End of a era.

ew

not epic

??????

end of an era

brotha moment

this is bait

epic troll

time to learn how to use funkwhale y'all

… I don’t know how I feel about this

I wonder how much this will fuck over artists on the platform?

i literally just dropped $100 on bandcamp this morning..... hoping this doesn't impact the site too negatively

the instant i need an epic account to log in i am deleting all my uploads lol

God this has like 97% chance of completely sucking, and even that number seems generous

Pffffffffft looooo

lmaolmaolmao rip “bandcamp is the morally superior option” gang

Don't know tons about Bandcamp tbh, do they currently have a solid app to play your music through? I feel like tech and reach wise this is a huge gain BUT the whole appeal of bandcamp being for the artist and independent is lost. RIP

It’ll turn into a regurgitation of Spotify and Apple Music without a doubt.

i dont want reach i wanna not work for the dlc nft guys

too bad!

truly no idea why they would do this

truly nothing is sacred anymore. rip.

ugh y

Hello microtransactions lmao

Ah fiddlesticks 🤦🏻‍♂️

don't know what this means, oh well

"Hello microtransactions lmao"
bonus tracks as dlc released months after album

"you can also support this artist by gifting them vbucks, happy fortniting!"

fucking rip

“truly no idea why they would do this“
let me introduce you to the concept of money

what is epic games and what is wrong with them?

lolwhat?

there is no way this will be a good thing.

Fortnite is good

they better not start fucking bandcamp up. these damn big companies

what the fuck

???????????????

Epic Music

oh boy

Epic Games killed Rocket League. They'll also kill Bandcamp.

bandcamp nfts yaas slay

Yikes forever

God dammit

well thats fucked

oh, brother...

bandcamp? i think u mean bandnite ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

LMAO bruh

Band of Susans > Band of Horses > Band of Skulls

Holy fuck

Lol

bend over for the corporate overlords

This does not bode well.

“We are pleased to announce that in as of January 24, 2024 we will be re-branding ourselves as Epic Music. We feel as if this change will better align with our internal goals and will make it easier for consumers to associate us with the broad range of services that Epic provides. We look forward to being your preferred music streaming platform for many years to come.

Cheers,
The Epic Music Team”

Fortnite battle pass needed for fugazi streaming

Epic plans to remove the Bandcamp shopping cart and then reintroduce it two years later

china owns bandcamp lol.

Next year they are going to announce timed exclusivity releases smh

"what is epic games and what is wrong with them?"
Well they are owned by Tencent, one of the largest Chinese multinational conglomerates who also subsequently plays a big role in perpetuating what is essentially state-run media(CCP still maintains editorial oversight on all news ouetlets in China).
Specifically on Epic Games, they are responsible for in my opinion one of the biggest anti-consumer tactics in the gaming industry in recent years as they have purchased exclusivity rights to third party games on PC, making them the only store front to carry quite a few games. For example, when Hitman 3 was released on PC the only place you could purchase and play it was on Epic's store, forcing you to use their platform even though it sucks and offers no value. It's the mentality of "What you don't want to use our store? Fine we'll make you use it" that leaves a bad taste in people's mouths, as opposed to winning consumers over by offering a better product or service.

Disgusting

Didn’t see this coming.

I have lived to see man-made horrors beyond my comprehension...

gonna give this two years max until it's completely gone to shit, followed by twoish more years of happy-anxious piracy until the Big Independent Platform of the future gains significant traction. RIP.

This is the most random news I've read this year.

ruh roh

"Well they are owned by Tencent"

god this is even worse than i thought.

i 100% guarantee within 2 years bandcamp will just be another streaming platform with only a slightly better pay scale than the competitors.

all i can say is hopefully co-op music platforms like resonate actually take off or independent music is going to suffer massively.

big yikes

Yep. I can already see this is an alternative app to Spoti or Apple with maybe a slightly better income for musicians (not very difficult) but no matter what , everyone is royally fucked already because the cut it's gonna be beyond ridiculous.

(Not that we were selling enough records to make a living anyway but it sucks for those who did.)

ill hold out judgement, i don't see them fucking with the formula too much in what is already a successful platform for reasons that mainstream streaming sites don't/can't address

what most likely will happen is that the tech side of the website and app are beefed up a ton at the cost of some loss of the independent nature of the website - planted advertisements for artists and/or artists signing deals with some imprint with ties to epic

at this point it seems useless to speculate as it just happens, give it six months to notice changes and then come to a conclusion

The End of an Era is a song by hopesfall.

"and champions for a fair and open Internet."

How do you even type that with a straight face. Good god.

Sint with the good takes

definitely a dicey development but we'll have to see how things shake out. I don't like the possibility of any kind of sweetheart deals or payola going on behind the scenes, but the ability to directly support artists and build a library of music you actually own is the main thing here that's really sacred to me, and god willing that aspect will remain intact for a while yet.

Nightmare decade

wasn’t hard to see coming tbh

just sucks it was epic games

really out of the loop here, why would a gaming company buy a music streaming site

Strange acquisition. Also tencent does not own epic gtfo

tencent doesn't outright own it but they own the 2nd largest stake at 40%

tencent "only" owns half of epic, that's correct

I wish I could be more outraged, but being mad at stuff like this has become so tiresome. At this point, it's an inevitability that everything good will be bought by a massive company, slowly hollowed out, and turned to a husk of its former self. Happens every week and I will never be loyal to any brand because of it.

Do you guys think bandcamp will try to integrate fortnite “concerts” in the same way they did with live streaming

Omg why, while not the worst news of the year just waiting to see how they screw it up.

what is Epic and what have they messed up before?

lame

Fuck Epic

we just got offline downloads in-player and playlists, now they're getting bought out by the company that still hasn't added basic user review functionality to their video game website lol. maybe the bandcamp people will show them how to build a website, idk

> really out of the loop here, why would a gaming company buy a music streaming site

Probably because the music streaming site does not make enough money to hold its ground in an increasingly precarious world over time, and it made the pitch now that the numbers allow it to happen.

Or probably because parent company saw the popularity and sprawling userbase of the music streaming site and they wanted to buy it, only those things happened for a reason, and it will be interesting to see if the requisites that led the music streaming site to its current position, will be maintained over time.

Long story short, what Sinternet wrote, let’s wait and see what happens along the way, although the odds definitely don’t look good, given who owns/has shares of who.

i figure best case scenario is that a bunch of money gets pumped into the website/mobile app and maybe they go to bat against apple to get in-app purchases. as long as they maintain the core functionality of direct payments to artists without an obscene cut by the company i guess its fine.

i just really, really hope they dont turn it into another iteration of a traditional music streaming service.

"The End of an Era is a song by hopesfall."

Lol, Storm

They will never buy sputnikmusic

Sput should get into the e-store/streaming business, given Sput's track record of polished user experiences and all.

I hope this is a good fit cuz I love using bandcamp

you're delusional if you think anything good is gonna come from of this

China's grabbing it all up

I'm very apperhensive about this but all we can really do is wait and see what happens and hope nothing too drastic changes.

Can see the Epic Games Store having some promotions to tie in with the takeover at some point though, maybe vouchers for their users to get them to visit Bandcamp or something.

last.fm all over again

It's probably not going to be pretty

Fucking heartbreaking...

what the fuck?

Haven’t fucked with Bandcamp since like 2018 so whatever but still fuck epic

I'd be really surprised if Bandcamp did not make decent money already. If they aren't, I can't understand why. Plenty of users and artists and from what I've seen, real support on there for artists and labels.

I mean I know people who spend like hundreds of dollars a month on bandcamp

they take like 15-20% on all sales, and they've paid out 890 million to artists since they started and 207 million in the past year alone, so you do the math. That's just on sales and doesn't account for label fees and other costs to use their platform.

Oh no that totally sucks. Why the hell did they do that...

Zero faith in this decision, it can only lead to disappointment.

My understanding was that they have been in the black for a long time but maybe that changed.
https://blog.bandcamp.com/2016/05/19/bandcamp-downloads-streaming-and-the-inescapably-bright-future/

Dudeee r.i.p. to all the independent artists now that like 50% of their revenue and sales will be swallowed by the creators of fucking fortnite

omfg its bicks pickles in person

1 comments

Any bandcamp alternatives out there?

re bandcamp alternatives i have been trying to understand resonate.is
got a cooperative feel to it but logging in and out is such a mess lol
and it has a slightly different focus, definitely not a 1 to 1 replacement of bandcamp or anything

fuck this so much

Fortnite Fridays

oh man just saw this this fucking suuucks

Yeah it totally mega sucks. Really disappointed.

Bad capitalism, no cookie.

Fuck Epic and fuck Tim whatever his name is.

> really out of the loop here, why would a gaming company buy a music streaming site

capitalism

Give it a year it'll be another shite streaming service claiming to be "artist first" because they give an extra £0.00001 per stream over Spotify.

Hey now £0.00001 converted to Canadian dollars is a lot

lmfao is this for real

Epic Games will start taking cuts of artists pay, like lets say an artists album is 8 bucks or something, they'll take out a chunk of that and a bigger chunk in merch sales. That's what troubles me, because Bandcamp is giving independent artists a platform to share for free and take donations. If Epic starts their strategy, Bandcamp will lose a lot of users.

lol Bandcamp already does that m8

Or, even worse, they make artists pay for unlimited releases. Or start making the songs automatically unlistenable (by this i mean, if you have been on the site, you will see you can individually listen to the songs without paying if the artist release allows this.) Or pulling an iTunes and only giving song "samples." Either way, this is definitely a concern.

DungeonBoy my bad lol. I'm just saying they'll make it probably worse. Capitalism sucks.

Totally sucks bleh bleh BLEH.

Hopefully this goes right, and that Epic doesn't screw Bandcamp over somehow

They’re gonna lose half their clientele regardless if they make changes or not. Independent artists and Epic is like oil and water.

Just look at how many people are turning their noses up to the announcement itt before any changes of note have actually occured.

indie company joins big company... discredits the "indie company" aspect a bit. nol is right, they will lose a lot of clients. I could see why artists will probably move. If Epic makes the revenue of 82% per artist sale down to, let's say, 70% and below (which they probably won't, but with big companies who knows,) Bandcamp will lose a LOT of artists. Also, they better not make this shit associated within the epicgames website OR on their shitty desktop application.

TD;LR: If Epic fucks up the artist revenue per sale rate, Bandcamp is probably screwed.

Epic Games also needs to know how to stay in their own lane.

tbf epic's whole thing to beat steam in the first place was their paying devs a higher percentage, so it seems unlikely they'd try to gouge the artists here since it goes against their established brand. but who knows, corps be corp'in

Well they screwed that up with the PC exclusives nonsense, a garbage store front and throwing their money around.

eh the exclusives I'm not too peeved about if they're just delayed to Steam and not restricted from it entirely, as long as they pay for it. if epic wants to rile up business by undercutting steam then good for them I guess. the storefront issue is still pretty funny tho, they've been at this for years now and people still have to come onto Steam to see if a game is good or not bc there are no user reviews on Epic yet lol.

such a good decision i love fortnite

Fort,

Knight

19 dollar fortnite card

@zaruyache The gaming community has always been whiny, if they can't have it immediately the crying never stops. I'll wait for things to hit half price most of the time. Still just as fun.

I still cant believe this is real

I wonder if there's potential in blockchain for music streaming. Does anyone have any thoughts on Audius? etc

There's potential in that it's a potential new market of people to scam and a potential new way to scam them

I have like 200 songs I could put on bandcamp is this the perfect time to cash in?

Old article, but potentially relevant in the long run…

http://musictechpolicy.com/2022/03/08/another-one-bites-the-dust-bandcamp-acquired-by-tencents-epic-games-and-still-no-fairness-for-session-musicians/

I hate Tencent so much man. Awful company

This is the first time I’ve been like especially compelled to retweet unionization efforts lol, no fucking brainer here

https://www.bandcampunited.org/

neat website

Well that didn't last long

https://youtu.be/GYGhmJD9LKc?t=7s

this really do be saying something about the ｍａｔｅｒｉａｌ ｃｏｎｄｉｔｉｏｎｓ

Poggers

Guess all those after game giveaways put a dent in their pocket.

But seriously, all those companies nearly going bankrupt and laying off fucktonne of workforce because of a little bit of net worth slowdown sure makes one think whether the whole system is worth keeping on life support at all. Almost as if going bankrupt because you wanted to run an inherently by-design unprofitable project is your own dumb fault...

bandcamp runs at a profit, just not enough of a profit to satisfy the capitalist ouroboros

Epic Games should acquire bankruptcy

https://www.instagram.com/p/CyereebvuQM/

predictable but no less sad

but can they acquire deez nutz

Could they acquire themselves to go fuck off and die and leave perfectly functioning platforms alone?

Or do shitstain big corpos just see a smaller company run an ethically good, profitable model and just go "absolutely not"?

We had a good run.

fucking devastating lmao, these suits are so used to seeing big numbers they can't comprehend the value in something only withstanding half of independent music on its back

another epic win for free market capitalism

big corpos just see a smaller company run an ethically good, profitable model and just go "absolutely not" [2]

Blame the CEO

this is just unbelievably shit, it gets worse and worse

everyone involved should be ashamed, artists lose a platform where they can actually make a living through digital music and the staff lose their living

billion dollar companies will bleed the platform dry and it'll be defunct in a couple of years

capitalism must be destroyed agreed

This is undoubtedly bad

It gets worse yet.


https://www.404media.co/bandcamps-entire-union-bargaining-team-was-laid-off/

figures, a big new corpo comes in, of course they'll terminate the unions first

So Bandcamp was held captive in the app store wars…

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/epic-games-drags-bandcamp-into-its-google-antitrust-case/

Monopoly laws sleeping on the job. Between stuff like Microsoft acquiring activision, I feel the sale of these things is in too few hands leaving everyone else to clean up the aftermath. Stop letting money ruin good things