Epic Games acquires Bandcamp | Hacker News Reader

Epic Games acquires Bandcamp

variety.com

709 pointskylestetz476 comments

Bandcamp Press Release: https://blog.bandcamp.com/2022/03/02/bandcamp-is-joining-epi...

This feels like a major blow, as someone who just semi recently (probably around pandemic start) started getting into purchasing flac music from indie artists, Bandcamp was a great source of music. I understand nothing will change in the short term, but long term I am very concerned. Especially as streaming becomes more dominant and companies are less willing to provide flac based music and physical discs (where I can rip my own) continue to disappear.

This feels like a potential last step of true music ownership and that makes me incredibly sad.

That being said if anyone knows of any place to buy flacs of music with great selection would love to know (especially for Japanese music which I generally have to import, thankfully they love CDs).

"Nothing will change in the short term" is the story of every acquisition, almost all of which end up with major changes for the worse at some point. (So yes, I agree with you.)

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.

And yet so many modern day startups have no viable exit strategy beyond acquisition- what does that say about the state of the industry, and of founders' commitments towards building a sustainable product?

When Epic bought the game "Rocket League" they promised not to change anything. At that time it had Windows, Linux, Mac, xbox, and playstation clients. 6 months after they aquisition they killed off the linux client (even for people who bought in-game purchases).

Epic lies. It is what they do. They are the epitome of a dangerous megacorp.

There's a Twitter account I can't find right now (help!) which shows the statements companies put out at the moment of acquisition ("nothing will change, ever, we'll always be independent") and the statements they put out a couple of months later ("all your files have been deleted, we've closed the offices, everyone is absorbed into Parent Company, so long and thanks for all the fish").

Hmmm. I tend to agree.

Would be interesting to think of acquisitions where this wasn't the case. The only one that jumps to mind is Zappos.

Prepare for a blog post titled Our Amazing Journey.

> That being said if anyone knows of any place to buy flacs of music with great selection would love to know

Bleep offers FLAC (even 24 bit WAV).

https://bleep.com/

It's mostly alternative and electronica stuff though. It was founded by Warp records (Aphex Twin, Autreche, Boards of Canada, etc) but it now sells stuff for other labels as well.

Major problem with bleep is I can't redownload purchases years later if my storage/backups were to be destroyed. I've got a pile of old Autechre purchases I can't get access to anymore which is frustrating, but not the end of the world.

Bandcamp has no cap on redownloading my library, and a decent mobile app for the stuff I don't keep stored on my devices.

Bandcamp isn't a perfect platform (they finally added a volume slider after a decade+), but they were a great solution to buying and releasing music for me since the birth of Bandcamp.

I still think Epic will allow download and ownership of FLAC files. They are quite open to ownership of content, I believe what they are trying to build is a stronger moat around their "app store". Longer term I think they will be looking to force Apple/Google to allow 3rd party app stores onto their platforms and in doing so need content.

This is a play to get content and direct relationships with producers, I don't think they will change the business model.

Hopefully they figure out how to let you backup game libraries once of these days. At least in MacOS I still can't back up an install like I can Steam games when moving to a new machine or wiping my current machine.

I've been buying more mainstream artists (who aren't on Bandcamp) from 7digital: https://us.7digital.com/

That said, I didn't spend nearly as much money there because Bandcamp showed a lot more evidence that they cared about ethics and getting money directly to artists. I have no idea how money works with something like 7digital, but I assume it doesn't pay artists as well.

7digital has really gone down hill in the last 2 years. They haven't updated their front page in forever and when they do its very slight. All the albums listed on the front page are from 2019.

Albums disappear all the time and never return, your downloads from your library break when that happens too. So be like me, download immediately and back it up.

I still use 7digital bc it's easier to actually download the mp3/flac, especially on mobile, without a 3rd party app (like Amazon) that makes you download one song at a time (as opposed to a zip of an album)

But it's a rotting, decaying place where new music doesn't get added.

I listen to mostly older shit. So no big deal for me. For now.

Qobuz offers both streamed music and flac purchases from their store.

You are a god send. If for no other reason than they have an album I had been looking to purchase I could find nowhere else.

It doesn't do either of those things if you reside in Canada (or presumably any other country not in its limited collection of markets).

Pretty sure it's just a front service for 7digital. All the big streaming services besides Spotify and Tidal are skeleton crew operations.

is it known how they are compensating the artists? the main reason why i am boycotting spotify.

Qobuz is the best

Boomkat is also good, different selection than Bandcamp but comparable in size (they definitely have some Japanese stuff that Bandcamp doesn't, e.g. Tzadik's Japanese music line).

I just checked it out to confirm that they have John Zorn's catalog, and it seems so. Good find. I thought the man was married to physical only.

> That being said if anyone knows of any place to buy flacs of music with great selection would love to know (especially for Japanese music which I generally have to import, thankfully they love CDs).

For buying FLACs of Japanese music, I'm a satisfied Ototoy[0] user, though I'm not sure if people outside Japan can create an account.

[0] https://ototoy.jp/top/

I can attest that, as an American, I was able to create an Ototoy account and purchase an album I have been trying to find for years. Thank you!!

> if anyone knows of any place to buy flacs of music with great selection would love to know

https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v12/ (scroll down).

This does not fit your criteria of flacs with wide selection, however I think Resonate is the most interesting pro-artist option out there at the moment, albiet with an extremely limited catalog:

https://resonate.is/

Resonate is nice and I like the fact that it's a co-op, but there is something missing that was present on band-camp, unless I missed it: the possibility to pay for real albums that will be shipped to you, or for you to download the .flac or .mp3 files to add to your library.

It's actually possible to download the files but the price is fixed and it seems to be track by track.

So it looks more like a replacement for Spotify to me.

https://indiehd.com/ sells FLACs.

It doesn't have a ton of music currently, but the payout to musicians is very good, so it could become more popular in the future.

I publish to Juno, they seem to be a valuable source for music that has been around for quite some time and they sell multiple formats including FLAC.

https://www.junodownload.com/labels/Ruff+And+Tuff+Recordings...

Qobuz markets itself first as a hi-res streaming service. However, it also offers FLAC purchases without DRM that are yours even if you don't continue to use Qobuz. Their selection is very large and might have more options for more well-known acts.

Would Bandcamp the business model + Bandcamp the website necessarily be difficult to reproduce, particularly in an environment in which the Bandcamp niche just became no longer fulfilled due to changing practices on the part of Original Bandcamp?

I can't imagine the infrastructure to do it is trivial, but I would say the larger burden is network effect. Bandcamp has existed for a long time and I know of indie record labels who use it as their default distribution. I am aware there are indie alternatives (some of which provided in the comments to my first comment). Also disruption of service often results in loss, would someone who is no longer focused on music move there stuff over if things changed dramatically? Would people download in time, etc?

Obviously this is all speculation, bandcamp could continue on as it has been for the conceivable future, but I am less pleased about that future than I was before I saw this news.

Makes me curious about the idea of a nonprofit organization whose purpose is to manage a platform that gives as much money as possible to artists. Perhaps that's a naïve vision, but I feel like a lot of artists would hop onboard if the interface worked, and that could overcome the network effect.

Don't forget the third ingredient: wide adoption by underground artists and listeners. Bandcamp is, in some circles, cool. A new service would need to work very hard to earn that kind of cachet.

It seems like the perfect thing for Facebook (err Meta) to do with their social network. Bands already use Facebook for announcing tours, events, etc. so it would be a logical step to let them sell digital goods/music and give a small percent to FB. But I dunno if Meta actually cares about this business anymore.

I'm not sure about always having Flacs, but a lot of "DJ" specific music platforms like Beatport have the ability to very easily download your catalog as files of various formats. The music curated there is of course leaning toward music you'd use as a DJ but it's pretty broad still.

"recently"

same here. last week i decided to not renew my spotify subscription for the first time in 10 years and bought some of my favourite albums on bandcamp. sigh

I've had good results over the years with Juno Download, although I generally shop there for electronic music.

Are you afraid of loot boxes in your music that you have to pay for with micro tokens? :)

HDTracks for purchasing and downloading. Deezer and Tidal provide high fidelity streaming.

Tidal pays better than most other streaming services afaik.

It’s sad to see Bandcamp go. Because in tech an acquisition means loss of that independence.

Are you willing to fund Bandcamp?

Being a bandcamp customer, the answer seems quite obviously "yes" as I've literally done that.

As an OG pirate in my teens and a what elite in my twenties I’ve been spending on average about £50 a month on bandcamp for pretty much all of my thirties.

I do through my purchases and my general encouragement of traffic to the site, if I wasn't a broke graduate student and had the funds to invest in them, without a doubt in my mind I would.

However, even if I am unable to invest in them I see nothing wrong about my expressing discomfort over someone else buying them. I have seen nothing as well that they needed cash to continue operations.

Given they've been profitable for years, yes.

https://bandcamp.com/jerhewet

This is absurdly sad to me. I like to own my media (in the most practical sense that current IP laws let me do so). I run a Plex server and use PlexAmp as my primary way of listening to music, and my criteria are always this:

* FLAC or similar, I want this to be a lossless preservation of what was on the best-available source.

* No DRM. No mandated player. Just let me download a dang file.

* "Real" flac: this is technically already covered under the first bullet, but I call it out because I've seen it happen before: if I can open the flac in audacity and see it's obviously just a re-encode of a lossy format that clips the upper and lower frequency ranges off, that's a smell and I don't like it. (I know, most people can't tell etc, but this is less for listening purposes and more for archival purposes).

* Supports the artist!

Now, I'll admit, when push comes to shove, I drop the last bullet point first. So previously, my source for music was:

1. CD's (and I would follow What's guide for making Perfect Flacs)

2. What

But then what shut down and I lost my main music discovery mechanism. Enter bandcamp! Now I've been very happy with:

1. Bandcamp (I buy CDs because I like the artwork and they're cool).

2. CD's (+ Perfect Flac ripping guide still)

Now I'm not sure what to do. Epic has really soured me on their brand already, and I already boycott their launcher and any EGS exclusives. I guess I have to find some other way to get stuff now.

Some people put a 17.5kHz low pass and high pass at 20Hz on the master. It's dumb and you have very few reasons to do it, but people still do it and keep it as default settings in "mastering chains" that get passed around and dropped on random tracks.

So you can't be sure if you're looking at a reencoding or a lossy file or not.

There are definitely good reasons to high pass at something low like 20 Hz. Very low frequency signals eat up a lot of headroom, make speakers work harder, and make it more likely to encounter distortion during parts of the signal path, all for zero audible benefit.

Having what is practically a DC offset in your signal doesn't do anyone any good.

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

You can still see the difference in a high detail spectrogram like RX9 produces. There are some artifacts beyond just cutting off above 20khz.

There are also full range mp3s, since iTunes by default doesn't apply a hard 20khz lowpass like LAME does.

> Now I'm not sure what to do

I mean, why not continue doing what you are doing until the thing that you like actually goes to shit?

Yeah, Epic's acquisitions don't really affect the aquired's day to day.

IDK why "protesting a launcher" means disassociating with every single thing a company does. Kind of hard to avoid every single Unreal Engine game, or Blender/Godot or any other company/game they gave no-strings grants to. Or games you played already but are on EGS when they get a PC port.

I certainly understand being skeptical of the "nothing's going to change," which seems almost guaranteed to be wrong, but still, we don't need to lament the downfall before it actually happens, even if we think it's inevitable. If they change the amount of money going to artists, or cripple the feature set, or stop supporting a platform you like, or disable downloads... that's when we lament.

Edit: for one thing, anyone who pops up with a "bandcamp replacement" right now is going to have a very difficult time arguing that their replacement is actually better as long as bandcamp is still exactly the same thing they were emulating.

Because, and fairly so, people don't want their spending to go into the pockets of companies that get kids interested in gambling or buy exclusivity.

But there is no gambling in Fortnite and shortly after Epic acquired Rocket League they removed their loot boxes too.

The only gambling there was in Fortnite was in the paid version of the game that nobody really played anyway. The game that is actually popular doesn't have it.

Consider alternatives to Plex (Jellyfin being the main competitor).

With Plex, you may own the media, but Plex, Inc. owns the authentication. You're not allowed to access the service running on your own hardware unless you can log in with a Plex account.

Also: losing What was indeed a massive blow, but there are others still carrying that torch...

Unfortunately, nothing currently beats Plexamp in terms of quality music listening, shuffle, smart playlists, etc.

You can still set up local login for Plex to avoid their auth on your own network or list of allowed IPs. It's not 100% what people want, but it's something.

Emby is pretty good.

> Now I'm not sure what to do.

Just FYI there's sites that take in What refugees

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

Also FTR I'm a heavy Bandcamp user and I'm disappointed by this acquisition.

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

Would you mind sharing any names? I don’t mind whatever ratio limits exist for new accounts, but I deeply miss finding music through staff picks and the forums

orpheus and redacted are the big ones. Getting in, of course, will be a challenge.

rutracker is a pretty open alternative.

I get FLACs from hdtracks.com

Can I ask your logic in why you go to these lengths? Almost seems like hoarding.

Part of it is just for fun. I like to collect the CDs. I like knowing the files I have are very faithful representations of the released media. And so on.

I really don't think it's hoarding - the overall data sizes here are small (relative to the fact that a 12TB WD Red is 250-300 dollars on amazon) and it's not like I spend my nights scouring ebay for this stuff. I just make sure I get best-available media while it's still widely and easily available.

Some of it is also that I just don't trust the current system to archive media. Sure, most popular things will be fine. But there's a lot of music that's not quite underground but also isn't popular and I wouldn't be surprised if it became hard to get ahold of the quality standards I have in 10-20 years.

Too bad. It was one of the few good independent websites left. As always, the CEO said they'll remain independent and blah blah blah in the email, but we know how that goes.

Good tip for people on the music side, and something to suggest to them:

1. Set up but do not publish your Bandcamp Subscriptions

2. Add all your music to it

3. Now it's all downloadable in your own user-side Bandcamp library. Check the format: FLAC is best.

Assuming not everyone holds on to masters once they're uploaded.

I look forward to not being able to download my purchases :(

That already happens with Bandcamp. If the artist removes a song/album, you have no way of downloading it again even if you've purchased it. You only get a license to download the music while it's still available on the website. I've lost a few tracks/albums this way, thankfully I had local copies already.

Although, oddly, I do have one album which is no longer available for streaming in the web client, but remains intact in the Android app.

I haven't had this problem, unless artists can do something that looks identical to this on the face.

I had an artist take "Album 1", "Album 2", "Album 3", and "Album 4", which I purchased through a whole-discography purchase, and merge them into "Album 1-4". It turns out I was able to download the originals anyways.

I haven't had this happen with albums that I can verify are currently unavailable on bandcamp, but I have ran into an issue before where an Artist updated the album with more tracks and a "remaster" which means I couldn't get the originals anymore. Luckily I usually buy the CD and keep it in storage as a backup I can rip from.

Not to mention the inevitable "we have updated our privacy policy" and the proliferation of tracking and fingerprinting on the increasingly slow-and-bloated site.

Maybe at least they'll add some kind of "Now Playing" feature in Fortnite, that would probably be fun for some people.

Looks like China is trying to invade the music industry as well.

This really sucks. Bandcamp has been my go-to store for buying music for a long time. No dark patterns, lightweight site, free previews, good terms for indie artists. I don't think I can ethically shop there anymore given Epic's ownership and business practices.

> No dark patterns, lightweight site, free previews, good terms for indie artists

I am with you. One of the biggest draws for me was these what you have described. Their website experience was straightforward and honest.

They are now being acquired by a company that is the complete opposite. We won't have to wait long for Epic's dark patterns and policies to creep into a once great marketplace.

Or just flat out discontinuing the web store to put it in the windows-only Epic client.

I know you're right but did you really have to hurt me so much?

My favourite thing is that they have all sorts of social features so you can really engage with other fans and make lists and explore and do things... but you can also just ignore the hell out of that and buy some music that you like.

IIRC, this is what MySpace was supposed to be in the first place. They made the mistake of leaning into a more general social media audience while Facebook was on the rise, but it seems to me like Bandcamp excels at being what MySpace could have become.

> Bandcamp will keep operating as a standalone marketplace and music community...

40% of which will be owned by Tencent, possibly more in the future based on the whims of Tim Sweeney and the performance of Epic's primary business (Video Games).

Really unfortunate to see an independent source for music become part of a huge conglomerate.

Epic Founder and CEO Tim Sweeney has addressed this a number of times and so far given no reason to doubt it,

> I’m the controlling shareholder in Epic Games, and have been since 1991. We have a number of outside investors now. Tencent is the largest. All of Epic’s investors our friends and partners. None can dictate decisions to Epic. None have access to Epic customer data.

> Tencent is a Chinese company founded in 1998. CEO Pony Ma and the other co-founders played a lot of Unreal Tournament back then, and visited Epic in the early 2000’s. In 2012 Epic was looking to move to online games, and we invited Tencent in as an investor to help us.

> I’ve never regretted it, and the recent anti-China rage doesn’t change that even slightly, as its completely unfounded. Epic has only had positive interactions with Tencent at all levels.

> All of Epic’s big decisions are made here in the USA and as CEO I’m 100% responsible for them. I’m grateful for everyone who has spoken in support. I also read and respectfully consider all dissenting arguments of fact and principle. Just please keep it real.

https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/111396399928729190...

Although I completely agree with you that it's a shame to see yet another indie source get swallowed up by a big corporation.

I think it's naive to think that the opinion of a 40% shareholder has no influence on the CEO. Even if that just presents as a bias in their decision making.

> Although I completely agree with you that it's a shame to see yet another indie source get swallowed up by a big corporation.

For the record, I don't think that Tencent is any more evil than Disney, Sony, or Microsoft in this regard.

> I think it's naive to think that the opinion of a 40% shareholder has no influence on the CEO. Even if that just presents as a bias in their decision making.

I'm more than willing to accept that I'm being naive. All I ask is some actual evidence of this influence/bias.

Defending one's investors is expected and fairly meaningless, though, isn't it?

Forgive a bit of ignorance on my end...what has Tencent actually done? I know they own stake in Epic and I've heard there's controversy, but I don't know what it is.

Well, they own WeChat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat#Controversies

There hasn't been any evidence that Tencent has influenced Epic, or have the power to do so. Sweeney has defended the rights of players and publishers on Epic to speak out against China and the CCP.

Just wait to see what happens when Gabe of Valve decides to retire and needs to diversify his holdings.

You think the guy who bought a racing team for funsies (and for charity!), the guy with an extensive forge setup in his palatial basement, needs more money?

I know it's hip to be cynical and all, but seriously. Even if he were so motivated by money, could anyone even put together a payout that'd be better than "continue to watch the Steam Store print money, beholden to no one because Valve is a privately-held company held by you"?

>I know it's hip to be cynical and all, but seriously.

I mean, thats many of the comments about this news, despite Epic/Tencent historally ringing true to their words.

>could anyone even put together a payout that'd be better than "continue to watch the Steam Store print money, beholden to no one because Valve is a privately-held company held by you"?

Sure. It's just a middleman storefront, and there are trillionaire tech companies right now (and more in the future). Maybe Gabe leverages Valve and jumps to a whole other industry when he tires of games. Maybe he just sells it all off and turns that into assets to will off (better than giving family a company they can't manage).

Nothing is certain and much larger internet darlings have been turned agaisnt faster.

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

The GP didn't say anything about anyone needing more money?

Somehow Neil Young (the guy who bought a model train company for funsies) and a host of his ostensibly-principled contemporaries all decided recently that they needed more money by selling their catalogs, so I would hazard against assuming anyone is immune to the temptations of more money.

Tencent as a game studio is even more hand-off than Epic. I haven't heard of any of their many acquisitions really being affected after purchase.

I'm having a little trouble understanding the motivation for this move. Did Bandcamp have a poor revenue/profit outlook and were they looking to scale? Was this just an exit for founders? I was under the impression that they had a relatively stable and profitable business, and strongly valued their branding and positioning as independent.

I assume it’s because Epic presented a ton of cash and a small but profitable company found it attractive.

I can’t imagine anyone wanting to work for or be part of Epic, so that’s my assumption of gobs of cash.

"I can’t imagine anyone wanting to work for or be part of Epic"

creators of one of the two largest third party game engines? A chance for your product to be integrated in a tool used by game studios throughout the world? You really can't imagine any reason past the monetary to work with Epic?

I think their products suck and are sleazy. I don’t think I’ll ever be in a position where I have the opportunity, and I’d work if I was starving, but I don’t want to work for a company that makes bad products as a result of a bad philosophy.

It’s nice to be a programmer and have options but I wouldn’t work with a company that makes such invasive software.

You must have missed the recent news about Simon Peyton Jones leaving Microsoft for Epic Games[0], then.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29131996

Staff moves at that level are a lot different than your average joe, huge paychecks involved and lots of insulation from the product org

But what's in it for Epic?

The Metaverse (Epic has hosted music events in Fortnite that have had millions of attendees), diversifying their game store. They've also bought art and 3D asset companies recently.

Presumably game creators will be able to purchase bandcamp music from right within Unreal soon. You already can purchase a variety of things like textures, models, code, etc.

Perhaps Epic originally wanted to purchase itch.io but couldn't settle on a deal so they went to the O.G. instead?

Motivation for founders is a lot easier to understand than that of the acquiring company. What on earth is Epic going to do with Bandcamp?

Create a market for music licensing that Unreal engine developers can use?

They recently acquired Harmonix (original makers of Guitar Hero and other rhythm games). Maybe they're trying to build a GaaS music game?

Comedy option? The Epic Games Store will be the new iTunes.

Licensing As A Service is probably a neat thing if it can be done at scale on par with the Unreal Engine Marketplace. But a lot of it boils down to "imagine if we could make IP law straightforward" which is somewhat of a moonshot.

Game soundtracks are usually sold on Bandcamp, even for games that aren't on the Epic Store.

Also could be a source of creative content to generate NFTs, maybe even tie that to licensing of music used in game livestreams.

I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Apple is big in music and they don’t like Apple. Wonder what Tim is cooking up for Tim on this one.

Metaverse concerts and fighting against Apple

Turn the Epic Games Store into a more general Play Store/Apple Store competitor by expanding into other media types?

bandcamp took VC.

bandcamp, as a business that just does a thing very well and fairly, is never going to become as big as Google or Facebook.

so, founder/VC/board now require it to be bought out for a huge multiple of revenue and be stripped for parts.

From the Epic side - they have to be looking at selling music in-game as a source of additional revenue. You'll be able to buy cassette tapes or virtual vinyl for your characters boombox. Of course there will be a matching dance you can also buy but maybe there will be a discount bundle.

I don't know anything about Epic Games, but as a huge fan of Bandcamp, this feels like a bit of a drag.

There's something about Bandcamp that seems exactly right. It's an open, fair and creative way to discover and publish music, that is really distinct from the rest of the music business.

I'm struggling to see how that fits into a gigantic video game company. If it has to pull in so much money that it "moves the needle" at Epic at all, I don't see how it can remain anything close to what it is today.

Every time a small successful tech company gets swallowed by a behemoth, I feel sad. Bandcamp was one of the good ones. If Panic ever gets bought, I'll straight up cry.

An ecosystem thrives by having a variety of organisms of different species and sizes interacting. The tech business ecosystem increasingly looks more like a giant pasture of uniform grass being grazed by half a dozen aging tumorous cows.

Everyone's forgotten that monocultures are bad.

For what it's worth, Panic appears to be one of those smaller indie developers similar to say Bare Bones Software or the Omni Group. I think those are sustainable non-startup software shops that can exist and persist on their own.

Many companies can exist and persist on their own until a behemoth decides they shouldn't.

It's not about "can this business get enough users to be profitable?" it's about "will some huge corporation decide to put them out of business because the cost to do so is a rounding error for them?"

At any point in time, Apple could decide to ship a nice FTP client with macOS, add web language support to XCode and Panic is dust.

I’m with you. Never heard of this Epic Games company. This is worrying.

I fell behind on downloading all of my 426 purchases on bandcamp, but now I feel a strong desire to catch up.

"Never heard of this Epic Games company. "

Creators of Unreal Engine, one of the two de facto 3rd party game engines in the industry, created way back in the 90's. You very likely played some game or 6 that was made using it. Also the developers of several games themselves like Gears of War, Unreal Tournament, Infinity Blade, and Bulletstorm.

But I guess more recently people would call them "The creators of Fortnite", that free to play battle royale that usurped PUBG as "the face" of the genre. They also have a PC game store that is relatively recent and under some ire from consumers for reasons that'd take a whole essay to fully explain.

As a middleman between games and developers, the reasons to purchase a music vendor is numerous. Time will tell what they do with it, but most of their previous aquisitions are hands-off.

Thank you. Ok, I guess have heard of them then. I played Unreal! And I've heard many mentions of the Unreal engine.

> but most of their previous aquisitions are hands-off

Thanks.

Given the immediate negative reactions that people have to this news (see the countless "what is a bandcamp alternative?" posts going around right now), I wonder how it will impact one of Bandcamp's most important assets: their Daily blog. From what I can tell, the blog posts are largely written by independent music journalists. The topics are all over the place (in a good way), and they are fun, personal ways to discover music. Will we see some of these core writers leave (on their own volition)? Likewise, will the direction of what is highlighted in these posts shift to align with other Epic assets?

On the technical end, there are plenty of legitimate complaints about Bandcamp's app. I would imagine Epic = more resources for the app, for better or for worse.

If you think of Epic not as a videogame company but as any other multi-billion dollar company that exists to "Maximize return for our investors by any means necessary," It makes sense. Take a company that is making money and has a large user-base, then "increase profits" (usually to the detriment of everyone involved except the company).

Maybe change of ownership won't significantly affect Bandcamp's operation, but my limited consumer-facing experience with Epic — via its game store — has given me such a bad taste that I'm not keen on using any storefront service managed by Epic.

And this is despite the vast majority of my Epic game library being free (literally hundreds of games) or deeply discounted — the storefront is really that bad. For example, when AWS went down a couple months ago, both the store app was non-functional. Apparently, the game store depends on S3 for game thumbnails and other metadata, and its caching is...non-optimal. I think I could've accessed my games by running their executables directly from file explorer. But 4 years in, this kind of slapped together design decision — on top of EGS still being bare bones compared to Steam — seems indicative of poor management.

Obviously, Bandcamp as a relatively mature storefront is not in the same situation. And remaining alive and sustainable probably outweighs what negatives Epic might bring as owner.

Bandcamp isn't really great as a store either. They don't have a real shoping cart, only client side stuff that can fail and empty your cart and/or make the entire site stop working until you clear cookies (support's response is just "oh yeah, that happens"). It seems unlikely that Bandcamp isn't sustainable from an ordinary business perspective considering that they have been voluntarily giving up their fees one day a month to support artists.

I use the whishlist to collect what I want to buy. And then put them into the shopping cart right before I buy them.

"when AWS went down a couple months ago, both the store app was non-functional. Apparently, the game store depends on S3 for game thumbnails and other metadata, and its caching is...non-optimal."

I don't see that as some kind of dealbreaker. Just an unideal choice for a consumer who may want everything to be offline and cached. The storefront is very likely some electron wrappper for their website, so I wouldn't be too surprised if their thumbnails were stored on some other server. Steam isn't too different in regards to that architecture (just not using AWS, since they preceeded that).

Games are available offline as of some year+ ago so that outage should not have affected your ability to run games.

Steam has been running for 18 years and still has problems.

That's a pity. Bandcamp is my go-to for getting DRM-free FLAC files straight from the artists. The site was a little crusty but they were a huge benefit as a tech-friendly independent music community.

I actually like the site, it's simple and fast. Rare attributes on today's web.

My only complaint about the site is its nearly-useless search feature, which uses some deranged fuzzy full-text logic that is almost guaranteed not to return the result you want.

Oh, and there's no "open in app" feature on the site, or a "copy URL" feature in the app.

Otherwise, I share the sentiment that Bandcamp itself is (was) a great place to buy indie music in high quality, and that this feels like the beginning of the end.

The search is laughably bad. Searching for an exact album title, when that album is on a label’s page, will often have no results. Luckily search engines know what’s up!

They aren't shutting down? Bandcamp's model is so directly connected to DRM free lossless downloads it'd be an incredibly bold decision to remove it.

I wouldn't be surprised if Bandcamp shuts down entirely in the next 2-3 years, to be replaced by some limp attempt at an integrated Epic music/streaming/gaming platform.

Similar things have happened before

Well, crap. Bandcamp was the perfect place for hosting my music. Hopefully Itch starts hosting music if they haven't already. I'd switch immediately. Are there any other good places to host low-budget indie music?

Soundcloud doesn't count because I get at least one spammer interacting with my tracks every single time I upload something. It's got to the point that I've started only uploading things secretly and sharing the private links with the people who will actually listen to the music.

Edit: I'm gonna experiment with self-hosting on Funkwhale. We'll see how that goes.

https://mixtape.ai

big new release coming this month with artist-side album drafting and merch features

Is that website supposed to be almost entirely empty with just an App Store button?

Release your app for android and I'll try it out if it's free

indieHD: https://indiehd.com/

I'm not affiliated, but I've known it for a while. It was known as IndieTorrent back then.

(also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30534759)

I know that everyone is commenting that this is the end of their independence. But, Epic Games has been really good to everyone they've acquired. Quixel is a great example. They protected Improbable when it was under licensing attack by Unity and they gave away $25 mil to help fund development for them when they didn't have to. They've given out lots of no strings attached megagrants when they didn't have to and they receive no direct revenue from. Those grants have helped independent open source 3rd party tools like Blender and Krita with no strings and no required oversight from Epic. And, some of those megagrants helped Unity and not Epic, e.g. the dialogue tool, but they didn't take backsies on their grant. They designed the grants to help the entire game industry and not just them. They have a very lawful good alignment as a company. They're an example of a really decent parent company IMHO. Also, Epic has a really solid financial foundation from Fortnite and their Unreal game engine so they're easily able to give independence to their subsidiaries without nervously micromanaging. Bandcamp is awesome so I hope I'm right.

I didn’t know about these acquisitions, I really hope you’re right.

At the moment, I’m heartbroken because of this. I’ve been using Bandcamp for a very long time now and it has been the single best thing to happen to independent music and musicians in the modern age. For me, one of its best features was the fact that it barely changed in all that time. It seemingly never chased the metrics that drive similar platforms to reinvent themselves constantly, so it’s always been a reliable, predictable partner. It’s the only product like it that I can think of where I can say that I truly believe that our interests are (were) aligned.

Now? It seems like a matter of time until their flashy front-end revamp, their new profit share agreement, a DRM option, a proprietary music player to compete with Spotify. I’m going to hope that their commitment to not changing dramatically holds true, but almost every acquisition starts with an email like this, so I’m not holding my breath.

And one of the worst parts, Bandcamp’s dominance is so thorough and its users so loyal that I’m unaware of a true competitor in their space. I’m not sure what I’d do if they did get progressively crappier.

Of all the companies they could have been acquired by we're probably lucky it was Epic.

Here's a thought.

Maybe Epic's strategy is to fight Apple/Steam (Marketplace monopolies more generally)?

They're already fighting Apple/Steam w/ gaming, maybe they're looking to have a music store already. I think undercutting fees charged by either could be a big win in their eyes.

I use all three and Epic is by far the worse software. Their platform requires root access on machines. It starts up when I don’t want it. It acts like malware. It also pegs my cpu at 100% at unpredictable times and download lots of data.

It’s good that someone is fighting Apple and Steam, but I wish some better company would enter the fight. As it is now, I’d be sad if Epic won.

GOG is much better when it comes to games, although there are a very small number with issues (there is one they sell that is effectively only multiplayer and won't run without anti-cheat software installed, also GWENT is an online microtransaction thingy but there since it is made by CDPR). Almost everything works completely offline. The website isn't perfect but not that bad (quite a bit better than Bandcamp) and you can download from the website or use a client.

I think it's interesting to note that Bandcamp has the same quarrel with Apple that Epic does. Doesn't (or didn't) their app have a brief explanatory note about why they have to send you to the browser to make a music purchase that was a subtle complaint about Apple's shitty policies?

Yes, “music purchases are not available on your device” or some such. Apple’s terms forbids them from saying it’s due to Apple’s policy. Furthermore the Apple policy forbids them from directly linking to the website purchase page.

I’m sure bandcamp received a huge amount of customer support messages about this. It’s confusing to most people.

If epic wants to “fight” Apple they need a far better UX.

This seems like an odd move for a gaming company. But I wonder about its implication for streamers who deal with DMCA takedowns for playing copyrighted music. Perhaps a scheme where partnered streamers are granted limited license to play music from across Bandcamp while they stream games from the Epic Store.

For a lot of indie games, it's not uncommon to see the game soundtracks available for download on Bandcamp. Part of me wonders if they could potentially integrate soundtrack bundle downloads with the Epic Store a little better.

The FTL soundtrack was my first purchase on Bandcamp and I think how I discovered it. I love it. Farewell.

I'm assuming that, while the store will also remain separate, there will be at least backend ties into the Unreal asset store. Could see them trying to work with some music creators to set up licenses for people to buy to add their music to Unreal games.

> This seems like an odd move for a gaming company.

Amazon is a bookstore.

Epic sees Steam and Apple (and Amazon) and knows that the platform is the chokepoint where all the money is.

Yeah, this is just Epic blurring the lines between video games and music content as it moves to become more of a media company.

It's also an easy way to to procure licensing to sell music content in games. I'd be interested to know why they passed up others like SoundCloud.

They are also a gaming tools company.

I think of them as primarily a gaming tools company.

Fortnite and other games are really just Unreal Engine advertisement vessels that got successful in their own right and now serve that purpose plus making lots of money on their own.

Bandcamp is just a store, they don't own rights to do anything other than sell music.

This is a little heartbreaking. The world just got a shade darker so that a few people could become a lot richer (I assume).

If so, did those people not build (and thus own) this platform? Is it not their right to sell it to others? I am not asking this so much to challenge your statement, as I agree that it's darker, but to demonstrate that clearly the platform delivered value to music consumers like myself, and perhaps we as music consumers should be willing to compensate the folks who build "glue" like Bandcamp more in order to provide such a great service in the future.

If Bandcamp saw people who bought music on Bandcamp as consumers, then Bandcamp didn't understand the people who used it, and this might be for the best.

Url changed from https://blog.bandcamp.com/2022/03/02/bandcamp-is-joining-epi... to what looks like the best third-party article. If someone knows a better URL, we can change it again.

Why prefer a third-party article rather than the original announcement? Presumably for neutrality? My gut instinct is to prefer the original announcement because it seems more of a primary source. How do you weight primariness vs neutrality?

I respect your long experience moderating HN, so asking mostly with the intent enrich my own intuition. Not a rhetorical question.

It's because corporate press releases are so lame [1]. They don't give relevant background, they're saturated with dystopian smarm ("Since our founding in 2008, we’ve been motivated by the pursuit of our mission"), and they're ultimately all about spin. I don't mean to pick on particular cases—it's across the board. You'd think the smarter people at some of these companies would realize how well they'd stand out by not writing that way, but that's surprisingly rare.

You're right to reference HN's 'original source' rule ("Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), because this is an exception to it. The reason we have exceptions is that there's a higher organizing principle on HN, namely that we're trying to optimize the site for curiosity [2]. Optimizing means that when there's a conflict between that rule and any other rule, the curiosity rule wins.

Funnily enough the curiosity rule is an instance of itself because it often produces decisions that are counterintuitive, yet at the same time are surprisingly clear. This case is one of the clear ones—it's obvious that corporate press releases don't serve curiosity, and in fact they're largely intended to smooth away anything that people would be curious about.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Thanks for explaining this. When I noticed the URL change I was surprised but this makes sense. It would be great if we could pin the original source link as the top comment though. Frustratingly Variety doesn’t seem to link to it anywhere in their article and it’s nice to have the official release along with the commentary.

>You'd think the smarter people at some of these companies would realize how well they'd stand out by not writing that way, but that's surprisingly rare.

it's all about CYA. Better to be "smarm" than create any opening for a legal storm that ruins the entire acquisition, or tanks any public shares from the news.

I'm still not too sure if the "curiosity" rule applies to this new link, however. Half the article is just quoting the source and another 40% just quoting the CEO's on how happy and great the oppurtunity is. Not much real analysis or introspection unless the audience had no idea what a Bandcamp is.

That's unfortunately better than 80% of modern jounralism, but I digress.

The technical co-founder (Joe H.) left at the beginning of the year, went to Disney Imagineering. He has had a very impressive career (was an engineering manager at Apple in the 90s).

This explains the slew of bug ridden releases they were radio silent about this past month. A shame.

When shopping for content around didgital platforms, the #1 decision that I take into account is how much of my purchase price actually goes back to the creator. Bandcamp seems to give the best cut for music, aside from directly purchasing from an artist's website, and Epic's acquisition might end up being a net positive for getting new users & overall growth. Personally I think it's a good fit and look forward to their success.

Can you elaborate on what makes it a good fit? I'm curious what your thought is.

I would have, at face value, considered the acquisition a bit odd given Epic's primary product.

It's boilerplate stuff, but my only experience with Bandcamp is buying a couple FLAC quality albums from artists that are too small to be signed onto a structured record label, or don't want to have additional middlemen between them and their fans. Was thinking something akin to Patreon with a well-functioning desktop app that goes beyond only having music offerings, like live shows or additional interviews with the band. Though other comments saying artists may need to have an exclusivity agreement in place to get this revenue sharing arrangement may be valid, the overhead of having to go through the traditional record label/publisher model is essentially rent seeking with providing no additional value.

It's my experience that when a buyout occurs, product quality usually suffers.

I wonder if there is a directory if beloved companies whose quality goes down after a buyout.

This past weekend, I was lamenting with a friend about how two US craft beer breweries we loved were bought out, and how they stopped producing their interesting niche beers in favor of more profitable ones. Their restaurant menus got bland too.

Not good in my book. I've been a huge fan and proponent of the platform since 2017 and have made over 600 purchases since. Mostly digital but also plenty of shirts, patches, an even physicals of select albums. My only gripe was the somewhat wanting android client which has just been fixed up (playlists and queuing).

I like it because its a simple and focused hub for artists and fans. The social interaction of the site fells like a perfect balance of presence and connection without any noise. You can see who purchased an album and leave an album review but unable to directly message users. User profiles are simply their collection and a 400 character bio that can contain links. Another plus is the simple web design they employ gives access to the mp3 if you scrape the album page. As a plan 9 user without a modern browser this made it easy to play the music by writing a script that scraped the album page for the mp3 links and fed those into play(1) creating a simple bandcamp player.

Epic will bring nothing good to the service.

IMO Epic has already brought something good: not getting bought by Apple or Google. Whether they can refrain from bringing something bad remains to be seen.

They are 40% owned by Tencent.

I haven't been in an active band for over a decade, but back when I was bandcamp was the only way we ever got money online. We had it set to optional to pay, and we would randomly get $5-30 from people around the world. It wasn't much, but it always felt nice.

I also like the way they handled payments to artists, I'm not sure if they still do it this way, but back then your first 9 payments would go directly to your paypal, and the 10th would go to theirs. And they would balance it out to keep it where they only took %10.

This is one my concerns. They will lose touch with the little guys. Also, I have several musician friends and I only buy their music from Bandcamp or straight from them. Some prefer not to even bother with CDs/Vinyl and just point people at Bandcamp as preferred vendor as they get a good cut of the money. They seemed to be like a company that wasn't controlled strictly by slick marketing (and empty promises) and bean counters.

Everyone here is really gloom and doom about this news but as much as I love Bandcamp, they have made some decisions that really made me not want to use the platform. For example, if an artist releases a free song as part of an album, it is not possible to add that song to your library without purchasing the whole album. This makes no sense when I only like and want to purchase say 2 or 3 songs off the album. This alone made me uninstall the Bandcamp app and just go back to Spotify.

That's not Bandcamp's fault. Whoever listed the album configured it that way. There are settings for artists (or labels or whoever) to allow people to purchase single songs, or require that they buy the entire album.

I've bought plenty of single tracks from albums. A few of them as recently as this past weekend.

Either I didn't explain it correctly or you didn't read what I said entirely.

If an album has a free song or single, you cannot add the free song to your library unless you purchase the whole album. Even if you are allowed to purchase individual songs on the album.

I don't think Bandcamp's policies were ever going to work for everyone, but I appreciate them, and am a pretty active customer and user. I may have to reconsider that now if Epic starts "improving" the service.

This is tragic for all the many, many reasons everyone else has outlined (DRM, Tencent, etc.), but for me the biggest blow is the loss of the last commercially viable (profitable!), but independent champion of underground and truly independent music.

Say all you want about the freedom and quasi-independence of self-publishing to the various streaming corporations, etc., but for years now, the underground scene has thrived on and been virtually exclusively supported by Bandcamp.

It's like every independent artist in the world just got signed to a major corporate label all at once, minus the benefits to the artists. I recognize that's hyperbolic, but fuck me, I feel physically sick over this.

If anyone wants to build an alternative/replacement/FOSS tool—whatever kind of remedy for this tragedy—I would eagerly partner up and design it (can't code well, sorry).

It'd be reasonable to structure the development company as a non-profit, to prevent an outcome like Bandcamp's.

I think it may be possible to build the marketplace in a purely FOSS-y way, but it would be illegal to operate it with the wrong configuration values. I'm thinking in particular about the accounting functions, such as earmarking x% of each sale for royalties, and ensuring they go to/from the correct bank accounts.

In other words, one could plausibly release the code as FOSS, but the interface would depend on a set of corporate entities that are configured a particular way, so it would be of limited value to the median person.

It would definitely lower the barrier to entry for people to fork the business, though, which is probably a good thing for the median person.

---

I'd also be down to contribute as an engineer, if such a project already exists with momentum or if somebody wants to start it!

Was Bandcamp draining money or something? Were they not profitable?

I hate this. Why does everything need to roll up into other companies. I don't want anything Epic is bringing to the table, and every interaction they've had with open platforms as a business has been negative as far as I can see.

I hate how much consolidation is going on right now.

Welcome to capitalism

This makes me happy for the Bandcamp employees who will hopefully get a good payout for their hard work but sad for what Bandcamp will become in the future under Epic.

I’ve really enjoying going into their record store / small intimate venu in Oakland, CA.

Well, time to hope https://resonate.is/ picks up the independent artists and doesn't do a blockchain.

I'm not hopeful about this for a few reasons:

- They used to be really into blockchain / smart contracts: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/25/resonate-spoti...

- Looking at their forum now, they say that they are not currently using or planning to use blockchains, but it seems like their founders aren't actually opposed to it, so I'm not sure they'll be able to hold the line against it: https://community.resonate.is/t/the-unreasonable-ecological-...

They have a lot of discussion of how they'd like to try to achieve the effects of NFTs without actually using blockchain tech, which, uh... feels like flirting with disaster to me. Seems like they don't quite get the core issues and are in love with flashy technology and complex financial structures.

I don't really think a coop is a "complex financial structure" itself, but I am hoping that democratic control aspect can forestall the blockchainification. That might be naive.

> how they'd like to try to achieve the effects of NFTs without actually using blockchain tech, which, uh... feels like flirting with disaster to me

To be fair, the "you need to pay for a license to have your otherwise unassociated digital music file be legal" copyright situation is the bizarre NFT-like thing that we all take for granted.

Someone project-official wrote:

> no blockchain or such in the works; previous experiments in 2018 hurt the co-op far more than they helped it.

https://social.coop/@hakanto/107889107767011612

So that's cheering!

Resonate has been around for a long time and hasn't gained any kind of traction, even with independent artists and labels. Would love to see them succeed but their identity/reason for existence seems to change regularly.

Hard to say how it'll shake out given that I think there's only now some public consciousness around Spotify's model not being great (I remember people talking about Taylor Swift refusing streaming like she was insane). Still, whether it's them or someone else, I like the idea of stream-to-own, so I'm a little hopeful.

I really hope this is just one bad move and doesn’t point to a larger, inherent flaw in the business models of smaller, indie companies. With Bandcamp now gone, there’s one less case study of truly free consumption and ownership in an increasingly rented/“streaming”/subscribing world.

Fucking god dammit. This is all I have to say. My one joy and it'll probably be ruined with bullshit.

Lots of disappointed comments here. Would you guys really prefer seeing bandcamp beeing bought by Apple?

Ideally I (and I'd assume other commenters) would have preferred to see bandcamp remain independent. It's not like there's a huge need to scale up quickly or provide large partnerships. Bandcamp was an effective way of paying small independent musicians with a good overall website which should have given bandcamp a reliable revenue source. Acquisition likely means the website will get worse, artists will be driven of onto other platforms (i.e. harder to discover ones), and if there's alternative financial incentives then small artists will likely end up making less (e.g. track streaming revenue).

I'd be disappointed if apple had made the purchase, though it would be less out of left field.

I too would have prefered seeing bandcamp stay independent but they were a privately owned company so that would have required a huge amount of idealism (which eventually wanes) or ambitions to compete with spotify. You can‘t always get what you want.

> It's not like there's a huge need to scale up quickly or provide large partnerships

Is "good enough" compatible with "capitalism"? Even ignoring the money aspect of things; you mention the website getting worse but I'm not sure the website has fundamentally changed (for better or worse) in a decade. Their iOS app isn't even compatible with ipads, it's locked to a phone aspect ratio with massive black bars surrounding it. Yet one could make the argument that things were "good enough" tech wise. Bandcamp (in my opinion) was a product/company that was good enough. But there's doesn't seem to be societal incentives to keep companies like that around in today's world... or maybe you just don't hear about them lol

While that would be worse, being acquired doesn't have to be the only choice. The main reason everyone liked Bandcamp is its independence. That independence translated into an excellent marketplace which was great for users and artists. The preference is that Bandcamp continues to be Bandcamp, not part of an umbrella.

Hope that explains it a bit. I'm quite sad and pessimistic about this. We'll see how well our reactions fare in about 2-3 years.

Give them a chance- epic doesnt have a reputation of blowing their aquisitions. It could be far worse!

Not everything has to be a buy out. Why can't a business just be a business and make some money for the owners and provide a service for the users and grow organically (or not). I know HN crowd often see that as an unnatural business model but it has worked for small business for eons.

I don't care who you are, when you get an offer for millions and millions, I'm sure you'll quickly sing a different tune. I'm sorry, but this kind of thinking is just silly. It's always easy to say this kind of thing from the outside.

Why on earth are those the two options?

Somebody breaks into my house and tracks mud all over the floor, and the response is, "well, would you rather they killed your dog? It could have been worse."

I'd prefer seeing Bandcamp continue to grow and prosper as its own company

I think most people would prefer to see them remain independent and successful as an independent company.

I'd rather it remained independent, but if it was a choice between Apple and Epic I'd pick Apple. Of course, Apple would never buy them because they have iTunes. Since you raised the comparison, what do you think Epic is going to do? How do you think being dragged into Epic's war against Apple is going to impact Bandcamp as a service? It clearly isn't being bought so that it just continues as is (despite the promises). It's going to be used as a weapon, which means it's going to have to change. That change is likely to increase costs. Ultimately the day will come were "We are sorry that Bandcamp doesn't meet our customers' needs" [it no longer meets our needs of making enough money, because of all the shit we added] "And so we are adding new features to improve your experience" [ads, tracking, selling your data, subscriptions, increased price].

I think the plan is to turn bandcamp into a streaming service.

For me I'd rather it just remain independent. It already does what it does well enough. There aren't any obvious features that would improve the site for me, just a lot of further monetization crap for users who fall for that stuff.

what a bizarre invented dichotomy.

what all these "disappointed commenters" wanted was for Bandcamp to continue to provide an excellent service, charging enough to stay in business and grow at a reasonable rate while allowing artists, who did the vast vast vast vast majority of the effort represtented by each sale, to profit and - unironically - connect with fans.

everyone wanted things to stay as they were, i get that. but i fail to see how that could have been more than a simple wish for anyone not owning any stakes in bandcamp.

peolpe wanted bandcamp not to give in to uber-capitalism and expect them to fight an uphill battle against spotify and the likes. That is a bit much to ask for in my view. They are forced to move towards streaming. What if pioneer comes up with a seamless spotify integration tomorrow? Usb ports would quickly become a rarity on dj equipment. i get that you like to „own“ your music and have it on your hd- but you also expect to be able to re-download things if you loose your files, right? so you are basically expecting bandcamp not to change in the future and that is out of touch with reality.

This is a big out-of-left-field move. About 12 years ago I rebuilt a record label's site, and bandcamp integration was a big part of that effort. A founder there helped get everything working.

The brand name now has a ton of cachet — I hope it continues with the acquisition.

Noo... It feels as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened...

I am glad I only made physical purchases through bandcamp now. I don't really get what Epic Games isn't going to do with the company besides make it more hostile to artists.

Can't wait to show off my indie vinyl collection in Fortnite!

actually this is a good angle, people might not be giving credit to bandcamp's social aspect. every album has a list of people who purchased it, and you can go to each person and see what albums theyve collected. You can even curate/hide albums in your collection basically choosing what to recommend.

I can see Epic building off the infrastructure there for games and in-game collectibles (of which your vinyls are now a part)

I find the social graph stuff frustrating, even though I generally like Bandcamp (fingers doubtfully crossed). Using the app or the online streaming requires an account that can't be opted out of the social graph, and this makes your Bandcamp profile publicly searchable by username, a thing that is completely unnecessary to both the use of the service and the goal of music discovery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games#Acquisitions

This appears to be the first company they are acquiring that is outside of the video game industry. This may start a new era for Epic Games. I wonder what direction they are going to take? I'd guess a new player in the multi-media field, but I really dont know.

Epic Games acquired and recently discontinued Houseparty, a video chat app. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houseparty_(app)

Given the Unity acquisition of WETA, I thought Epic Games's next acquisition would be to buy a movie or FX studio to compete - that is, if they aren't building their own. I think the end result of these acquisitions is that the line between making a game and a movie will no longer exist. Sometime in the future, everyone could build and render their own Star Wars in Unreal or Unity.

> This appears to be the first company they are acquiring that is outside of the video game industry.

ArtStation also falls outside the core videogame industry and would seem to be similar to Bandcamp, insofar as its a two way marketplace connecting artists with fans.

Or just helping set up ways to license music for games made with Unreal as part of their asset store/offerings.

So that means the market is blown open for a new Bandcamp clone as epic dismantles and destroys them.

That's your opportunity

For first world issues, this is terrible. I love Bandcamp and love supporting artists there. Epic is a scourge.

I am surprised slsk did not appear prominently in this discussion as alternative to share, own, collect lossless music. Is it due to its nature? It is certainly something of the past in terms of userbase but I can't imagine any of the services mentioned coming close to replacing bandcamp.

Because artists don't get paid when you download their music for free from Soulseek.

It's been fascinating to see a wider audience being introduced this way to the behemoth that has been absorbing so much in the past years and hearing Epic being described as a "gaming company", it's like saying Amazon is a bookstore: sure it started this way, but it's already so much more now.

They already try to own the entire pipeline for 3D creation, not just for games but anything 3D.

They don't see Fortnite as a game, but as a platform (Errant Signal had a good essay on that topic two years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNukmNDq60Q) and it's only been more visible ever since, acquiring key tools like Sketchfab, RealityCapture, Quixel, and Artstation.

I make music and sell it on Bandcamp as a way to raise funds to donate to nonprofits. It’s been a reliably honest website, and a fantastic source of both music and validation. Although it’s really tempting to speculate otherwise, I really hope they stay the same.

Big Corporations always ruin the good stuff. It was a good site with good content and fair practices. Alas bandcamp we hardly knew ye. I hope the owners made out like bandits I guess, they put in a good effort for a long time.

I don't get it and I don't see this being positive for me as a customer of Bandcamp, which is the only place I buy music online from.

Now if they can finally make the Android app a decent music player I'll revise my judgment :)

This is incredibly disappointing. I bought quite a bit from bandcamp, to both support the platform and the artists, and I don't think epic should be the middleman in that transaction. Thanks, I hate it.

Is it just me, or does this seem like a rather lateral move to get into more of the "marketplace" like Epic has been doing recently? Is there some grand goal that I'm not seeing here?

Maybe they want a music catalog to play/merge into their games/social platforms like Fortnite.

Bandcamp is one of the few sites still in existence that allow you to purchase things without making an account. I expect this will be the first feature to go. So long, Bandcamp.

It would be very hard to do this without taking VC money (server costs alone must be massive) - and to take VC money means you're most likely going to be hard on the metrics, which is the opposite of what Bandcamp did and what has made Bandcamp unique up to now.

"So sad" "I'm disappointed" Ok but everything like Bandcamp will always go away because it's not efficient enough. If it exists today, it's treading water! It is on borrowed time! Bandcamp was like a character in a video game with 1HP and a temporary shield called "Startup." Bandcamp is to the way capital works as life is to mortality. Nothing workable will ever exist at scale unless our species is completely overhauled.

In case of DRM: https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/audio

Rented games, rented music, rented health, rented lives but hey at least you got your own misery!

As the lyrics of a contemporary classic goes, "20,000 years of this... 7 more to go."

Does anyone know Bandcamps funding situation? Did they need an exit like this? Or can people not run businesses long term for profit anymore?? Such a shame. If you think Epic will just leave them alone you just need to read the corporate speak in the first paragraph of the announcement:

“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 is a bummer, but I'm getting giddy at all of the opportunities for indie devs to rebuild the web. It's a guarantee anything acquired is going to get destroyed in the mid to long-term and people will be thirsty for something that isn't a corpo-nightmare. Even more fun is the opportunity to do that with decentralized data.

Could I please get an overview of Epic's bad practices and decisions? Currently my frustration from this is rather unfocused—and mostly comes from Bandcamp being a couple heads above everyone else in terms of user-friendliness and having outstanding selection: from Gruuthaagy, Jungle Death and Mamaleek to big names.

My main gripe is their willingness to support systems that are functionally gambling directed at children. I also didn’t love their attempt to essentially “weaponize” their young teen fortnite audience when they got into that dispute with Apple a few years ago over in-game purchases transferring from their end to the iOS version.

>“Fair and open platforms are critical to the future of the creator economy,” Epic Games, best known as the company behind battle-royale game “Fortnite,” said in announcing the pact.

So how do 3D artists go about designing and selling skins to Fortnight players without giving Epic a cut?

Nothing changes with acquisitions until everything changes. Just keep a close eye on Bandcamp.

I misread this as Epic Games acquiring Basecamp and was scratching my head for a few minutes :)

I read this correctly and I'm still scratching my head.

My immediate thought on this was that we could see in-engine asset stores promoting music from artists and potentially even having predefined contracts for easy of integration? Like, this could be a pretty good thing if it's handled properly

It's difficult to understand how an indie focused site will sell to a big generic company. They obviously know that Epic is going to have different culture even if they say the contrary. So probably making money or exit was the priority here.

This makes me sad. Hopefully, new, inovative and non-VC funded solutions will fill the void. I recently discovered the stream2own service Resonate. Really cool stuff, but the catalog of artists is currently small (~3500 indie artists).

Absolutely terrible. It does not bode well for consumers when all the good small players sell out. I feel like this has been a worsening trend.

Someone should get started on a viable alternative. Is it possible to yield a mvp over a couple of weekends? :P

Wow. Did not see that coming. I love Bandcamp, tho strangely stagnant as a product, but I loved its chill communal vibe and lack of tryhard tech for techs sake.

Wonder what the future holds with this acquisition.

Totally not thought through, but it seems like it could be good if once a company hits a certain size they have to increase their difficulty level and only grown from the inside, no acquisitions.

Not sure if it's a good thing pals, I'm a big fan of bandcamp and I have a really nice collection there, should i expect some drastic changes to the platform?

I can't help but think we never solve "how to pay musicians" until we first jettison the absurdities, specifically "paying for downloads."

Start with the assumption; mp3s are free to create and copy, and there is no point in pretending that this isn't simply how it is, and should be considered a universally good thing. Even streaming a song a second time is stupid.

Now that we've accepted this, how can we collectively figure out some way for me to send money to my favorite artists so they keep doing their thing?

(And I say this as someone who does fairly regularly pay for digital downloads.)

While not perfect, this is how I (and others) use Patreon.

I'm not sure it exactly fits your ideal, but it's closer than anything else I've seen to how I'd like it to work.

Me too, but I use it in a way I know many music artists wouldn't be happy with.

I don't care about "personal rewards", but I do care that my contribution makes a tangible difference to what the artist might be able to do. Basically, if they're already doing great, I won't be gilding their lilies, no matter how much I love them.

And now I'm using an automatic downloader to fetch all the FLAC encodings of the several hundred albums that I purchased from Bandcamp.

which one are you using? I could not find an up-to-date one on GitHub. thanks!

Bandcamper for Chrome. Just finished downloading over 300 albums.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bandcamper/nafpaeh...

This is why, as a user, you should prioritize relying on non-profit services and software rather than for-profit companies.

No. No no no. Bandcamp was where I went to get DRM free music and feel like my money was going to the artists.

I hate everything about this :/

this will be my new goto example for why VC is a cancer for businesses that can and should be cash positive almost immediately and could instead just choose to be "run well at a reasonable growth rate" instead of betting everything on number 17.

I highly recommend waiting until something bad happens before you use this example.

That sounds worrying. Will they mess up DRM-free FLAC releases? I have little trust for Epic.

Conflict in europe, and now this ?

Fuck, please no :'(

I've spent thousands of dollars on Bandcamp. This makes me really, really sad.

Is there any good kit out there for artists to self host their own store/player?

I don't yet know if it's any good, but I'm looking into Funkwhale right now, which was originally created as an open source alternative to Grooveshark. It is, however, explicitly designed for music under free licenses (whether creative commons or something else), so it's not an option for many artists.

Another option I just came across is https://codeberg.org/simonrepp/faircamp which sets out to be an open source Bandcamp clone, conveniently enough. It does appear to have payment options, but I'm unsure whether they're actually functional since I haven't tried it myself yet (but I plan to).

Does anyone have a mass downloader for your purchases on Bandcamp?

[ insert obligatory comment about epic games hating linux ]

I guess others were interested in the FortNite concerts.

Got really confused because I thought it said Basecamp.

What's next for Epic? Streaming and video sharing?

This could even be a ecommerce/merch thing or something for creators. I think I remember reading that Bandcamp does like 9 figures in merch volume

Could be a boost with content for well, content/game creators using UE among other things.

So next news will be that EA is acquiring SoundCloud.

Welp this fuckin' sucks. Good going Tim Epic.

so when/if bandcamp jumps the shark, hopefully there will be a similar music site to jump to.

I hope they keep Bandcamp Fridays!

So... Epic's iTunes? eTunes.

It's really sad to see these almost "public goods" platforms be acquired by other companies, which will probably turn them in something else at some point because their vision isn't the same.

This could probably be avoided by using different strategies. For instance, if Bandcamp was an NGO of some sort, or has a social contract attached to it, etc. it could have terms for not being acquired.

You, capitalism. Again.

what.cd the hell happened here?! My beloved Bandcamp! to Epic Games!?

Tencent always wins

Sad news.

Aw man.

Uh-oh.

Nothing good can come of this. :(

Dang first Putin invades, then this? I am just not sure how much bad news I can take in one week.

I wonder if they are related. Maybe the Bandcamp founders are Putin supporters. Dead giveaway will be if they do a Bandcamp Friday Russia fundraiser.

The future of media and entertainment is clearly in web3

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