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This feels like a major blow, as someone who just semi recently (probably around pandemic start) started getting into purchasing flac music from indie artists,
by siver_john 5y ago
This feels like a major blow, as someone who just semi recently (probably around pandemic start) started getting into purchasing flac music from indie artists, Bandcamp was a great source of music. I understand nothing will change in the short term, but long term I am very concerned. Especially as streaming becomes more dominant and companies are less willing to provide flac based music and physical discs (where I can rip my own) continue to disappear.
This feels like a potential last step of true music ownership and that makes me incredibly sad.
That being said if anyone knows of any place to buy flacs of music with great selection would love to know (especially for Japanese music which I generally have to import, thankfully they love CDs).
- maldusiecle 5y agoBoomkat is also good, different selection than Bandcamp but comparable in size (they definitely have some Japanese stuff that Bandcamp doesn't, e.g. Tzadik's Japanese music line).
- slothtrop 5y agoI just checked it out to confirm that they have John Zorn's catalog, and it seems so. Good find. I thought the man was married to physical only.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoHDTracks for purchasing and downloading. Deezer and Tidal provide high fidelity streaming.
- prox 5y agoTidal pays better than most other streaming services afaik. It’s sad to see Bandcamp go. Because in tech an acquisition means loss of that independence.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoAs a chronic music pirate- I love Bandcamp. I've purchased more music through Bandcamp than anywhere else. I'm not going to let myself be bummed by this news until Bandcamp actually changes for the worse. Once again everybody is letting themselves be upset by some hypothetical scenario where the new owners drive the service into the ground.
- krageon 5y ago> Once again everybody is letting themselves be upset by some hypothetical scenario where the new owners drive the service into the ground. It's not hypothetical, it's evidence-based reasoning.
- minusf 5y agoi am old. it's not the first takeover i have seen. it's for a reason many people are sceptical here.
- prox 5y agoI hope you are right, but the track record for take-overs isn’t very good. When the original managers leave, you get replacements from the parent company. Or managers who want to “change things” so they can impress the upper echelons. Seen it too much.
- officeplant 5y agoI don't even really need a hypothetical scenario. All that could happen does indeed suck, but I'm mainly irked about giving my money to Epic after 15 years of loving Bandcamp.
- selfhoster11 5y agoBandcamp was the only music store I was happy to throw my money at. I guess the ol' tricorn hat may be getting dusted off real soon if anything material about the company or the selection changes.
- zippergz 5y ago"Nothing will change in the short term" is the story of every acquisition, almost all of which end up with major changes for the worse at some point. (So yes, I agree with you.)
- superkuh 5y agoWhen Epic bought the game "Rocket League" they promised not to change anything. At that time it had Windows, Linux, Mac, xbox, and playstation clients. 6 months after they aquisition they killed off the linux client (even for people who bought in-game purchases). Epic lies. It is what they do. They are the epitome of a dangerous megacorp.
- smoldesu 5y agoFor the record, Rocket League is still perfectly playable on Linux (even online) through WINE or Proton. But yes, they did axe the native version.
- riskable 5y agoThe input latency is noticeably higher when you play like this though. It drove me nuts last time I tried it (using Steam Controller and Dualshock 4 controller). It's a big reason why Rocket League sucks so bad on the Nintendo Switch (input lag).
- smoldesu 5y agoYou sure it's not a V-Sync issue? Most Linux games will introduce input lag with in-game vertical sync, but if you disable it and let your compositor do it's job it tends to shape up just fine. Not saying that it was user error here, but I haven't noticed any significant input lag when I play it.
- ffpip 5y agoThey also made the game free to play. https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/15/21438194/rocket-league-free-to-play-release-date-psyonix-epic-games https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/15/21438194/rocket-league-fr...
- fsflover 5y ago> if anyone knows of any place to buy flacs of music with great selection would love to know https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v12/ https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v12/ (scroll down).
- noyesno 5y agoQobuz offers both streamed music and flac purchases from their store.
- ShroudedNight 5y agoIt doesn't do either of those things if you reside in Canada (or presumably any other country not in its limited collection of markets).
- siver_john 5y agoYou are a god send. If for no other reason than they have an album I had been looking to purchase I could find nowhere else.
- minusf 5y agois it known how they are compensating the artists? the main reason why i am boycotting spotify.
- marrone12 5y agoThey pay literally an order of magnitude more per stream than spotify. .04 cents vs .003 cents https://www.soundguys.com/tidal-hifi-review-25846/ https://www.soundguys.com/tidal-hifi-review-25846/
- marrone12 5y agoQobuz is the best
- vintermann 5y agoPretty sure it's just a front service for 7digital. All the big streaming services besides Spotify and Tidal are skeleton crew operations.
- bb010g 5y agoQobuz is not associated with 7digital.
- skyfaller 5y agoI've been buying more mainstream artists (who aren't on Bandcamp) from 7digital: https://us.7digital.com/ https://us.7digital.com/ That said, I didn't spend nearly as much money there because Bandcamp showed a lot more evidence that they cared about ethics and getting money directly to artists. I have no idea how money works with something like 7digital, but I assume it doesn't pay artists as well.
- loudtieblahblah 5y ago7digital has really gone down hill in the last 2 years. They haven't updated their front page in forever and when they do its very slight. All the albums listed on the front page are from 2019. Albums disappear all the time and never return, your downloads from your library break when that happens too. So be like me, download immediately and back it up. I still use 7digital bc it's easier to actually download the mp3/flac, especially on mobile, without a 3rd party app (like Amazon) that makes you download one song at a time (as opposed to a zip of an album) But it's a rotting, decaying place where new music doesn't get added. I listen to mostly older shit. So no big deal for me. For now.
- vintermann 5y agoYes, my impression is that 7digital does the absolute minimum. This is the case with basically all streaming services that try to compete with Spotify. I've tried all the big ones except Tidal, which has its own problems for which I refuse to touch it. Want an example? Here's Deezer: https://www.deezer.com/search/%22Arrows%20in%20the%20Gale%22/album https://www.deezer.com/search/%22Arrows%20in%20the%20Gale%22... Here's 7digital: https://no.7digital.com/search?q=Arrows%20in%20the%20Gale https://no.7digital.com/search?q=Arrows%20in%20the%20Gale I probably can't post more links without getting auto-hidden by HN, but just try the search elsewhere too. Also try the album titles "Fresh Fruit", "I'm Looking for an Angel", "Day Dawn" or "My Car Sounds". That is one spammer. He releases 300+ albums at once, several times per months, to virtually all streaming services. They all have the same title, and the same generic album art, often a filtered stock image. They're officially "compilation albums". He has been doing this for about a decade as far as I can tell. He uses a different made-up label each time. If you blindly search up any song by one of the classic artists he targets, likely you will get one of his "compilations", and he will get money for every play. But Spotify is different. Those Echo Nest people have a special hatred of spammers, they kicked him out ages ago.
- kinnth 5y agoI still think Epic will allow download and ownership of FLAC files. They are quite open to ownership of content, I believe what they are trying to build is a stronger moat around their "app store". Longer term I think they will be looking to force Apple/Google to allow 3rd party app stores onto their platforms and in doing so need content. This is a play to get content and direct relationships with producers, I don't think they will change the business model.
- officeplant 5y agoHopefully they figure out how to let you backup game libraries once of these days. At least in MacOS I still can't back up an install like I can Steam games when moving to a new machine or wiping my current machine.
- pl0x 5y agoAre you willing to fund Bandcamp?
- masklinn 5y agoBeing a bandcamp customer, the answer seems quite obviously "yes" as I've literally done that.
- siver_john 5y agoI do through my purchases and my general encouragement of traffic to the site, if I wasn't a broke graduate student and had the funds to invest in them, without a doubt in my mind I would. However, even if I am unable to invest in them I see nothing wrong about my expressing discomfort over someone else buying them. I have seen nothing as well that they needed cash to continue operations.
- antihero 5y agoAs an OG pirate in my teens and a what elite in my twenties I’ve been spending on average about £50 a month on bandcamp for pretty much all of my thirties.
- officeplant 5y agoGiven they've been profitable for years, yes.
- jerhewet 5y agohttps://bandcamp.com/jerhewet https://bandcamp.com/jerhewet
- pier25 5y ago> That being said if anyone knows of any place to buy flacs of music with great selection would love to know Bleep offers FLAC (even 24 bit WAV). https://bleep.com/ https://bleep.com/ It's mostly alternative and electronica stuff though. It was founded by Warp records (Aphex Twin, Autreche, Boards of Canada, etc) but it now sells stuff for other labels as well.
- officeplant 5y agoMajor problem with bleep is I can't redownload purchases years later if my storage/backups were to be destroyed. I've got a pile of old Autechre purchases I can't get access to anymore which is frustrating, but not the end of the world. Bandcamp has no cap on redownloading my library, and a decent mobile app for the stuff I don't keep stored on my devices. Bandcamp isn't a perfect platform (they finally added a volume slider after a decade+), but they were a great solution to buying and releasing music for me since the birth of Bandcamp.
- Something1234 5y agoAnd what's the problem with having a system level mixer instead of every app having their own volume slider in software?
- officeplant 5y agoI didn't really have an easy way to adjust the volume of a single tab in my browser without downloading an add-on to give each tab their own volume slider. I've got multiple sources of audio coming from the browser since it has taken the place of so many applications. Generally I'd expect sites that sell/stream music to have a simple volume slider.
- arwhatever 5y agoWould Bandcamp the business model + Bandcamp the website necessarily be difficult to reproduce, particularly in an environment in which the Bandcamp niche just became no longer fulfilled due to changing practices on the part of Original Bandcamp?
- siver_john 5y agoI can't imagine the infrastructure to do it is trivial, but I would say the larger burden is network effect. Bandcamp has existed for a long time and I know of indie record labels who use it as their default distribution. I am aware there are indie alternatives (some of which provided in the comments to my first comment). Also disruption of service often results in loss, would someone who is no longer focused on music move there stuff over if things changed dramatically? Would people download in time, etc? Obviously this is all speculation, bandcamp could continue on as it has been for the conceivable future, but I am less pleased about that future than I was before I saw this news.
- qbasic_forever 5y agoIt seems like the perfect thing for Facebook (err Meta) to do with their social network. Bands already use Facebook for announcing tours, events, etc. so it would be a logical step to let them sell digital goods/music and give a small percent to FB. But I dunno if Meta actually cares about this business anymore.
- nluken 5y agoMakes me curious about the idea of a nonprofit organization whose purpose is to manage a platform that gives as much money as possible to artists. Perhaps that's a naïve vision, but I feel like a lot of artists would hop onboard if the interface worked, and that could overcome the network effect.
- krageon 5y agoThe people that handle the money can get away with taking more from themselves in this scenario, so they definitely will.
- 5y ago
- glenstein 5y agoThis does not fit your criteria of flacs with wide selection, however I think Resonate is the most interesting pro-artist option out there at the moment, albiet with an extremely limited catalog: https://resonate.is/ https://resonate.is/
- almet 5y agoResonate is nice and I like the fact that it's a co-op, but there is something missing that was present on band-camp, unless I missed it: the possibility to pay for real albums that will be shipped to you, or for you to download the .flac or .mp3 files to add to your library. It's actually possible to download the files but the price is fixed and it seems to be track by track. So it looks more like a replacement for Spotify to me.
- aezell 5y agoQobuz markets itself first as a hi-res streaming service. However, it also offers FLAC purchases without DRM that are yours even if you don't continue to use Qobuz. Their selection is very large and might have more options for more well-known acts.
- Dubhead 5y ago> That being said if anyone knows of any place to buy flacs of music with great selection would love to know (especially for Japanese music which I generally have to import, thankfully they love CDs). For buying FLACs of Japanese music, I'm a satisfied Ototoy[0] user, though I'm not sure if people outside Japan can create an account. [0] https://ototoy.jp/top/ https://ototoy.jp/top/
- jmbylsma 5y agoI can attest that, as an American, I was able to create an Ototoy account and purchase an album I have been trying to find for years. Thank you!!
- czbond 5y agoAre you afraid of loot boxes in your music that you have to pay for with micro tokens? :)
- whyoh 5y agohttps://indiehd.com/ https://indiehd.com/ sells FLACs. It doesn't have a ton of music currently, but the payout to musicians is very good, so it could become more popular in the future.
- ehnto 5y agoI'm not sure about always having Flacs, but a lot of "DJ" specific music platforms like Beatport have the ability to very easily download your catalog as files of various formats. The music curated there is of course leaning toward music you'd use as a DJ but it's pretty broad still.
- doublerebel 5y agoI've had good results over the years with Juno Download, although I generally shop there for electronic music.
- winternett 5y agoI publish to Juno, they seem to be a valuable source for music that has been around for quite some time and they sell multiple formats including FLAC. https://www.junodownload.com/labels/Ruff+And+Tuff+Recordings/releases/ https://www.junodownload.com/labels/Ruff+And+Tuff+Recordings...
- mackrevinack 5y ago"recently" same here. last week i decided to not renew my spotify subscription for the first time in 10 years and bought some of my favourite albums on bandcamp. sigh