(no subject)

[olivermoss]

Epic Games bought Bandcamp. Bandcamp is where you buy music if you want the max amount to go to the artist, but have no ability to make playlists. The site's UI sucks, because they money goes elsewhere. Epic Games is a platform known for having massive amounts of money and doing big moves with having platform exclusives. A lot of gamers hate them, but have had to join to keep playing the same franchises they have for years. This could be a big move against Spotify.

On one hand, breaking up Spotify's hold on the market is good. On the other hand, Epic is known for big moves that are... sometimes popular and sometimes horrible. I have a lot of music over there, all my The Midnight albums, etc. So I am a bit alarmed by this. Bandcamp allows people to DL the music they buy, and over the next week I will download every purchase.

Comments

[bluedreaming]

Thanks for the heads up! I need to make sure I’ve downloaded all my music too.

[mistressofmuses]

I... had not heard about this, which surprises me, because I have several friends who sell their music on Bandcamp.

Yeah, I think it's time to make absolutely sure I have all my Bandcamp stuff downloaded.

If this does become viable competition for Spotify, that would be cool. But I've appreciated what Bandcamp is and does (best percent of revenue to artists, especially with Bandcamp Fridays), and worry about that changing for the worse in the future.

The announcement certainly sounds positive, and like things aren't changing for the worse, but... announcements always sound that way, and things could tank hard a year or two down the line if there's suddenly a change in philosophy.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, this just broke today afaik. I follow some musicians who were trying to make sense of it. While I like someone making power moves against Spotify's dominance, I don't trust Epic and while they aren't going to change anything right now... let's see if that is still true in 8 months. Epic tends to build markets on platform exclusives and then pretty much bashed their way into the gaming platform game by buying exclusives and even offering new AAA games for free. They tend to take a sledgehammer to the market to up the install base.

... But also Joe Rogan sucks and maybe they'll introduce playlist functionality. I will be happy if Spotifty falters and I can actually listen to music on bandcamp instead of buying there... then heading over to YT to listen.

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah, I feel like Epic could very easily take this in a very different direction if they decide that would be better for them. I hope not... but I know better than to trust companies to make decisions I agree with, ha.

Playlist functionality would be pretty cool tho.

[rekishi]

meep. it's good that I have downloaded mine but I thought I'd have more time in discovering new music over there..