prior to this, bandcamp was owned by Epic and lord only knows why they bought them or what their bigger plan was. i also have no idea how much they staffed up under epic rule since they went from a small business to being owned by the fortnite money man. Entirely possible it's something like:
1. bandcamp is a sustainable normal small-to-medium business growing healthily
2. Epic has tons of fortnitebux and is feuding with apple so they buy bandcamp as some kind of tangential play should they end up as a big alternative store on iOS. so they could have a music store offering (to compare to itunes? not that apple gives a crap about itunes anymore??) in addition to an app store?
3. the money music stops and everyone races for a seat. bandcamp is left hanging.
4. epic sells bandcamp to whoever just to get it off the books so they can focus on fortnite lootboxes
5. songtradr or whatever their name is tells the union to pound sand and cuts bandcamp down to a core team because they're planning to just gut the product and transition all these indie artists over to whatever platform they were running before. This is a music IP company. I don't think they want to handle B2C purchases or provide streaming music. They just wanted to buy a big pot of artists and IP to add to their collection.
This may have been a last-minute accelerated deal process where Epic would have all but shuttered Bandcamp if a buyer couldn't be found, before they needed to announce massive layoffs to assuage investors. Songtradr is given an opportunity to see the deal, wants to ensure Bandcamp's survival in its current form (because its demise would hurt the entire ecosystem Songtradr depends on).
But Songtradr isn't given time to put together a transition plan or identify the exact legal path to deal with the union (especially given that they're in an entirely different country with different labor laws!) and not expose themselves to liability. So they announce conditional openness to the acquisition (per the link above, the transaction hasn't closed yet), and this at minimum gives Bandcamp a stay of execution while they identify next steps.
Now, they've identified at least one next step - how much of the current Bandcamp costs they can carry during the transition - and that's 50% of current staff. A tough call to make, but if the alternative was shuttering the service, a very justifiable one.
Epic is private, Tim Sweeney owns >50%, and their only real rival in the game engine space had recently torpedoed themselves which caused a large amount of gamedevs and even some publishers to swear off Unity.
That's largely a distinction without a difference while Epic still owned (owns? seem deal isn't closed yet) them. If Epic is in peril, Bandcamp is in peril since they owned Bandcamp up until recently, and we know Epic is in financial trouble because of the Epic Games Store.
Their entire minimum revenue guarantee scheme to lure over indies and publishers is apparently extremely expensive for Epic and the store has yet to turn a profit on the whole. Before, they could run it off of Fortnite profits alone. That said, Sweeney has admitted that well is basically running dry and it's why they've been doing layoffs and the like everywhere.
If a company is in trouble, the first thing on the line are the subsidiaries and Bandcamp is a questionable acquisition on the Epic rep sheet, being a music store for a company whose main business is making videogames and selling a gaming engine to people. That means it either goes under or is sold off because it's seen as an irrelevant "aside" subsidiary.
Was anything in danger of shutting down before Q1 2022? All time tech market highs were ~3-6 months beforehand and presumably the acquisition negotiation took time.
Self-replying to retract the above. From https://www.404media.co/bandcamps-entire-union-bargaining-te... it seems that Songtradr leadership had explicit knowledge of the members of the union bargaining team, lied about it, and laid every single one of them off. I no longer think it likely that Songtradr is operating in good faith.
They would have to do what any union does - leverage worker power. If the majority of Bandcamp engineers agreed to halt work until x demands are met, it would drive Bandcamp as a service into the ground. Tech workers also hold the keys to everything - they could take the site down, lock up the music, etc.
They maybe can’t prevent it, but they could leverage BC/Epic/whomever into providing some kind of decent severance for those left out in the cold. In theory.
bandcamp was owned by Epic and lord only knows why they bought them or what their bigger plan was
this is incorrect. in addition to whatever lord you are speaking of, I also know. (unless you meant me, but even then, I think others share this knowledge.)
Epic bought Bandcamp to use it as a weapon in various lawsuits against Google and Apple over their pricing models. Bandcamp joined a suit against Google over its Play Store pricing in particular.
it didn't go anywhere, because Bandcamp already qualified for media app pricing, which rendered its role in the suit meaningless. but that was why Epic bought Bandcamp.
On point 5, bandcamp doesn’t own any rights to the music on the site. The artist agreement is limited to the service of selling music, if that changes the artists can revoke their agreement.
Pretty sure there's value in owning a platform where small independent ("undiscovered") artists release their work and where listeners go to find that work. In particular, it seems likely that having the metrics and historical data could give SongTradr insight into which artists seem likely to catch on, etc.
That would be the worst move Songtradr could make here. The ability to distribute your music while maintaining the rights to it is one of the main reasons - hell, if not the main reason - artists and labels (and fans like myself) love Bandcamp. Making such a change would, to my mind, royally piss off the entire community and, in particular, the artists that make the platform as successful as it has been. I can only imagine the negative press that such a move would generate.
Move their music off it. It happens a lot. If a band's earlier Bandcamp album gets picked up by a label, they will insist on exclusive distribution, so the band will remove it from BC.
If Bandcamp were to try such a move they would destroy the value of their business overnight. Retroactively changing the agreement with your customers about their IP is the best way to permanently destroy trust.
It would be a more dramatic overnight loss of customers than Unity. It's entirely laughable, and given that laws restrict the licensing and royalties of music, it might not even be legal.
Labels can only write up contracts giving them rights because they pay for studio time (given them a financial buy-in to the creation of the music) and pay advances against royalties. Not so for indie distributors. I don't know if there are specific applicable laws, but it's absurd enough that everyone would immediately drop Bandcamp.
Music royalty rates, for physical records, radio and internet streaming, are also determined by a panel of judges: the United States Copyright Royalty Board.
Not saying they won't try, but there are enough label-represented bands on Bandcamp that they would obliterate their back catalog (along with any network effects they're enjoying) overnight.
Technically Bandcamp is a very simple payment and file host.
A small team can quickly copy how it works and get all the artists to move platform if they were to shoot themself in the head. Right now this doesn't happen because Bandcamp functions and exists and has a reputation for musicians.
Lose that, all the artists start looking for a new home and someone will make an alternative quickly.
Let's be real, fiat currencies are essentially backed by Uranium 235 and defense industry engineering capabilities. (both as it relates to turning the U235 into large amounts of energy in a small amount of time and producing other things like aircraft carriers)
funnily enough you CAN actually redeem the banknotes for these things but most people don't typically enjoy the experience
agree. the USD dollar is backed by the threat of violence which is how I understand what it means to be an empire; in contrast with a 'civilization' (though it seems as though empire is the early stage of civilization, it boots things up)
I know you're not posting in good faith but I do want to underline two things, in case anyone else is reading this who is similarly dismissive as OP:
- they did kill her
- she was clearly not a witch, given that they do not exist
And given the dearth of warlock or wizard trials, it is safe to say that this was clearly motivated by sexism - viewing women as far more likely to be agents of Satan, just as Eve handed Adam the apple.
Witch did not imply woman in former centuries. For example, if you take a look at the "witches" executed during the Salem witch trials, many of them are men, including the alleged ringleader; George Burroughs, George Jacobs, John Proctor, John Williard, and Samuel Wardwell were all convicted and executed for witchcraft. Others were also tried and punished or imprisoned until trial. This holds true in Europe as well.
Your narrative doesn't really work well at all here for other reasons either - some of these were powerful men who were accused by women or slaves, not representatives of the patriarchy.
> she may have been one of the 300 or more executed. The Privy Council in Edinburgh granted a commission to try her, but there is no record of her death.
They may have killed her. It sounds like they probably did.
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
VC can be a great way to break into markets that just have inherently large moats or barriers to entry. Stripe is an example: you can code all you like but you literally can't move money without going through a ton of very annoying (to devs, anyway) footwork to get cozy with the existing financial institutions. The connections your VCs give you can matter as much as the money.
They can also literally kill your company. VCs have a very specific strategy: they give some money to 1000 companies knowing that 990 of them will return 0% in the hopes that of the remaining ten, 9 of them return %X000 and one returns %X0000. Given this, they are going to have very little interest in finding a company that will return even "good" results. They're going to push you to shoot for huge growth or die trying. And given the choice between "grow modestly and safely" and "grow faster but risk exploding" they will push you to pick the latter, because in their business model they can't even count low enough to measure returns that are just 10x.
> They can also literally kill your company. VCs have a very specific strategy: they give some money to 1000 companies knowing that 990 of them will return 0% in the hopes that of the remaining ten, 9 of them return %X000 and one returns %X0000.
+1 to this.
There are definitely different models for VCs, but in general, the big "brand name" VCs are in the unicorn business. This tweet [1] does a succinct job of explaining why.
The result of this is that as a founder, if you own 49% of your company and big-VC investors own 51% of your company and someone comes along offering to buy your company for $100m, your investors are likely to turn it down. For you, that would likely be a life-changing amount of money. For a big-name VC, it doesn't move the needle. In most cases, they'd rather roll the dice and end up with $0 then get their share of a $100m exit.
> There are definitely different models for VCs, but in general, the big "brand name" VCs are in the unicorn business.
Slightly naive question, but does this include YC? The wording on their page makes it sound like joining YC would help most startups but is that just for show? Or does this apply much more when the VC owns >50% of the company?
KSP1 was made by a bunch of scrappy lovable indie devs making their first game (iirc Squad's team was a marketing company prior to this?) in a LCOL area funded by dreams and whatever $10 early access sales they made on steam, with no-one to tell them what to do.
KSP2 is made by TTWO, who is a publicly traded AAA studio of notable fame and decades of legacy and domain expertise.
If Squad sold KSP1's IP to TTWO and then went and made "KSP2" under a new name with their squad-sale money, that would be a different story. But even with that goodwill, I would still not be believing in the current KSP2 ever being a success story.
> KSP2 is made by TTWO, who is a publicly traded AAA studio of notable fame and decades of legacy and domain expertise.
KSP2 was made by indie devs (Star Theory) hired by T2
They just... failed.. they negotiated budget, failed to deliver, negotiated another bigger one, failed to deliver again, and T2 said "fuck it", took IP from them and created studio to develop it.
ST actually wanted to sell out to KSP2 after that disaster but they basically chose to poach ST developers instead, because why you'd buy a company where management now failed to deliver on promised goals twice.
My guess is ST either bite more than they could chew or purposefuly lowballed T2.
But the people they poached included the management which was perhaps the worst decision that T2 made when they created Intercept Games.
Furthermore, looking at the demos presented in 2019, it's not clear that much progress was made between then and now.
The complete stall since early access release (7 months with just a handful of hotfixes) and lack of feature delivery suggests that IG don't have the competency to deliver.
That, or they moved all their staff to their other "unnamed title" they're hiring for and have KSP2 on the most minimum of developers to pretend they're making progress toward their roadmap.
> But the people they poached included the management which was perhaps the worst decision that T2 made when they created Intercept Games.
Huh, didn't knew that. I only heard that "most" people came over.
But yeah full price EA into absolute shitshow of a game doesn't bode well.
> That, or they moved all their staff to their other "unnamed title" they're hiring for and have KSP2 on the most minimum of developers to pretend they're making progress toward their roadmap.
That would be weird, what makes the Take2 management think they can deliver something else competently ....
OpenOffice is a zombie living on the old name alone. LibreOffice is the "new" (it's like over a decade old i think) current one and e.g. ships preinstalled on big ubuntu images, for instance.
OSRS also moved to oldschool.runescape.wiki and AIUI jagex pays for their hosting and provides some kind of content access to make updating/syncing easier.
Plus they have RuneLite cooperating with crowdsourcing things like droptables and drop rates. (And of course mods often will outright tell them what certain droprates are or how they function).
OSRS wiki isn't the best example. Jagex does not fund it, and is recommending they move to fandom/ad based support.
Despite the OSRS wiki being legitimately the best website I use every day, it's leadership has been sounding the death knell every few months, always to an alarmingly quiet response.
They have no money, have no revenue generator, and have a full staff that needs to be paid. The last post they put to the community mentioned moving back to fandom (crazy) or injecting ads at a pretty insane volume.
So yes, fandom sucks. But also, a "normal" wiki takes expertise, and usually, compensation.
I think you might have some of the facts wrong here - the post you're talking about never mentioned moving back to Fandom (nobody would ever entertain that option), and we ended up putting one pretty small ad in a pretty non-disruptive place, not "injecting ads at a pretty insane volume".
In reality, we are doing fine on revenue, and more than covering the full-time labor costs by serving one ad to about 35% of users (really more like 20% after you account for ad blockers). It's still a bit icky compared to doing something donation-based or working directly with the studio, but neither of those would pay the bills. It turns out that a pretty small amount of advertising pays the bills just fine, which really puts into perspective how insane Fandom's monetization is.
KSP2 isn't an enshittification play, imo. It's literally just bad project management.
I'll list their sins from my armchair:
- remaking a beloved, established game that has a prodigious base of features and extremely extensive modding support. you have a HUGE hill to climb just to get to your "MVP" - you have to supplant the existing game plus its modding community, and this is already a niche audience of ["people who find orbital mechanics as a primary gameplay loop to be fun"]. They were always going to need to really fucking knock it out of the park on their first at-bat to make this work.
- doing so on a short time-frame
- trying to be all artsy about it too. not that that's a bad thing, but it does position you to take your time rather than going fast. and like I said, they already had a steep hill to climb.
- standard-issue development hell. it happens.
- special-issue development hell where TTWO did some fucky-wucky stuff where they hired away a ton of the staff from the studio they were contracting with, cancelled the contract, and brought it all in-house with the poached team. Hardly an encouraging sign.
- with all the delays adding up, I suspect they were given the ultimatum to either ship their current state into EA and start recouping money, or get scuttled. People have allegedly looked into the code and found extensive additional systems that were basically hastily commented or hacked out so they could ship some vaguely-functional core.
I was really, really looking forward to KSP2. KSP1 but with good graphics, a non-unity engine (it was always a miracle that squad had gotten such good large-scale physics out of unity), and promises of official support for non-kerbin bases and interstellar travel? Yes please, sign me up!
But honestly, my mental model for how this would be successful was "they'll reimplement the existing base game in a new engine. big task but doable for TTWO's money, it's not indie anymore, and they obviously already understand the product. Then, with the base game ported, people will be willing to buy in EA because they see the promise of 'KSP but more!!!'". And that last bit was going to be critical, they'd need people bought-in if they wanted TTWO to keep funding them / them keep funding themselves.
So when they launched this scrap heap into EA, I knew it was doomed. And look at the, what 8ish months between then and now? They've released a few quaint patches that ignored all the huge issues and done basically nothing else.
I fully expect them to now slowly wind the EA down with a skeleton crew and people will just forget it to an ignoble death. I mean, TTWO can hardly be keen on continuing to pour development funding into this EA, right?
From my armchair I'll add that throwing away the KSP1 engine and replacing it with, based upon the number of bugs, a new implementation of the same basic idea seems like a terrible idea. My understanding is that most of the original Squad team (i.e. the only people in the world with experience building a successful orbital mechanics game) weren't kept on for KSP2. Take Two should have done everything possible to keep them as core KSP2 developers.
All that said, I don't think the game will be left unfinished. All costs are sunk and Take Two has a (reportedly) somewhat functional, nicer looking copy of KSP1 with, presumably, at least base elements of interstellar travel and colony systems in place. It's probably worthwhile trying to get the project over the last few hurdles, as it's a potential goldmine if they can pull it off.
> KSP2 isn't an enshittification play, imo. It's literally just bad project management.
It is also MBA decisions (kicking the game out for full price as an early-access game that was nowhere near close to being ready for that).
The combination of PM and MBA decisions that have screwed it up are definitely enshittification-adjacent, although they may just lack enough competency.
The first point is incorrect IMO. They just needed a really solid core of unjanky physics for an MVP, which was why a sequel was needed in the first place - KSP 1 engine limitations. Couldn't even deliver that.
The root problem with KSP2 is that they needed to make the core of the game perform much better than KSP1 in order to pull off the scale of what they intended to achieve. And then the they shipped into EA with significantly worse performance than KSP1.
Look at the reviews for KSP2. This is not even one of the larger problems with the game. They released into EA with terrible, nearly unplayable performance... on an RTX 4090! a $1600-2000 GPU that at the time was difficult to obtain even if you had the cash.
It gets worse because they don't consider the current $50 price to be 'full price'. They claim it's the discounted EA price and full retail would be higher.
1. bandcamp is a sustainable normal small-to-medium business growing healthily
2. Epic has tons of fortnitebux and is feuding with apple so they buy bandcamp as some kind of tangential play should they end up as a big alternative store on iOS. so they could have a music store offering (to compare to itunes? not that apple gives a crap about itunes anymore??) in addition to an app store?
3. the money music stops and everyone races for a seat. bandcamp is left hanging.
4. epic sells bandcamp to whoever just to get it off the books so they can focus on fortnite lootboxes
5. songtradr or whatever their name is tells the union to pound sand and cuts bandcamp down to a core team because they're planning to just gut the product and transition all these indie artists over to whatever platform they were running before. This is a music IP company. I don't think they want to handle B2C purchases or provide streaming music. They just wanted to buy a big pot of artists and IP to add to their collection.