Comment by ye-olde-sysrq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ye-olde-sysrq | Hacker News Reader

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prior to this, bandcamp was owned by Epic and lord only knows why they bought them or what their bigger plan was. i also have no idea how much they staffed up under epic rule since they went from a small business to being owned by the fortnite money man. Entirely possible it's something like:

1. bandcamp is a sustainable normal small-to-medium business growing healthily

2. Epic has tons of fortnitebux and is feuding with apple so they buy bandcamp as some kind of tangential play should they end up as a big alternative store on iOS. so they could have a music store offering (to compare to itunes? not that apple gives a crap about itunes anymore??) in addition to an app store?

3. the money music stops and everyone races for a seat. bandcamp is left hanging.

4. epic sells bandcamp to whoever just to get it off the books so they can focus on fortnite lootboxes

5. songtradr or whatever their name is tells the union to pound sand and cuts bandcamp down to a core team because they're planning to just gut the product and transition all these indie artists over to whatever platform they were running before. This is a music IP company. I don't think they want to handle B2C purchases or provide streaming music. They just wanted to buy a big pot of artists and IP to add to their collection.

Alternate, equally speculative but less cynical take on 4-5, largely advised by Songtradr's announcement here: https://twitter.com/songtradr/status/1709986126117630051?s=2...

This may have been a last-minute accelerated deal process where Epic would have all but shuttered Bandcamp if a buyer couldn't be found, before they needed to announce massive layoffs to assuage investors. Songtradr is given an opportunity to see the deal, wants to ensure Bandcamp's survival in its current form (because its demise would hurt the entire ecosystem Songtradr depends on).

But Songtradr isn't given time to put together a transition plan or identify the exact legal path to deal with the union (especially given that they're in an entirely different country with different labor laws!) and not expose themselves to liability. So they announce conditional openness to the acquisition (per the link above, the transaction hasn't closed yet), and this at minimum gives Bandcamp a stay of execution while they identify next steps.

Now, they've identified at least one next step - how much of the current Bandcamp costs they can carry during the transition - and that's 50% of current staff. A tough call to make, but if the alternative was shuttering the service, a very justifiable one.

What do tech unions even do? Doesn’t seem like they can prevent this at all

They would have to do what any union does - leverage worker power. If the majority of Bandcamp engineers agreed to halt work until x demands are met, it would drive Bandcamp as a service into the ground. Tech workers also hold the keys to everything - they could take the site down, lock up the music, etc.

They maybe can’t prevent it, but they could leverage BC/Epic/whomever into providing some kind of decent severance for those left out in the cold. In theory.

Except Bandcamp wasn't at risk of shutting down before Epic. If it's being run unsustainably now, that's on Epic.

Was anything in danger of shutting down before Q1 2022? All time tech market highs were ~3-6 months beforehand and presumably the acquisition negotiation took time.

That's largely a distinction without a difference while Epic still owned (owns? seem deal isn't closed yet) them. If Epic is in peril, Bandcamp is in peril since they owned Bandcamp up until recently, and we know Epic is in financial trouble because of the Epic Games Store.

Their entire minimum revenue guarantee scheme to lure over indies and publishers is apparently extremely expensive for Epic and the store has yet to turn a profit on the whole. Before, they could run it off of Fortnite profits alone. That said, Sweeney has admitted that well is basically running dry and it's why they've been doing layoffs and the like everywhere.

If a company is in trouble, the first thing on the line are the subsidiaries and Bandcamp is a questionable acquisition on the Epic rep sheet, being a music store for a company whose main business is making videogames and selling a gaming engine to people. That means it either goes under or is sold off because it's seen as an irrelevant "aside" subsidiary.

Epic is private, Tim Sweeney owns >50%, and their only real rival in the game engine space had recently torpedoed themselves which caused a large amount of gamedevs and even some publishers to swear off Unity.

There was no investor pressure.

Tencent owns 40% of Epic, and Epic lost most of its legal battle against Apple.

Epic is underperforming

Self-replying to retract the above. From https://www.404media.co/bandcamps-entire-union-bargaining-te... it seems that Songtradr leadership had explicit knowledge of the members of the union bargaining team, lied about it, and laid every single one of them off. I no longer think it likely that Songtradr is operating in good faith.

bandcamp was owned by Epic and lord only knows why they bought them or what their bigger plan was

this is incorrect. in addition to whatever lord you are speaking of, I also know. (unless you meant me, but even then, I think others share this knowledge.)

Epic bought Bandcamp to use it as a weapon in various lawsuits against Google and Apple over their pricing models. Bandcamp joined a suit against Google over its Play Store pricing in particular.

it didn't go anywhere, because Bandcamp already qualified for media app pricing, which rendered its role in the suit meaningless. but that was why Epic bought Bandcamp.

Yep, that's the one. Just a weapon to be used and then thrown away.

On point 5, bandcamp doesn’t own any rights to the music on the site. The artist agreement is limited to the service of selling music, if that changes the artists can revoke their agreement.

That can change.

It can, but not retrospectively.

"By continuing to use Bandcamp, you agree..."

What's an artist who depends on the platform to do?

Move their music off it. It happens a lot. If a band's earlier Bandcamp album gets picked up by a label, they will insist on exclusive distribution, so the band will remove it from BC.

To where? Because as a buyer of music I like BC's deal and would love to make sure alternatives have similar arrangements?

That would be the worst move Songtradr could make here. The ability to distribute your music while maintaining the rights to it is one of the main reasons - hell, if not the main reason - artists and labels (and fans like myself) love Bandcamp. Making such a change would, to my mind, royally piss off the entire community and, in particular, the artists that make the platform as successful as it has been. I can only imagine the negative press that such a move would generate.

Leave.

If Bandcamp were to try such a move they would destroy the value of their business overnight. Retroactively changing the agreement with your customers about their IP is the best way to permanently destroy trust.

It would be a more dramatic overnight loss of customers than Unity. It's entirely laughable, and given that laws restrict the licensing and royalties of music, it might not even be legal.

Labels can only write up contracts giving them rights because they pay for studio time (given them a financial buy-in to the creation of the music) and pay advances against royalties. Not so for indie distributors. I don't know if there are specific applicable laws, but it's absurd enough that everyone would immediately drop Bandcamp.

Music royalty rates, for physical records, radio and internet streaming, are also determined by a panel of judges: the United States Copyright Royalty Board.

"Pray we do not alter it further..."

I guess that only works for Darth Vader.

Not saying they won't try, but there are enough label-represented bands on Bandcamp that they would obliterate their back catalog (along with any network effects they're enjoying) overnight.

Technically Bandcamp is a very simple payment and file host.

A small team can quickly copy how it works and get all the artists to move platform if they were to shoot themself in the head. Right now this doesn't happen because Bandcamp functions and exists and has a reputation for musicians.

Lose that, all the artists start looking for a new home and someone will make an alternative quickly.

See: Unity

If it did, I'd probably stop using Bandcamp.

Pretty sure there's value in owning a platform where small independent ("undiscovered") artists release their work and where listeners go to find that work. In particular, it seems likely that having the metrics and historical data could give SongTradr insight into which artists seem likely to catch on, etc.

AI training set

4 should be - bandcamp employees vote to unionize. Epic can't let that cancer spread to the game devs so they sell it off as quickly as possible.

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