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> With that said, if they do tank, it can seriously be replaced by someone in a weekend, maybe 2 :)

The technology probably could be replicated in a weekend, but as always, Bandcamp is more than just the technology. Labels, artists and the community trust(ed?) them as a place where people got treated more fairly and it wasn't focused solely on growth of the platform. To replicate that same thing that Bandcamp created might take the same amount of time, ~15 years.

Here's a hypothetical scenario:

- You're running the successor to Bandcamp

- You're making good money, employ a couple staff

- Epic comes to you offering millions to buy your business

The rational choice is to sell. Would you choose the stress of running a sustainable business over the payout? I know I wouldn't.

There's no indication afaik that Bandcamp was in financial trouble before they got acquired. This is inevitable in the current ecosystem.

Cheaters think everybody cheats when given the opportunity. Thieves believe only fear of the law is what keeps the masses in line. Liars believe lying is normal and that they’re only embellishing anyway and really it’s for the greater good and also pragmatic and necessary to succeed.

There are many people who would not f their users and employees over when given the opportunity. Be like that.

Would like to think i wouldn't sell, but if someone massive company is offering my money, the worry is always they'll build their own later and stomp me anyway.

That and there's probably an element of wishful thinking. "I built this nice thing, and they promised me they won't mess it up."

That's why the product itself should not just be the technology stack (as GP might allude to), but something larger. In the case of Bandcamp, it's the relationships, community, trust and integrity that makes it what it is, and another massive company won't just be able to create those things by throwing random employees at the problem.

Well, first of all, it’s transactional. I have no particular affinity for any given service I use. If another service comes along that has enough upside to overcome the momentum of switching, I’ll definitely do it, and I’m sure you would too, and maybe that will annoy the company. That goes the same for the company; if they have a chance to cash out, I’m sure they’d take it. And maybe that will annoy me.

But the bigger point is that you conflate selling to a bigger company with more resources with “f[ing] their users,” which is just naive.

I'm a Bandcamp user, the sale to Epic fucked me over.

I’ve admittedly aged into a stereotype out of an Hard Times article and so haven’t bought an album in years…

What did they do exactly? My music is there I bought years back.

Like the sibling comment, I'd honestly be interested in hearing how they fucked you over. I know the whole "we will keep running it just like it's always been" trope is very hard to swallow, but it seems to me they actually had left it alone thus far. Am I wrong about that?

Same. The best online music service since Napster got screwed and it's never coming back. The writing is on the wall and it's clear that the "enshittification" officially begins.

> But the bigger point is that you conflate selling to a bigger company with more resources with “f[ing] their users,” which is just naive.

Because that's what happened to a lot of companies who got bought out - eventually the MBA sharks wanted their returns. Minecraft, MySQL, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Reddit, TwiXXer, they all fell victim to enshittification.

Others just ossified with steady streams of Big Money coming in like Mozilla, Wikipedia or a ton of stuff from Adobe. Or they got closed down by Big Corp because they were no longer "profitable" enough like Google Reader.

Personally, I'm happy enough that HN still exists.

"It's just transactional"

"I don't owe anybody anything"

"You're just naive"

These are the rationalizations used to justify antisocial behavior. It's nihilistic and destructive to society.

I've heard people espouse this kind of logic even when talking about employees who have worked for them for 20 years. They exchanged labor for pay and therefore nobody owes anybody anything. Yeah, right.

I wish I worked with people that share your philosophy.

> But the bigger point is that you conflate selling to a bigger company with more resources with “f[ing] their users,” which is just naive.

It's not naive, it's how these things go the majority of the time. I think that expecting otherwise is a bit naive.

Thing is, we are in a pretty ruthless society governed by sometimes insane amounts of money - and eventually, anyone will sell out given the right price, and no matter the purchase contract, eventually big-corp culture will seep in. See e.g. Atlassian, Apple, Oracle, Microsoft or Facebook who have been on the buyer side, and Minecraft and MySQL for infamous cases of companies that got bought out.

I agree with you on not wanting to fuck the users over either. Personally I don't want to do that.

But the reality is, I have other things I need in life too, and those things require money. My dad is working into his 70s, what if I could fund his retirement? What if I could pay for my brothers uni? Or for my grandma's nurse?

When our basic necessities are not secure, we can't always make the ethical choice. Until then, people will keep selling out.

Literally everybody has family members who could use extra money. If having family absolves you from ethical constraints we can dispense with the notion of ethics altogether.

Sure, and that's why most people would sell.

Having a family doesn't "absolve you" from ethics, but it means that you have to weight doing right by your family vs doing right by your users. Most people choose their family, and nobody blames them for it.

> nobody blames them for it

I do.

If somebody has to do wrong by their customers to do right to their family, they've seriously messed everything up.

Ok well, that's alright but you have to realize that you're in the minority here.

And no, they haven't messed everything up, society has failed them

I don't think selling your company is unethical

Bandcamp did have investors, they weren't 100% bootstrapped. Those investors likely had board seats and a significant say in whether to accept Epic's offer.

Not to mention that COVID led to a steep increase in the site's traffic. It's possible that the added operational burden meant that Bandcamp was no longer the chill lifestyle business that it used to be.

It's not at all as simple as a "rational choice". It completely depends on your objective. Why did you start the business in the first place?

If it was to make a few mill and never have to work again, sure, sell.

If you wanted to build something bigger than yourself, work with great people, feel accomplished, then why sell? How is that few mill going to get you those things?

A lot of founders regret their first sale because they realise they didn't want a cashout, they wanted to build something awesome

To back this view up there are plenty of artists who openly admit they "break even" when they've sold a 300-batch of records.

The operating costs include buying instruments/software/hardware, using a mastering service and pressing vinyl - all of which are not cheap.

They do it for the love of producing music - and watching their work sell out within _minutes_ of being released... which in turn inspires them to make another record (or ten haha!)

I'm not dismissing that, but most artists sell out given the chance.

The thing is that the gap between "breaking even" and "life changing money" is huge for most artists. You wouldn't sell out for 50K per year, but 1M? Sell out for 2 years and you're set for life, then you can go back to making the music you love.

But very few artists can pull 1M per year, so it doesn't happen as often.

> feel accomplished

Believe it or not you can buy that. Though I'm sure there's some corporate backed, non-replicable, behavioral science study that says otherwise.

I choose not, can you convince me otherwise?

> Believe it or not you can buy that

I don't believe it. That is, I believe it's true for some people, but not all. It's not true for me.

Buying stuff is not an accomplishment.

A few mil won't get you those things, but they'll guarantee your basic necessities. For example, my dad is working into his 70s. If I could fund his retirement I would.

And here's the kicker: you can always go build something bigger than yourself after selling. Having fuck you money means you can make the ethical choice next time.

Edit: on your comment about founders regretting their first sale. I'm guessing most founders are also well off, and don't worry as much financially. But even then, regret doesn't mean they made the wrong choice. I regret exercising my Shopify stock while I worked there, but it was still the best decision for me at the time.

> Having fuck you money means you can make the ethical choice next time.

If you weren't able to make the "ethical choice" the first time, you almost certainly won't make it the next time, either. All of the motivations that informed your first choice will equally inform your next.

Calling it the "ethical choice" was a mistake on my part. It's more of an "ethical calculus" between doing right by your family, and doing right by your users.

So it's not that choosing your family is unethical, but it does have consequences for your users. If family was taken care of them the ethical calculus shifts in the users favor.

The people who get to have the option of a multi-multi million dollar exit are the ones who start at the beginning when the company is worth nothing. Most people who can't afford basic necessities also can't afford to take the risk of starting something new. In fact, I would say it's a terrible decision in that case, akin to buying lottery tickets. The far easier way to guarantee "basic necessities" in tech is train up, get a good job, be frugal. You could have enough to never need basic necessities within 10 years, max 20.

The vast majority of founders I see are relatively self-sufficient already and live comfortably. They're founders because they're addicted to it, love making something new, and potentially are chasing that mega-exit. 10s-100s of millions, not a few.

Maybe the reason the majority of founders are like that is because the ones who sell out and go live comfortably for the rest of their lives take themselves out of the pool and you don't hear about them.

> If you wanted to build something bigger than yourself, work with great people, feel accomplished, then why sell? How is that few mill going to get you those things?

It's possible that the founders felt they had accomplished this, and after spending 15 (?) years running it, were ready to move onto something else. I've sure as hell never stayed at the same job for 15 years. I'd go nuts.

They may have also felt some obligation to early investors, often who are friends and family or early employees, to get them a nice return.

Then sell it to the employees who have a vested interest in maintaining it.

You're expecting a group of startup employees holding illiquid stock to come up with the cash necessary to buy the finders out on a company that could otherwise sell for (apparently) $273 million?

Sure, depends on how you structure it.

They had what, 400 employees, so 675k per employee.

> The rational choice is to sell.

Not necessarily. Whether or not that's the rational choice depends on what your goals are.

It's also rational not to sell. Why not value a nice sustainable business over selling out?

I understand that many of us would sell, I would probably sell too. But different people do exist. Valve didn't sell, for example, and I'm sure they were approached many times.

Yeah they definitely do exist, but it's the exception. That's why everybody knows about valve and epic.

However, if Gabe's family had urgently needed money back in the day, would he have sold? Maybe.

That's what I'm getting at. You need to be in a very stable position to be able to turn down a big offer like that when it comes, and in general in our society we're always one or two emergencies away from being destitute on the streets.

Until we make sure people are taken care of, these companies will keep being the exception.

I don't know about how rare it is, because rejected offers don't make the news. We either talk about the successful selling stories, or the major holdouts. I don't think this paints a full picture.

Besides, my point is that there are multiple options, all of them rational. There is no single rational choice.

> The rational choice is to sell.

If you as the owner are already wealthy 'enough', then that is not necessarily the rational choice. It depends how much you care about the future of the business.

In my dreams, if I ran such a noble business, I would hope that I'd have managed to extract enough value from the business to arrange for my own pension by the time others want to acquire it, so I can reject their offers and keep control to safeguard the business's integrity.

On the other hand, we are human. If the acquiring party makes an absolutely life-changing offer, it may be hard to resist. The story of Nullsoft and AOL comes to mind.

Well yeah, but almost nobody is in that position and that's the problem. You could always help out the people around you.

Until everyone in our society is taken care of by default, these noble businesses will keep being extremely rare.

> With that said, if they do tank, it can seriously be replaced by someone in a weekend, maybe 2

It can't. The classic HN mistake here is to think the difficulty in replacement is engineering / building it. That's pretty much never the actual case. Engineering it [0] is the easiest part of building a replacement.

[0] this part: "Direct upload mastered files to s3 from the artists, activejob to convert to various formats and throw back to s3 via activestorage, subdomain model scoping for artist pages, stripe integration for payments."

> With that said, if they do do tank, it can seriously be replaced by someone in a weekend, maybe 2 :)

The back catalog of independent music on that site would be a huge loss. Every single artist would need to find and agree on that mythical hobby site, it would have to be able to handle the rapid growth if they were able to re-locate.

I agree it should have stayed simple, but we continue to believe that things should grow forever or die in the doomed attempt, so we will never have nice things.

> Bandcamp has always felt like it should be someone's lifestyle business, like gumroad, and never seemed like it was trying to be a "business" that needed to add features or obsess over hyper hocky stick growth.

Bandcamp did seem like a chill midsize lifestyle business before the Epic acquisition. I suspect that Epic's acquisition offer was too good for the founders and board to turn down.

(While Bandcamp wasn't a classic venture-funded startup they did have outside investors.)

> While Bandcamp wasn't a classic venture-funded startup they did have outside investors

I don't think it's correct to say they weren't venture-funded. True Ventures lists them on their portfolio page. I don't know what that says about how much True Ventures put in, but they must have invested something.

Crunchbase says that was a Series A in 2010 with no further rounds, so I don't think that's inconsistent with my original post. They took some outside investment early on but their path looks nothing like the classic VC-funded growth trajectory.

I can't help but make a wry observation that they are objectively VC-funded, but that by saying they aren't a "classic VC-funded growth trajectory" you're doing a No-True-Scotsman-style "not a true venture funded company" argument, and that they are literally a True Ventures funded company..

I'll show myself out.

(Seriously though, I see your point and am not trying to bicker about this; I just think it's a funny situation)

I kinda doubt it would be THAT easy to replicate but if you can do it, sell it to me.

> Bandcamp has always felt like it should be someone's lifestyle business

Me too. Layoffs are terrible for the people involved but I honestly don’t see why bandcamp would need more than a handful of employees. The more people you have to pay the more money you have to extract from your customers and the whole point of bandcamp was to be a very slim layer between artists and customers.

> Basically what I'm saying is it feels very much like a rails app you could build in a weekend.

Downvoted solely for that comment. Honestly, I feel like it's so tiresome and lazy with the "X could be built in a weekend" or "Why does Y need so many employees?" comments. Sure, I've worked at companies that were easily overstaffed, and it's not hard to find some slack in any sizable company. But these kinds of comments pretty universally are completely lacking in insight of what it takes to operate and run a sizable business. It's basically just selfishness that people only comment on the limited slice (usually of programming work) that they understand.

To you and everyone else saying "you can't reproduce the business in a weekend" or that I'm overlooking that side of things, I specifically said "like a rails apps you could build in a weekend" because I was talking about... THE APP. I never did and never would claim that the user base, traction, brand recognition, or label deals could be replaced in a weekend. I was only speaking about the simplistic and minimal set of features for the bandcamp.com product. My words made it pretty clear what I was talking about so it feels like people choosing to view it as me saying the business side is more complex are just looking for an argument or to "tell me how it is". The logic here makes no sense. I DID NOT mention the business yet you people are giving me shit saying the business can't be replicated in a weekend. Where the F did I say that it could?! I SPECIFICALLY talked about an APP, and you're ignoring that key word and fighting me over something I never claimed.

With that said, if they do tank, it can seriously be replaced by someone in a weekend, maybe 2 :)

That's even more true for Twitter, and look what's happened... nothing.

Well, I mean.. Mastodon? Nearly 2 million monthly active users across some 10,000 servers. https://joinmastodon.org/servers

I have never used it but looking at the front page, it comes across like Vimeo is to Youtube but for music.

Why is bandcamp so big ? I could do that in a weekend.

Then please do it! We need more sites like this.

Assuming you’re not being sarcastic, what would be your next move on Monday after you’ve created your working prototype?

You sound poised to make somewhere in the neighborhood of $273M in a weekend, then.

Musicians have trusted it. Why should they trust you?