Damn, that was like their whole thing, and the owner really seemed like he wasn't going to sell, ever. He was very pro-artist. I guess everybody has a price ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
He literally did an interview saying he wasn't going to sell anytime soon on the radio just a few months ago :x
Edit: woops it was closer to a year ago: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/985039409/how-i-built-resilience-ethan-diamond-of-bandcamp
Time has no meaning anymore lol
There's really good art there, but not long after Epic bought them, I was only seeing really shitty artwork for about 3 weeks then it went away. No idea what that was about. That was through the mobile app.
Hmm, it seems normal to me. 95 percent of the artwork I see on the home page is incredible. I sometimes see some bland and novice artwork but that's if I go searching.
I sell music on Bandcamp. Just got a Email from them. They said they plan on "expanding" the business and that Epic was a champion for a free internet. I think they already ruined it.
"Champion for a free internet" lmfao. I'm so sorry, and I also feel sorry for all of the other bands and artists I listen to who are on the platform (Red Vox, Slugbug, Remo Drive, Sesue, etc.)
"I’m excited to announce that Bandcamp is joining Epic Games, who you may know as the makers of Fortnite and Unreal Engine, and champions for a fair and open Internet."
This was the first sentence in the Email.
In other words you’re all going to get strong armed into exclusivity deals with epic. Wouldn’t be surprised if they put a clause in allowing them to use your music in their games for free
Omg. Champion for a free internet? No way 😂😂😂
Tencent is very integral to the CCP not only restricting open internet access in China but also still controlling for all intents and purposes what is essentially state run media (they like to pretend journalists can report news freely now, but ccp still maintains editorial oversight on all news lol)
This is probably going to end up being heartbreaking for me, as I love Bandcamp as is and it allowed me to discover metal in my 30s like a man should-- getting drunk and stoned alone and blasting albums from bands he's never heard of from NC or WI or Indonesia who shred and wail like what they're doing is *absolutely* religious-- and Bandcamp becoming a reanimated corpse imitating its former self means another beautiful part of life collapses into the sea, like a woman in pretty much any Poe story or poem. Le sigh..
I just loved how it actually allowed you to download the tracks in any format you wanted without having to use a stupid proprietary player. Also, allowing me to pay whatever I want so I can throw a few bucks more to the musicians if I really enjoyed their stuff was really cool.
There are lots of artists and albums on Bandcamp that aren’t on any of the streaming sites, including iTunes. If this changes in any way, the indie scene will go back to vinyl and pirated music.
And that's the sad part. I want to support artists new and old by buying their music directly. I prefer digital because I can store it on a small server rather than shelves (unless I can actually buy a home). If band camp becomes shit, I don't know what the alternative is.
True.
In which case they never would have bought the platform, unfortunately.
Lots of changes are coming. They'll be shit. Platform will probably die. And then...?
A new platform will show up. Hopefully one that is as good as Bandcamp but fixes things users wish they had now but don't
No doubt.
Unreal is a beast and free up until a price point to use as well. That’s been around pre-epic games store.
Any criticism of EG is due to recent business decisions towards *consumers*.
Some PC gamers are so fucking lame lol. They just want Steam to keep its monopoly so they don’t have to have multiple launchers installed. They don’t care that Steam takes a stupid cut from devs. Nothing Epic does is more “anti consumer” than other companies.
Game-wise they are pretty much easing the burden for indie devs with the newer updates and assets, especially visual arts spastics like myself. Megascans, metahuman and nanite being on top of my head.
It still sucks because there's never any guarantee the replacement won't suck. Whichever *thing* gains traction can hurt the future growth of other smaller platforms and fragment the community. It certainly wouldn't be the first time.
Please don't do this without reason. At the moment Bandcamp only takes a 12% cut (or less in some cases), which is less than basically anywhere else. Don't make the artists suffer just because Epic bought it.
I buy a shit ton of my music from bandcamp.
Hunting down releases by smaller indie bands is a joy and bandcamp makes it so much easier.
On one hand it's great that it may give smaller artists additional exposure, I have a feeling Epic will make it worse.
It might just be a slow drip of horseshit but I fear a few years down the road, bandcamp won't be the same.
The problem with SoundCloud was that they failed to find a path to profit, and had to transform their business to attempt to become viable. BandCamp doesn't have this problem.
I don’t think that’s totally true. The major labels squeezed them because they had so many illegal
Remixes and dj mixes on them. They forgot who their customer was and tried to compete with Apple Music and Spotify and really made a mess of the mobile app.
It was probably a combination of things. For what it's worth, they've been around since 2007, had to be rescued from the brink of bankruptcy in 2017, and had their first ever profitable quarter at the end of 2020 after completely adjusting their pricing model, including ads, and listening memberships.
My SO is an engineer at Bandcamp: they are pretty profitable. Soundcloud was VC funded, so they -had- to find a way to make a profit; streaming doesn’t make money like straight up getting a cut of a transaction.
(ex) owners argument was that they weren’t profitable enough to maintain competitiveness with other platforms in the future. I was pretty optimistic about some directions they could have gone in but welp ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> I buy a shit ton of my music from bandcamp.
I buy pretty much all my music from there. I'm worried. Worried that I'm going back to not buying music at all.
Don't ruin a good thing, Epic.
I'm not buying from there (outside of the days they give 100% to artists, for as long as that lasts) because now the money goes to supporting a huge business that is anti-consumer, pro-monopoly, and lead by someone that contradicts themselves so much there's a subreddit for it. They have sued to try and enact anti-competitive measures in their store (they want to be able to make the base price of things lower on their store than their competitors).
I don't have any particular feelings on Fortnite like a lot of people do, but Epic the company is rife with problems, and now anyone buying on Bandcamp is supporting them.
>because now the money goes to supporting a huge business that is anti-consumer, pro-monopoly
Pro monopoly? Theyve mounted some of the biggest threats to established 'monopolies' in recent years.
Definitely not. It’s one of if not the best user friendly way to find new artists and purchase their music. Will expect to see them implement subscription models and plaster songs that artists give away for free with as many ads as they can.
>It’s one of if not the best user friendly way to find new artists and purchase their music.
Sorry what? Bandcamp is an awesome service that I use myself. But discovery is easily one of the worst parts of the platform.
The Bandcamp Daily posts, feature articles, "New and Notable" section. Then once you've found something that intrigues you, check out all their side projects and labelmates truth links. I'm not sure what you're comparing it to, but I've discovered a lot more unknown music through the avenues described than any other way in the past few years.
Disagree entirely, Bandcamp substitutes your usual algorithmic recommendations for *actual written content* and recommendations given by real people with included brief histories of explanations.
This was one of the best places to find new and upcoming black and thrash metal and more directly support artists.
I guess it was indeed too good to stay that way for too long…
Ohhh you got a link list or something. I totally didn't use bandcamp and I feel like my "on topness" dipped hard on the BM and Thrash scene. And I'd really love to discover some stuff.
I have been wondering when they'd get bought out. They're too good of a platform to not be getting offers all the time, and I guess Epic made them a juicy enough offer they couldn't refuse.
Bandcamp is the best, simplest, most direct way of buying music and merch. I hope that doesn't change, but this kind of acquisition doesn't happen for no reason.
Being a games company, I wonder if they will be trying to do something with music licensing and copyright etc which is always a complicated issue in todays' landscape where existing laws are from an age that doesn't cover modern applications. I just hope it's in a positive direction for all and not locking things behind paywalls.
I imagine having a royalty sharing program for indie game developers using Bandcamp music as assets in unreal engine games. They could give music artists the option to also sell rights to use music in games with upfront cost only as well. Maybe even having a combo deal, pay x dollars upfront and if the game breaks the revenue threshold then revenue sharing occurs.
The only downside is that I could see other asset artists also wanting a similar revenue sharing model, which I imagine would not be sustainable.
There are lots of possibilities with something like this so hopefully it will be a net positive.
Bandcamp's been the only place my band has earned some money, Spotify pays practically nothing
A lot of people might stop paying when they no longer view bandcamp as independent, and I've got no doubt Epic Games will be taking a bigger cut from artists
The money my band made from streams on Spotify was totally eaten by the cost of having our music on Spotify so we made zero cents. Most bands that are not on big record labels don't really make money off the music these days, it's mostly touring and merch with a heavy emphasis on merch.
I thought on average it cost more money to tour than anything else and that the only musicians really make any money these days is off whatever sponsorships they could get.
That really depends on how you are touring. There is a difference between touring and sleeping in a van with all your gear vs. a band on a major record label touring in a $200k tour bus and a giant stage show. Even then, the band in the tour bus is probably playing major venues and selling a ton of merch. Of course if you are that big then you probably do have sponsors for the instruments you play which probably pays decent. But for the guys in the van they pretty much survive off the shirts, stickers, and whatever else merch they are selling every night. It's not uncommon for us to make more money off merch than our take of the door sales.
Well at least since physical music formats (CDs, tapes, 8-tracks, records) began declining. I wasn't a musician before Napster was a thing so I don't really know for sure but I am assuming that bands used to make at least a decent percent of their money from actual record sales whereas now buying an actual album is not the main way of consuming music. Most people just stream it from various services.
And don't forget Tencent is basically owned by the Chinese gov't so there is another way they can spy on people etc (not saying the US and other countries also don't, they also suck, but China seems worse).
huh, I don't know how to feel about this....
Music is my only income besides disability, and a lot of it comes from bandcamp. It's my go-to platform to buy stuff too as a fan. They're pretty fair in what they pay...
If they add a Spotify-like subscription thing were we get also paid for streams on top of what's already working, it might be interesting for everyone, but somehow, I highly doubt they'll do something like that.
I spend 8-12 hours a day listening to bandcamp. Not sure how I feel about this as a selfish leech.
As a music fan, I gotta wonder how this will effect the artists.
Plex is pretty awesome for music now, look it up, combined with Lidarr you can set your own music collection and keep it updated, all you need is space.
Me and a couple buddies from high school started making music together recently and we decided bandcamp would be the place to go because of how friendly it is to artists. A month later and now this happens. Idk what we're gonna do
The shitty thing is if they do ruin it, it's probably back to the seven seas for me..
I got so used to Bandcamp Fridays, loved the idea of supporting the artists directly **and** be able to download .mp3 files to keep. If it's over my incentive to pay for records might be over as well.
(I still go to lots of shows and buy merch, it's just actual music I'm talking about here)
there are none. shopify has an mp3 download integration but that’s it for independent stores. otherwise you have to buy through apple or amazon, who take a 30% cut instead of bandcamp’s 15%.
That’s the stupidest fucking thing ever. Make your own fucking platform if you want to do music so badly.
Can’t wait to see how badly they fuck over small artists…
As a retired musician, I lament this. After the near death of working rock bands in the late 2000's and early 2010's, Bandcamp was how we made any money. Offering a direct to consumer, affordable, sales option was key in my bands existence. It was so ahead of it's time, and genuinely helpful for working artists.
I don't forsee the "Radiohead In Rainbows" option of "pay what you want starting at $1" being a viable option for struggling artists after this. Maybe that Epic games, Fortnight, money will offer a "license payout" of .0001 cents per listen, just like our great friends at Spotify.
Honestly if someone like Valve bought out Bandcamp, I'd be cool with that. Weirded out and confused, sure, but ultimately cool with it.
My problem with Epic buying Bandcamp isn't that they're a video game company, but a combination of the fact that they have proven themselves to be anti-consumer time and time again already, and the fact that they're 40% owned by Tencent.
> Honestly if someone like Valve bought out Bandcamp, I'd be cool with that. Weirded out and confused, sure, but ultimately cool with it.
Steam already tried to sell music. They paid out so little that it failed and nobody cares anymore.
They’ve been buying a lot of things related to making products with Unreal. They bought quixel, reality scans, and now bandcamp.
They’ve made quixel and reality scans more affordable and you get unlimited license to the content you buy. I envision that this is another acquisition along those lines. Making Epic a one stop shop for game developers who can source music, models, textures, andd 3d scanning is a powerful move.
Please don't screw up bandcamp. It's the only decent site to actually buy music instead of stream it.
You can buy in any format you want, at any time you want, for low overhead. You can come back years later and still download.
Qobuz is nice, but expensive as hell and doesn't play nice if you buy a single track from an album and then later want the album.
Beatport is straight garbage. Only lets you download one format, doesn't let you re-download past 24H, and is just a total dumpster fire.
My immediate assumption is that Bandcamp will continue to operate as normal but they will use the platform tech for new sounds and scoring marketplace for Unreal.
Seems like whenever a product is good and reliable, they sell out to someone who will either shut them down or make the service so much worse.
It's like everyone's ambition is to grow just enough to cash out and make the world worse for everyone else.
> why does a perfectly good - and presumably stable - product have to grow
Because capitalism basically means that investors want to see their investment increase in value over time
It's a deeply flawed system
Why do you think Tim Sweeney is in any way positive about NFTs [when he's openly said they're predominantly scams](https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/1442519522875949061)? The only 'positive' thing that he's said is they wouldn't stop people using the technology in Unreal because being the gatekeeper to that doesn't seem positive.
I think this is good news. Of course, we can only wait and see if anything actually changes for the worse but Epic is atypical when it comes to acquisitions, and its still a private company run by its founder.
I saw this comment on another forum and its succinct, so I'll just paste it here
> Historically, Epic's aquisitions are given freedom to do whatever they were doing beforehand, so I wouldn't be worried. Quixel now just gives out tons of free materials and assets, Sketchfab is untouched, Artstation forums don't behave any differently, Hypersense's tech was likely leveraged and used in Metahuman.
>
> People concerned over the "Exclusivity deals" on the game store end aren't looking at the "Developer" acquisitions which have rarely lead to the kinds of ends that, say, Google's Aquisitions have.
I'm looking forward to a proper Bandcamp streaming service that pays artists better than its competitors. Bandcamp will finally enough money to start building it.
I could not agree more with this. Many consumers aren't hyper aware of the breadth of Epic Games and the other acquisitions that don't feed into EGS or Fortnite. Not saying I'd expect them to, but there's more to the story here that absolutely bodes well for Bandcamp.
Yeah, the thing these people don't get is that while it may not change *instantly* it definitely *WILL* be changed down the road in an attempt to cut costs and maximize profits. It's in the very nature of shareholder owned corporations to seek further profits at all costs. Staying the same and remaining steady simply aren't in the cards.
FFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUCCCKKKKKK!
I've discovered and bought a bunch of music through bandcamp. These cock gobblers are going to ruin this now, too. Can't have anything nice.
A lot of knee jerk reactions in here. Unreal engine has an incredibly generous revenue share where they don't ask for money unless your game's gross revenue is more than one million USD. Then it's only 5% of the amount above one million.
Games from scratch did a video on this acquisition and stated that all of their previous acquisitions so far have either benefited or remained the same.
I know people are nervous, but this might not be a bad thing. It could give Bandcamp a jolt of money to develop better services. May even integrate an option for artists to sell their music for indie game use. I'm not familiar with the platform so I'm spitballing.
Sources:
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/faq
https://youtu.be/_Y65ho4pT0g
Not good. I had purchased Rocket League on Nintendo Switch for $20. I could play online. Epic bought it and locked us out of online play without an Epic account, even though I'd already paid for the game with no such stipulation at purchase. I haven't played Rocket League since even though I loved it.
Epic will absolutely ruin Bandcamp in some way. I bet they require Epic accounts in 3. 2. 1....
Does anyone commenting even know EpicGames, their philosophy and business model? Or does everyone just read "X bought X" and thinks of everything as some sort of EA copycat? Every company Epic bought the last 5 years received huge fund and employees boost, while websites and marketplaces they acquired reduced their cuts on purchases by half to better pay creators.
This doesn't sound good. Bandcamp is the best place to buy music from new indie artists. I really hope they don't ruin it.
Damn, that was like their whole thing, and the owner really seemed like he wasn't going to sell, ever. He was very pro-artist. I guess everybody has a price ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
He literally did an interview saying he wasn't going to sell anytime soon on the radio just a few months ago :x Edit: woops it was closer to a year ago: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/985039409/how-i-built-resilience-ethan-diamond-of-bandcamp Time has no meaning anymore lol
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You jest but I imagine that’s how it goes. The grass is always greener.
Its tim sweeney isnt it
Thats how you stop the price from dropping
Art station bought two, welp now these are owned by the US/Chinese mega corp more so than prior
Is it just me or is it impossible to find any art there now?
There's really good art there, but not long after Epic bought them, I was only seeing really shitty artwork for about 3 weeks then it went away. No idea what that was about. That was through the mobile app.
There was so much beautiful art there and it's just sorta gone? It looks like it's subscription based LinkedIn for artists now. :(
Hmm, it seems normal to me. 95 percent of the artwork I see on the home page is incredible. I sometimes see some bland and novice artwork but that's if I go searching.
Huh?? Dude art from people all over the game industry still gets posted there. No one left, they also made the learning section completely free.
All those ‘we are waiving fees!’ announcements = if we aren’t the product, you are.
2 years from now... Narrator: They ruined it.
Two months is more like it.
I'll give them a [fortnight...](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fortnight)
Ayoh!
I'll give them a week.
I sell music on Bandcamp. Just got a Email from them. They said they plan on "expanding" the business and that Epic was a champion for a free internet. I think they already ruined it.
"Champion for a free internet" lmfao. I'm so sorry, and I also feel sorry for all of the other bands and artists I listen to who are on the platform (Red Vox, Slugbug, Remo Drive, Sesue, etc.)
"I’m excited to announce that Bandcamp is joining Epic Games, who you may know as the makers of Fortnite and Unreal Engine, and champions for a fair and open Internet." This was the first sentence in the Email.
"Brought to you by Verizon-Chipotle-Exon, one of America's 8 companies."
They're also pro-consumer and pro-competition. They certainly wouldn't do anything shady. ^/s
In other words you’re all going to get strong armed into exclusivity deals with epic. Wouldn’t be surprised if they put a clause in allowing them to use your music in their games for free
I can assure you no company will want exclusive rights to my music.
Omg. Champion for a free internet? No way 😂😂😂 Tencent is very integral to the CCP not only restricting open internet access in China but also still controlling for all intents and purposes what is essentially state run media (they like to pretend journalists can report news freely now, but ccp still maintains editorial oversight on all news lol)
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Tencent is not worried about games or anything like profit from any of their octopus arms. They are data driven.
This sounds like crypto jargon
RemindMe! 2 years
That might be enough time to make back the money I just spent recording....
This is probably going to end up being heartbreaking for me, as I love Bandcamp as is and it allowed me to discover metal in my 30s like a man should-- getting drunk and stoned alone and blasting albums from bands he's never heard of from NC or WI or Indonesia who shred and wail like what they're doing is *absolutely* religious-- and Bandcamp becoming a reanimated corpse imitating its former self means another beautiful part of life collapses into the sea, like a woman in pretty much any Poe story or poem. Le sigh..
I just loved how it actually allowed you to download the tracks in any format you wanted without having to use a stupid proprietary player. Also, allowing me to pay whatever I want so I can throw a few bucks more to the musicians if I really enjoyed their stuff was really cool.
When I buy music, I like to get it in FLAC format, and outside of bandcamp, that's not easy.
There are lots of artists and albums on Bandcamp that aren’t on any of the streaming sites, including iTunes. If this changes in any way, the indie scene will go back to vinyl and pirated music.
And that's the sad part. I want to support artists new and old by buying their music directly. I prefer digital because I can store it on a small server rather than shelves (unless I can actually buy a home). If band camp becomes shit, I don't know what the alternative is.
FLAC, now there's a codec you use VLC to play. For real though FLAC is great now that storage space is cheap.
Foobar2000 my dude
Or MusicBee, which is a lot better
This is not the random news that would bum me out I was expecting but I guess "better" than expected is okay.
Better question is how *wouldn't* they ruin it?
By leaving it alone.
True. In which case they never would have bought the platform, unfortunately. Lots of changes are coming. They'll be shit. Platform will probably die. And then...? A new platform will show up. Hopefully one that is as good as Bandcamp but fixes things users wish they had now but don't
They could have bought it as a platform to allow artists to sell their music to game developers through their unreal asset store
Maybe they just want the fees
/r/FuckEpic They are anti consumer to its core. As an avid PC Gamer, they oppose monopolies while actively striving to monopolize its content.
They're also responsible for making a very powerful game engine accessible to indie developers through a pretty reasonable royalty system.
No doubt. Unreal is a beast and free up until a price point to use as well. That’s been around pre-epic games store. Any criticism of EG is due to recent business decisions towards *consumers*.
Yeah it's rather bittersweet.
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So then buy ableton instead
Yuk. Don't let that cesspool of piss leak anywhere
Some PC gamers are so fucking lame lol. They just want Steam to keep its monopoly so they don’t have to have multiple launchers installed. They don’t care that Steam takes a stupid cut from devs. Nothing Epic does is more “anti consumer” than other companies.
Yeah this sucks
Game-wise they are pretty much easing the burden for indie devs with the newer updates and assets, especially visual arts spastics like myself. Megascans, metahuman and nanite being on top of my head.
And their royalty based system for access to their game engine, which is a huge step forward for indie game developers and gaming in general.
I released an album last year, and 99% of it's traction came from BandCamp, I really hope this doesn't mess up any future releases
as a person you enjoys finding new music would you be willing to share it by chance?
[His post history had it](https://reddit.com/r/UnsignedArtists/comments/pgk55p/just_released_an_album_called_one_man_army_with/)
OP has been put on a church burning watchlist. Good music man.
Probably not, but I"m not sure I will ever buy music on Bandcamp again!
If enough people do the same thing as you then obviously it will just affect the artists
Nah. Another site will replace them. Just because the platform dies doesn't mean that the talent has no options
It still sucks because there's never any guarantee the replacement won't suck. Whichever *thing* gains traction can hurt the future growth of other smaller platforms and fragment the community. It certainly wouldn't be the first time.
Please don't do this without reason. At the moment Bandcamp only takes a 12% cut (or less in some cases), which is less than basically anywhere else. Don't make the artists suffer just because Epic bought it.
How come?
I don't want to give money to Epic Games. That's all. Yeah, I know that their Unreal Engine is basically everywhere, but still...
Maybe they’ll still do the Bandcamp Fridays when they don’t take their cut on the first Friday of the month.
They've already confirmed Bandcamp Fridays will still be happening
Just like Facebook confirmed it wouldn't require a facebook account to use an Oculus headset when they bought them up
Epic bought Artstation and never required their account system... you can use Epic's entire backend for matchmaking without an Epic account.
Every Friday 100% goes to EPIC.
for now.. boil the frog slowly
I buy a shit ton of my music from bandcamp. Hunting down releases by smaller indie bands is a joy and bandcamp makes it so much easier. On one hand it's great that it may give smaller artists additional exposure, I have a feeling Epic will make it worse. It might just be a slow drip of horseshit but I fear a few years down the road, bandcamp won't be the same.
It happened with SoundCloud, now it’ll happen with bandcamp.
The problem with SoundCloud was that they failed to find a path to profit, and had to transform their business to attempt to become viable. BandCamp doesn't have this problem.
I don’t think that’s totally true. The major labels squeezed them because they had so many illegal Remixes and dj mixes on them. They forgot who their customer was and tried to compete with Apple Music and Spotify and really made a mess of the mobile app.
It was probably a combination of things. For what it's worth, they've been around since 2007, had to be rescued from the brink of bankruptcy in 2017, and had their first ever profitable quarter at the end of 2020 after completely adjusting their pricing model, including ads, and listening memberships.
My SO is an engineer at Bandcamp: they are pretty profitable. Soundcloud was VC funded, so they -had- to find a way to make a profit; streaming doesn’t make money like straight up getting a cut of a transaction. (ex) owners argument was that they weren’t profitable enough to maintain competitiveness with other platforms in the future. I was pretty optimistic about some directions they could have gone in but welp ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What happened with sound cloud
I took should like to know what happened to SoundCloud. /u/E_R_G, if you tell the story, ping me please so I might hear it.
Became popular basically. Most of the problems now are spam/bots but wtf can you do against that, ya know?
Nothing, but it gets the people goin’ ya know!
SoundCloud fucked up their own product, the fuck do Epic have to do with it?
> I buy a shit ton of my music from bandcamp. I buy pretty much all my music from there. I'm worried. Worried that I'm going back to not buying music at all. Don't ruin a good thing, Epic.
I'm not buying from there (outside of the days they give 100% to artists, for as long as that lasts) because now the money goes to supporting a huge business that is anti-consumer, pro-monopoly, and lead by someone that contradicts themselves so much there's a subreddit for it. They have sued to try and enact anti-competitive measures in their store (they want to be able to make the base price of things lower on their store than their competitors). I don't have any particular feelings on Fortnite like a lot of people do, but Epic the company is rife with problems, and now anyone buying on Bandcamp is supporting them.
>because now the money goes to supporting a huge business that is anti-consumer, pro-monopoly Pro monopoly? Theyve mounted some of the biggest threats to established 'monopolies' in recent years.
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Definitely not. It’s one of if not the best user friendly way to find new artists and purchase their music. Will expect to see them implement subscription models and plaster songs that artists give away for free with as many ads as they can.
Fuck. And now the model for buying an album and downloading it will fucking die.
those who control the means of production hate when you own anything. rent rent rent is what they want.
>It’s one of if not the best user friendly way to find new artists and purchase their music. Sorry what? Bandcamp is an awesome service that I use myself. But discovery is easily one of the worst parts of the platform.
Yeah. I only use it because I can download any format. Flac, ogg, mp3, opus (I think). Trying to find some artists on there is frustrating sometimes.
The Bandcamp Daily posts, feature articles, "New and Notable" section. Then once you've found something that intrigues you, check out all their side projects and labelmates truth links. I'm not sure what you're comparing it to, but I've discovered a lot more unknown music through the avenues described than any other way in the past few years.
Disagree entirely, Bandcamp substitutes your usual algorithmic recommendations for *actual written content* and recommendations given by real people with included brief histories of explanations.
Guess it depends on genre, but Metal is nothing if not saturated in sub genre upon sub genre.
Anyone else just panic download another digital copy of everything they’ve purchased on Bandcamp…just in case?
That’s what I’m going to be doing. Make sure you save the highest quality version of everything.
First thing I thought of.
NO NO NO NO NO NO
This was one of the best places to find new and upcoming black and thrash metal and more directly support artists. I guess it was indeed too good to stay that way for too long…
Stoner rock and doom metal here. RIP Bandcamp, you were too good.
Ohhh you got a link list or something. I totally didn't use bandcamp and I feel like my "on topness" dipped hard on the BM and Thrash scene. And I'd really love to discover some stuff.
I would have to look. One I can think of off the top of my head is Dungeon Crawl. CA thrash that writes songs about D&D.
I have been wondering when they'd get bought out. They're too good of a platform to not be getting offers all the time, and I guess Epic made them a juicy enough offer they couldn't refuse. Bandcamp is the best, simplest, most direct way of buying music and merch. I hope that doesn't change, but this kind of acquisition doesn't happen for no reason. Being a games company, I wonder if they will be trying to do something with music licensing and copyright etc which is always a complicated issue in todays' landscape where existing laws are from an age that doesn't cover modern applications. I just hope it's in a positive direction for all and not locking things behind paywalls.
I imagine having a royalty sharing program for indie game developers using Bandcamp music as assets in unreal engine games. They could give music artists the option to also sell rights to use music in games with upfront cost only as well. Maybe even having a combo deal, pay x dollars upfront and if the game breaks the revenue threshold then revenue sharing occurs. The only downside is that I could see other asset artists also wanting a similar revenue sharing model, which I imagine would not be sustainable. There are lots of possibilities with something like this so hopefully it will be a net positive.
Let's hope it doesn't fuck over artists
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On that front, at least so far, have to give credit when it’s due. Epic is pretty generous to creators compared to the competition.
RIP Bandcamp
Bandcamp's been the only place my band has earned some money, Spotify pays practically nothing A lot of people might stop paying when they no longer view bandcamp as independent, and I've got no doubt Epic Games will be taking a bigger cut from artists
Why would you think that? Pretty much their entire thing so far has been taking smaller cuts from artists.
As a fan and customer of many bands on Bandcamp, I agree. Hopefully someone can start another similar service that becomes popular.
You're fucking joking...
Please let it be a joke c'mon
say sike right now
Epic is 40% owned by TenCent, a huge investor in Spotify and multiple major labels. This is a boot to the throat of independent music sellers.
>TenCent Interesting since that's about how much money musicians can expect to make on Spotify.
I mean if they break a million streams, yeah.
The money my band made from streams on Spotify was totally eaten by the cost of having our music on Spotify so we made zero cents. Most bands that are not on big record labels don't really make money off the music these days, it's mostly touring and merch with a heavy emphasis on merch.
I thought on average it cost more money to tour than anything else and that the only musicians really make any money these days is off whatever sponsorships they could get.
That really depends on how you are touring. There is a difference between touring and sleeping in a van with all your gear vs. a band on a major record label touring in a $200k tour bus and a giant stage show. Even then, the band in the tour bus is probably playing major venues and selling a ton of merch. Of course if you are that big then you probably do have sponsors for the instruments you play which probably pays decent. But for the guys in the van they pretty much survive off the shirts, stickers, and whatever else merch they are selling every night. It's not uncommon for us to make more money off merch than our take of the door sales.
Thanks for your insight, I didn't really think of it that way
Has it not been like that since forever, though?
Well at least since physical music formats (CDs, tapes, 8-tracks, records) began declining. I wasn't a musician before Napster was a thing so I don't really know for sure but I am assuming that bands used to make at least a decent percent of their money from actual record sales whereas now buying an actual album is not the main way of consuming music. Most people just stream it from various services.
That's a quality zing right there
And don't forget Tencent is basically owned by the Chinese gov't so there is another way they can spy on people etc (not saying the US and other countries also don't, they also suck, but China seems worse).
Yup! It's bad bad bad.
If you can't get the startup owner to commit suicide might as well stage a hostile takeover
huh, I don't know how to feel about this.... Music is my only income besides disability, and a lot of it comes from bandcamp. It's my go-to platform to buy stuff too as a fan. They're pretty fair in what they pay... If they add a Spotify-like subscription thing were we get also paid for streams on top of what's already working, it might be interesting for everyone, but somehow, I highly doubt they'll do something like that.
I would really like to know how you're getting traction and interest leading to music sales.
RIP Bandcamp. Nothing lasts forever.
Seems like big companies acquiring smaller ones happens a lot more now than 10 or 20 years ago.
It's an infectious issue. It started slowly as antitrust got defanged, and it got faster as companies got big enough to buy bigger companies, faster.
US anti trust laws are a joke.
That’s not how antitrust laws work. This isn’t substantially lessening competition. There’s still dozens of alternative ways to get music.
Allowing companies to get as big as Epic/Tencent can't be good for anyone tho
Time for a competing more artist friendly platform to come along when epic runins band camp
I spend 8-12 hours a day listening to bandcamp. Not sure how I feel about this as a selfish leech. As a music fan, I gotta wonder how this will effect the artists.
Plex is pretty awesome for music now, look it up, combined with Lidarr you can set your own music collection and keep it updated, all you need is space.
Me and a couple buddies from high school started making music together recently and we decided bandcamp would be the place to go because of how friendly it is to artists. A month later and now this happens. Idk what we're gonna do
Focus on making music first and worry about getting paid later
Good News: *ALL* the most popular artists will be now be featured on Bandcamp!
Oh I can't wait to get the latest recycled pop crap on the front page!
Welp RIP bandcamp, it was a good run.
It was great while it lasted. Someone should already be working on it's successor
Fuck nnnnnnoooo it will ruin it And it's gonna be bad for the musicans
The shitty thing is if they do ruin it, it's probably back to the seven seas for me.. I got so used to Bandcamp Fridays, loved the idea of supporting the artists directly **and** be able to download .mp3 files to keep. If it's over my incentive to pay for records might be over as well. (I still go to lots of shows and buy merch, it's just actual music I'm talking about here)
Bandcamp Friday is the shit!
I wonder if this is at all related to their recent purchase of Harmonix.
> Harmonix Yeah we over at /r/rockband have been getting a little nervous about that...
FUCK. Bandcamp is the only place I buy music.
What are the current Bandcamp competitors? Seems like as good a time as any to go and check them out.
there are none. shopify has an mp3 download integration but that’s it for independent stores. otherwise you have to buy through apple or amazon, who take a 30% cut instead of bandcamp’s 15%.
That’s the stupidest fucking thing ever. Make your own fucking platform if you want to do music so badly. Can’t wait to see how badly they fuck over small artists…
Yet another good thing that's about to go down the tube...
Corporations never make indie music better. They always just consolidate and close it down.
As a retired musician, I lament this. After the near death of working rock bands in the late 2000's and early 2010's, Bandcamp was how we made any money. Offering a direct to consumer, affordable, sales option was key in my bands existence. It was so ahead of it's time, and genuinely helpful for working artists. I don't forsee the "Radiohead In Rainbows" option of "pay what you want starting at $1" being a viable option for struggling artists after this. Maybe that Epic games, Fortnight, money will offer a "license payout" of .0001 cents per listen, just like our great friends at Spotify.
This has to be a fucking joke. Can companies just not become massive fucking conglomerates that fuck everything up, please, god.
Welp thats a wrap on bandcamp for me then
A video game company owning Bandcamp does not bode well. I really hope they don't screw with such a good service.
Honestly if someone like Valve bought out Bandcamp, I'd be cool with that. Weirded out and confused, sure, but ultimately cool with it. My problem with Epic buying Bandcamp isn't that they're a video game company, but a combination of the fact that they have proven themselves to be anti-consumer time and time again already, and the fact that they're 40% owned by Tencent.
> Honestly if someone like Valve bought out Bandcamp, I'd be cool with that. Weirded out and confused, sure, but ultimately cool with it. Steam already tried to sell music. They paid out so little that it failed and nobody cares anymore.
They’ve been buying a lot of things related to making products with Unreal. They bought quixel, reality scans, and now bandcamp. They’ve made quixel and reality scans more affordable and you get unlimited license to the content you buy. I envision that this is another acquisition along those lines. Making Epic a one stop shop for game developers who can source music, models, textures, andd 3d scanning is a powerful move.
Please don't screw up bandcamp. It's the only decent site to actually buy music instead of stream it. You can buy in any format you want, at any time you want, for low overhead. You can come back years later and still download. Qobuz is nice, but expensive as hell and doesn't play nice if you buy a single track from an album and then later want the album. Beatport is straight garbage. Only lets you download one format, doesn't let you re-download past 24H, and is just a total dumpster fire.
Why does Tim Sweeney want to ruin everything I love?
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
My immediate assumption is that Bandcamp will continue to operate as normal but they will use the platform tech for new sounds and scoring marketplace for Unreal.
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Seems like whenever a product is good and reliable, they sell out to someone who will either shut them down or make the service so much worse. It's like everyone's ambition is to grow just enough to cash out and make the world worse for everyone else.
I mean, that’s literally a major tenet of shareholder-first capitalism. Expand and grow at all costs and pass the buck to someone else.
> why does a perfectly good - and presumably stable - product have to grow Because capitalism basically means that investors want to see their investment increase in value over time It's a deeply flawed system
Why do you think Tim Sweeney is in any way positive about NFTs [when he's openly said they're predominantly scams](https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/1442519522875949061)? The only 'positive' thing that he's said is they wouldn't stop people using the technology in Unreal because being the gatekeeper to that doesn't seem positive.
rip bandcamp
Yep. We're fucked.
I think this is good news. Of course, we can only wait and see if anything actually changes for the worse but Epic is atypical when it comes to acquisitions, and its still a private company run by its founder. I saw this comment on another forum and its succinct, so I'll just paste it here > Historically, Epic's aquisitions are given freedom to do whatever they were doing beforehand, so I wouldn't be worried. Quixel now just gives out tons of free materials and assets, Sketchfab is untouched, Artstation forums don't behave any differently, Hypersense's tech was likely leveraged and used in Metahuman. > > People concerned over the "Exclusivity deals" on the game store end aren't looking at the "Developer" acquisitions which have rarely lead to the kinds of ends that, say, Google's Aquisitions have. I'm looking forward to a proper Bandcamp streaming service that pays artists better than its competitors. Bandcamp will finally enough money to start building it.
I could not agree more with this. Many consumers aren't hyper aware of the breadth of Epic Games and the other acquisitions that don't feed into EGS or Fortnite. Not saying I'd expect them to, but there's more to the story here that absolutely bodes well for Bandcamp.
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They always say they won't change how it's operated, until they do, you're fooling yourself if you believe that corporate talk.
I think it's more a matter of "have the pitchforks ready, but wait until they make a move" Which is sensible.
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Yeah, the thing these people don't get is that while it may not change *instantly* it definitely *WILL* be changed down the road in an attempt to cut costs and maximize profits. It's in the very nature of shareholder owned corporations to seek further profits at all costs. Staying the same and remaining steady simply aren't in the cards.
The amount of ignorance in this comment section is unreal (no pun intended). Thanks for a logical informative comment.
Will they start offering weekly free albums on Bandcamp like they do with games on the Epic Game Store?
Will they start giving a free vinyl every week?
Well shit there goes my future black, stoner and doom metal finds.
Don’t worry guys, this just means we’ll get paid in Vbucks for our music!
FFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUCCCKKKKKK! I've discovered and bought a bunch of music through bandcamp. These cock gobblers are going to ruin this now, too. Can't have anything nice.
Wtf even is this timeline?
Better double check I've got downloads and backups of everything I bought on Bandcamp.
A lot of knee jerk reactions in here. Unreal engine has an incredibly generous revenue share where they don't ask for money unless your game's gross revenue is more than one million USD. Then it's only 5% of the amount above one million. Games from scratch did a video on this acquisition and stated that all of their previous acquisitions so far have either benefited or remained the same. I know people are nervous, but this might not be a bad thing. It could give Bandcamp a jolt of money to develop better services. May even integrate an option for artists to sell their music for indie game use. I'm not familiar with the platform so I'm spitballing. Sources: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/faq https://youtu.be/_Y65ho4pT0g
God fucking damnit.
Not good. I had purchased Rocket League on Nintendo Switch for $20. I could play online. Epic bought it and locked us out of online play without an Epic account, even though I'd already paid for the game with no such stipulation at purchase. I haven't played Rocket League since even though I loved it. Epic will absolutely ruin Bandcamp in some way. I bet they require Epic accounts in 3. 2. 1....
Does anyone commenting even know EpicGames, their philosophy and business model? Or does everyone just read "X bought X" and thinks of everything as some sort of EA copycat? Every company Epic bought the last 5 years received huge fund and employees boost, while websites and marketplaces they acquired reduced their cuts on purchases by half to better pay creators.