, I typically look at the collections of other people who bought an album I enjoyed.
can one stream a mix of music sourced elsewhere and bandcamp music? If people have to keep switching apps, I think that's going to limit the appeal to people who are a bit more serious/intentional about every "listen". There's a lot of those, but it's still a minority.
Any time I download music from Bandcamp, I drag it into Apple Music on my Mac and it syncs to all of my devices, sitting in my library like any other album.
It’s actually one of the reasons I use Apple Music over Spotify, the process to do this in Spotify is much more convoluted.
Spotify’s process is that the files need to be locally accessible from any computer playing the music, or they must be synced manually to the mobile app.
Lack of a real library is why I ditched Spotify for Rdio years and years ago, and why I switched to Apple Music when that became a thing. And I still run a Plex server, partially for the PlexAmp player.
But you still can’t even just add them to your library in Spotify, you have to put them in playlists, and then download that playlist on your phone, and then they’ll be on your phone. At least that was the system last I used it
While not automatic, YouTube Music can do this. You can basically upload your own music. Create playlists that mix yt songs and songs in your collection. You can upload on one machine, and access the uploaded song from anywhere, so you're basically using their cloud.
I can tell you that I wasn't accused, but that it's also for private consumption only, no way to share the songs, so they might not be that strict. No idea though. You can read about the feature here: https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522
> Most people these days want to stream, not to buy and download
To each their own. For me Soundcloud wins hands down because of social network effect and gets me continuous stream of mixes. I really don't care what was the authors journey to releasing an album. A lot of music soon going to be generated anyway.
I really despise Apple Music for its album centric view and lack of good playlists. Spotify is somewhere in the middle.
It's funny; this is the polar opposite of how I listen to music. I only listen to albums, and 95% of playlists I listen to are my own and just contain a series of albums.
I really haven't found any problems in collecting 320k Mp3s as a producer myself.
I think if most people knew the real way most modern music is produced and mastered now (on laptops), and how a lot of masters and music catalogues behind the scenes are literally re-encoded from mp3 backups, they'd see that lossless music is not an exact science.
Flac is also not universally supported by playback devices, and can become unsupported at any time faster than Mp3, so using more universal formats is not necessarily a bad thing.
That being said, I use HD lossless WAV copies for all of our own masters.
Regardless of how good high bitrate MP3s can technically be, my experience with MP3s has been poor. I can't remember the last time I got one that was of good enough sound quality that it didn't annoy me to listen to it.
That's why I go with lossless encodings. They aren't a guarantee of good sound quality, but the odds of them being so are much, much higher.
Personally, I don't actually care about whether or not FLAC is widely supported across devices. My media center will do on-the-fly conversions and lets me stream to anything, and if I need a different format for some reason, I can just convert from the FLAC to whatever I need.
I understand. I think the reason why they charge more for lossless is the additional bandwidth required to download them. Cloud host providers charge based on bandwidth, so they pass that cost on to buyers. I do know 320k VBR is usually undesireable, sometimes converting a 320k Mp3 back to WAV can cure some problems with frequency loss and artifacts... I don't know the specific answer to your dilemma, as flac formatted files are not usually something I use. Best of luck though! :/
I have no actual dilemma. Bandcamp is still good, and there's a chance that they will remain so. If they go away/get bad, that's just the loss of one source of high-quality music. There are others -- even if I'm only left with physical CDs.
Judging by the Bandcamp United's (Union about to form at Bandcamp) feed, it seems they were nearing the completion of their initial steps to ask SongTradr to recognize and negotiate with the union. The "Last Call" post was made just 4 days ago: https://union.place/@bandcampunited/111219165521125342
Wonder if it ever got started or SongTradr tried to nip this whole thing in the bud?
SongTradr needs demonstrate that Bandcamp wasn't financially viable and thus layoffs were coming regardless of unionization attempts. They acquired BandCamp two weeks ago and layoffs post-acquisition are extremely common.
> SongTradr needs demonstrate that Bandcamp wasn't financially viable
That's provably false.
> He notes that, according to its co-founder, Ethan Diamond, Bandcamp has been profitable since 2012.
> In addition, Bandcamp charges its customers (indie artists) just 10-15% commission rates as a retailer – and on Bandcamp Fridays, it charges nothing at all.
This is an egregious comment. Why are you assuming the GP was satisfied in making this point. You are assuming the worst in this person just because you disagree.
Right, that’s what I’m saying is so out of line. Their phrasing was simply concise, you shouldn’t be so comfortable reading into it any more than that.
Theoretically could be considered union-busting. But since the company was just acquired (likely sold due to poor performance and almost certainly being reorganized) there is very good plausible deniability.
Looks like it, Starbucks has a tendency to suddenly close stores in areas where unions are attempted. Doesn't seem to matter to them if the store was doing well or not.
Around here (near Seattle) they are having to explain why the foam floor mats behind the counter used for anti-fatigue were removed as trip hazards, but only in stores attempting to unionize...
I destroyed my back working without mats in the resturant industry. Every winter I get back pain and have to use a cane for a few weeks. Use mats if you are going to stand somewhere 8+ hours a day kids.
I'm not going to get into the why's at Starbucks, but I worked retail years ago and one person insisted on having a standing mat, and I tripped over that thing -all- the time.
Just get more comfortable shoes. As ugly as Crocs type shoes are, my back pain disappeared when I started wearing them. They don't -have- to be gaudy, I wear the Santa Cruz often which just looks like a typical loafer. They also make 'work shoes', which are apparently loved by nurses...
I've worked behind the counter in a similar job to Starbucks while in high school and college. Shoes were not an end-all-be-all solution. Anti-fatigue mats helped significantly in my case.
> Could this be considered a strike breaking action? Especially if the union was planning to negotiate for remote work.
Yes, it could be considered retaliation via constructive dismissal without cause. In theory the NLRB could force remediations including but not limited to reinstatement of position (ie, hiring them back). If the NLRB decides that the terminations were intended to break support for recognizing the union, the NLRB has the authority to force automatic recognition without an election.
That's assuming the union pursues that case, of course, and the whole process takes months.
A union does not need to be recognized for anti-union actions to be illegal. There are a lot of protections in place around the protection of the worker's right to unionize, and if you get anywhere close to infringement you're in for a world of hurt.
If the union / workers attempting to form a union can demonstrate that the company knew about the union, and show that the action adversely affected the ability of the workers to unionize, then they definitely have a pretty strong foundation for a lawsuit.
> Perhaps not, if the union is not yet recognized.
That's incorrect. Most of the rights afforded by the NLRA actually apply regardless of whether or not a union exists; a union is simply a formal structure for exercising those rights.
In this case, firing employees could be considered retaliatory action. Retaliatory action is illegal regardless of whether or not the union has been recognized (in fact, it is illegal to retaliate against employees for supporting a union even if there is not sufficient support for the union to call an election).
I love this legalizing and philosophizing. Bottom line is half the employees lost their jobs, and even if there is some sort of anti-union or NLRB-initiated action here, it will be years before there's a fine or lawsuit. By then the business will be unrecognizable.
Which is why vicious, "take the company out back and Ol' Yeller it" level approaches should be the norm for the NLRB. Make examples of a few high-profile companies, and eventually negotiating with a union will appear more appealing than risking the consequences of union busting.
It also could be a purely financial decision. Bandcamp claimed $51m in revenue (I assume gross?) in 2016 [1] and, per reporting, had about $20m in net revenue in 2022 [2]. With the reported 210 employees, that's $95k in net revenue (not profit -- wages / costs are not yet accounted for) per employee. That is very low. You could easily see an acquirer wanting to be more profitable and cutting things like editorial.
Not sure who's getting laid off, but for me in the past the Bandcamp Weekly show was the one that gave me opportunities to explore new genres and artists. I think their shows have a positive impact towards the platforms, buyers, and artists.
Agreed. It’s one of the best music shows out there. Selfishly I hope Andrew Jervis wasn’t laid off but realistically it’s hard to imagine everything continuing as before with 50% of the company gone.
100% really hope Andrew Jervis is able to keep his show going. So much of the music that I keep coming back to is music that I discovered through his show!
I don't understand how people can say things like this where companies don't even make a profit like uber year after year yet no one wonders why they have the shop they do.
It should be ok to not be exceedingly profitable. Bandcamp produced loads of amazing valuable content. But greedy maniacs will always hate this. I am reminded of the Craigslist leadership who was mad insulted for the conscious decision to impose an upper bound to their growth which is a refreshingly moral thing to do under capitalism
I'm excited for this vein of Leftism to end. We're seeing the DSA get chucklefucked due to their 10/7 Attack response, and we're seeing their NIMBY allies get chucklefucked in the legislatures.
Hopefully some new, more productive and positive ideology emerges.
As a musician once on there, I joined, spent a lot of time carefully designing my page and uploading my catalogue, and then I paid $20 a month for their premium service for absolutely no traction on the site beyond external promotion I did.
The UI on BandCamp has been vastly outdated for ages now, it was very hard to navigate and find new music by genre. i only go there to buy music if I have a direct link.
It's a pre-soundcloud site, and even soundcloud (with a superior UI) was going broke years ago. I was unaware they had a staff of developers, I envision most of them were on the bench most of the time.
Bandcamp doesn't even allow YouTube video embedding for music videos, which is a huge mistake alone.
Music platforms should be heavily promoting any independent artist that pays them a monthly fee... They seem to think that monthly subscription money form hard working artists is simply for extra file storage above free accounts.
I can't wait until something far better with an artist focus comes along, and no that is not Spotify.
> i only go there to buy music if I have a direct link.
> Bandcamp doesn't even allow YouTube video embedding for music videos, which is a huge mistake alone.
> Music platforms should be heavily promoting any independent artist that pays them a monthly fee... They seem to think that monthly subscription money form hard working artists is simply for extra file storage above free accounts.
You haven't really understood the value Bandcamp offers and you're criticising them for not being something they never claimed to be.
Bandcamp is (was?) to music as Flickr is to photography. It's a portfolio site, that doubles as a means to buy things from that portfolio. It's the thing an artist's social media pages link to to say "here's my body of work for you to browse through." Where browsing through that portfolio — listening to 30-second previews of songs, etc — doesn't require signing up for any service, but is just a regular part of the public web.
I'm talking about what you get without having to sign in. Even with free albums, IIRC you can't fully preview the song without "buying" it, which means signing in first. The signed-in experience is mostly akin to the signed-in experience of the iTunes Store. It's what you get when not signed in that's unique.
>Even with free albums, IIRC you can't fully preview the song without "buying" it, which means signing in first.
Actually, you can! Fun fact, unless an artist/label has explicitly limited what you can listen to without having made a purchase, you can listen to most of the music on Bandcamp in full, without buying it, an unlimited number of times if you're not logged in. The way it works is that, if you're logged in, you get a set (~3?) number of listens before Bandcamp basically says, "Yo, you seem to dig this, you should prolly be a mensch and throw some dough to the artist(s)/label." If you're logged out, I'm not sure what the limit is (if there even is one?), but it's likely easily circumvented by clearing cache/cookies.
That's incorrect. Bandcamp does not require sign-in for full preview, and you do not need to buy it either.
There are decisions that can be made by some artists, although I don't recall being offered "full preview requires signin" when I put my own album on BC.
Bandcamp let me pay a musician for a song, regardless of how unknown or unpopular a band was. You’re three dudes in your mid-thirties playing open mic night and passing a hat around, and definitely cannot afford to get on Spotify or Youtube Music, but you can get on bandcamp and a few people can pay $5 for a song they liked when they were tipsy.
> Bandcamp let me pay a musician for a song, regardless of how unknown or unpopular a band was.
This is what made me love Bandcamp. I get to pay the artists more-or-less directly, and as a person who tends not to be into the Big Music Names, Bandcamp is utterly amazing, chock full of smaller artists doing wonderful things.
Also YT Music quality is shit. I bought a new pair of headphones and though they were defective until I played some songs encoded by yours truly as opus files.
Even without a cut, there are several virtual distribution services like DistroKid and TuneCore which for a flat fee will take care of submitting whatever WAV one created to all streaming platforms. Getting it noticed is a whole other story.
This is exactly why I have Spotify rather than bandcamp. It finds music I like, regardless of musician effort. I found more new musicians in the first year of Spotify than decades before.
It’s a loss for everyone if good music goes unheard.
Fuck Spotify. They've played a major role in drastically reducing any chance of significant revenue flowing to musicians, in complete contrast to Bandcamp.
People hearing your music is nice and all (I like it when people hear my stuff on BC), but it is orthogonal to the revenue that used to be associated with making recorded music available. There's far, far more music out there than anyone will ever be able to listen to, and I consider the possibility of even 1 paid milkshake for a musician much more important than some random number of listeners who heard the track on Spotify. I appreciate that you may see things differently, but I think that you're wrong.
You know what Glenn Jones (American guitarist), Talisk (Scottish folk), Tonbruket (Swedish jazz), Daniel Herskedal (Norwegian jazz, tuba), The Books (New York, sound collage), Yom (French klezmer clarinetist), Kongero (Swedish folk a cappella), and Naragonia (Belgian accordion folk) have in common?
That 1. I supported them on Bandcamp 2. I would never have found them if it wasn't for Spotify's discover weekly.
I could list a lot more artists for which this is true. It's not even counting the ones I found indirectly.
This is maybe something artists should be aware of when they think they get such a good deal from Bandcamp and such a bad deal from Spotify. It's not as simple as that. I'm sure it's true that most people who promise you "exposure" are trying to exploit you, but that doesn't mean you can ignore how you actually got in front of the audience you have.
The problem with this angle is that Bandcamp also has discovery features through which you may have found a different (or maybe an overlapping) 8 artists too. There's a good chance they would not be the same, and there's a argument that it might feel more difficult (Spotify appears to work VERY hard at getting better at prediction, Bandcamp is more like human curation, which is to say less reliable but also occasionally more serendipitous).
I see that indirectly, Spotify likes to recommend me stuff that has gotten attention from a few specific human curators: NPR desk concerts, the Mark Radcliffe Folk sessions (a BBC program I believe), and A Prairie Home Companion. So it's not an either-or, I would not even have heard of those curators without Spotify.
But some of the best stuff Spotify has found for me, has had ridiculously few plays and no obvious human curator connection.
Bandcamp just isn't in the same league, and I'd say Spotify is far better on serendipity too. It's far from predictable what it will recommend, there's not many human curators you can say that about (including the three I mentioned).
I think you've identified the major problem for musicians: there's so much music available today that the value of writing more has crashed. The value to listeners is now in the delivery infrastructure and recommendations.
The population of music lovers, people that have favorite bands, genres, albums, want more music. Those who listen passively and do not own or care about albums and don't go to concerts etc. can be safely ignored; Spotify is fine for them.
> Those who listen passively and do not own or care about albums
I see it very differently. I care about good music. There's an incredible amount of good music out there, and it's rare that an album is full of it. Your definition of "good" may vary, but mine isn't really influenced by the artist. Most albums are mostly not-good-music. I'm picky, and look at unrelated songs independently. This is why I don't really care for albums. I feel no debt to a single artist or a nothing-more-than-release-time-related collection of music, which is what most are.
Some albums I do considered a complete, single, work, but that's relatively rare. Daft Punk - Random Access Memories is a good example, in my opinion.
I don't see what concerts have to do with anything. Those are often related to luck and finances/privilege.
Ah the no true Scotsman argument. I have favorite bands and genres, I support local bands when I find them, I go to concerts when I'm able, though I don't live in an ideal location for it. I play music and I try to get together with others to play. And I use Spotify. I'm not interested in owning albums, you can stream an album or individual songs.
I spent years buying music, ripping the CDs, organizing files, etc. I'm very glad that I don't need to bother any more. I don't own the medium the music is stored on, I don't really get why it matters.
Prepare for your music to disappear at any point. Licensing deals end and albums you love are suddenly removed from platforms. I understand that's an acceptable trade off for a casual listener. I actually use Spotify for previewing albums and consider it great value.
However any music I care about I buy as I plan to own my library for decades to come.
Plus, you're missing out on a lot of great music that never has been available on streaming platforms.
> Prepare for your music to disappear at any point.
So far it's only happened because the musician himself pulled the music, and I wasn't really enthused after that to try and find it again. As the gp said, there's so much music now... I might be missing out on some music but if I've already got too much to ever listen to then why does that matter? In fact, having to make the choice to purchase is necessarily going to limit the amount available and my willingness to take a chance on it.
Streaming has opened up so much for me that I would never have found browsing music shops. Of course if Spotify disappeared then I'd have to find another service or buy the music then. A problem for it's time.
Support, experience, control. Physical media supports the artist. When you play a physical album you experience the whole album. When you own an album you control it and it cannot be taken away, edited or lost.
Streaming doesn't support the artist. Streaming obliterates coherence of albums. When you stream music you do not control it and it can be taken away, edited or lost without your knowledge or consent.
There's a few albums I love listening to all the way through every time. But for the most part I want to listen to the songs I like. I think about all the times I've found one song that really moves me on an album I don't care for, your suggestion is kind of like "well you should miss out on those gems".
Physical media doesn't support the artist much better either, that's been a topic of conversation since I was a kid.
>our suggestion is kind of like "well you should miss out on those gems"
No, I'm the same way. Sometimes an album only has 1 good song; other times an album is great but I can't stand 1 or 2 songs. The important thing is that I listened to the whole album! I'm judging the songs in the context of their creators. I'm experiencing them together and in order, and that's a very different experience than interleaving songs. Interleaving is fine and can be an artform in itself (we used to call it a "mix tape") but I believe you owe it to the artist to listen to the thing they made in its entirety. It would be like reading a book collection interleaving the chapters. It's not fair to you or the authors.
That's how I feel about it. You ARE missing something.
>Physical media doesn't support the artist much better either, that's been a topic of conversation since I was a kid.
I have many musician friends, and they would ALL disagree with you quite strenuously. The money they make on streaming is ~0. The money they make selling CDs is almost all profit - and it's also the thing they made instead of sliced and diced and mixed with other things other people made.
> I'm experiencing them together and in order, and that's a very different experience than interleaving songs.
I don't follow. You're free to listen to full albums, in sequence, on Spotify. You can listen to any song at any time in any order, from the album, or custom playlists. It's just a large catalog of music where you can click and play/queue anything you see, with some recommendation systems that create custom playlists you can choose to listen to.
I'm getting the impression that many people criticizing these streaming services don't understand what they actually are.
As a listener, this is my entire concern, use case, and reason for paying for a streaming site: finding new music to listen to. I don't think I'm unique. Artists should get more, which is why I pay for Spotify Premium, but the use case of a listener is important. Bandcamp doesn't address that, for me.
There is more music on Bandcamp than you could listen to in a lifetime. More comes out in a week than you could (probably) listen to in a week.
So when you sayd "finding new music to listen to", there's a hidden implication in there: you want to find new music that is on Spotify (which in turn implies things like major labels, artists seeking or expecting breakout etc.
Bandcamp is an amazing resource for discovering new music, but a subset of all new music, just as Spotify is. It's fine to say you prefer what you can find on Spotify, just don't make the claim that Bandcamp somehow isn't up for this general task.
I’m unaware of anything on Bandcamp that is remotely as useful to me as the auto-built playlists and artist/song radio tools in Spotify. That there’s “a lot” of music on either platform is meaningless if the tools to find things I’d like don’t work for me.
I get the compensation model sucks for artists. I try to buy things from bands I like. But ultimately, if artists don’t like the Spotify model, they should pull their music - but I’m going to continue to use a platform that gives me access to everything I’d ever want to hear for like, $10/mo.
I think the auto-built playlists are bad. Not only because they slip in something jarring, but even the "This is..." playlists can't be trusted. They often mix artists with the same name who have nothing to do with each other.
No, I think it's for active discovery Spotify is good. I have never enjoyed everything on the Discover weekly playlist, quite often it contains stuff that makes me ask "why did you even think I would like that crap, Spotify". But when it hits, it hits amazingly well.
And yet you're listening to Spotify, still, instead of 'albums you bought'.
This is really the point. It's not new: radio was the previous way to have music discovery for 'free', or at least unmetered, with its own costs and issues.
If Spotify made no pretense that it even attempted to pay rights holders anything it'd probably fit its role even better, but it actively tries to supplant the whole concept of having to buy or own albums or music at all. It's designed to be what you have INSTEAD of buying music. When it hits, you don't need to buy music.
The music MAKERS might need you to buy their music, but Spotify is for helping you ignore that.
Heh. How about an ad-supported Spotify, except literally all the ads are for bands and live gigs and music? Bring payola to Spotify. You never pay for it, but you get radio levels of interstitials and they are all from music producers trying to sell their album or single, all for literal music. Albums used to get late-night TV ads and label promotion…
> but I’m going to continue to use a platform that gives me access to everything I’d ever want to hear for like, $10/mo.
I'm going to continue to use a platform that can only cost as little as it does because the people who create the art that motivates the entire existence of the platform get paid essentially nothing
Then they should pull their music. You know, the part I said that you cut off so you could what, poorly paraphrase my position as negatively as possible? To what end? Was your day that bad that you needed to make someone else look little to feel better about it?
I'll rephrase: I don't want to find the music. I want recommendation of music that I might like. I want a mostly passive experience, where I can click a like button to get more like that, added to feed. I don't want to actively search, because I'm doing other things when I listen to music. If I find a song that interests me, I'll listen to the songs "radio" to find similar artists. This is an acceptable use pattern.
> which in turn implies things like major labels, artists seeking or expecting breakout etc.
This is nonsensical [1]. I follow YouTubers have their music on Spotify. Some are just spoof songs.
I have not been able to use Bandcamp to discover music. Even for music in niches that are so tiny that they're not on Spotify, I didn't find them on Bandcamp (I found them on YouTube). Bandcamp's recommendations for me are lousy.
It's separate pots for ad listens vs. subscriber listens. AFAIK there are also separate pots by country, since subscription fees and profitability of ad markets vary widely by country.
Do you have a reference for this? If the pots are different, what's the practical difference, when the majority of the profits, and payout, comes from premium?
This is easy to check. Yes, premium listens are pooled separately from ad-supported listens.
If an artist is extremely popular with ad-supported listeners, that doesn't let them eat into the pool of payments from premium listeners.
Note, however, that listens are pooled by country, not per user. So premium accounts running background music in a hair salon 6 days a week will decide where your subscription money goes far more than the music you listen to.
Originally, this was because the big record companies demanded it. Now, the record companies are having second thoughts, but Spotify, which has adapted to the funding key favouring background music, are the ones resisting.
Spotify has a catalogue that appeals to people that like pop music. Bandcamp provides an outlet for artists that aren't part of the pop music spectrum. I'm deep into electronic music and Bandcamp is the _only_ place that some artists are even listed, and it's become an amazing space for artists that want to release limited press special edition records - pre-ordered by fans to cover the manufacturing price. Prior to this I acquired a few cool records via Kickstarter, but Bandcamp is preferable.
Furthermore, Spotify are well known for paying artists next to nothing. Bandcamp are well known for letting artists take the majority of the purchase price of their music.
Not to mention, listening to mp3s is for chumps!
Bandcamp is the best there is (for now) if you want to financially support the artists you like. I spend a lot of time in record stores (both physical and digital) but they are mostly extinct now. There's a few I still frequent: Juno, Boomkat, Hardwax among them, but the more the world turns to services like Spotify, the less room there is for real music stores.
It's super annoying how the internet kills everything that was good. Bullshit for the masses over quality service for people that care.
yep.
I use both daily but find bc more valuable.
bc does little to help me find new music (so I get my leads elsewhere) but once I know what I want it is more likely to be on bc than spotify.
spotify does a good job of helping me follow artists I already know, but not so great identifying new ones.
I'm sure that depends on what you're looking for tho.
It’s a loss to musicians to have a monopoly like Spotify (who likes to recreate popular songs with their own artists and label) be the gatekeeper to what is good music.
From a service perspective, it’s great. I have the worlds music at my fingertips. From a music perspective it’s horrible. I have one company dictating streaming payments and terms on an entire industry and you’re f&$ked if you don’t play nice. Ask Taylor Swift.
And honestly, for some of this stuff, I understand Spotify’s position. At the same time, their willingness to promote fake artists with copy cat songs to circumvent paying royalties to BMG or such is why musicians are eating ramen and only a handful of musicians are eating steak.
Agreed. Spotify is a terrible alternative for the musicians.
Myspace and Mp3.Com used to be the road map to how sites should be run, but venture capitalism and publicly traded companies ruined the entire ecosystem.
> Spotify is a terrible alternative for the musicians.
I'm not a musician. I'm a listener trying to find music that I like to listen to. Do you have a recommendation for us on the other end of the speaker wire?
there's this neat website/app called bandcamp, you may have heard of it somewhere. it asks you to occasionally buy albums, rather than pay a fixed fee.
As a listener, Bandcamp is my favourite place for discovery bar none. Find a genre or label and start exploring the catalogue. Find other users with similar tastes and explore their lists. Follow artists, labels and users to see their activity stream.
It's not as passive as just hitting play on a playlist, but I've discovered so many incredible artists and labels this way. I'd be genuinely devastated if Bandcamp goes away.
This is, effectively, what the recommendation systems do. They suggest songs/artists that users with similar tastes liked, and songs with similar styles (there's deep analysis/categorization of the sound of the song).
I prefer an automated process, rather than clicking about, navigating lists. It's ok that this is my preference.
I’m afraid if bandcamp doesn’t address discovery and SoundCloud doesn’t either then you’re referring to the “shuffle-radio” where you discover new music without doing anything? This is how Brooks Jefferson got to 60m listens in the first place. “Sounds like Garth Brooks!” Because it’s his songs sang by a wedding singer.
No, recommendation systems, like Spotify uses, uses crowdsourcing and song analysis to drive the "radio". You can make "song radio" that has the same style/feeling as a song, artist, or genre.
Soundclouds problem was always that they started out as basically a free service for a particular niche(artist to label contacts), starting to charge(pissing off people who expected free forever) and then moving out of the niche made it so they never really had a footing for something people would pay for.
The problem with so many "internet unicorns" from the 2000-2010 era is that they handwaved per-customer costs as hardware/network costs and assumed that as long as they scaled then salaries would be a minor part, we as an industry are now trying to dig ourselves out of that hole with a even shittier AD experiences just as that AD market is crashing down.
They still pretty much same. I don't get any audio ads, some ads in my stream, but never seem to be playing. Premium offering is stuck somewhere in 2009 when offline playback was a thing. Lack of integrations with Homepod & Tesla is somewhat becoming a problem. Still no way to filter your stream or get know what bitrate you are streaming.
If you re-frame Spotify as a way to discover music, it's not worthless.
Feel free to use Spotify to find artists and give them money however you want.
Also, nobody is stopping you from spending your time finding new music and giving money as directly as possible to the artist.
Spotify can be seen as a way to increase your exposure to new music, and for that it might be worth the $XX/month to many people, the ability to stream/cache it is a nice addition, but you don't have to rely on it as a way to give money (a pittance) to artists you like.
> If you re-frame Spotify as a way to discover music, it's not worthless.
It is to me, though. I don't need another way to discover music. I have that well-covered.
And by "buy music", I wasn't referring to a way to pay artists (that would be a followup question if I didn't already know that part). I mean, can I download the music in a high-quality, open-standard, format?
I thought Spotify only did streaming, and I am not interested in a streaming service.
Sounds like you’re not in Spotify’s market if you don’t want to stream and you don’t care about discovery. It’s probably not the right service for you.
No secrets. I get recommendations from my friends, I keep track of what musicians/producers/etc. were involved in producing music that I love, and seek out what other works they were involved in, etc. I pay attention to incidental music I come across and pursue it.
I've been doing this for decades and as a result, I have a very eclectic collection that covers almost all genres. This approach may not work for everyone, but it works very well for me.
on the flip side to this, I don't have Spotify because curating music is a hobby of mine. The research from various sources - forums, FB groups, Discogs, Bandcamp mailing lists, etc. is part of the journey.
> It finds music I like, regardless of musician effort.
This isn't really true...musicians must put forth a ton of effort just to be part of the songs that are recommended to you. Spotify favors and rewards those who promote their music on other platforms, since it scours the web for articles mentioning your name and people posting about you on social media in order to determine how far up in the "rankings" you should be when someone asks for a similar sounding song.
Is this assumed or is there public info about their algorithm?
In the first song of my Discover Weekly, if I google the very unique artist name, I get exactly four hits: their bandcamp page, their website, their Spotify page, and their YouTube channel that hasn't been updated in a 9 months, with that last video having 120k views. The rest is unrelated to them.
This doesn't refutes what you're saying, but I would have exactly 0 chance of finding them on my own, with the effort they're putting in.
Discover Weekly specifically requires artists to "pitch" their songs to Spotify. If you're already following the artist, their new releases that have been pitched are supposedly guaranteed to show up on your Discover Weekly. Otherwise, I believe it's someone at Spotify who picked that song which then distributes it to "relevant" listeners.
Again, is this assumed, or do you have something public that can be linked to? The only explanation of the algorithm is what I would expect, rather than some silly humans in the loop: recommendation based on user activity and the analysis of the song style [1].
It probably depends on music genre, but Bandcamp hosts a ton of music that's not available anywhere else. Spotify is great for popular music, but a lot of small/niche artists have presence only on Bandcamp, both digital and physical. Pretty much all of my vaporwave/futurefunk/synthwave vinyl records are from Bandcamp.
Compared to what? Genuinely asking, because I like Spotify's recommendation system yet I always have the feeling that it can be better... even with the recent enhanced shuffle playlist and efforts to provide more contextual recs.
YouTube music, Pandora, I'm sure there are others.
Spotify likes to feed you back stuff you liked even if it's only tangentially related to what you're asking for. It also repeats the same recommendations for things like radio over and over again.
That is borderline tragic to hear. Pandora acquired __the__ music streaming service when it came to discovery, rdio, and did absolutely nothing with it.
I listen to music a lot, but never got algorithmic recommendation systems. It just seems too soulless.
Personally i still listen to the radio (streamed online obviously), in the UK NTS Radio (nts.live) and Rinse FM (rinse.fm) are good. Very few adverts, NTS is pretty much listener funded, not sure what Rinse do as I rarely hear ads.
The shows get archived on SoundCloud so you can ID tracks and find them on Spotify later if they were that good.
I would also add dandelionradio.com. All their streaming shows are uploaded to mixcloud. I'm a little worried though because their DJs always point to their artists' bandcamp pages to help you find the music.
That hasn't helped any. I have almost 1100 liked songs, several dozen liked albums, and several years of near daily listening. The recommendations are still less good (for me) than what YouTube recommended without an account, just based on my listening history.
I know a lot of musicians that use it. I have been making music for over 20 years. What musicians want from sites like this is to be able to offload their marketing so that they can focus on making music, not to have boilerplate functional features (like bulk file uploads) for a fee.
Sites and apps now avoid giving any real promotional value to users because they can later sell it to them incrementally. It's a tactic to keep artists primarily promoting the platform in addition to promoting their work on the platform. Very little value overall, as now there are tons of competing music and social platforms available, but all of them offer the same desperately weak promotional value to musicians.
Do you seriously think those features are worth 20 dollars a month?
Again, clearly advocating for the platform and missing the entire message.
A musician can easily self host a site that does exactly what bandcamp represents for them. Also, most serious artists are already distributed to platforms that do exactly what Bandcamp does and more.
There is very little value in bancamp, unless you are perhaps trying to sell songs with lots of uncleared samples in them.
But if you signed up for Bandcamp Pro for $20/month, then clearly you either were happy with what you were getting, or you misunderstood what you were about to get. But personally I think that pricing page is pretty clear about what you get.
See, for me I like that Bandcamp is just a store. That I see an artist I like on social media, click their bandcamp link, and if I like their music I buy it. I don't use its recommendation features, and the only social feature I use is the ability to follow an artist and thus get news-bulletins about their work.
Once you get to an artist's page, the UI is simple and clean and Just Works. I can see their releases, buy and download them easily. That's what I want when shopping.
Imho, Bandcamp shouldn't even offer that kind of $20 "promotion subscription" thing you mention. Just sell music, take the cut, and be done with it.
Honestly my only real UI complaint about Bandcamp is that artists often move between labels and collabs and the label runs the bandcamp page so their music is mixed in with all their labelmates. That's where I find it gets very confusing. Like most of Lauren Bousfield's albums are at
and is not linked from her personal page at all. Another album (Palimpsest) is linked from her personal page, but if you click on the artist of that one it takes you to a different label (https://deathbombarc.bandcamp.com/).
So obviously something is horribly wrong with navigation in how it handles labels and the like.
Yeah, I got into shopping for weird stuff on Bandcamp when we went remote, started out with postrock and postmetal stuff and then a Twitter thread about the strangest music made by trans women made me a fan of Bousfield.
Hah, it's just the one track "Hazer" that goes full grindcore, the rest of the album is a bit more... hard-mode in a Japanese rhythm game if it was super-distorted hyperpop.
This is an interesting perspective to say the least. I’ve been impressed with the work their developer team has done over the years.
I can’t say I shared your troubles finding new music on there. It’s been the best place for me to discover new artists. The recommendation systems, following artists, and their unique write-ups on artists, scenes, genres are quality.
You’re take on what they ‘should’ be doing seems very misguided. I’m surprised that you think Bandcamp Pro is a hands-off marketing and promotion service. They are absolutely clear about what they offer for $10/month, and no where do they say they’ll promote your music for you.
The UI is good overall, but the search system is the worst I've ever seen. And there's no "open in app" link on the mobile site. Been like this for as long as I've been using it. It's like they don't want to be more successful than they already are.
Generally I'd agree with you, but for certain apps, it would be nice to be given the option. I never want to be forced to use the app, but sometimes when looking at a bandcamp page and checking out the music, I'd like to switch over to listening in the app, since I don't have to keep the browser window on top for it to continue playing. The only way to do that is to go use the (bad) search feature in the app to find the thing you're already looking at in the browser.
Precisely. I specifically want to use the Bandcamp app, but there's literally no way to switch from web to app. There's no way to put a URL into the app, and the search is so incredibly bad that it's almost impossible to find the thing I'm already listening to, even when I'm already logged in in both places.
I’m not sure where you got the idea that the premium service included promotion. Last I looked, the subscription simply unlocked some specific features. If you just paid for it and hoped that meant your band was going to be promoted, you threw your money away, but that hardly seems like bandcamp’s fault.
He's thinking of engagement and discovery like youtube or the old MySpace experience for independent music creators. People land on the page and discover new artists and easy discovery of new ones.
Bandcamp always struck me as a place for producers to sell to DJ’s since you can get high bitrate MP3’s and lossless files.
A pattern I’ve seen is that artists will put a new release on Bandcamp a week before it’s available on streaming services. This lets them pull in more revenue by selling the album for $10 to enthusiasts before it’s released to the masses.
I'm the opposite. Found Bandcamp UI pretty good, intuitive and no bs, discovered tons of good music through the Discover section on the bottom front page. Also the Bandcamp blogposts are the among the best music article. Soundcloud on the other hand I would only go via directly link. I guess it also relates to the genre you're interested in, my favorite artists probably never post to Soundcloud.
What's wrong with a paid storefront for artists? Considering the rest of the ecommerce ecosystem, 20$ seems fair. Have you considered that 20$ is just the cost of doing business?
Discoverability is a problem yes, but I don't know that it's a solvable one. And if Bandcamp tried seriously to solve it, they would likely have to rely on investment money, and eventually enshittify the platform.
$240/yr is too much for simple hosting- a small artist can get that for free these days, especially if they don't need DRM. For the price you'd expect promotion and discovery.
I pay $0 a month to host a website. A number of artists I've bought from have you pay with paypal and a download link is included on your receipt. That's what, nine cents per transaction plus five percent, and minimal egress charges from a cloud provider.
Cloudflare free tier as a CDN. They're on the record about why they do it- mainly, it generates large sales leads, makes it easier to hire, and provides them a community of willing QA testers for new features.
Hosting costs for a small website are literally pennies a month if your content can be cached. Plenty of truly free origin hosts available. GitHub Pages is a popular ine.
Right, so Cloudflare makes their money one way or another. If at some point they decide it's not worth it to host free content anymore then you're out of luck.
That's what I mean, there is a cost of doing business and someone has to pay it. It sounds like Bandcamp was a shitty partner too, but the larger point still stands I think.
I’m not sure what the experience is with other niche genres of music but I’ve found more black and death metal on Bandcamp in the past month than has ever been recommended to me elsewhere. I get the impression that HN posters who don’t use Bandcamp just see it at some place where a band can make a MySpace profile - but it has a serious network effect going on.
For instance, the label 20 buck spin, has a boat load of artists on there. For metal, their profile page on Bandcamp is worth more than a 100 algorithmic playlists on Spotify.
As a listener of hardcore and punk since I was a teen, Bandcamp is the place to be. It is the only site where I can get music from my local scene too even though I don't go to shows anymore. I am grateful to Bandcamp, hope someone will acquire them that truly knows music business, etc.
Thanks for that link! I’ve recently gotten into metal (Holy crap what an awesome genre of music I’ve neglected to explore my whole life! I feel like a kid in a candy shop hearing all of these new amazing sounds) and started learning guitar because of it.
Having someone share their curated music is way more powerful in my opinion than some algorithmically generated playlist.
Bandcamp is an odd site. It's existed for a very long time and is simple (or was when I last used it a couple years ago) in terms of application requirements. Basically what I'm saying is it feels very much like a rails app you could build in a weekend. Direct upload mastered files to s3 from the artists, activejob to convert to various formats and throw back to s3 via activestorage, subdomain model scoping for artist pages, stripe integration for payments.
Bandcamp has always felt like it should be someone's lifestyle business, like gumroad, and never seemed like it was trying to be a "business" that needed to add features or obsess over hyper hocky stick growth. If it tanks it's because it should have stayed as a weekend side project lifestyle business and never been bought by someone that wanted to convert it into a money printing machine because it never can be that type of business.
With that said, if they do tank, it can seriously be replaced by someone in a weekend, maybe 2 :)
> With that said, if they do tank, it can seriously be replaced by someone in a weekend, maybe 2 :)
The technology probably could be replicated in a weekend, but as always, Bandcamp is more than just the technology. Labels, artists and the community trust(ed?) them as a place where people got treated more fairly and it wasn't focused solely on growth of the platform. To replicate that same thing that Bandcamp created might take the same amount of time, ~15 years.
Cheaters think everybody cheats when given the opportunity. Thieves believe only fear of the law is what keeps the masses in line. Liars believe lying is normal and that they’re only embellishing anyway and really it’s for the greater good and also pragmatic and necessary to succeed.
There are many people who would not f their users and employees over when given the opportunity. Be like that.
Well, first of all, it’s transactional. I have no particular affinity for any given service I use. If another service comes along that has enough upside to overcome the momentum of switching, I’ll definitely do it, and I’m sure you would too, and maybe that will annoy the company. That goes the same for the company; if they have a chance to cash out, I’m sure they’d take it. And maybe that will annoy me.
But the bigger point is that you conflate selling to a bigger company with more resources with “f[ing] their users,” which is just naive.
These are the rationalizations used to justify antisocial behavior. It's nihilistic and destructive to society.
I've heard people espouse this kind of logic even when talking about employees who have worked for them for 20 years. They exchanged labor for pay and therefore nobody owes anybody anything. Yeah, right.
> But the bigger point is that you conflate selling to a bigger company with more resources with “f[ing] their users,” which is just naive.
Because that's what happened to a lot of companies who got bought out - eventually the MBA sharks wanted their returns. Minecraft, MySQL, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Reddit, TwiXXer, they all fell victim to enshittification.
Others just ossified with steady streams of Big Money coming in like Mozilla, Wikipedia or a ton of stuff from Adobe. Or they got closed down by Big Corp because they were no longer "profitable" enough like Google Reader.
Personally, I'm happy enough that HN still exists.
Like the sibling comment, I'd honestly be interested in hearing how they fucked you over. I know the whole "we will keep running it just like it's always been" trope is very hard to swallow, but it seems to me they actually had left it alone thus far. Am I wrong about that?
Same. The best online music service since Napster got screwed and it's never coming back. The writing is on the wall and it's clear that the "enshittification" officially begins.
Thing is, we are in a pretty ruthless society governed by sometimes insane amounts of money - and eventually, anyone will sell out given the right price, and no matter the purchase contract, eventually big-corp culture will seep in. See e.g. Atlassian, Apple, Oracle, Microsoft or Facebook who have been on the buyer side, and Minecraft and MySQL for infamous cases of companies that got bought out.
Would like to think i wouldn't sell, but if someone massive company is offering my money, the worry is always they'll build their own later and stomp me anyway.
That's why the product itself should not just be the technology stack (as GP might allude to), but something larger. In the case of Bandcamp, it's the relationships, community, trust and integrity that makes it what it is, and another massive company won't just be able to create those things by throwing random employees at the problem.
Bandcamp did have investors, they weren't 100% bootstrapped. Those investors likely had board seats and a significant say in whether to accept Epic's offer.
Not to mention that COVID led to a steep increase in the site's traffic. It's possible that the added operational burden meant that Bandcamp was no longer the chill lifestyle business that it used to be.
I agree with you on not wanting to fuck the users over either. Personally I don't want to do that.
But the reality is, I have other things I need in life too, and those things require money. My dad is working into his 70s, what if I could fund his retirement? What if I could pay for my brothers uni? Or for my grandma's nurse?
When our basic necessities are not secure, we can't always make the ethical choice. Until then, people will keep selling out.
Literally everybody has family members who could use extra money. If having family absolves you from ethical constraints we can dispense with the notion of ethics altogether.
Having a family doesn't "absolve you" from ethics, but it means that you have to weight doing right by your family vs doing right by your users. Most people choose their family, and nobody blames them for it.
It's not at all as simple as a "rational choice". It completely depends on your objective. Why did you start the business in the first place?
If it was to make a few mill and never have to work again, sure, sell.
If you wanted to build something bigger than yourself, work with great people, feel accomplished, then why sell? How is that few mill going to get you those things?
A lot of founders regret their first sale because they realise they didn't want a cashout, they wanted to build something awesome
> If you wanted to build something bigger than yourself, work with great people, feel accomplished, then why sell? How is that few mill going to get you those things?
It's possible that the founders felt they had accomplished this, and after spending 15 (?) years running it, were ready to move onto something else. I've sure as hell never stayed at the same job for 15 years. I'd go nuts.
They may have also felt some obligation to early investors, often who are friends and family or early employees, to get them a nice return.
You're expecting a group of startup employees holding illiquid stock to come up with the cash necessary to buy the finders out on a company that could otherwise sell for (apparently) $273 million?
To back this view up there are plenty of artists who openly admit they "break even" when they've sold a 300-batch of records.
The operating costs include buying instruments/software/hardware, using a mastering service and pressing vinyl - all of which are not cheap.
They do it for the love of producing music - and watching their work sell out within _minutes_ of being released... which in turn inspires them to make another record (or ten haha!)
I'm not dismissing that, but most artists sell out given the chance.
The thing is that the gap between "breaking even" and "life changing money" is huge for most artists. You wouldn't sell out for 50K per year, but 1M? Sell out for 2 years and you're set for life, then you can go back to making the music you love.
But very few artists can pull 1M per year, so it doesn't happen as often.
A few mil won't get you those things, but they'll guarantee your basic necessities. For example, my dad is working into his 70s. If I could fund his retirement I would.
And here's the kicker: you can always go build something bigger than yourself after selling. Having fuck you money means you can make the ethical choice next time.
Edit: on your comment about founders regretting their first sale. I'm guessing most founders are also well off, and don't worry as much financially. But even then, regret doesn't mean they made the wrong choice. I regret exercising my Shopify stock while I worked there, but it was still the best decision for me at the time.
> Having fuck you money means you can make the ethical choice next time.
If you weren't able to make the "ethical choice" the first time, you almost certainly won't make it the next time, either. All of the motivations that informed your first choice will equally inform your next.
Calling it the "ethical choice" was a mistake on my part. It's more of an "ethical calculus" between doing right by your family, and doing right by your users.
So it's not that choosing your family is unethical, but it does have consequences for your users. If family was taken care of them the ethical calculus shifts in the users favor.
The people who get to have the option of a multi-multi million dollar exit are the ones who start at the beginning when the company is worth nothing. Most people who can't afford basic necessities also can't afford to take the risk of starting something new. In fact, I would say it's a terrible decision in that case, akin to buying lottery tickets. The far easier way to guarantee "basic necessities" in tech is train up, get a good job, be frugal. You could have enough to never need basic necessities within 10 years, max 20.
The vast majority of founders I see are relatively self-sufficient already and live comfortably. They're founders because they're addicted to it, love making something new, and potentially are chasing that mega-exit. 10s-100s of millions, not a few.
Maybe the reason the majority of founders are like that is because the ones who sell out and go live comfortably for the rest of their lives take themselves out of the pool and you don't hear about them.
It's also rational not to sell. Why not value a nice sustainable business over selling out?
I understand that many of us would sell, I would probably sell too. But different people do exist. Valve didn't sell, for example, and I'm sure they were approached many times.
Yeah they definitely do exist, but it's the exception. That's why everybody knows about valve and epic.
However, if Gabe's family had urgently needed money back in the day, would he have sold? Maybe.
That's what I'm getting at. You need to be in a very stable position to be able to turn down a big offer like that when it comes, and in general in our society we're always one or two emergencies away from being destitute on the streets.
Until we make sure people are taken care of, these companies will keep being the exception.
I don't know about how rare it is, because rejected offers don't make the news. We either talk about the successful selling stories, or the major holdouts. I don't think this paints a full picture.
Besides, my point is that there are multiple options, all of them rational. There is no single rational choice.
If you as the owner are already wealthy 'enough', then that is not necessarily the rational choice. It depends how much you care about the future of the business.
In my dreams, if I ran such a noble business, I would hope that I'd have managed to extract enough value from the business to arrange for my own pension by the time others want to acquire it, so I can reject their offers and keep control to safeguard the business's integrity.
On the other hand, we are human. If the acquiring party makes an absolutely life-changing offer, it may be hard to resist. The story of Nullsoft and AOL comes to mind.
> With that said, if they do tank, it can seriously be replaced by someone in a weekend, maybe 2
It can't. The classic HN mistake here is to think the difficulty in replacement is engineering / building it. That's pretty much never the actual case. Engineering it [0] is the easiest part of building a replacement.
[0] this part: "Direct upload mastered files to s3 from the artists, activejob to convert to various formats and throw back to s3 via activestorage, subdomain model scoping for artist pages, stripe integration for payments."
> With that said, if they do do tank, it can seriously be replaced by someone in a weekend, maybe 2 :)
The back catalog of independent music on that site would be a huge loss. Every single artist would need to find and agree on that mythical hobby site, it would have to be able to handle the rapid growth if they were able to re-locate.
I agree it should have stayed simple, but we continue to believe that things should grow forever or die in the doomed attempt, so we will never have nice things.
> Bandcamp has always felt like it should be someone's lifestyle business, like gumroad, and never seemed like it was trying to be a "business" that needed to add features or obsess over hyper hocky stick growth.
Bandcamp did seem like a chill midsize lifestyle business before the Epic acquisition. I suspect that Epic's acquisition offer was too good for the founders and board to turn down.
(While Bandcamp wasn't a classic venture-funded startup they did have outside investors.)
> While Bandcamp wasn't a classic venture-funded startup they did have outside investors
I don't think it's correct to say they weren't venture-funded. True Ventures lists them on their portfolio page. I don't know what that says about how much True Ventures put in, but they must have invested something.
Crunchbase says that was a Series A in 2010 with no further rounds, so I don't think that's inconsistent with my original post. They took some outside investment early on but their path looks nothing like the classic VC-funded growth trajectory.
I can't help but make a wry observation that they are objectively VC-funded, but that by saying they aren't a "classic VC-funded growth trajectory" you're doing a No-True-Scotsman-style "not a true venture funded company" argument, and that they are literally a True Ventures funded company..
I'll show myself out.
(Seriously though, I see your point and am not trying to bicker about this; I just think it's a funny situation)
> Bandcamp has always felt like it should be someone's lifestyle business
Me too. Layoffs are terrible for the people involved but I honestly don’t see why bandcamp would need more than a handful of employees. The more people you have to pay the more money you have to extract from your customers and the whole point of bandcamp was to be a very slim layer between artists and customers.
> Basically what I'm saying is it feels very much like a rails app you could build in a weekend.
Downvoted solely for that comment. Honestly, I feel like it's so tiresome and lazy with the "X could be built in a weekend" or "Why does Y need so many employees?" comments. Sure, I've worked at companies that were easily overstaffed, and it's not hard to find some slack in any sizable company. But these kinds of comments pretty universally are completely lacking in insight of what it takes to operate and run a sizable business. It's basically just selfishness that people only comment on the limited slice (usually of programming work) that they understand.
To you and everyone else saying "you can't reproduce the business in a weekend" or that I'm overlooking that side of things, I specifically said "like a rails apps you could build in a weekend" because I was talking about... THE APP. I never did and never would claim that the user base, traction, brand recognition, or label deals could be replaced in a weekend. I was only speaking about the simplistic and minimal set of features for the bandcamp.com product. My words made it pretty clear what I was talking about so it feels like people choosing to view it as me saying the business side is more complex are just looking for an argument or to "tell me how it is". The logic here makes no sense. I DID NOT mention the business yet you people are giving me shit saying the business can't be replicated in a weekend. Where the F did I say that it could?! I SPECIFICALLY talked about an APP, and you're ignoring that key word and fighting me over something I never claimed.
I use Bandcamp a lot. Tbh, if I had acquired Bandcamp, in efforts for streamlining, I probably would have laid the editors off too. I've never read a single bandcamp article. Did anyone actually read them, especially enough to justify their cost?
Their niche genre articles were actually pretty good, I would read them every now and then to find new bands to listen to. They hit a nice sweet spot of highlighting five or so releases per article so that you weren't overwhelmed with picks but had options, and the writing surrounding them was usually pretty good, you could tell the authors really cared about the music.
i definitely read them. bandcamp had a very skilled editorial team that would reliably surface both new and interesting scenes and archival labels that wouldn't have found much reach otherwise, and ive definitely bought albums and found stuff i wouldn't have heard otherwise based on their recommendations
not everything, but their work definitely brought me to music i wouldn't have found otherwise
if I had acquired Bandcamp, in efforts for streamlining, I probably would have laid the editors off too
that's not what happened. they're not streaminlining for the sake of streamlining.
SongTradr is in the business of B2B sync licensing. Bandcamp's in the business of selling music to fans.
SongTradr's probably throwing out the articles not because they didn't move sales to fans, but because SongTradr doesn't care about selling music to fans.
they're probably more interested in converting Bandcamp creators to a sync licensing business model.
I've never read a single bandcamp article. Did anyone actually read them, especially enough to justify their cost?
yes. your experience is your experience. it is not universal. Bandcamp was making money with those articles, both for itself and its creators, for many many years.
Same here. I wasn't even aware Bandcamp had articles! But I basically just navigate to specific labels/artists/albums, buy what I need and resync my local backup of my collection.
I'm not a bandcamp user, so maybe this is an obvious question, but if bandcamp were to shutter operations, would the files in your local backup still be usable by you?
Yes, the Bandcamp files are fully DRM-free. You can download the music in just about any DRM-free format, I always go with FLAC. The FLAC files are exactly the same as any other FLAC file, just losslessly compressed samples.
Yeah, it's actually freakin' awesome sometimes. I got the entire discography of one of my favorite artists for like.. $10 or something? I think I bumped up the price because I felt bad and felt they deserved more haha
I've purchased thousands of dollars of music through Bandcamp, and every purchase is a FLAC file I download. Bandcamp has no control of or connection to the music I've purchaed after the download is complete.
Their articles are fantastic and they curate and promote such diverse and unique musicians. I don't know any other publication that goes so in depth with such niche music. I hate thinking about this in terms of profits. Those articles celebrated and expanded on music culture so much.
> I've never read a single bandcamp article. Did anyone actually read them
I didn’t read all of them, but occasionally when they touched on a subject of interest, I really appreciated them, and they helped me find new music by both known and unknown artist.
They were clearly written by someone knowledgable and who cared. That’s getting increasingly rare these days and that’s a shame.
Nope, the only time I discovered music on Bandcamp was when some indie label was selling their whole catalog for a low price and I got the whole bundle. 99% of the time, I knew what I was looking for and came there for the lossless digital releases and/or to support the artist.
Qobuz is another option, but I always prefer Bandcamp because Qobuz's UI is pretty bad and it constantly corrupts my session such that I need to clear the site's cookies to do anything.
I used to use them too, but they closed their EU store so Bandcamp is the only option for me now. Yes, Apple and Amazon might also be options, but I haven't ever done business with either and I don't intend to begin.
God damn. Bandcamp is where I get my music wherever possible - they're an amazing platform and product and I like the fact that my purchases are going to support the actual artists instead of vanishing into the Google or Spotify machinery.
I knew it was possible after the Epic sale that they'd get screwed, but this worse than I expected.
This was my first reaction, but on thinking more I think this might end up being positive. Bandcamp is where I look first for music, and increasingly new releases are never there. It's great for music released in the mid 2010s, but it has without question been slowly dying. Hopefully somebody who cares is going to resurrect it.
I'm probably being too optimistic, but it's a nice psychological blanket
This is a naïve question, but why on earth are unions isolated to one company so often in USA? Surely an industry-wide solution would be more effective.
Industry-wide unions have been stomped out over time, some by direct actions from companies or the government, some from corruption, some from propaganda campaigns. It is one of the many sad parts of being in the U.S.
I don't know the history exactly, but my assumption is that trying to bootstrap an industry-wide union from nothing is exceedingly difficult, while making one at a single company is much more viable. Presumably the idea would be to merge the company-specific ones into industry ones after they're more stable.
It's not a US thing, in my opinion. The industry based unions are currently very strong and some are on strike right now (nurses, auto workers, writers, actors). To me the idea of forming a new union to target a single employer seems like a losing strategy.
Bandcamp voted to unionize in March, although they are still fighting for recognition, as Epic has refused to recognize it so far (last I checked). I wonder who involved in that was affected by the layoffs.
I too wonder how this will affect the platform. I've always been a fan of how Bandcamp was operated in the past (access to high quality lossless audio, directly support the artist, nice app, etc).
This was interesting:
> Bandcamp United is looking forward to bargaining with Songtradr in the near future regarding wages, working conditions, and benefits. It’s our hope that Songtradr honors our existing progress (including Union Security and and preserving our artist first mission in our Collective Bargaining Agreement) that we’ve already made at the bargaining table.
Until we have more information it seems that the Epic purchase royally screwed a company that by all accounts was operating just fine previously. I really hope someone spills the beans on this whole fiasco.
Has anyone ever tried writing something into their company's sale contract that says 100% of staff must be retained for some duration of time to prevent new overlords from doing exactly this?
Obviously in Bandcamp's case this probably would not have helped, since they had already "sold" themselves to Epic before being offloaded to Songtradr. I'm just trying to think of how one could reasonably, enforceably stop an acquiring company from doing this to the acquired company as soon as the ink is dry on the acquisition.
One strategy the acquiring company will use to sidestep it is enacting an internal reorg, where staff are assigned to new roles they may not want to fulfill, passively encouraging them to find employment elsewhere.
I was under the impression (perhaps mistaken) that music you purchased in iTunes had to stay in iTunes. Can I take my files where I please or do they have to reside in the Apple walled garden?
iTunes purchases have been DRM free since the mid 2000s. Most, but not all are also available in Apple Lossless format, which means you can convert them to whatever format you prefer without any quality concerns.
You can download AAC files that are AFAIK digitally watermarked with your Apple ID to prevent piracy, but you can use freely in all your client tools. But they are not lossless. I don't know if iTMS sells lossless music.
However, they do cap the number of times you're permitted to download our collection.
I’d been wondering this myself and now suspect I’ve written off Apple too soon. If I buy music from Apple on my iPhone it’s not trapped on Apple devices?
When I first switched to iOS I didn’t see any way to play my music in Apple’s music player and I assumed the door was closed both directions.
I think you still need iTunes on your computer for it. You have to import your music into your iTunes library and sync your phone with a computer.
Purchases, similarly, can be redownloaded on the computer. They're all DRM-free AAC, since the early 2000s.
I've mostly used Spotify in the past decade, but it seems to all work the way it always has. They just shove Apple Music (not the same as iTunes) in your face when you open the Music app, until you turn it off.
How much of my money goes to the artists when I purchase with iTunes Store? If I recall correctly, Bandcamp gives ~80% usually to the artists, except on Bandcamp Fridays when they give ~90% to the artists (waiving their own fee).
iTunes, Amazon, streaming platforms, etc. do not deal directly with artists. Apple gives the majority (not sure of the percentage) to a distributor (LANDR, DistroKid, CD Baby, etc) who is responsible for the song, and then they take a negotiated cut and pay it to the artist.
DistroKid, for example, charges about $20/year to keep all of your music releases on 100 or so streaming and download services, but takes no cut of the proceeds.
This distribution method is far and away the norm nowadays, especially with dance music, because it gets music everywhere, right alongside artists signed to labels. Bandcamp appeals more to the hipster crowd.
You're right. The numbers I had in mind were averages:
> on Bandcamp Fridays, an average of 93% of your money reaches the artist/label (after payment processor fees). When you make a purchase on any other day (as millions of you have, with more than $1 billion now paid directly to artists), an average of 82% reaches the artist/label.
Haha yes of course! I missed my own comment and thought you were talking about Bandcamp, when I was the one talking about iTunes... Sorry for the confusion :)
Sad to see what has happened to BandCamp. My only gripe with BandCamp is the 128kbps streaming of full songs without purchase. If you are hell-bent on allowing full songs to be streamed before someone buys, just go all-in and allow full quality.
The purpose of that is to allow previewing before purchase, which IMHO is a wonderful feature and is the big reason I used to use Napster. If I liked some of the songs, I'd buy the album. I do the exact same thing now on Bandcamp.
> Why does Bandcamp look like it hasn't been updated since 2012?
Because it doesn't need to be. Personally, I really like that their site hasn't been brought up to be in line with the current trends. That would make the site worse.
No. And neither is Twitter, Facebook, or Threads. Anyone can replicate all of these apps in a weekend.
If you’re talking about the difficulty of attracting a bunch of paying users, building trust in your platform, working through payments and fraud, then yeah it’s monumentally hard and takes a long time.
I don’t see Bandcamp having nearly the same network effects as those social media sites tho. Yes there are some elements — trust I think is the big one — but there’s very little if any relationship model on Bandcamp.
Technically possible, but Bandcamp is like Myspace was, and like Purevolume was before Myspace. It's the default place for small independent artists and labels to post and sell their music.
Switching to full-on Dirty Hippie mode here but, goddammit why why WHY can’t we just have nice things without profit motives or acquisitions or shareholders or growth hacking and just enjoy the ride and the gifts that these kinds of resources give to the world? Why is the default setting “always sell out”?
IUMA was the Bandcamp of the early aughts. It was THE place to go for discovering new exciting music that you never knew could exist, the equivalent of listening to pop radio all the time and then one day turning the knob left to the local college station. (“What is this?” “It’s NEW.”) This was what the internet was FOR—accessing the inaccessible. Then some corporation bought it and smashed it into ash.
I get it, really. I’m naive af. People need to eat. Infrastructure isn’t free. Licenses need to be licensed. But fuck, I’d rather these sites never existed in the first place than have my heart broken like some middle schooler seeing their crush dancing with the rich kid.
They do exist, but yeah they are rare. Both Ableton Live and Reaper refuse to take outside investments or sell. The Live owners are famous for telling them to screw off. Major reason I use both of them. The music tech business is getting rocked by acquisitions recently.
It's worth noting, though, that Justin can afford to not take outside investments for Reaper because he already "sold out" by selling Nullsoft to AOL for ~$50 million. I say this not to throw shade or anything like that -- I really like and respect Justin and am literally developing an extension of the Reaper API and a product built off of it as we speak -- but in the context of this discussion, it's worth noting that often the financial freedom to do awesome stuff and not sell out is enabled by wealth made somewhere else first.
Reaper rocks. I love that the installer is so small, shows that nothing is in the code but what's essential. I also love that they allow scripting within the DAW, and that they ported to Linux, and I love the payment model, and and...
Worth noting here that the main guy behind Reaper is Justin Frankel, creator of Winamp - would seem like he doesn't really need or want outside investment.
I am really worried about Ableton. Feels like music production industry is going through a consolidation stage (NI/Izotope) and Live is absolutely the prime real estate in the business.
You can find interviews with them talking about this, they really don't like that side of the business. I don't know what happens if the owners die mind you, but I'm not worried about them changing their minds.
I do believe that the original founders had a fantastic vision that they mostly realized. But at some point they decided to sell the business and move on. Unfortunately that meant that the vision, and, more importantly, the full control over that vision have vanished. Don't know what the solution is for businesses like that... A worker owned co-op? A non-profit? Some legal structure that is capable of withstanding investor pressure and just existing as a fairly successful business.
I’m not sure how I feel about this as regards the product. As a user, I’m happy for it to just be maintained. It doesn’t need new features, it doesn’t need editorial stuff, it just needs to continue functioning as it has done for a long time. As long as there are enough staff to fix bugs and keep it running…that seems like a good thing. Better than the risk of people changing it for little reason.
This is a plague on the software industry. No one wants a new design language every two years, or all the buttons in the frontend to be moved to different places with different icons. It's not "innovative" or "exciting" or "friendly." It wastes whole lifetimes worth of time for the users. Whole cottage industries are devoted to retraining on the pointless changes. Yet it always happens anyway. I'm not sure how incentives could be restructured to stop this kind of churn, but if left unchecked it can kill whole companies.
Agreed. I’ve seen a lot of complaining about how bandcamp’s UI is “stale” or “outdated” and as far as I can tell, what that means is it still works and does all the stuff it needs to do, but it would look different if it was built today and that bothers people. I don’t really get it, but then again, I still use Craigslist and old.reddit.
Edit: although, full disclosure, I haven’t looked at Reddit in months so if they shut down the old interface as part of the recent fit of user-hostility, I haven’t noticed.
As a user who absolutely hates un-requested change being shoved down my throat: I can actually see it from both sides.
Innovation almost always looks like throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. You have to "break" things to figure out what can be improved.
The problem is that we've gone all in on SaaS and pushed updates. Pushed updates were a huge win for security, and SaaS has some pros for some users and certain niches.
But long gone are the days where a company would invest time and money into beta test periods where they'd try out new features on focus groups who would give feedback and then the rest of us would wait for reviews from the early adopters before deciding if the upgrade costs and risks were worth it.
These days we get "upgraded" whether we opted in or not. And we're all the beta testers 100% of the time.
That has been the real plague on the software industry IMO. At least, it has ruined my enjoyment of computers and tech for the most part, and further driven to me towards native open source software (which I already used anyway, I just cling to it harder now because I feel like it is under threat). Now get off my lawn.
What has happened, for example: listening parties. Not a massive feature, but no doubt something that required a few person-years of effort to get right (and they did).
What hasn't happened but should: "buy my wishlist, now" (again, not crazy hard, but probably a good few person-months to get right.
BC's basic page layout and page flow have not changed noticeably in years. Thankfully!
Yeah I was aware of that. I can’t see a reason to buy it and layoff staff other than “maintenance mode” though. Songtradr do licensing so having that catalogue available to them seems very useful.
Assuming they want to run it maintenance mode and have it not burn a hole in their pocket, they probably want people not pushing for raising wages, benefits, etc. in the future or now -- they'll likely sell off what remains to private equity or maybe try to get AI to run the show.
At what point is a shop a union shop though? Is it when they vote to unionize, or when the union receives recognition and a collective bargaining agreement?
(That's not a rhetorical question, I'm genuininely interested in it from a philosophical and/or legal point of view)
Facts may be different but it doesn't feel like any lessons were learned.
10+ years of free money and excess and less than two years into higher rates without any significant market correction for stocks or housing we should lower interest again?
It was not spectacular for a while according to musicians who sell there, and decision to sell out was just icing. Will there be a good faith player in this niche for once?
According to what musicans? where? What is it the icing on top of?
ps. I'm a very tiny musician on BC. I know of no changes that altered BC's utility for me as someone with an album there, or as an avid purchaser of recorded music.
Friends run a band professionally (aka music is their job), they say it's scammy in how they charge their fees, leading to very small or zero revenue compared to other platforms. They say Bandcamp is good at selling physical merch including vinyl, but not digital music
I wonder what challenges Bandcamp faced here. Is it really that management wasn't serving the market in good faith, or was there a problem with profitability?
There's no indication that they faced any problems at all.
Epic bought them when investment money was abundant, they probably made an offer that the owners couldn't refuse.
A year later, cash is harder to come by, epic sells off businesses that aren't core. Songtrader, facing the same market conditions as epic, sees layoffs as a cost cutting measure regardless of profitability.
There are a lot of assumptions on this thread. I don't know the answers in this case (not sure if anyone does?) but I think it is naive to assume that Bandcamp was wise to be employing all these people. While acquisitions tanking a company with stupid decisions are super common, it's also super common for companies who are trying to look like they are growing (for future funding or acquisitions) to have way too much staff (and thus, high a burn rate) instead of running a sensible, profitable business. It is not necessarily a good thing that they have tons of employees - sometimes it's entirely motivated by putting lipstick on a pig in order to look like a runaway growth success thing.
Songtradr is in the music infrastructure business. I think it's quite possible they are cleaning house to make Bandcamp a more viable business that is actually focused on their core business. Doesn't seem impossible to me that Bandcamp was way off base trying to make too much written content when really, it's about selling music.
But I'm spitballing here, anyone know more about whether Bandcamp was bloated?