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It seems like the forum is pretty split up by micro-genre these days but I figure this is of interest to all music weirdos. Everyone's favorite streaming service what with the Fridays released a statement outlining the deal: https://blog.bandcamp.com/2022/03/02/bandcamp-is-joining-epic/ So far Bandcamp is (unsurprisingly) claiming this won't change anything about their platform and services. Edit one of the editors has clarified that they deactivated the account on their own: https://twitter.com/modernistwitch/status/1499099815271149569 My initial nuanced opinion is that this will not be a good thing for either artists or users. Bandcamp makes a big deal about being "artist focused" and I heard their CEO was on NPR a few months ago talking about how content he was with the current state of things. deadking fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Mar 2, 2022 |
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Mar 2, 2022 20:49
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https://twitter.com/Vektroid/status/1499084961705381888
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Mar 2, 2022 20:55
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One of the worst things I've seen in the music landscape. Like Vektroid notes in her thread, poo poo was already bad and now they expect us to believe them that Epic will fix it? Those mfs took years before they even added a loving shopping cart to the epic games store dude.
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Mar 2, 2022 21:02
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Quick clarification that one of the BC editors has clarified that they deactivated their own account to avoid all the shouting. The perils of trusting ephemeral Twitter poo poo. Editing the OP in a minute here. https://twitter.com/modernistwitch/status/1499099815271149569
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Mar 2, 2022 21:08
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Why does Epic Games even want to buy Bandcamp? Reading online it has something to do with... the Metaverse?quote:It may seem like a highly unlikely pairing, but acquiring Bandcamp does align with Epic's broadening ambitions for the metaverse as well as CEO Tim Sweeney's intent to create a version of the internet that more closely aligns with the company's vision for Fortnite.
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Mar 2, 2022 21:26
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The last thing I want on earth is to have the kind of stuff I buy on Bandcamp be in any way connected to Fortnite, and I'm extremely certain the people who make the kind of stuff I buy on Bandcamp would vehemently agree. As in fact would the Fortnite audience.
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Mar 2, 2022 22:03
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quote:I’m excited to announce that Bandcamp is joining Epic Games, who you may know as the makers of Fortnite and Unreal Engine, and champions for a fair and open Internet. The company that has thrown around hundreds of millions of fortnite daycare dollars to segregate the PC gaming market over the past few years is widely known as a champion for a fair and open internet. The same company that is 40% owned by Tencent. Seems accurate. Sure, you could use Bandcamp to listen to music from artists you support, but have you considered how fun it could be listening to ads for NFTs in-between tracks?
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Mar 2, 2022 22:31
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Ugh introducing any type of advertising to bandcamp would be so annoying.
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Mar 3, 2022 00:37
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Bloodplay it again posted:The company that has thrown around hundreds of millions of fortnite daycare dollars to segregate the PC gaming market over the past few years is widely known as a champion for a fair and open internet. The same company that is 40% owned by Tencent. Seems accurate. Not to open old wounds but what is the problem with segregating the PC market? I can't get my head around why people are so unhappy about this. This is sad news though, bandcamp has always felt like a fair deal all round
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Mar 3, 2022 08:15
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Really scratching my head about what other people must predominantly listen to and buy on bandcamp to make Epic loving Games think "this'll be a nice addition". Cause my own collection sure as hell can't be representative in the least.
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Mar 3, 2022 08:53
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McFlurry Fan #1 posted:Not to open old wounds but what is the problem with segregating the PC market? I can't get my head around why people are so unhappy about this. I think my own issue with PC games segregation is that Valve spent years creating a store with reviews, community forums, modding/workshop support, achievements, friend/party systems, SteamVR, cloud storage, and tons of other features. They're part of the reason I haven't had to mess with an optical drive in a computer for well over a decade. It took several years to get from the olive green, two-updates-per-day crashfest to the relatively stable behemoth it is today and the issue goes well beyond "why not just open up another launcher?" as often seen online. Epic facilitates scummy deals with games publishers. Advertising under the guise of helping indie devs ("we take a smaller cut than Valve"), their money is more often spent paying out large sums to games publishers for exclusivity deals. For particularly egregious offenders like Square Enix, it leads to situations where a game is released on consoles for $60, more than a year later on PC as a timed Epic Games Store exclusive for $70, and finally on Steam for full price (presumably $70) when that exclusivity ends. There's often a large lapse between a console and a PC release to entice double-dipping, which was annoying by itself, but now there's a third layer to obfuscate things built nearly exclusively with fortnite money. Developers often get paid bonuses based on game sales. It's slimy to purposefully tank sales by releasing your game exclusively on the Epic storefront. It means the publisher gets to pocket that exclusivity cash from Epic and pay it out to themselves while pointing fingers at things like piracy as the reason why employees in constant crunch don't get a big bonus for all their hard work. Even more frustratingly, you'd think all this exclusivity money would lead to a better product, but the FF7 Remake PC port is shockingly barebones, especially when put up next to Final Fantasy 15, which really makes use of what PCs have to offer. That's an awful lot of hate for Square Enix, so let's look at some other examples of ways they've facilitated garbage in the PC games industry. After $6.3M was raised on Kickstarter for Shenmue 3, Epic purchased sales exclusivity from the publisher Deep Silver about five months before its release. Deep Silver had been using Steam to advertise the game up until that point, of course, and Steam had been listed as the PC storefront since its announcement. The onus was on Steam users to seek out refunds by the end of it all. The same publisher pulled more garbage in early 2019 with Metro: Exodus. About two weeks before the game was scheduled to launch, Deep Silver announced the game would be exclusive to Epic for a year. Again, they'd been using Steam to market and even sell preorders of the game. With the announcement, they created a garbage FOMO situation where, if you wanted to play the game on Steam, you had to pre-order it prior to any critic reviews. If you wanted to wait for reviews, you'd be forced to either wait a year or buy it on a separate storefront. 505 Games' parent company Digital Bros. did it with Control and even created a separate, more expensive version when the game finally hit Steam. No way to buy just the base game anymore. You had to buy a more expensive version with the DLC included for $50. Tetris Effect is probably one of the dumbest exclusivity deals because it advertised VR support, but of course the Epic platform does not have any sort of VR support, so you had to use SteamVR anyway. It's also one of the only releases I know that had multiple exclusivity deals. First it was released on PS4. Then as an Epic Games Store exclusive on PC. Later, a different version called Tetis Effect Connected was released as a Microsoft Store exclusive. It finally hit Steam last August. That's all after conveniently forgetting that they were doing some shady poo poo with their launcher when it was brand new. I don't think Epic trying to create a web of contacts for my profile is any cooler when it's done on my personal PC than when other companies try to do it with their Android and iOS apps. New, free games every week passed out like candy at a parade, hemhorraging money in the process. Thanks to their dumb lawsuit against Apple, we have some idea how much money they've lost. How can a company throw away hundreds of millions of dollars and still afford acquisitions left and right? They've bought RAD Game Tools, Sketchfab, Harmonix, ArtStation, and several other companies in the past few years, too. Anyway, my  wound up being quite a bit longer than anticipated. These are just a few examples of the kind of behavior they facilitate when throwing around large wads of cash. I've spent nearly two decades building up a media library that keeps getting holes poked into it by Epic's bank account. It's like spending 20 years building a collection of MP3s only to find that some MP3s created after 2018 must be opened with CCP_shit_spyware_player.exe instead of my preferred player.My Lovely Horse posted:Really scratching my head about what other people must predominantly listen to and buy on bandcamp to make Epic loving Games think "this'll be a nice addition". Cause my own collection sure as hell can't be representative in the least. My  take is that, because Bandcamp is installed on millions of Android and iOS devices, it's a good way to harvest data and make that social web. Y'know, for the metaverse. It's also another way for them to throw away millions and operate at a loss for more classic hollywood accounting.
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Mar 3, 2022 10:52
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It sucks. I’ve posted about it in a couple other threads. There’s no way this benefits users or artists in the long run. Huge betrayal of consumer/artist trust.
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Mar 3, 2022 15:28
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I'm suddenly feeling really hesitant to make any more purchases on Bandcamp. :\ Are there any good alternatives that are: 1. Fair to artists 2. Not obnoxious 3. DRM free The tech solutionist in me feels like this could be a good time for some sort of artist-owned Bandcamp replacement, but things like that don't work without significant luck and/or constant, all-encompassing PR assaults.
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Mar 3, 2022 15:46
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More to the point, 4. where the artists are. I'm quite motivated to make more purchases all of a sudden, before things go to poo poo in some entirely foreseeable way.
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Mar 3, 2022 15:54
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Bloodplay it again posted:My Excellent post! And thank you for reminding me to uninstall the band camp app from my phone 
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Mar 3, 2022 17:22
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Unfortunately I don't think there are any alternatives that allow artists to post their stuff for streaming and sell physical merch. Soundcloud might be the closest but it's nowhere near as useful as Bandcamp (and I don't really know anything about how that company is run). I guess the best bet is the tried and true buying merch from artists at shows and on tour but that's hardly a fix.
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Mar 3, 2022 18:22
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Not these days especially, no.
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Mar 3, 2022 18:51
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Well one good thing to come from this is that any music you bought that was removed by the artist is now back on the app at least. If you forgot to grab the files for any of the music that vanished, you should he able to download it now. 
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Aug 28, 2023 07:18
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Can't wait to buy my music on Epic Music Launcher and watch my PC catch on fire from playing a MP3 file
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Aug 29, 2023 14:22
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