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Comment by siver_john | Hacker News Reader

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).

View on HN

"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.)

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.

For the record, Rocket League is still perfectly playable on Linux (even online) through WINE or Proton. But yes, they did axe the native version.

The input latency is noticeably higher when you play like this though. It drove me nuts last time I tried it (using Steam Controller and Dualshock 4 controller). It's a big reason why Rocket League sucks so bad on the Nintendo Switch (input lag).

You sure it's not a V-Sync issue? Most Linux games will introduce input lag with in-game vertical sync, but if you disable it and let your compositor do it's job it tends to shape up just fine.

Not saying that it was user error here, but I haven't noticed any significant input lag when I play it.

They also made the game free to play.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/15/21438194/rocket-league-fr...

Which is a big middle finger to those who had purchased the game. And I can't think of a game that didn't have the quality of its player base (and so, gameplay) decline after going F2P (looking at you, TF2).

The costs and benefits around a game going F2P are too numerous to list in a HN comment, but I think it is extremely reductive to call it a “middle finger” just because you spent $20 four years and 500 hours of game time ago.

More people playing the game you like is very good for that game receiving more investment/developer time. Shorter queue times, more revenue for the game in the form of mtx, and gameplay in a competitive multiplayer game should never (this is a big should, but in the ideal) get worse for an existing player because of skill-based matchmaking (something TF2 lacks).

Making Rocket League F2P meant that skilled players could register as many new accounts for themselves as they wanted and "rank up" their buddies in competitive matchmaking. This completely ruins the competitive aspect of the game since it's far too common to join a game and get completely crushed by some grand champion playing on a brand new account, teamed up with his friends.

Another problem it enables is trolls: People make new accounts then join games to ruin the fun for everyone else. Account got banned? No problem: Make a new one. Repeat.

The ranked play aspect of the game was completely ruined after Epic bought Rocket League.

Those are problems, true, but literally every modern competitive ladder deals with the three problems you're describing: smurfs, boosting, and trolls. Overwatch dealt with all three even when the game cost $40!

In return for those problems, the game gets an instant, massive increase in players. Monetization usually increases, since modern mtx are usually much more effective than either subscription or one-time-purchase models.

I'm not saying there are zero problems with going F2P. Obviously there are. But just as obviously, since so many studios have chosen to go that route, the benefits are worth it for the company. If the revenue benefits are worth it, they keep developing the game, keep running the servers, keep fixing bugs, rather than just letting the game die. That seems pretty good.

> Monetization usually increases, since modern mtx are usually much more effective than either subscription or one-time-purchase models.

Are you posing this as not a problem? This makes a game the digital equivalent of cancer: There's a lot of it, it grows fast, but nothing about it is worthwhile or good. It just exists to prey on everything around it.

TF2 has competitive matchmaking. And anecdotally I’m usually placed in casual matches with similarly ranked players.

As someone who bought the Rocket League and plays on Linux... :(

"Because I paid for the game, and despite the fact I was happy to pay for it and I enjoy playing it, I think everyone else should need to pay for it, too. Otherwise all that enjoyment I had will be undone."

c.f.: sunk cost fallacy

I'm happy to pay for a game I enjoy playing, the game is made F2P, it becomes inundated with Eternal September players, it is no longer fun to play, I am annoyed.

The changes made when games go F2P tend to change the product you paid for in significant ways, often in ways that some players will think ruin it.

There's a reason I haven't played TF2 in years, and it's not because I'm indignant that others didn't have to pay for it.

As a long time player I'll say that surfing definitely increased by a lot when it went free to play, it's not entirely sunk cost fallacy. Im high enough now that it's not much of an issue but lower ranks are rife with surfing and even in my diamond 1 games I see them enough to be annoying, at least.

*smurfing

That is because Epic was buying up popular games, removing non-$exploitable$ platforms from them, and securing them behind it's software walled garden. The point of buying Rocket League and then giving away "free" versions of it away was to get people stuck in their walled garden with the hope they'll use it and buy other things. They also ramped up the microtransactions.

I don't like not being able to play the game on my OS anymore, but that's just a tree in the forest of behavior. Epic anti-competitive monopolist behavior is completely transparent if you've been watching from the start. They also attacked companies that created popular games using their engine by copying the games and releasing them for free to undercut their own engine customers (see: Fortnite vs PUBG).

Epic uses their "free" software as a weapon, just like Microsoft did in the 90s.

Yeah, they are one of my least favorite companies in the industry.

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").

Do you mean the "Our Incredible Journey" Tumblr? https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

No wonder I couldn't find it anywhere in my Twitter history... thank you, you saved me going mad (for now).

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?

Doesn't exiting necessarily imply a change in leadership?

IPOs are the alternative form of exit and they certainly don't.

Where does the drive for an "exit" come from? It's a jargon term not used in the entrepreneurial side of most other industries.

Many people are attracted to this industry by the stories of Google/FB/etc early employees walking away with 8 figure sums and retiring after a few years of work. Thus the exit obsession.

> It's a jargon term not used in the entrepreneurial side of most other industries.

That's because in most of the industries you are thinking of, you can get traditional financing.

The need for an exit of some sort follows from the financial structure.

I don't think elsewhere it's called an "exit strategy" to seek financing, be that IPO, Shark Tank, or the much more common and mundane options. I'm not even naively proposing that it's somehow bad to sell a profitable business in this way. I know selling a piece of your business involves diluting your control, but it is nearly always contractually required to not involve an "exit" (in terms of involvement) outside of tech. (Selling it wholesale does in any industry)

I'm just confused by two interlinked things. The terminology of "exit" and the implicit need for an "exit".

To me, the focus on "exit" does imply moving away from involvement with the business (in how the phrase sounds, and most importantly, in how it seems to be most often used). Which to me signifies a culture built around starting businesses and ultimately around becoming a VC yourself. Doing this is not notable, but presuming it is.

So either "exit" is any kind of large financing, and it doesn't involve "exit" in terms of involvement, in which case the term "exit" is strange to me.

Or "exit" is selling control and does imply "exit" in terms of involvement, in which case it's interesting that this is presumed to be the goal of starting a profitable business.

It seems in practice to be just jargon that covers both, but more the latter.

> I don't think elsewhere it's called an "exit strategy" to seek financing

I don't think that's how it is used in this context either.

A lot of early stage money in tech startups is there for the short(ish) term, and they definitely want to get their money out (i.e. "exit") at some point, not build a business over decades.

It's their usage of "exit", and the need to have a strategy for it, which drives the usage more broadly, I think. Agree it can be a bit confusing by confounding the above needs.

Right, it's the focus on "exit" also for founders (who also run the business) that puzzles me.

As for the "exit=financing" association, I made that based on your comment:

> > It's a jargon term not used in the entrepreneurial side of most other industries.

> That's because in most of the industries you are thinking of, you can get traditional financing.

> The need for an exit of some sort follows from the financial structure.

But I think I misunderstood and you were saying something more like that the lack of traditional financing leads to a form of financing that necessitates selling the business wholesale.

> But I think I misunderstood

Yes I should have been clearer.

Re founders there is a tension: They often want to both maintain control (i.e. equity) and realize some $$ from building the company. A liquidity event of some sort is often seen as the best way to do this, especially if they've been lean on salary for a decade at that point, which is often the case.

> And yet so many modern day startups have no viable exit strategy beyond acquisition

Bandcamp was already profitable and has been for years. The pandemic dramatically increased their sales. They were doing fine.

Why did they need an exit?

That is the real flaw of SV thinking: that simply being a profitable, going concern is somehow inadequate. The result is monopoly accretion as small companies are repeatedly swallowed up by bigger ones.

SV is not a homogeneous thought-entity. Maybe the founders were tired of running it or wanted to move on to do something else. Businesses get bought and sold all the time and don't need to be a lifetime commitment for the founder (it would still get sold or shutdown at that point anyway).

You make a good point, but I wonder what the real world business equivalent of this is? Is it the destiny of every successful café to become acquired by Starbucks one day? (assuming there's not a better comparison I should be thinking of)

Successful restaurants, bars, etc do change owners from time to time as owners retire or simply want a change of pace. I imagine the difference is the amount of money involved. It's possible for an individual to save up several hundred thousand to a million to buy an existing, profitable small business. Less so the hundreds of millions to billion+ a business like this might go for.

Around me in Sydney, there is a major “hospitality group” that’s spent the last 10+ years buying up bars and pubs.

There’s a few smaller operations doing it as well.

The big one, Merivale, seems to have practically unlimited money to throw at interesting or struggling venues. While I really don’t like the changes they eventually make to most places they buy, I have a grudging respect for the business acumen of Justin Hemmes the owner.

He seems to have an uncanny knack for having bought a good sized venue a year or two before, in every area that becomes cool and popular. Often they’ll barely change for a few years, while the demographics around them shift, then one day they’ve suddenly been renovated and there’s a queue of b-grade celebrities all dressed up and lined up around the block waiting to get in every weekend for a month or two.

I totally get that my demographic spends less over the bar than the crowd he’s so good at attracting, but he’s ruined two of my local ex-favourite pubs in the last few years, and over decades he’s turned some of my favourite music venues in things like trashy Mexican restaurant/bars.

But yeah, even as successful as he is in his field, I doubt it’ll get him into the three comma club.

>Is it the destiny of every successful café to become acquired by Starbucks one day?

Almost, but it's these guys:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAB_Holding_Company

The goal of every venture-backed tech startup is to reach an exit. That's the whole explanation of "why." You can go back in time and ask them "why did you have to take VC money" in 2008 and that might be an interesting question. But once they did, there's no surprise whatsoever that they went for the exit today.

Did bandcamp raise a lot of money from venture capital? The last round listed on crunchbase was a series A in 2010. It looks like management were fine running it more like a lifestyle business.

Yeah, as far as I can tell, they took a seed round and a series A and have been profitable since... 2014? If memory serves?

If you look at their staff growth, it's been very slow and very steady. At the time of acquisition they were sitting in the 100-150 headcount range, which is modest for a company that's almost 15 years old. Given their claim of 207M to artists last year and their touted 18% average rev share, we can guess they were generating around 50M per year gross, which is a very healthy cashflow for a company that size.

Their strategy was clearly not to take over the world, but to carve out a niche and not bother to directly compete with the streaming platforms (which helps to explain, for instance, the incredibly rudimentary mobile player app).

As for the senior management, Diamond had already previously started and sold a company. I'm sure he was doing fine. The same is true of Mark Hall, their VP of Product (who started 5-ish years ago, if I recall). The technical founders I'm less sure about, though apparently at least one of them had already moved on.

I'd absolutely describe it as a sustainable lifestyle business that had a good long-term trajectory. It was never going to be a unicorn, but who cares?

> a sustainable lifestyle business

A company with 100 employee isn't a lifestyle business. The term we used to use for that before VC swallowed the world and decided that anything less than a billion is chump change was simply "business". A 100-person company with millions in revenue is a successful medium-sized business.

The only reason it doesn't feel successful and stable today is because we live in a unprotected corporate environment where any of the giant behemoths may anti-competitively crush a smaller business if they so choose to and there won't be any repercussions.

I wouldn't be surprised if the main motivation for Bandcamp selling was simply the fear of being either bought out by someone worse, or crushed by them. (Likely Spotify, which is two orders of magnitude larger than them.)

Yup, excellent points all around. Well put!

I love the 'rudimentary' app. It was only recently I noticed a lot of people complaining about it. It was a surprise to me. I can search and find new albums, and I can listen to album from start to finish without any issues, share a track link to a friend, and purchase + download the album for offline. Only feature I would have liked to see is the niche addition of built-in ListenBrainz support. What else was missing?

For me the big one is playlists. I'm absolutely an album listener (call me old school), but I like to build thematic playlists of multiple albums that I listen to in rotation (for example, I have a background electronica playlist I love to use when I'm working), and the player lacks that capability.

Notably, Bandcamp absolutely encourages purchasing individual tracks, so for folks who, unlike me, tend to build mixed playlists, it's even more annoying that this feature doesn't exist.

In fact, they only very recently (as in last month!) added basic queuing support:

https://blog.bandcamp.com/2022/02/10/the-bandcamp-app-now-su...

Which is pretty incredible as I view that as a core feature of any music player.

> more like a lifestyle business. reply

Bandcamp is 100% a bonafide operating business. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but perhaps you're seeing that they were just trying to run "Business as usual" and equating that to a lifestyle business as they weren't chasing growth.

I think it's more so the result of cheap money than some way of thinking. Higher interest rates will curtail a lot of this activity. Might even see a wave of divestitures or spinoffs as companies have to look harder for sources of capital.

The need to "exit" and the obsession with "growth" that occupies the minds of SV founders significantly pre-dates the low rate environment that's dominated since 2008. The only difference is the path: IPO vs acquisition.

> Why did they need an exit?

Because the people who like to start new companies and take lots of risks generally tend to not like running stable businesses and dealing with FP&A managers, lawyers, compliance and tax experts

> Because the people who like to start new companies and take lots of risks generally tend to not like running stable businesses and dealing with FP&A managers, lawyers, compliance and tax experts

... in SV/the tech industry.

That's kinda my entire point.

Stealing someone else's analogy: If you went to a bank to get a small business loan to open up a coffee shop, and you told them "Yeah, I'm hoping to take a bunch of your money, open a coffee shop, never return a profit, and then sell it to Starbucks", you'd get laughed out of the room.

In SV that's a business model.

You won't get much money selling a small coffee shop which is why it won't work. There is a small upper bound to what you can possibly be worth.

The more accurate to life version of that sale is "I'm going to open a small regional coffee chain and then sell it to JAB Holding Company"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAB_Holding_Company

Coffee shops don't grow at the speed software does because they are limited by the physical world.

There aren't many "startup industrial companies"

I think the most likely explanation is that the founders just got bored with the project as they got older and aged out of their own primary target demographic. You have kids, you start getting regular colonoscopies...all the trials and tribulations of teen and twentysomething indie musicians start feeling less urgent and relevant.

That, and/or they were not interested in running a company that is finally getting too large to feel like a family / tight-knit community. The kind of person who likes running a 20 person outfit is very plausibly someone who gets no joy out of running a 200 person one or even actively hates the idea.

So they sold to someone they liked well enough, or in any case someone they distrust less than others to have the expertise and values to scale the business in a way that doesn't COMPLETELY destroy what made it special

Why do things need an exit strategy, why can they not simply exist and do good work and pay people fairly? Does everything have to exist purely to maximise profit?

The employees who traded compensation for equity probably don't agree. Bandcamp's success is built partially on this trade and at some point it needs to pay off for them. I suppose they could stay private forever and give out profit-sharing bonuses, but I think people go into this expecting an exit.

Did Bandcamp offer employee equity?

Would they have ever managed to hire anyone if they didn't?

Who's to say they didn't? As mentioned elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30532741), they were always focused on slow and steady growth and seemed to be more lifestyle business than wannabe unicorn. Not the shop to join if you wanted lottery ticket options. Maybe they didn't.

Some people just want to work at a decent company for reasonable pay, and aren't looking to get filthy rich busting their asses for a FAANG.

Bandcamp is absolutely a company I would've considered working for. I'm long past the point in my career where I care about a lottery ticket. They were profitable, big enough to be sustainable, but small enough to be nimble. The management seemed to make all the right noises regarding their values and motivations.

I'll take that over a massive tech company or a tiny startup any day of the week.

I didn't think it needed clarification, but "they wouldn't be able to hire anyone" does not literally mean they would have zero candidates. It's expressing the fact that they would be severely limiting their talent pool by offering 0 equity in this industry, where equity is one of the reasons people are willing to take a risk on a startup.

> where equity is one of the reasons people are willing to take a risk on a startup.

They're not a startup. They're a profitable, mature, 15 year old company of 100-150 people. Working there isn't "taking a risk", so there's no need to entice people with hazard pay.

And yet those early employees who joined before they were profitable took a risk, and likely below-market rates, and got equity. Because that’s one proven strategy a startup can use to try to find people who can get them to not-a-startup.

I never thought I’d see the day where hacker news, of all places, forgot how this works.

> And yet those early employees who joined before they were profitable took a risk, and likely below-market rates, and got equity. Because that’s one proven strategy a startup can use to try to find people who can get them to not-a-startup.

I was interpreting the original comment that kicked this off ("Would they have ever managed to hire anyone if they didn't?") as referring to their hiring practices now, not 15 years ago when they were first starting up. Granted I may have misinterpreted the nature of their remark.

Obviously back then, yeah, folks would probably have been given an equity stake.

So we're arguing different points.

What I personally don't know is if they were continuing to give out options to new hires to this day. Based on my own experience in a startup-now-going-concern, my bet is "no", given that it would no longer be strictly necessary to entice folks to join the company, but I could be wrong.

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

Your critique appears to assume that every tech company or startup begins by offering below market rates. That's not universal, and who knows, maybe they had a seed round and were able to pay people appropriately. They were also founded in 2008, it was a different time in the market anyway.

Looking at Crunchbase's list of articles, the earliest news story from May '08 mentions that it was a four-man startup that was completely virtual. Don't know how that lasted, but not having an office certainly frees up the budget to pay people.

https://gigaom.com/2008/05/07/bandcamp-clubwiki/

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

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

Yes, they did.

>Does everything have to exist purely to maximise profit?

No, everyone is free to start a bandcamp alternative that does not sell out. But the probability of people wanting to "cash out" or trade equity for other things they want is pretty high. And so that is the world that we see, because it is a reflection of what people want.

Sure, but what people want as individuals and makes sense for them to individually do can nevertheless be harmful to society. That is what people are complaining about generally.

I don’t know how to combat the shift to a single monopoly/duopoly in every market though, but it’s definitely going to make our lives worse. Especially with the erosion of private ownership for us plebeians.

Because in our current corporate environment where there is essentially no anti-trust enforcement, any small or medium-sized company is vulnerable to being destroyed by one of the giants.

The very term "exit strategy" answers your own question: if you're committed to building a sustainable product, with long-term sustainable profits, caring for your employees and your customers, without any explicit plans to sell off your company to random megacorp, where it will be scrapped for parts, then you're a dumb loser trying to build a lifestyle business and you deserve to be shamed out of Silicon Valley! How dare you waste our precious venture capitalist time with that crap!?

I get it: venture capitalists are interested in the most efficient possible way to loot the economy, and funding non-viable startups until they're so overhyped that some other idiot buys the over-inflated toxic asset from them before it blows is a great way to do that.

Of course speaking out against VC and startup culture on Hacker News is going to get me downvoted to oblivion, so go ahead and mash that down arrow. Don't forget to dislike and unsubscribe!

I completely agree, but this isn't just a VC problem. The entire current economic system incentivises this.

Yeah. They also could have IPOed, but either way the fundamental issue is that people looking for long term investments are willing to pay 10x forward earnings. How do you compete with that without getting employees to make major personal sacrifices?

HN is a lot more jaded towards startups and founders’ games these days. Back in late 2019 there was this thread about a Garry Tan video where the tone of the discussion was fiercely against working for startups, saying it was better to join FAANG or start your own company instead:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21865065

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.

Tell it to "Rocket League" or look at what happened to PUBG when they used Epic's engine. Epic only makes those things "free", it only buys popular software, because it's goal is getting more people locked into it's walled garden Epic store. It is not because they are nice. As soon as they believe they have a critical mass of Epic store users you can damn well bet they'll treat Quixel, Sketchfab, and Artstation forums just like the Rocket League linux client the minute there's any more profit to be squeezed out.

> look at what happened to PUBG when they used Epic's engine

They made a lot of money.

> it only buys popular software, because it's goal is getting more people locked into it's walled garden Epic store.

The rev stream is royalties from engine use since the free tiers are locked to UE, not EGS.

>> look at what happened to PUBG when they used Epic's engine

> They made a lot of money.

They reportedly worked with Epic Games on technical support for PUBG features, and Epic Games may've ended up using some of them in their own Battle Royale mode:

> Notably, Epic Games updated their in-development title Fortnite, a sandbox-based survival game that included the ability to construct fortifications, to include a battle royale mode that retained the fortification aspects. Known as Fortnite Battle Royale, Epic later released it as a standalone free-to-play game in September 2017. Shortly after its release, Bluehole expressed concerns about the game, acknowledging that while they cannot claim ownership of the battle royale genre, they feared that since they had been working with Epic for technical support of the Unreal engine, that they may have had a heads-up on planned features they wanted to bring to Battlegrounds and could release it first.

Quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUBG:_Battlegrounds#Epic_Games...

Article: https://www.pcgamer.com/pubg-exec-clarifies-objection-to-for...

I'm well aware of the lawsuit. It went nowhere.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/27/17509114/pubg-fortnite-la...

Saying someone copied your work and broke the law doesn't mean that that they did. That's why we have tribunals.

Personally, I'm all against what they did with Fortnite and PUBG - they didn't broke any laws, but the surely reworked Fortnite into PUBG,instead of creating their own thing (it is now). But that's a long shot from saying they committed a crime or that their acquisitions turn up bad.

Aren't PUBG the ones who tried to sue people for using a frying pan as a melee weapon in game? Years after valve had it in TF2?

There lawsuits seem a bit empty

Super Mario RPG did frying pan as a melee weapon back in 1996. Sure it was character locked, a single player game in a totally different genre, etc, but it still means frying pans ere an established video game melee weapon long before before TF2, much less PUBG.

>As soon as they believe they have a critical mass of Epic store users you can damn well bet they'll treat Quixel, Sketchfab, and Artstation forums

Maybe. But Unity is technically still used in more games and is being just as aggressive in acquisitions between Parsec, Syncsketch, Ziva, and even Weta Digital. It's definitely not going to be a battle won by outspending the competition.

Tim Sweeney has been pretty crystal clear about his feelings disliking walled gardens and monopolies for at least a decade, since well before the Epic Games Store or Fortnite existed. He is very much a tech guy, not some super savvy cutthroat business guy (as is pretty clear when you look at their battle with apple, which made absolutely no financial sense)

This is a good counterargument only if you believe Tim Sweeney will outlive Epic Games. I don't think he will, and I have no reason to believe that Tim's successor will have his mindset or his values.

Do you think bandcamp leadership will live forever if it remains a “lifestyle business”?

He dislikes monopolies and yet uses monopolies on distribution to expand the market share of Epic Games Store?

Rocket League lost Linux support shortly after. Any company cutting off previous Linux support is not a good one.

Can I get a refund for it? I had it on Steam but don't really play it anymore. Is such a service degradation a reason for a refund even if I had a lot of fun and countless hours in it? I don't need the money, but I heavily dislike such practices and want them to at least feel that.

It's a company that's been successful, while also mired in a variety of legal problems and scandals, often related to how their games are so deliberately addictive.... I don't doubt what you say about their good intentions, I just honestly worry more about any fallout from that kind of business practice leading to an acquisition.

Never heard of legal Epic having legal problems because of addictive games. Can you elaborate?

But being a market, Bandcamp's user's are actually artists and listeners, so Bandcamp having freedom to do what they want doesn't mean they can suddenly start giving all their music out for free, unless they change to a Spotify style model of listens = payout.

I wouldn't be surprised if the acquisition is to provide royalty free music to the games industry via Unreal Engine, as was the case for Quixel, but none of this is really good news for artists trying to make money unless Bandcamp plans to pay the artists out of their own pocket for a royalty free side.

All of that is speculation of course, we'll see where it goes. It's just a weird acquisition if it's not for integration I feel.

"none of this is really good news for artists trying to make money unless Bandcamp plans to pay the artists out of their own pocket for a royalty free side."

To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if that's Epic's endgoal. But the music industry is a gargantuan behemoth with paper thin profit margins, and Epic is already struggling enough battling the mobile market (a much more lucrative market where the fight makes sense).

I can't see any significant push like that happening for a decade+. This and the harmonix aquisition are probably just the foot in the door needed for those plans should they want to push one day.

They might focus on streamers, they have quite a bit of issues using music. Their recorded streams tend to have large portions of the stream without sound and it definitely needs fixing. The music industry fees are simply too high for them to pay.

> none of this is really good news for artists trying to make money unless Bandcamp plans to pay the artists out of their own pocket for a royalty free side

I don't see why that's the case? Just give Bandcamp artists the tools to set their own royalty structure (In the same way they price their own songs) and integrate this marketplace into Unreal or wherever else. Self published artists get a source of revenue typically reserved for labels and Bandcamp gets the cut instead of someone else.

That's a fair point. My original assumption was that royalties wouldn't flow back to artists in a meaningful way but bandcamp has been a big advocate of fairness toward artists so that's really a fair take on my behalf.

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.

And what's the problem with having a system level mixer instead of every app having their own volume slider in software?

I didn't really have an easy way to adjust the volume of a single tab in my browser without downloading an add-on to give each tab their own volume slider.

I've got multiple sources of audio coming from the browser since it has taken the place of so many applications. Generally I'd expect sites that sell/stream music to have a simple volume slider.

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.

Yes, my impression is that 7digital does the absolute minimum. This is the case with basically all streaming services that try to compete with Spotify. I've tried all the big ones except Tidal, which has its own problems for which I refuse to touch it.

Want an example? Here's Deezer:

https://www.deezer.com/search/%22Arrows%20in%20the%20Gale%22...

Here's 7digital:

https://no.7digital.com/search?q=Arrows%20in%20the%20Gale

I probably can't post more links without getting auto-hidden by HN, but just try the search elsewhere too. Also try the album titles "Fresh Fruit", "I'm Looking for an Angel", "Day Dawn" or "My Car Sounds".

That is one spammer. He releases 300+ albums at once, several times per months, to virtually all streaming services. They all have the same title, and the same generic album art, often a filtered stock image. They're officially "compilation albums". He has been doing this for about a decade as far as I can tell. He uses a different made-up label each time. If you blindly search up any song by one of the classic artists he targets, likely you will get one of his "compilations", and he will get money for every play.

But Spotify is different. Those Echo Nest people have a special hatred of spammers, they kicked him out ages ago.

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.

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

They pay literally an order of magnitude more per stream than spotify. .04 cents vs .003 cents https://www.soundguys.com/tidal-hifi-review-25846/

Qobuz is the best

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

Qobuz is not associated with 7digital.

I'm not saying it's the same company, I'm saying Qobuz almost certainly buys backend/licensing services from 7digital. Most do. Even Spotify used to do it.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Look at this sideways for a second and you'll see that you just described precisely and exactly the structure and supposed-mission of every performing rights society in the world.

And yet they just don't seem to have any interest in it.

The people that handle the money can get away with taking more from themselves in this scenario, so they definitely will.

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.

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.

As a chronic music pirate- I love Bandcamp. I've purchased more music through Bandcamp than anywhere else. I'm not going to let myself be bummed by this news until Bandcamp actually changes for the worse. Once again everybody is letting themselves be upset by some hypothetical scenario where the new owners drive the service into the ground.

i am old. it's not the first takeover i have seen. it's for a reason many people are sceptical here.

I hope you are right, but the track record for take-overs isn’t very good.

When the original managers leave, you get replacements from the parent company. Or managers who want to “change things” so they can impress the upper echelons. Seen it too much.

I don't even really need a hypothetical scenario. All that could happen does indeed suck, but I'm mainly irked about giving my money to Epic after 15 years of loving Bandcamp.

> Once again everybody is letting themselves be upset by some hypothetical scenario where the new owners drive the service into the ground.

It's not hypothetical, it's evidence-based reasoning.

Bandcamp was the only music store I was happy to throw my money at. I guess the ol' tricorn hat may be getting dusted off real soon if anything material about the company or the selection changes.

Are you willing to fund Bandcamp?

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

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.

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.

Given they've been profitable for years, yes.

https://bandcamp.com/jerhewet

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