Bandcamp Acquired by Epic Games

He certainly appears to be in the “can dish it out but can’t take it” camp when it comes to exclusivity. It’s not a development that’s particularly thrilling but Spotify is far from a force for good come to that. Ethical choices seem to be thin on the ground for consumers these days, particularly in tech…

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I’ll check in a week when back home. It’s possible that every album I’ve streamed happens to have all tracks freely available.

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Well, I didn’t expect to hear this and yes I agree with everyone, I’m not a fan of Epic games either.

Yeah. BandCamp’s purpose is to sell music and there is no BandCamp subscription, so I don’t understand why they would let one freely listen to anything.

Whether or not one can hear the entire album is probably the artist’s choice. From my experience, it’s usually just a representative track and in poor res…

You can choose the format of something you have bought. I use FLAC, of course.

Really, the whole point of my original post was to question the article writer who opined that BandCamp was a substitute for a streaming service.

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Some smaller labels offer the whole of the album to “try before you buy”, but most of the bigger independent labels only seem to offer a couple of tracks.

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Doh…

And I finally caved into " peer pressure" and joined the Bandcamp wagon about a week ago.

And now this :roll_eyes:

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I’ve only tried to stream albums from Indie bands I’ve never heard of. Thus my good luck

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I was talking the BandCamp app downloads not downloads to other devices.
I download on my laptops in FLAC only

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So you are the cause of our potential musical downfall :joy:
Trying to be hopeful, but there is great music and bands there, and they will go elsewhere if too much changes

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Well, @AceRimmer has optimism and pessimism enough for all of us. Caving into peer pressure doesn’t sound like him though…

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I need an emoji to depict. Tongue in cheek :sweat_smile:

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Can I ask whats so bad about Epic Games? Having not been an avid gamer for a long while. The unreal engine is a game changer in my industry at the moment.

It is isn’t it. I’m not a gamer, my son is and takes it seriously. Someone has to listen to him IRL so I know some stuff. Here’s some gripes I’ve picked up.

  • Some sharp practice around development and testing of Fortnite, he mourns a different game that Epic did wrong to.
  • Fortnite became so popular all the hardcore gamers hate it.
  • The Apple court case around app store, Epic gave off we’re for the consumer noises, they were really for themselves.
  • Running their game portal at a loss and paying well over the odds to get exclusive titles, using financial clout to put your competitors OOB

There’s more, much more, but it’s difficult to recall…

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So like pretty much like every other software tech company then. Could be worse it could have been Autodesk or Adobe.

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Oh my, what if was Electronic Arts :grimacing:

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I now feel this sounds a little mean spirited towards my son. We get on well but he does talk about this stuff a lot. He’s currently quite exercised about whether all games should have an easy mode. He’s certainly adept at getting in a conversational preemptive strike to avoid talking about music…

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If things do go “pear shaped” for Bandcamp, a number of labels do have online shops where downloads can be purchased, e.g. Domino, Sub Pop, Heavenly, Fat Possum. Others do not, e.g. 4AD, Matador.

Obviously this doesn’t cover artists without access to this type of provision

Found an interesting article looking at why Bandcamp has been so successful, this part stood out:

"Third, since all our fates are intertwined and things in the universe are connected and so on, Bandcamp should recognize that it can grow the most under certain market conditions that favor it. The conditions most beneficial to Bandcamp are those that favor value creation and that disfavor empty speculation and criminality. To that end, the company should consider meeting with other companies that stand to benefit from rigorous antitrust enforcement, like DuckDuckGo, Affinity, and a whole host of others, form a trade group, and hire some lobbyists.

Right now, the only related group that exists is the Coalition for App Fairness, a trade group formed by Basecamp and Epic Games primarily interested in reducing Apple’s 30-percent app store fees. Reducing these fees is, in the long run, probably important for Bandcamp to reach a certain level of growth: The entire reason that Bandcamp does not allow in-app purchases is so that it can preserve its revenue split with artists without having to also cut in a trillion-dollar company. As of this writing, the Coalition has already successfully gotten the Arizona House of Representatives to pass a bill that would force Apple and Google to allow alternative payment methods to circumvent their gatekeeping."

I do wonder if given energy prices skyrocketing and the age of free money is coming to an end, if Bandcamp will be a blueprint for how labels and artists change the business model. Away from $10 for everything, closer to stream with limits, purchase to remove.

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Thanks for posting that an interesting read.

Nice little post thanks.

Like many others I took a deliberate decision to opt out of the race to the bottom (income wise) that is streaming audio and look for everything I buy on Bandcamp first, precisely because of their ethical stance on sharing revenue and even encouraging people to buy on Bandcamp Fridays.

I would be even happier if there were three or four Bandcamp like businesses out there (with the right amount of music) to stop everything going to one place, but I understand that’s unlikely to happen.

As to labels changing their business models, I would not hold my breath on that one.

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