TiL Epic had purchased BandCamp
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Selling Bandcamp
Thank god, keep your grimy paws off my music, Sweeney.
Monkey's paw: Google buys it
At the same time, Epic is divesting itself of Bandcamp, a deeply strange acquisition in the first place. It’s being sold to Songtradr.
Not today, monkey's paw.
Tomorrow: Songtradr joins the Koch Media family
I might be jaded, but I'd wager that whoever buys it, is going to be worse than having Epic as a rich daddy who is focused on and making money through his core business and doesn't really know what to do with Bandcamp. Entities that buy it are almost certainly going to squeeze harder at the expense of user experience.
Why don't we buy it?
Could this be a kickstarter?
Yeah, people speculated that this was coming.
Also, why the hell do they own bandcamp, lol.
I dunno, company that sells digital content for young people buys company that sells other digital content for young people. I can see the synergy there. Epic Games Store and Bandcamp aren't that far apart.
Wait.... They sell games? I thought, they'd just gift you some every week!
Lol same my entire Epic library is all the free games I get every Thursday like today.
And there's like 300 of them. With Steam, I had to buy my way into a Buridan's donkey position where I don't play anything because I have too much. My man Sweeney made me jaded for free.
Think my number at moment high 100's but only way I have been getting games for the last 6 months though.
Wait that's a good point. I hope I get to keep all my free games.
They wanted to use it to sell music licences for games and media production and the like. But it never really worked out, so they've sold it to a company that already actually knows how to do that.
Also, why the hell do they own bandcamp, lol.
Because a gaming company with a successful battle royale is like a mule with a spinning wheel or something.
A good reason would have been potential "synergies" with Harmonix, which they also own, but I don't recall ever seeing anything about that. Collaboration between the company that sells music and the company that makes music games seems like a no-brainer to me.
Thank fucking god they're selling Bandcamp before they had a chance to ruin it🙏
Now it'll go to some private equity vampire who will really ruin it
It went to Songtradr, who are mostly a music licencing company. So I'm guessing that at least initially things are going to stay the same but that musicians are going to get nagged into letting Songtradr put their stuff up on their big licencing store. And then enshittification, because that's how absolutely everything is going.
as of right now Songtradr is still run by actual musicians so it probably won’t be so bad
but that could always change down the road
They're also increasing the price of V-Bucks to try to get even more money out of Fortnite players.
This is the part that blows my mind. When you have a money-printing machine like Fortnite and you still manage to lose money, maybe it's the CEO you need to be firing.
The Bandcamp sale is hopefully good news. Songtradr looks like they're just in the music business and don't (from their Wikipedia page) have any obviously dodgy investors.
Narrator: No dodgy investors... Yet.
Indeed
They also bought 7digital.com this year, which is a site I sometimes buy MP3s from since they have a better selection of mainstream record-label stuff than Bandcamp (no Amazon MP3s here in Canada).
Godot seeing both Unity and Epic implode in the same month: "now's the time"
The second good news for Godot today and I'm here for it
People are losing their jobs. Their families are going to be in serious distress. I don't wish layoffs on anyone.
The reason they're going through layoffs is because they hired unsustainably and chose to do layoffs instead of reducing salaries. This is something that is far more often avoided with democratically owned and community driven projects like Godot, or even better, worker cooperatives and unionised workplaces, where e.g. Mandrogon chose to be more careful, and unionised auto-workers in Germany chose a temporary pay-cut during a recession to avoid having to fire people.
I'm not happy that these people got fired, but there's a systemic problem here and Godot and other democratic structures of ownership help to alleviate that. Which is related to the first bit of good news today: Brackeys, the de-facto Unity YouTuber with a direct line of communications to Unity who retired 3 years ago - curiously 1 day after Unity went public through an IPO - rose from his grave to champion democratic ownership and is now learning Godot.
Man, Gamers™ get fuckin' vicious when it comes to things like this that make them click different icons than the ones they like. It's pretty gross.
Having been through a few myself.. it sucks but you plan for it. Technology is rapidly changing. If you're employed at a tech company you need to plan to be at another I've shortly because the companies implode quickly as the technology evolves.
You adapt or you don't. There's nothing sad about it, it's the way it is.
It's funny really. They probably could continued growth had Tim Sweeney just swallowed his pride and accepted the 30% commission rate. Instead, the game has a nearly non-existent prominence on mobile because of it.
Didn't they just buy Bandcamp?
Good thing I'm developing all of my games in Unreal right now.
Unity has fallen, billions must use blueprints
Lol