Make sure to archive your bandcamp collection, which you can do with the following script: https://github.com/easlice/bandcamp-downloader
Other downloaders only target the openly available mp3 files.
You should always archive your collection anyways. One negative thing about bandcamp is that artists/labels/bandcamp can remove anything at anytime for any reason, so things you paid for can straight up disappear. This was very disappointing to discover. Note that sometimes things are set as hidden, rather than outright removed. This info may be outdated, as the relevant support page seems to gave changed from the last time I looked at it.
Because of their no DRM policy and full on downloads, not just streaming, Bandcamp has basically become the only place I’ll buy music outside of CDs.
I’m happy enough to hand artists money if it’s easy and I can archive a lossless copy, but if they start fucking around with things, I’ll go right back to doing what I was before. That said, if they fix the outright removal of paid things problem, and start treating “artist” as first class instead of “label” in searches and links, I’ll be singing their praises.
Does much the same thing, but it unpacks the zips and tracks the directories. It can run as a docker container which syncs your collection on a daily timer. The use case is to download your purchases to local directories for use with Jellyfin/Plex/etc. You can just buy music and it'll appear on your local media server automatically within a day.
didn't want to create an issue on github for this but just looked at it and seems to have a duplicated PUID setting (the 2nd should be PGID I guess) in entrypoint.sh
> Because of their no DRM policy and full on downloads, not just streaming, Bandcamp has basically become the only place I’ll buy music outside of CDs.
Just so you know, Apple and Amazon also offer DRM free music downloads. Obviously, you have to actually buy the individual song or album, not a streaming plan.
In Apple's case you do need to install iTunes to get your DRM-free file (on Windows, I'm not sure what the status is on Mac nowadays), which kind of sucks.
I have also purchased music on Amazon and let's not pretend its "full on downloads", Amazon has V0 MP3 only iirc and Bandcamp offers ever format under the sun including FLAC and ALAC.
Don't know about Apple because iTunes doesn't have Linux support and the whole setup of downloading an app in order to download a file strikes me as a bit gross.
It's true Amazon doesn't offer lossless audio downloads, but they're very good quality, and DRM-Free.
iTunes downloads are AAC, 250+ kb/s (remember this bitrate is with a more efficient codec).
I'm probably opening a can of worms here, but I'm really quite skeptical more than one in a million people could tell the difference between iTunes and lossless in a blind test. Maybe drop that to one in a thousand for Amazon vs Lossless. (I really do wish Amazon offered AAC downloads.)
For me it’s not about somehow hearing a difference (at least, not anymore, especially at my age. Thought I do remember the days when mp3s had a good chance of sounding tinny from bad encoding, even when done by myself from a CD). Honestly, I probably have a nonzero amount of bandcamp flac files that are actually just mp3’s that were converted, but I’m unlikely to ever know unless I analyze the waveform.
For me it’s about having a reference/master copy to archive and then modify, cutting parts away I don’t like, applying equalization, etc and compressing for streaming/loading on a device. I am not going to compound losses on a file if I can help it.
Storage space is trivial these days, so just grabbing a flac file and declaring that it’s perfectly as the artist intended removes any potential cognitive load of trying to evaluate audio quality or “which of these mp3 files is the best one to archive” anxiety.
This is what I do as well. I prefer to have the FLAC files for local playback and archiving then have a script which watches the FLAC folder, converts to v0 MP3 which then gets synced to my phone using Syncthing (because phones have such limited storage these days without Micro SD).
> I'm really quite skeptical more than one in a million people could tell the difference
Consider that lossless is good not only for listening, but also for transcoding. For example, when you want to use a media player with limited formats, or when the inevitable future codecs become popular.
(And for archival of digital source material, lossless is the only sensible option.)
AAC is one of the most widely used and implemented codecs in existence. It’s extremely unlikely that you’ll ever need to transcode it for compatibility since the only reason to do so (licensing) becomes moot over a preservation timeframe as patents expire. If you aren’t noticing technical defects in your recordings now, you’re really not going to care in 20 years - many of us will be lucky to still hear well enough!
> And for archival of digital source material, lossless is the only sensible option.
I work in digital preservation and one thing everyone is keenly aware of is the cost of storing large amounts of data. Archivists like lossless, of course, but if it’s below the level where humans can notice problems they’re often more forgiving than you might think because preserving twice as many works with the same storage budget has its own appeal. Your personal music collection is probably small enough that it fits in your personal storage slop but maybe that’s not true if you’re a huge fan or partial to high-res soundboard recordings, and if you’re archiving for a larger group you’ll start to exhaust what capacity you can get for free.
> that’s not true if you’re a huge fan or partial to high-res soundboard recordings, and if you’re archiving for a larger group you’ll start to exhaust what capacity you can get for free.
But hard drives are cheap. I have a multi-TB hard drive that is used exclusively to store my music. When that fills, I'll just get another.
> It's true Amazon doesn't offer lossless audio downloads, but they're very good quality, and DRM-Free
They are DRM-free, but I wouldn't characterize the MP3s as "very good quality". They're only OK. It was the quality of their encodings that got me to stop buying music downloads from Amazon.
I'm a DJ on mid-range monitoring hardware and I can definitely hear the difference with apple's encodes vs FLAC, at least on their older encodes. I am not 100% sure its the compression protocol (could be differences in mastering since streaming has different requirements) but the attentuation on bass and watery-sounding cymbals stick out like a sore thumb in the right listening environment
I only buy music on itunes as a last resort, so I don't have a huge sample size.
Note that parent is a DJ and while DJing the files are bot just reproduced but usually there is some digital processing involved. This makes it easier to hear the difference.
Maybe but I don't do critical listening on club systems unless I'm checking my own mixdowns. Unless the DJ is redlining (which they shouldn't be if they're competent) the audio should come out of the mixer relatively unmolested. My critical listening rig is a broadcast amp with two passive studio monitors.
Should also note I can't hear the different between well-encoded 320kbit and FLAC. But lower bitrates (256kbit and lower) on mp3 are audible.
I showed a friend once how bitrate and sampling frequency start to really matter when doing stuff like slowing down a lot. But I guess it's not typical in DJing.
I generally record everything in 44khz, but I will record at 192khz if I know I will be doing any time stretching. The high sampling frequency matters for that.
I can spot and recognize the audio on ABX if I focus with basically a 100% rate on the infamous ABX test website with a HD600 headphone, so basically a crap one. Now if you ask me which one would be the best sounding or lossless (for the "highest" quality one, obviously for other it's relatively easy to spot in a clean environment), I believe I would have a harder time.
It's a shame (and puzzling really) that Apple only offers lossless on the streaming side and not on the purchase side. I don't need a physical CD, just the bits on it.
Afaik 7digital is the main backing service of a lot of streaming sites like qobuz and Deezer.
7digital is chock full of spam. Spotify, for all their faults, has some people who care about quality on those sort of things (the old Echo Nest people). 7digital and their white-label frontends don't, they're skeleton crew operations.
I hope they understand, they can't run Bandcamp like that. Bandcamp has had problems like this in the past, with people spamming the services with other people's music and pretending to be them. It happened to an old classmate of mine who's a reasonably well known Jazz musician. Someone pretended to be her on Bandcamp for years.
If this roll-up company plans to run Bandcamp like 7digital, there will be a ton more of stuff like that.
7digital doesn't accept music directly from artists, it's up to their distributor to ensure the music is valid... and there are several distributors that are known to be very very lax in that regard.
The 7digital acquisition is still pretty fresh, so your experience with them was the state of things prior to the acquisition. Also moving forward, remember that this was already the state of things on Bandcamp, lest people forget and think that the impersonations started after this acquisition.
Songtradr's core business has been B2B sync licensing. One of the reasons "Trust" is such a big deal on the website is that very large brands can't risk having a debacle where it looks like they've stolen music. So we do a lot of vetting of information before music is made available to our B2B partners.
Rest assured that if things slide in a direction, it'll be towards more vetting, not less.
Unfortunately, that is a big if and is frequently an issue on Bandcamp where stuff you get in flac has been passed through some lossy format. 7digital often sells flac for more money so hopefully that makes them more likely to verify that they are actually lossless (I haven't found an issue from them but only have a few albums there since the negative of them is the distributer model that is heavily geographically restricted).
if you digitized at 24 bit, then 16 bit is technically compressed. with flac, the waveforms aren't compressed, but the amplitude is, so audio buffs claim they can hear more separation. I can't hear it, but I also can't taste the difference between coffee bean origins, but I know people who can.
FLAC supports bit depths between 4 and 32 bits per sample (the reference decoders only support up to 24 bits per sampl). Other than that, it does not change the bit depth of the data.
You could hear the difference with a 24 to 16 conversion only because it usually involves dithering, which means there is some injected noise. If they choose not to do that, 16-bit dynamic range is enough to store someone whispering in your ear next to a running jet engine.
According charts in google, a jet engine at 100 yards distance is 105dB louder than a whisper. 16 bits can do 96dB without dither.
More importantly, the problem isn't trying to hear 96dB of range all at once. The baseline is fixed in place, so when you have a quiet section all those high bits are 0 and you need the low bits to have enough detail by themselves. And a whisper is pretty far from the quietest thing you might have in a track.
If you can hear the dithering noise, then I'm pretty sure there are sounds you're hearing that would be wrong or missing without the dither.
I'm pretty sure the 16-vs-24 thing has been proven already. 24-bit only really makes sense if you're fucking with the material. Same with 44.1khz vs higher sample rates.
They have the same problem as nearly every other digital music store that isn't beatport.... and that is that they aren't beatport (or rather, they don't have beatport's catalog)
There's no evidence that more than a very small percentage of humans (if even that) can differentiate between reasonable bit-rate pyscho-acoustic (lossy) compression and the source material.
Double-blind tests have made this abundantly clear.
If you really can hear a difference, you've either got particularly poorly compressed files, or are in a tiny minority of us.
A huge portion of all compressed media files are poorly compressed files. Often these poorly compressed files come directly from music distributor with the wrong compression settings, or with really really bad noise. Remember, many music distributors are working with old systems (unable to upgrade either due to driver/software or licensing issues), outdated software, and plain old junky audio interfaces, etc.
Lossless (when used properly and able to algorithmically guarantee what comes out == what goes into the compression toolchain) avoids the whole issue altogether, and that's what's valuable about it.
Focusing on whether compression captures every nuance of uncompressed sound is the wrong battle. The real battle is against careless distributors and bad artifacts introduced by poor compression settings and often incorrectly coded compression utilities used throughout the music industry.
(ie we on hn might all be using Lame or the Fraunhofer mp3 encoders, but a lot of music producers/distributors will be using custom / closed source encoders, or even audio workstations with the encoder implemented in hardware, and those might or might not be encoding mp3 correctly.)
Poorly compressed files is usually the problem, and when lossless files are relatively low burden (what's a few gb between friends. I'm not storing them on my 64gb ipod anymore), i'd rather just have the lossless ones.
I'm aware of those studies. Nonetheless, the difference to my ears, in my settings, with my equipment, is not slight. It's screaming-in-your-face obvious.
Whether it's because of the math or because of poorly done encoding is only of academic interest. It happens regardless of the cause. Using a lossless encoding resolves the issue entirely.
Interesting - it's a persistent and annoying problem. I assumed that better bit rates would improve the issue but most compressed music I listen to is AAC where it may be better.
It's interesting how easy miscommunication happens. I said it's mainly for one thing, not the other. I didn't say it wasn't for or never used for other purposes. People are misreading that "not the other" as though I used a period instead of a comma. Read it as "not mainly for listening" and you'll read it the way it's intended.
Carry on listening to a format most people use for purposes other than listening if that works for you. I can't stop you with a simple dependent clause. You're safe.
And archiving. Personally I prefer to have the lossless format stored in my digital vault and use a lossy version on my portable devices for storage efficiency.
> downloading an app in order to download a file strikes me as a bit gross
It's impossible to be a casual user of the Apple ecosystem. There are photos on my kids iPads that I'd like to save to the family archive, but I can't muster up the energy to work out how to do it again.
I've done it before but long enough ago that I've forgotten the method but remember the frustration and effort - I know it's going to be less than what my exaggerating memory tells me, but... eughhhh, Apple.
For an online music store with DRM free downloads I like Qobuz. Available quality depends on the album/song, but if something is not on Bandcamp it's a good, no-nonsense alternative.
Just tried them... they make you download individual tracks like they've never heard of a zip file, just to make you try their app out of annoyance. Not really no-nonsense :(.
Oof, that's frustrating and a recent change. There used to be a quality selection at the top and a "Download all" button that would download an archive of the entire purchase.
I actually love watermarks as a solution for DRM-Free media, because they make illegal sharing more cumbersome but don't impede legitimate customers (at least in any way I can think of). In fact, I kind of feel like watermarks add value, lending an authenticity to my purchase which a pirated copy wouldn't have.
No, not for a while. As I understand it they didn't have one at first but after some asshole used it as a backup (since they let anyone upload "music") and made a blog post about it they added one. Quite possibly they wanted to anyway and it was just a convenient excuse.
Thanks for asking, because it turns out I was wrong :(. I should know better than to rely on my memory these days. If you download the same FLAC file twice it won't be the same (possibly unless the two downloads are within a few days) but I just checked and they do decode to the same WAV. I haven't checked multiple accounts but when trying to find the article I thought I remembered I found someone saying they had checked and found them to be the same (not that long ago). I'm not sure if the FLAC or other specific file downloads are ever exactly the same between accounts, possibly not and they record the generation timestamp or such, but it seems the audio itself is not watermarked.
Apple does indeed include the original purchaser in the MPEG-4 metadata. I have no idea whether or not they also do any kind of more advanced watermarking of the actual audio data itself.
> Because of their no DRM policy and full on downloads, not just streaming, Bandcamp has basically become the only place I’ll buy music outside of CDs.
> That said, if they fix the outright removal of paid things problem, and start treating “artist” as first class instead of “label” in searches and links, I’ll be singing their praises.
I had paid things removed from my bandcamp collection a few years ago. The only recourse provided by band camp was to contact the artist(al things were from the same artist). If the experience of another user that responded to you about being able to download removed things that were paid for... well that is much better than the bandcamp experience since I can not download things that were removed.
> One negative thing about bandcamp is that artists/labels/bandcamp can remove anything at anytime for any reason, so things you paid for can straight up disappear.
That seems borderline illegal.. I can't imagine Valve removing a Steam game from someone's library if they already bought it without the Internet giving them a lot of bad press, they'll just delist the item from being purchased.
Given that Bandcamp does allow downloading your purchases (indeed, I've only ever used them that way), I suppose they could argue that anything beyond a download immediately after purchase was only ever just a convenience feature.
If they get a lot of customers that effectively treat them as a streaming service, tough, I suppose I can see that there might be a certain impedance mismatch of expectations there.
Bandcamp, 7digital, rarely CDs (but I do still have a USB DVD recorder so I can still rip). And honestly, if I find that something is no longer available (like Spirogyra's "Bells, Boots & Shambles") and the composer is no longer living, I'll take it off something like YouTube if there's a decent quality rip available there. In some cases, original recordings aren't great quality anyway.
Throwaway, but I work at Bandcamp. We're all very frightened and don't know what the future holds. We were told that some, but not all, will get offers from Songtradr and it may be up to a month before we receive an offer. It's pretty depressing.
For what it's worth in this depressing and anxious waiting period: thank you for your efforts, and I sincerely hope you can continue as you have been.
As many other commenters have pointed out, Bandcamp is a great service. For me, it's really the only place I purchase music because of its commitment to paying artists fairly and offering FLAC downloads of the purchased music.
Again, thank you and good luck!
As an aside, I support unionisation precisely as the counterpoint it is intended to be, and any management actions against unionisation should be treated with suspicion and I generally look at that kind of behaviour as the base reason why unions need to exist in the first place.
(Both sides can be corrupt, but if there's only power on one side, then the corruption is both more likely to occur and increase).
I hope the unionisation thing is totally unrelated to this situation.
Thank you, I appreciate it! A few quick questions:
1. How are benefits/compensation? Competitive?
2. Are there a lot of international remote employees at SongTradr? Bandcamp has a lot of people around the globe and we'd love to know if SongTradr is likely to make offers internationally or if it'll just be near offices.
1. Compensation is what I would call mid-tier competitive for each region. You won't get an SFO salary in Spain. You'll get more at FAANG or a more tech-focused startup, but I left a FAANG job to come here.
2. Lots of international employees. No exec-level requirements of working from an office, but some teams may have their own rules.
3. It's middle of the pack, but that's mainly because I get stuck doing jobs I hate because I'm the only one with the experience, and we've got a client breathing down our neck. it's the burden of being the Sr Dev, but eventually, I'll have trained my team well enough that I can do a bit of real innovation... until then, I really believe we're enabling artists to make a better living by opening up a market (sync) that has generally been reserved for artists that are already living comfortably.
Do you think this sale was intended as a union-busting move? It sounds like they're not retaining staff with the sale, and this timing seems to match with Bandcamp's staff unionization efforts.
It was probably mostly about cash balance for the company. I once worked in a company that was a niche business but very profitable and with predictable cash flow. That made it very quick and easy to sell when needed, basically a tradeable asset. Twice in the space of a few years it was sold when the current owner wanted some cash and another had excess cash. Sounds like this is the case with Bandcamp.
In my middle management experience, being profitable and owned by a company that didn't share the business domain was best as they mostly left us alone as long as we were profitable. When they finally got bought by a similar business, that's when they tried (and failed) to merge jobs. I've since left but they've recently been spun out yet again.
These decisions take time to make. Not sure when the union efforts started though - but not sure how likely this would be as a result of those efforts..
Bandcamp workers voted in favor of a union in March 16th of this year. It was one year and a week after Epic acquired the company.
It's impossible to know what Epic is thinking know, or even when they bought BC, but 6 months sounds like how long it would take to sell Bandcamp off as a retaliation for unionizing.
When Epic was announced as a buyer, it kinda struck me that Valve would've been a better steward for the platform in the short term, with potential synergy in the long term considering how many OST they already sell for games.
Seconded. Bandcamp is one of the few platforms that I really respect. It's done great things for artists and listeners. I'm happy to spend money there.
thanks for your contributions to bandcamp, I'd love to connect with you to explore opportunities working on www.kuky.com we're a platform that actually pays creators for their music.
Epic bought Bandcamp less than 2 years ago. No one had any idea why at the time and now they are already selling it, almost certainly at a loss. This is the type of situation that would cause senior leadership heads to roll if there was any justice in the world, instead 16% of employees get laid off.
Turns out that growth based on an assumption that your model of "slot machines for children" is not infinitely exponential and cannot subsidise "free games on PCs to compete with Steam while trying to dictate to Apple how they build their products".
Epic is a proper trainwreck, and summerises all that is wrong with management.
It feels like there is absolutely no direction except "grow customer base in every way except treating our customer and employees like humans", to the point where they give games away, and still can't take over the market.
In which way Epic did not treat employees like humans? I know few people at Epic myself and I've never heard them say anything but Epic being their best employer in their career, by far.
Also, how do they not treat customers like humans?
Ugh. I wasn't happy that Epic owned it, but they didn't seem to be doing anything to harm it yet. I don't know much about Songtradr, but I don't trust a company that is focused on licensing and not creation.
SongTradr's main business focuses on earning money for musicians. We aren't in the business of owning music and then licensing it, we're in the business of connecting musicians with companies that want music. some of it is advertising, some is YouTube/content creation, and some is for streaming (https://pretzel.rocks, which is how I joined the company).
We support the artists by finding diverse ways for them to monetize their music. I've purchased a dozen albums on Bandcamp. All of the artists are already on pretzel (our content acquisition team works hard, especially on internal referrals), but I look forward to simplifying the process down to a simple click (right now it's DDEX and spreadsheets)
I'm not a fan of our marketing, but it's more aimed at content licensees, not licensors.
My buddies and I did a project for them a few years back working on a song discovery mechanism (which they patented) for use when finding songs to pitch for things like ads and tv shows that might be of interest to your company.
Every company has rationalizations about how they are helping their customers, and one can hardly blame artists for doing what they need to do in order to survive, but I doubt most of them dream of having their work used by big shitty brands.
I know a few that have recognized how hard it is to make a living as a musician and, as an adaptation of sorts, wholeheartedly jumped into the world of “sync licensing” (or is it synch?), where they are actually focusing on writing music specifically to appeal to the commercial needs of “big shitty brands.” It makes perfect sense to me. It’s a way to use your skills to help someone else do what they want to do. It’s not like I’ve had the luxury of building whatever software I want for most of my career. It usuall comes down to what some product marketing douche is convinced will make money.
I really like your comment. I don't understand why it's OK to shit on artists/musicians for selling their music to "big shitty brands" when I've written a ton of code for "big shitty brands" most of my career.
I meant that all of the artists that I purchased music from. When I like a band, I make sure to tell my buddy over in the group that signs artists. Pretzel has great terms that are non-exclusive, so it's easy to get a 'yes'.
You don't trust a company that is trusted by Heineken?
But for real. What kind of company needs to list a bunch of random companies and say they are "trusted by" them. If you need to tell me how trusted you are then I really don't trust you.
This makes me very nervous. Bandcamp is one of the few great sources to buy new music and support artists rather than labels. I hope that it doesn't get ruined.
I work at SongTradr, and while I'm not involved with the acquisition, I wouldn't expect it to drastically change for end users. I hope that we'll drastically improve things for musicians, offering them more ways to earn money from their music.
Best case scenario in my mind is that bandcamp stays almost entirely the same, except artists get some additional settings on their music metadata that lets them turn on “offer my music for licensing on SongTradr” and set prices and terms. Nothing different at all on the bandcamp fan-facing experience, but it makes the music suddenly show up in licensing searches on some other b2b UX and is just another no-brainer income stream for the artist.
Maybe a stupid question but if songtradr focuses more on B2B licensing of music could't they hammer out exclusive deals and remove the music entirely from end customer catalog? I mainly think about licensing it to other streaming services.
People have already mentioned that some music disappeared from the catalog because artists pulled it. I wonder if this acquisition would make it more common.
While it's entirely possible, I've never heard of this specific thing happening. Companies want music that is popular. They might pay enough to make music exclusive in the B2B licensing, but they don't want music that nobody can listen to. The only thing I could think of is if a movie/game wants to buy out an album as their soundtrack, but again, I've not heard of this actually happening, at least pulling back a release.
Likely music disappearing from Bandcamp is likely because the artist signed with a Label and the Label wants exclusive ability to market the artist's music.
From what I can tell, Epic did the gutting today, and it's left to us to pick up the pieces. It doesn't make sense to me, letting everyone go before the acquisition, why not let the acquiring company figure out what to do with the employees. It stinks of internal politics.
Songtradr has done a good job with previous acquisitions, including mine. I'm no longer working on that product, but it's doing well. I don't agree with every decision being made for it, but I didn't before the acquisition, so... no big change there.
Based on the bandcamp employee throwaway that commented earlier, I wonder if epic just wanted credit for cutting a lot of jobs to make shareholders happy. That “16%” announced is a big number that would be less attention-grabbing if it didn’t include all of bandcamp.
What product of yours was acquired? I would like to enter the Music services business and it would be great to connect with someone that has hands on experience.
Music Services is a tough place to do product development in. Nobody is flush with cash, so all deals are percentage based... so you have to generate pass-through revenue. It's impossible to generate revenue from the general public, as they can get music from spotify/youtube for free, so you have to find a niche.
I know several startups in the music space that are begging to be acquired because they didn't realize they needed pass-through revenue, they thought they could do what another company was doing, but cheaper, but the problem is that few established labels are willing to move off their old providers, as they value their industry relationships.
> Songtradr is talking up using its licensing prowess to give opportunities to Bandcamp artists — including licensing on Epic games.
So... Epic sells bandcamp, a profitable business unit, to another entity which will then sell bandcamp assets back to ... Epic. ?? And Epic's competitors. Why would Epic go out of its way to support a company that is supporting its competitors?
(author here) I'm assuming because sync rights are complicated, and Epic didn't quite realise how complicated. But Songtradr literally does rights as its main business. So this would work like Epic outsourcing it to a specialist, with an extra step.
I'm still boggling that Epic thought tiny independent record labels would be good for pressuring the union to stop. Tiny labels these days tend to be set up by musicians who work too hard and who likely have close personal knowledge of working shitty jobs. Epic really had NO IDEA.
I think you're exactly right. Epic thought that buying a music company would let them acquire what they needed to do sync... but sync doesn't matter for Bandcamp, so it was hard for them to align.
(while I work for SongTradr, I know nothing of the acquisition, so this is just speculation)
Just hypothetically, if I wrote a Minecraft mod that replaced the in-game music with music from a streaming service (to be clear, one the user would need to have a subscription for, and authorize via the streaming service's OAuth API)...
the main concern here would be the streaming service. If the streaming service offers a full API for custom implementations, then you're probably fine. If, instead, you're using their non-public API, you'll probably get a Cease And Desist and your API keys revoked.
Then, like the other response mentioned, there's the streaming aspect. You, probably won't get sued, but anyone that streams with that music will get muted on Twitch and Revenue Claimed on YT.
Why build a minecraft mod for this, when you can just play music on your computer and turn off the minecraft music? A few hotkeys and you don't even have to swap screens to change the music.
Music in games can be contextual, and it's more fun if you score that beforehand than stepping out and doing it as you go. You may also want to enjoy the score a map/modpack maker intended.
Since that’s all client side, I don’t think sync rights come into it… unless you start streaming while playing the mod, in which case you have now synchronized the music to video and are in violation.
Buying songtradr to complement bandcamp might have been a better option, because they could then be making revenue from any other game that licensed via songtradr. ?
It isn’t even that per-se. It’s treatment of dividends as income vs long term capital gains. Very, very different tax rates and degree of flexibility re: when you’d get taxed.
* Unlike many other tech foundations, it's a 501(c)(3) charity, which dramatically limits the ability of industry titans to buy influence — since donations are tax deductible and thus cannot be used to unduly advantage any commercial entity.
* The Board of Directors is elected by the "Membership", which is primarily comprised of individuals who have contributed the most towards ASF projects. It's a sort of co-op structure which ensures that the org stays aligned to the interests of certain stakeholders.
(FWIW I used to be very involved at the ASF but have not been active for several years.)
I've often wondered whether an analogous charitable organization owned by musicians could slot into music distribution, in the space of DistroKid / TuneCore / CDBaby — handling royalties, QC'ing releases, and bargaining with audience-facing distributors like Spotify, Amazon, Apple, etc.
It can work and there are some organizations run that way.
But just because something is a charity with a Board of Directors doesn't mean it can't be looted in various ways. It's happened before and will happen again.
how can you have a list of something like "will never"? a list of people claiming "will never" but never is a really really long time, and nobody can predict the future.
> Lichess, legally, is now a charitable organization
I’m not saying Lichess will do something like this, but have you heard the saga of the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan (ERIM)?
It grew out of the University of Michigan — as a non-profit. Its president and board spun off a for-profit subsidiary owning the majority of its work, people, and assets and leaving a small fraction for the non-profit.
Then, the for-profit entity was bought by a succession of other entities: Veridian, General Dynamics, and now MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates.
I only learned of this while working with a graybeard from the original ERIM during their General Dynamics days — he was still sore about it.
So never doubt a president/ceo and board if they’re really determined in going for-profit!
This language is offensive (to me [0]) and sexist. Feel free to use it if it really floats your boat, but you could get the same effect without the implicit sexism just using "oldster". You could also say "older colleague", or even just "person".
This sort of deliberate bad faith interpretation of another's comment is the worst form of virtue signaling hysterics I've witnessed outside of a lab.
The OP is referring to a specific person (and used the pronoun 'he'). It is in fact not considered by any reputable etymological source as a slur or as a sexist term in any capacity.
I've seen complaints about it on HN before, so don't go claiming that this has never come up before.
The term is widely used by younger programmers in online discussions to refer to unnamed (and it oftens seems as if the name is almost not actually known) older programmers. I've seen it on HN, Reddit, Twitter (RIP) and Mastodon. It's not a reference to specific person, it's a reference to a perceived role.
Even if a person has/had a gray beard, why is that the characteristic used to describe them?
And it is sexist only in an implicit sense: it is obviously a term used to describe (a) only men (b) older programmers. There is absolutely no chance that someone says "I talked to a graybeard about it" to mean that they spoke to a (older) female programmer.
Thank you for sharing your feelings on this one, I hadn't heard of "graybeard" categorized that way by anyone before, though I can see your point-of-view and respect it.
That being said, if the person was an actual human being, and subsequently had a graybeard (as I do!) - would that still be offensive?
I don't intend to be combative, simply trying to learn!
If you really feel that they color and presence of their facial hair was the best way to describe whatever it was that felt relevant to mentioning them, I can't really call that offensive.
But the term "graybeard" is known in these circles as a reference to an older, always male, programmer.
What actually matters is that they've been around the block enough times to understand (for example) that Rust probably will not solve every programming issue known to current programmers. Their gender and facial hair status is not really relevant. "Corner office grump" would be another term that I'd find entirely acceptable: non-gendered, unconcerned with physical appearance, but encapsulating much the same sort of personality that "graybeard" is attempting to evoke.
Old women grow beards too, though it is very unfashionable at the moment. British comedian Liza Tarbuck did an entertaining and thought provoking piece on the subject a few years ago but I was disappointed to learn that the beard she sported was stuck on rather than home grown.
Now more than ever I think it's important to support small, independent music sellers. I buy a lot from Bleep and Boomkat but there are a lot of other good options too.
What would an employee-owned Bandcamp-like platform look like? Has anyone experimented with or attempted this model to prevent or stave off enshittification?
this exactly the type of platform where community ownership makes a tons of sense but I don't know if we've seen many examples of it actually working and resulting in something sustainable
there are people working on questions like "what if the owners could have exited to their community instead of Epic"
Sounded cool at first to me, but no clear pricing means I'm out. Pay-per-play also feels worse than a monthly flat fee. Even if it's cheaper than a standard streaming service for me, that means I'll have second thoughts about leaving music on overnight while I sleep. Or if I don't really like the first few tracks from an artist I hear, is it worth it to keep digging through their discography and pay for songs I might not enjoy?
> Pay 1/4 of a penny the first time you play, then a little more each time you replay.
Then it’s yours forever.
How much is "a little more"?
Owning songs after you've listened to them enough is a nice idea, but since my library is about 20k songs, that's 28k dollars until I own them all, so it's not like I'd ever have hopes of not having to pay to listen anymore.
If they paid more for it than its worth, than they lost money the instant they bought it. If they sold it to a company that thought it could increase the value of bandcamp by owning it, then they might have gotten more for it than it was worth when they owned it, hence increasing their own value (or at least making a valuation which was previously potential concrete).
I'm not an accountant, but I know enough to have a sense of much "creativity" is possible. The purchase price might be in the past, while costs are ongoing. Yes there would be a markdown from purchase to sale, but that's a different line item from the annual run rate.
I am mildly amused that the "offer musicians a platform to sell and license their music in one easy place" was the (pivoted[1]) focus of a startup I worked at few years back. Except they were backing it with Ethereum and smart contracts.
[1] about three months before they folded due to the original plan[2] not working.
[2] which involved getting record companies to easily license their music and yes, you are probably laughing at about the right level just now.
> Game music and classical are the same genre, right?
I know that was meant facetiously, but the music in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for one is quite beautiful and made with actual instruments like piano, oboe, violin, guitar. Interactivity is one direction for true innovation in contemporary classical.
This is the sort of thing I meant, yes :-) My kid loves (a) game music (b) classical (c) complicated metal, and I will absolutely hold that these are different faces of the same thing.
The large orchestral scores of many games certainly have deep ties to classical. Parts of the Zelda, Final Fantasy, Dark Souls, etc. But, and this is likely obvious to all involved but said for posterity anyway, not all game music is classical derived. Metroid Prime is electrosynth, Paper Mario is pretty jazzy, and Persona is supremely jazzy with dashes of rock.
of course. But cut scenes with orchestral instruments (even synthesized as they frequently are) are soundtrack music in classical style. That's the stuff I mean.
So THATS why they shadow banned me out of my account for having registered with an obfuscated email address after being cool with it for a dozen years.
Unlikely. There hasn't been time for any policy changes, and either way both Epic and this new buyer seem to be mostly about owning and less so about controlling.
I don't know who needs to hear this, but you can download all the music you uploaded by starting a draft of a Bandcamp subscription service (after buying something to create an account and profile if you don't have one). All your albums will be added to your personal collection. I suggest FLAC.
edit:
Magic trick: open one (1) album. Change it to FLAC. Download.
And once again the money hungry sociopaths are going to ruin a perfect platform that does exactly what it's supposed to and not an iota more on chase of that elusive "infinite" growth, something that only children below the age of 5 and apparently people with MBAs believe to be something actually attainable.
I've posted something to this effect before but I'll post it again. I'm terrified someone is going to enshittify bandcamp.
I used to be a huge what fan, primarily for discovery. Never would've known I liked atmospheric black metal if not for them.
When they closed, I didn't really have enough "in" in the scene to know where other refugees went, so I just shopped around for anywhere else that would let me get "real" (in the what sense of real - decent encodes from raw source material that have the full spectrum and aren't just FLAC encodes of "high quality" mp3's). I don't pretend to be able to hear the difference, but I like it for archival purposes. I have plexamp transcode the audio anyway when I'm on mobile.
Turns out most people don't give a shit so most places don't offer flacs. Except bandcamp. Plus they pay artists fairly, which ended up being as important to me as the flacs as I came to support indie bands for whom selling on bandcamp was a huge lift. I like seeing CDs literally come from residential addresses in Sweden. I like supporting the random 1 dude making awesome metal out of his basement.
I also worry about enshittification of Bandcamp. And I'm an artist with music on the site. I was very nervous about the Epic deal when it happened (figured it was a way to get the founders and the A-round VCs some money in a cash-out after an incredibly long period of time, similar to what happened to Meetup).
But now? Songtradr smells like an investment bank, one that looks at music as "content" or "IP" and wants to license the hell out of it -- and ultimately, own as much of the rights as possible.
They do not strike me as aligned with artist interests, or with the spirit of Bandcamp, which, admittedly, at this late date is mostly a fantasy.
Bandcamp represents the last, best refuge for artists in a world where most companies offer you "exposure," what else would you want, stop whining about being paid, etc. Bandcamp means payment. Which means livelihoods.
Songtradr employee here, we only own a tiny amount of music (that wasn't produced in-house), it was acquired as part of another acquisition and my understanding is that we're trying to divest ourselves of it so that rights holders.
So that can be one less thing you worry about, we're not buying up music.
I joined through the https://pretzel.rocks acquisition (which is where the above mentioned music came from), and they've kept our niche-industry-best 70/30 split on that product.
We're not the bastion that Bandcamp is, but we DO focus on ensuring that youtube influencers and tiktok stars are paying their fair share for the music that they use. We make sure that cosmetic companies using indie artists are paying market rates and not taking advantage of their naiveté.
I hope (though I can't guarantee) that we're able to keep Bandcamp the way it currently is. The company has treated my previous company/brand well, and I'm hoping that carries forward to a brand that carries MUCH MUCH MUCH more gravitas.
But holy hell do I hate our name. We've got other brands that we could use as our main name, but we went with the one that sounds like "Traitor". I blame this on our founder being an Aussie and they sound clearly distinct when they're both in his accent.
The other useful resource I will mention is "soulseek" (https://www.slsknet.org/news/) which is basically old-school direct downloads, and includes a lot of obscure music that you won't find on AppleMusic/Spotify.
Most people from What migrated over to what is now called REDacted. Unfortunately your window for account renewal is long passed, but the large majority of What is on there at this point, so worth going through the interview if you wanna get back into it
I beg you, can you please not fucking ruin it? It's perfect as it is. Artist uploads music, people pay for music and download it. Don't change anything. Don't add new features, don't enshittify existing features, don't make design changes, don't do anything. Bandcamp is done, no need for any further changes, just put it in a cabinet and let it run.
Thanks,
Someone who've spent thousands of dollars on Bandcamp
Greetings and thank you for expressing your valued concern. We wish to emphasize our commitment to customer feedback in our ongoing enhancements.
Allow us to assure you that you will enjoy our latest AI music generation suite as well as an cutting-edge state-of-the-art next-generation AI album cover generator. In tandem with these remarkable enhancements, we will be sprucing our algorithms allowing you to expand your ears to the emerging artists at the forefront of the industry.
Furthermore, we are introducing a suite of premium subscription options, enriched with the ability to curate offline playlists, meticulously optimized at a pristine bit-rate of 32kbps.
Drawing inspiration from the insights garnered from record labels these enhancements epitomize our pioneering advancements, we eagerly anticipate your enthusiastic feedback of these remarkable transformations.
You forgot to mention that you're ending the DRM-free direct download option, don't worry because you can listen to any of the music you've purchased any time in our newly updated website or app! It's now EVEN EASIER to take your music anywhere! No more copying files or worrying about backups!
I appreciate the effort but this was terrifying to read.
I think at this point I try to just not care anymore. Software and businesses that are currently great will go to shit and there's nothing I can do about it. Try to enjoy it whilst it lasts and don't get too attached or involved.
> It's perfect as it is. Artist uploads music, people pay for music and download it. Don't change anything.
Coudn't agree less. Listen: I love Bandcamp and buy a lot of music there. However, it could be so much better. It is far from perfect.
For starters: the collection view. It's as barebones as possible, just a simple grid of stuff you bought. No way of separating albums and tracks (which is why I don't buy single tracks anymore because it just clutters my collection). No way of sorting according to different criteria. No possibility for more compact views (list view, anyone?). I get that lots of people just download stuff and use their own music management software/app, but in that case: why is there no way to download stuff in bulk? Sorry, but it's simply bad. Another thing that has annoyed me for years is if artists release through labels: If I click on an artist, I want to see their music, not all music from the same label so that I have to painfully look through the whole catalogue to find more music from the same artist. Also, if I want to be notified for new music from that artist, I can only follow the label, so I get notified for everything they release. What kind of insanity is this? With very few exceptions, I don't care about labels (sorry label owners, but that's just how it is).
Another point is discovery: Through Bandcamp, I have discovered way more new music than through any other service just by browsing through new releases and the daily picks. However, there's so much more potential here. There already are fans you can follow and artist recommendations, but it's just all extremely clunky and discovering people with similar taste in music is basically impossible. Bandcamp has so much information about my musical taste and which artists I like, it should be able to do much more with this.
> Another thing that has annoyed me for years is if artists release through labels: If I click on an artist, I want to see their music, not all music from the same label so that I have to painfully look through the whole catalogue to find more music from the same artist. Also, if I want to be notified for new music from that artist, I can only follow the label, so I get notified for everything they release. What kind of insanity is this? With very few exceptions, I don't care about labels (sorry label owners, but that's just how it is).
What you describe only happens if a label uses an artist account. Bandcamp introduced label accounts years ago, encourages using them and to my knowledge offers a way to turn artist accounts into label accounts. With a label account both entities, labels and artists, are separated. The label catalogue merely links to the artist's release page while the artist's account can feature releases on several different labels. Of course the release/album page still offers a way back to the label page. It all works as one would expect.
Label accounts are very important for verifying authenticity on Bandcamp.
It's very easy to pick up some small but niche artist that is not on Bandcamp, and upload their music pretending to be them. (It's of course very illegal, but I personally know artists this has happened to).
It's harder to fake an entire label. Before you buy anything on Bandcamp, check that their label links to them, otherwise you could well be supporting a scammer.
> It's very easy to pick up some small but niche artist that is not on Bandcamp, and upload their music pretending to be them.
Yes, quality control is something else where Bandcamp could drastically improve. New releases are riddled with questionable stuff. Blatantly copying an existing artist is one thing, but often it's popular stuff just slightly modified, usually pitched up/down with some new drum loop and then called a day. I know there's a whole artform in remixing/mashups/etc., but there's a line somewhere where it just becomes a lazy rip-off.
Unfortunately some labels deliberately use artist accounts. I can only guess they do so because it keeps their visitors within their catalogue more easily.
With a label account users clicking on the artist on a release page will go to the actual artist page which might contain releases from all kinds of labels.
Yes, I have also seen these label accounts, but somehow, I mostly end up with labels using artists accounts. I guess they don't really want to migrate because in the end, it makes the label less visible when doing so... I think it would be in Bandcamp's best interest if they would pressure labels to take this step, but maybe it has other consequences for labels I'm not aware of.
on discovery, at some point they turned tag pages from paginated into endlessly scrolling kind, and that's been one of the worst thing one could do for discovery. no longer can you actually browse the catalog top to bottom, you're forced to scroll and start from the top every time. oddly enough, there's still pagination in the Discover section of front page, but it only goes back 200 pages, which really isn't that much (those 200 pages might only go back a day/a month/a year, depending on how active a tag is).
for how much music there is, the discovery tools are kinda lacking. you can't really browse the full catalog. especially for stuff that's previously released, but not "popular enough" to be surfaced in 'best selling' sorts. stuff that doesn't make it into 'new' - which can literally be like 'oh, this released a week ago? it's not new already', and doesn't make it into 'best selling' that really only makes already popular stuff more popular, which isn't doing much for actual discovery of others. there's a lot of music that's out there and just yet to be discovered, and it's being held back by platforms that don't really do anything with it. held back by a catalog that lacks browsing tools and doesn't get more things brought to surface. i'd rather see platforms move on from 'making popular stuff more popular' and 'only ever showing stuff that's new new new', and make an actual effort to make all things discoverable.
> Don't add new features, don't enshittify existing features, don't make design changes, don't do anything. Bandcamp is done, no need for any further changes, just put it in a cabinet and let it run.
I primarily use bandcamp for my music, but it's most definitively not perfect. I think I use about 3 browser addons for simple quality of life improvements.
Sometimes the player is on the top left, sometimes it's bound to the bottom, sometimes it's inlined and you can only press play without fast forward.
I think by default there are no or only a few shortcuts?
Playlist only from your collection and mobile only, not on desktop?
I lowkey had high hopes for bandcamp when epic bought it. I though the cash would make them rework the UI into a more consistent experience.
As of right now, it's the same as its always been.
I understand the inclination to pessimism, and it may well be very well grounded, but we should perhaps try to be optimistic and aggressively activist at the same time.
I have a straightforward guide on how to get up and running on windows here: https://github.com/easlice/bandcamp-downloader/issues/21
You should always archive your collection anyways. One negative thing about bandcamp is that artists/labels/bandcamp can remove anything at anytime for any reason, so things you paid for can straight up disappear. This was very disappointing to discover. Note that sometimes things are set as hidden, rather than outright removed. This info may be outdated, as the relevant support page seems to gave changed from the last time I looked at it.
Because of their no DRM policy and full on downloads, not just streaming, Bandcamp has basically become the only place I’ll buy music outside of CDs.
I’m happy enough to hand artists money if it’s easy and I can archive a lossless copy, but if they start fucking around with things, I’ll go right back to doing what I was before. That said, if they fix the outright removal of paid things problem, and start treating “artist” as first class instead of “label” in searches and links, I’ll be singing their praises.