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.
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.
If you have a platform that artists allow purchasing of their music through, you can extend it to allow customers to sell/license songs in their games (developer) or buy snippets of song in Fortnite (gamer).
Sound Cloud would achieve these features too, and I am certain they considered more than just Bandcamp, as well as kept everyone under NDA during the shopping around.
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.
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.
> 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.
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"?
What's the relevance of the Gates Foundation? Gates didn't sell Microsoft in order to start it, he used his own personal fortune (fine, Warren Buffet helped, but he didn't sell any golden geese to afford it, either).
Gates sold a decent amount of his Microsoft stock to fund the foundation, something Gabe can't really do given the current structure of Valve. They would have to go public for him to do so, sell to private concerns, or something like that all actions which would dilute his control of Valve.
>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.
>I mean, thats many of the comments about this news, despite Epic/Tencent historally ringing true to their words.
I can't meaningfully reply to this because I don't understand your misspelled malapropism (words ring true, not their speakers). You seem to be suggesting that Epic/Tencent tell the truth, which historically I see isn't true (Linux support, Rocket League, etc), so I must be misunderstanding you.
>It's just a middleman storefront, and there are trillionaire tech companies right now
I think you misunderstand Valve, which is currently in the process of releasing a revolutionary console/handheld PC, and its profit margins, which might be healthier than you anticipate.
>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
Moreover, I think you misunderstand Newell himself. Steam Machines, Proton itself, and now the Steam Deck suggest a dedication to pro-consumer practices generally and videogames specifically that don't really map well to the typical bloodless VC calculus that you're trying to understand this situation with.
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.
Well, why not? Neil Young is 76, Sting is 70, Bob Dylan is 80. At that point it's better to just sell the catalogue for an enormous amount of money to do things with.
Because despite all the problems, there is at least a glimmer of a hope that an artist's estate will act in the interest of preserving their patron's legacy.
GabeN's personal financial stake in Valve likely realizes much more in the way of a) cashflow and b) control than any rocker's relationship with their catalogs.
Newell isn't the ageing rocker, smarting over the unfairness of the contract, he's the old-school cigar-chomping record executive, deigning to allow others to enrich him with their art. If he wants more money, he's just got to wait around for a bit. It'll arrive presently.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Given almost literally all of recorded corporate history in the United States, the onus is very much on the other side to continually demonstrate a lack of influence/bias.
Edited to add: I find the blind faith people place in billionaire CEOs insane. Maybe save the empathy for people who need it and treat the obscenely wealthy with healthy skepticism?
"the onus is very much on the other side to continually demonstrate a lack of influence/bias."
does 10 years of lack of influence count? Like, all Tencent did was try to make some LoL mobile game in china (in Unity, ironically enough). That's the one thing I can't imagine Riot/Epic doing without influence. But that's not really a smoking gun. China, mobile market huge, LoL big IP. No effect on LoL proper outside of the devs working on it.
Tencent don't seem to be the kind of company that cares about sticking fingers in the pudding of what works. They invest in successful companies and help other companies (including Sony and Nintendo) operate within China. At this point it feels like the skepticism is unwarranted.
There are many American companies that capitulate to Chinese political pressure without even being owned by the Chinese. Tencent owns 2 of the top 5 biggest gaming platforms in the US, but the one that got accused of being too close to the Chinese is now owned by Microsoft.
I think the question is why is there an expectation that Tencent is somehow more nefarious than any other billion dollar conglomerate?
Because in a very literal sense every large Chinese company is not only "in bed with", but a direct extension of the Chinese government, which uses its other tentacles to attack foreign companies it does not control via market manipulation and hacking.
America as one of the largest economies does all these things but in a much more disparate fashion, with the corporations fighting each other and local law just as much as foreign influences, weakening overall effectiveness.
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?
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 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.
This is Epic, not google. They've only had 2 aquisitions "shut down", both of which were game studios. One being a studio that became independent again, People Can Fly (Makers of Outriders).
From a dev perspective of someone who's worked with several Epic tools I'm not immediately worried about what seems to be more of a technical acquisition. Historically they do seem to actually leave their subsidaries hand-off, integrating their tech into Unreal instead of absorbing it entirely. I imagine the extend of the ramifications here include some way to expand Unreal's Asset store to include music or SFX (which artists can opt into offering on the asset store).
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 purchased a few albums from Ghost Mice, who deleted the albums or their account (and made a new one?). They are no longer downloadable. In the entry in my purchases history, it says:
> Deleted Artist
> Sorry, Strays by Ghost Mice is no longer available. Please contact Ghost Mice for more information.
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.
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.
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.
The Epic Games Store is barely even functional for video games. They haven't been able to implement table stakes features like reviews and a shopping cart, despite promising them for years now. Going wider and increasing its surface area even further doesn't really sound like a winning move.
User reviews are in the pipeline and shopping cart was added last year. And I doubt there were technical barriers that kept them from making this. Just a matter of other priorities on the store not immediately visible to western eyes (e.g., they have aggressively pursued regional pricing for the last 18 months).
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.
I can never tell if comments are sarcastic are not...
but "fortnite" by epic already had concert/online experiences. They've been pretty fun. Maybe getting band camp allows them access to artists they didn't have before?
Are you suggesting the primary reason SPJ moved to Epic Games is because they offered him more money than Microsoft?
Reading the message from SPJ[0] seems to indicate he is excited for the people and projects he will be working on as well as being given the freedom to continue working on education, functional programming research, and continuing to work in the Haskell ecosystem.
Of course large amounts of money are involved for an engineer of SPJ's renown and experience - that requirement exists for any company that want's SPJ's time.
That's what I mean by insulation. Bagging a "famous" engineer is a political and PR move and they get a lot of freedom to define the role, something that most of us can't do
Every one of us can negotiate and hold out for what is important to us -- sure, SPJ may have more leverage than most of us, but it's not required to be at that level to be able to find a place with freedom if that's what you are looking for.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Conversely, if Sweeney saw users as participants, for lack of a better word, this might be for ... the good?
For whatever you have in mind, the question was basically whether you see the users as the owners. I thought it is a misleading question because it is riffing on a legal notion of property and possession, without clearly characterising that property, leaving open any illegal aspect to be pointed out if that was your moral basis of the argument. And indeed, one could attempt a hyperbolic retort in which it should be definitely illegal, say, to change a running system. Or how is leninist marxism for a debatable mindset. Understandably you have rejected that debate. Of course the users are an integral part of the platform, and it's a consequential facet of the culture that some are already feeling sold-out.
Eventually it's kind of subjective, when everyone values the entity differently.
>If Bandcamp saw people who bought music on Bandcamp as consumers, then Bandcamp didn't understand the people who used it
If they DIDNT see people who bought music as consumers, they'd be shut down instead of acquired. It's still a business, not a charity case. It costs money to host music and pay the payment processors for the ability to let people use credit cards.
People who want some truly decentralized form of music hosting/publishing would be better off going back to the limewire dys than expecting a steady, supported website provide all the expected niceties.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why would they shut it down? Discontinuing a successful social app during Covid times doesn't make sense at all. Bandcamp seems to be too big to be closed like that though.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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 $40!
In return for those problems, the game gets an instant, massive increase in players. Monetization usually increases, since modern mtx are usually much more effective than either subscription or one-time-purchase models.
I'm not saying there are zero problems with going F2P. Obviously there are. But just as obviously, since so many studios have chosen to go that route, the benefits are worth it for the company. If the revenue benefits are worth it, they keep developing the game, keep running the servers, keep fixing bugs, rather than just letting the game die. That seems pretty good.
> Monetization usually increases, since modern mtx are usually much more effective than either subscription or one-time-purchase models.
Are you posing this as not a problem? This makes a game the digital equivalent of cancer: There's a lot of it, it grows fast, but nothing about it is worthwhile or good. It just exists to prey on everything around it.
"Because I paid for the game, and despite the fact I was happy to pay for it and I enjoy playing it, I think everyone else should need to pay for it, too. Otherwise all that enjoyment I had will be undone."
I'm happy to pay for a game I enjoy playing, the game is made F2P, it becomes inundated with Eternal September players, it is no longer fun to play, I am annoyed.
As a long time player I'll say that surfing definitely increased by a lot when it went free to play, it's not entirely sunk cost fallacy. Im high enough now that it's not much of an issue but lower ranks are rife with surfing and even in my diamond 1 games I see them enough to be annoying, at least.
That is because Epic was buying up popular games, removing non-$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.
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").
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.)
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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!
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hard agree, I really hate the trend of businesses having to have "an exit", be it IPO or get swallowed by one of like 6 behemoth companies. I love a good "we know who we are and are happy being it" success story which I thought Bandcamp was.
Dont get me wrong, I am not happy at all about this silicon valley „winner takes it all“ mindset.
Let me explain how i see things. Bandcamp is for djs and indepenent music lovers. Although djing has managed to evaded streaming so far, it is almost inevitable to come. I am sure the folks at bandcamp were very clear about that and were looking to find a way to deal with the situation.
Bandcamp is almost as old as Web 2.0. That's why people are so confused about this. Why does a profitable 15-year-old company need to sell? They didn't say in the post, so all we can do is be frustrated.
If you don't sell, it's likely the large companies trying to buy you will copy you and use their piles of money to undercut you out of business (and if they don't, any VC backed startup can try).
So you either survive as small and unnoticed, or become big enough to be interesting (and then bought or killed unless you achieve absurd growth).
Can you really own music? See i have been collecting vinyl for 20 years and know about the pleasure it can provide. But with digital files scarcity, age, smell, looks, condition no longer matter. There is nothing left to „own“. The only thing you own is your hard disk.
I don't care about the tactile aspect of a particular album (as opposed to the "feel"/"UX" of a particular format in general, which I do find fun) or piece of media.
I care about one thing, and one thing only: an irrevocable right to experience a particular piece of media where and when I please in the original form it was released, subject to natural degradation of the physical medium. Now that music is digital, I expect the "when" to be "at any point in my life, starting from when I purchased it", and the "where" to be "any device with the ability to play music".
Streaming is essentially asking for permission to re-experience a piece of media every time I want to do so, and Spotify's and YouTube's answer is often "no". My music library is simply a necessary evil that facilitates security against their whims.
But strangely, better metrics for artist compensation somehow don't lead to better artist compensation. I've never heard a testimonial from a band about how much better the spotify compensation model is, but I've heard dozens of testimonials and articles about artists to whom spotify pays pennies while bandcamp pays their bills.
> 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.
Not supporting linux as a gaming platform is a down to earth decision. It's reasonable, whether necessary or not. As a linux user, I see a difference between the expectation of Linux plus driver vendors to support games and a game vendor to support linux, when it is often depending on a busfactor of 1.
>Not supporting linux as a gaming platform is a down to earth decision.
Why should I care? It was supported before Epic bought them and Epic decided to axe it. My experience with Psyonix post-Epic is far worse than pre-Epic, which is exactly what the thread is about.
As long as you don't care to point out if and how wine support is far worse, why should anyone care what you care?
There's a difference in semantics whether they violently "axe it" or carefully decide "Not supporting linux" any longer. If you do not care about the difference then because you do not understand the decision any better than I do. Arguably, the decision for selling-out will have a similar motivation as the one against linux, so I find your before/after distinction a possibly misleading false dichotomy.
There is no indication that the motivation is the same for bandcamp. Pretty much everyone in this thread is agreeing that they see bad omens, sure. I just don't agree that Epic is to blame for that.
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.
Sure but not everyone is driven strictly by profit. I prefer to stay naive to not being motivated only by profit in my life decisions. Yes, I've made decisions that turned down large sums of money to maintain my happiness and sense of being a moral human being.
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].
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."
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.
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).
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.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 340 ms ] threadAmazon is a bookstore.
Epic sees Steam and Apple (and Amazon) and knows that the platform is the chokepoint where all the money is.
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.
As for SoundCloud, either they didn't come to terms for whatever reason, or they didn't try to begin with if marketing considerations favor BP.
If you have a platform that artists allow purchasing of their music through, you can extend it to allow customers to sell/license songs in their games (developer) or buy snippets of song in Fortnite (gamer).
Sound Cloud would achieve these features too, and I am certain they considered more than just Bandcamp, as well as kept everyone under NDA during the shopping around.
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.
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.
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 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.
I can't meaningfully reply to this because I don't understand your misspelled malapropism (words ring true, not their speakers). You seem to be suggesting that Epic/Tencent tell the truth, which historically I see isn't true (Linux support, Rocket League, etc), so I must be misunderstanding you.
>It's just a middleman storefront, and there are trillionaire tech companies right now
I think you misunderstand Valve, which is currently in the process of releasing a revolutionary console/handheld PC, and its profit margins, which might be healthier than you anticipate.
>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
Moreover, I think you misunderstand Newell himself. Steam Machines, Proton itself, and now the Steam Deck suggest a dedication to pro-consumer practices generally and videogames specifically that don't really map well to the typical bloodless VC calculus that you're trying to understand this situation with.
Newell isn't the ageing rocker, smarting over the unfairness of the contract, he's the old-school cigar-chomping record executive, deigning to allow others to enrich him with their art. If he wants more money, he's just got to wait around for a bit. It'll arrive presently.
> 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.
> 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'm more than willing to accept that I'm being naive. All I ask is some actual evidence of this influence/bias.
Edited to add: I find the blind faith people place in billionaire CEOs insane. Maybe save the empathy for people who need it and treat the obscenely wealthy with healthy skepticism?
I don't think "blind faith" is fair - I just haven't seen any reason to believe Epic is controlled by Chinese interests.
does 10 years of lack of influence count? Like, all Tencent did was try to make some LoL mobile game in china (in Unity, ironically enough). That's the one thing I can't imagine Riot/Epic doing without influence. But that's not really a smoking gun. China, mobile market huge, LoL big IP. No effect on LoL proper outside of the devs working on it.
Tencent don't seem to be the kind of company that cares about sticking fingers in the pudding of what works. They invest in successful companies and help other companies (including Sony and Nintendo) operate within China. At this point it feels like the skepticism is unwarranted.
I think the question is why is there an expectation that Tencent is somehow more nefarious than any other billion dollar conglomerate?
America as one of the largest economies does all these things but in a much more disparate fashion, with the corporations fighting each other and local law just as much as foreign influences, weakening overall effectiveness.
From a dev perspective of someone who's worked with several Epic tools I'm not immediately worried about what seems to be more of a technical acquisition. Historically they do seem to actually leave their subsidaries hand-off, integrating their tech into Unreal instead of absorbing it entirely. I imagine the extend of the ramifications here include some way to expand Unreal's Asset store to include music or SFX (which artists can opt into offering on the asset store).
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.
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.
Maybe at least they'll add some kind of "Now Playing" feature in Fortnite, that would probably be fun for some people.
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.
> Deleted Artist
> Sorry, Strays by Ghost Mice is no longer available. Please contact Ghost Mice for more information.
The brand name now has a ton of cachet — I hope it continues with the acquisition.
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.
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.
I’m sure bandcamp received a huge amount of customer support messages about this. It’s confusing to most people.
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.
but "fortnite" by epic already had concert/online experiences. They've been pretty fun. Maybe getting band camp allows them access to artists they didn't have before?
https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/fort-nite-concert-seri...
Also could be a source of creative content to generate NFTs, maybe even tie that to licensing of music used in game livestreams.
I can’t imagine anyone wanting to work for or be part of Epic, so that’s my assumption of gobs of cash.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29131996
Reading the message from SPJ[0] seems to indicate he is excited for the people and projects he will be working on as well as being given the freedom to continue working on education, functional programming research, and continuing to work in the Haskell ecosystem.
Of course large amounts of money are involved for an engineer of SPJ's renown and experience - that requirement exists for any company that want's SPJ's time.
[0] https://discourse.haskell.org/t/an-epic-future-for-spj/3573
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?
It’s nice to be a programmer and have options but I wouldn’t work with a company that makes such invasive software.
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.
For whatever you have in mind, the question was basically whether you see the users as the owners. I thought it is a misleading question because it is riffing on a legal notion of property and possession, without clearly characterising that property, leaving open any illegal aspect to be pointed out if that was your moral basis of the argument. And indeed, one could attempt a hyperbolic retort in which it should be definitely illegal, say, to change a running system. Or how is leninist marxism for a debatable mindset. Understandably you have rejected that debate. Of course the users are an integral part of the platform, and it's a consequential facet of the culture that some are already feeling sold-out.
Eventually it's kind of subjective, when everyone values the entity differently.
If they DIDNT see people who bought music as consumers, they'd be shut down instead of acquired. It's still a business, not a charity case. It costs money to host music and pay the payment processors for the ability to let people use credit cards.
People who want some truly decentralized form of music hosting/publishing would be better off going back to the limewire dys than expecting a steady, supported website provide all the expected niceties.
I can see Epic building off the infrastructure there for games and in-game collectibles (of which your vinyls are now a part)
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.
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.
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.
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).
It’s sad to see Bandcamp go. Because in tech an acquisition means loss of that independence.
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.
It's not hypothetical, it's evidence-based reasoning.
Epic lies. It is what they do. They are the epitome of a dangerous megacorp.
Not saying that it was user error here, but I haven't noticed any significant input lag when I play it.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/15/21438194/rocket-league-fr...
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).
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.
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.
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.
c.f.: sunk cost fallacy
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.
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.
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'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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Almost, but it's these guys:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAB_Holding_Company
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 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.)
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAB_Holding_Company
There aren't many "startup industrial companies"
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
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.
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.
I never thought I’d see the day where hacker news, of all places, forgot how this works.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21865065
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.
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.
> 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...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/27/17509114/pubg-fortnite-la...
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.
There lawsuits seem a bit empty
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.
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.
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.
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.
Would be interesting to think of acquisitions where this wasn't the case. The only one that jumps to mind is Zappos.
https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v12/ (scroll down).
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.
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.
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.
This is a play to get content and direct relationships with producers, I don't think they will change the business model.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
And yet they just don't seem to have any interest in it.
https://resonate.is/
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.
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/
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.
https://www.junodownload.com/labels/Ruff+And+Tuff+Recordings...
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
Now if they can finally make the Android app a decent music player I'll revise my judgment :)
I respect your long experience moderating HN, so asking mostly with the intent enrich my own intuition. Not a rhetorical question.
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...
Eventually we're going to build software for aggregating related URLs.
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.
I'd be disappointed if apple had made the purchase, though it would be less out of left field.
That's been the state of tech ever since Web 2.0 or so.
If you don't sell, it's likely the large companies trying to buy you will copy you and use their piles of money to undercut you out of business (and if they don't, any VC backed startup can try).
So you either survive as small and unnoticed, or become big enough to be interesting (and then bought or killed unless you achieve absurd growth).
Tech is kind of a dark forest now (https://thoughtcatalog.com/christine-stockton/2021/02/heres-...).
I've worked for 2 companies that didn't sell and were obliterated this way.
I care about one thing, and one thing only: an irrevocable right to experience a particular piece of media where and when I please in the original form it was released, subject to natural degradation of the physical medium. Now that music is digital, I expect the "when" to be "at any point in my life, starting from when I purchased it", and the "where" to be "any device with the ability to play music".
Streaming is essentially asking for permission to re-experience a piece of media every time I want to do so, and Spotify's and YouTube's answer is often "no". My music library is simply a necessary evil that facilitates security against their whims.
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
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.
They ditched the Linux version of Rocket League. That counts as a blown acquisition to me.
Not supporting linux as a gaming platform is a down to earth decision. It's reasonable, whether necessary or not. As a linux user, I see a difference between the expectation of Linux plus driver vendors to support games and a game vendor to support linux, when it is often depending on a busfactor of 1.
Why should I care? It was supported before Epic bought them and Epic decided to axe it. My experience with Psyonix post-Epic is far worse than pre-Epic, which is exactly what the thread is about.
There's a difference in semantics whether they violently "axe it" or carefully decide "Not supporting linux" any longer. If you do not care about the difference then because you do not understand the decision any better than I do. Arguably, the decision for selling-out will have a similar motivation as the one against linux, so I find your before/after distinction a possibly misleading false dichotomy.
There is no indication that the motivation is the same for bandcamp. Pretty much everyone in this thread is agreeing that they see bad omens, sure. I just don't agree that Epic is to blame for that.
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."
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.
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.
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.
big new release coming this month with artist-side album drafting and merch features
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)