They can and will ruin everything you love
welcometohellworld.com
welcometohellworld.com
But what I never did? Read their blog or used any of their social features. So as long as Songtrader keeps paying artists, and keeps offering downloads while letting me stream the music for free until I can decide if I want to buy it or not, I'll be fine with them.
To put it another way, there are plenty of ways to find music, what underground musicians need is a an easy to use tool to put their music online, as we are not big enough for Spotify.
Bandcamp has lasted because they haven't let the place go to shit like their competition and they've been reliable enough to stay online consistently.
I don't need social tie ins, and I don't want to message my listener base about anything. The spam emails I get from labels trying to be social go directly into the trash and usually make me unfollow them (or disable notifications)
It's a semi-smug affirmation that you don't care which, great. There's others that do, especially when the trajectory for changes like these is for a platform to get worse, not better.
I agree that it's a pattern that happens a lot on unrelated threads, and it sucks, but this one in particular is an exception since the entire OP is about trying to make us care.
The point of the article isn't to make you care about Bandcamp in particular, though it's clear the author does. It's to point out the fact that if there is something you DO care about, how acquisitions and corporate plays can and will destroy it. You could replace Bandcamp with Steam, or HN or any other entity. That's the point. Not the particulars of Bandcamp itself.
People here get so lost in the weeds and don't actually read what the message of the article is.
They might think that their work is necessary and invaluable, but it doesn't mean that the company or their users will. Like you're saying, I have a hard time caring about Bandcamp losing full-time writers when they weren't the main attraction at all.
Even if we didn't read their blog posts or listen to their radio podcasts, there is something beautiful in that effort. And I agree that written critique doesn't do much for music or art, for that matter.
Even though you can't quantify it, I wouldn't dismiss Bandcamp branding effort around music. You can't strip music of everything aside from sounds. Bandcamp's rich illustrations managed to set a musical mood, for example.
Image is important. Controversies, interviews, politics, and even ridiculousness are part of the culture regardless of whether one decides to engage.
Besides, wireheading will soon be possible. Best to re-evaluate your pleasure from time-to-time, while you can.
Isn't it part of the market mechanisms that customers punish bad behavior?
If we don't care about the employees, who does?
If we care only under certain circumstances, where is the limit?
Union busting, unpaid overtime, forced labor?
The customer either has responsibility or he hasn't.
And if somebody feels ashamed because they realize they can't ignore how a product or service they use is made, proves my point.
If they say they deny responsibility, then I can give severe examples to ask: Are you sure?
I don't care so much about Bandcamp that I'll make a personal judgement in their case, and personally investigate the details of their situation.
And yeah, the most boycotted company (assuming it is true) means there is barely any effect. People don't boycott, many people don't even care enough to talk, far fewer want to walk.
Ironically, it's almost as if you (the person complaining about the market mechanism) don't want to boycot those people that don't give a damn. It's inconvenient isn't it? Imagine having to shun your friend, kick out your tenant or fire your employee because they wore a slave-labour Nike shoe. It's much easier to blame a market mechanism.
Blaming a system that we can regulate and allows companies to get away with shady practices sounds way more reasonable to me.
And "everybody" does include their employees. If a company doesn't treat their employees decently, they aren't a good company and I will avoid doing business with them.
Fair enough, but I wouldn't hold my breath!
But I never cared about or wanted anything other than 1) my music I bought and 2) their not great but good enough search. That's it!
I've worked for publishers most of my career, so I know what half those employees are going through is painful. It has happened to me before, too. But as a customer of the site, I was completely and blissfully oblivious to any editorial staff.
My process: Load bandcamp.com Immediately click on the Heart icon, where all my purchases live. Listen.
This was true on the app, too. I found their homepage utterly useless. None of the artists I'm into ever appeared there. Not cool enough, I'm sure.
Long live bandcamp.
(Can you think of an counterexample? A small, beloved indie business that was bought out by a megacorp and had consumers love it more because it had more money?)
So, it's like entropy. The latch only moves in one direction. Given a consumer beloved business, the only possible thing that can happen is that its goodwill is turned, quickly or slowly, into money. This is actually ok. Every beautiful living thing will eventually die. It's simply a fact of life. Cherish the good things while you can, because entropy will always win.
Bandcamp didn’t build goodwill without spending money. In fact, it gained goodwill precisely because it spent its money in ways consistent with building goodwill.
Slow to produce, quick to consume.
That bias tends to mean that large corporations consume more than they produce over time, as they’re biased towards short term financial results — but you absolutely can grow goodwill with money plus time.
Look at esports, where years of financing community contests have earned good will from players.
Or the numerous charities that corporations like McDonalds run. Ronald McDonald house can and does earn them a lot of good will — which they turn around and spend on short term results.
My point is this is less about entropy than the short-term managerial culture we follow.
So in the real world, (real) goodwill turns into more money. But in accounting, money turns into goodwill!
"In accounting, goodwill is an intangible asset recognized when a firm is purchased as a going concern. It reflects the premium that the buyer pays in addition to the net value of its other assets. Goodwill is often understood to represent the firm's intrinsic ability to acquire and retain customer business, where that ability is not otherwise attributable to brand name recognition, contractual arrangements or other specific factors" (Wikipedia)
Any going against that trend?
1) Obviously, first and foremost, this is a tautology. 2) There is little proof that companies that last long term, do so for good reasons 3) What does it matter... at all? Wide and short, Long and narrow, short and sweet, all these forms of impact have nothing to do with their inherent value
Classic HN comment.
> Classic HN comment.
Try to be more constructive in the future.
0. "Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World" McGonigal, Jane
Even though it didn’t end as the dreamers had hoped, revolution in a broad region of the world isn’t exactly an opiate.
And the thing is, Epic are following industry norms for this. All digital storefronts are trying to enforce the same sorts of policies. Get as much "stuff" in front of as many people as possible and have them fork over money to rent that "stuff" with tenuous if any protections for their purchase. Valve really are the outliers in this, and the only others I can think of that do what they do are Itch.io and Bandcamp, one a tiny player catering to a lower market and the other essentially the only survivor in their particular niche. Gamejolt and Soundcloud aren't even really competitors for each of them respectively.
You appear to be arguing in unequivocal favor of a short-termist, purely profit-driven way of doing business, which is a viewpoint that, to me, needs a whole lot more cogent support than the word salad posted above.
As a user I care about stability, which requires things to work out on longer time scales than a few years. And since I cannot know or verify if a company also cares about this (and will still care in a few years), I have to trust them. But such trust is hard to come by...
Ask Gen-Xers, specifically those who are not over-consuming news media and the harmful generalist social media (Reddit's default subs, Twitter's political echo chambers). My life is way, way better now than it was prior to the internet, Google and half a dozen other services.
Even HN's favourite boogieman Facebook provided me with insane value. For example:
- While I lived abroad, it provided an easy, passive way for me to keep in touch with my family. Compare that to my parents' desperate 10 dollars per minute phone calls in the 1980s
- I met friends through Facebook advertising for a boardgaming group (that I also ran on Facebook.) I met people from way, way more backgrounds than otherwise possible
- I can passively keep in touch with friends and easily get in touch if I'm in the same area.
People "struggle" to find "long term value" because that's ironically the meta for upvotes on the contrarian SV Internet right now and we internalize those values far too easily. Rest assured, value exists for most, if not all.
But what you don't see (or perhaps didn't pay attention to) is the way that Facebook monopolizes that value. They gained that control through ruthless manipulation, advertisement, buying of competitors and more. Then once you have buy-in, you're stuck with the enshittification they force on you because all of the alternatives have died.
For Bandcamp, they existed in the bought competitors space. And we're seeing the cycle I mentioned above occur faster and faster. The goal of companies like Facebook, Epic, Uber etc isn't to actually make a good thing. It's to dominate a market. The value is incidental, occasionally coming with the aquisitions.
Small towns are no longer truly isolating. If you're an outsider, for whatever reason, in a small town it's no longer a sentence for loneliness, harassment and abuse. You will likely still experience harassment and abuse, but there is bound to be a community online that you can connect to in order to overcome loneliness.
That's a pretty bad selection bias. You shouldn't exclude the perspectives of those who've been harmed by social media. That would be like asking people if alcohol has been a positive influence in their life, but excluding alcoholics.
"Revenue is way up for our Web3 SaaS this qua- aaaand it's gone."
The problem is that the technology enables illicit activity on a large scale because of its core premises.
The problem is NOT that people write it off because of the risks built-in to the technology, at least for most people. I'm sure scammers and crypto zealots do consider that a problem.
You can also say what you want about FB/Instragram doing many bad things but you can still be "friends" with people you know and stay up-to-date with them in a pub/sub style (which didn't really exist outside of christmas cards before social media was thing).
Google/Apple Maps are a great resource still.
Apple produced and still produces smartphones which have massively changed society. Those aren't going anywhere
Smartphones enabled app-based services for banks and other institutions and such with a ubiquity that did not exist in the desktop and dialup era.
Like it's so easy to look at how the world has changed in the last 15 years that I have trouble taking your claims that nothing lasts seriously.
However, I think that falls pretty squarely in the "internet" era rather than the "VC" era of your point. I'm not sure if that gets at the spirit of your argument (which I generally agree with).
I interpreted the word "institutions" pretty broadly here though, since the original comment was talking about a whole "era". Not trying to disagree with the gist of the original comment, just making discussion about an edge case I thought of.
- Facebook (Groups, Messenger)
- Amazon (Store, Audible)
- eBay
- Spotify
The rule is: every for-profit company will lose its way in the drive for higher and higher profits, or it'll be killed for having not kept that promise. It's inevitable. Every company in existence now will die one day.
There's no guarantee a democratic organization would last forever, but at least its not subject to the artificial drive to grow forever.
Sort of the classic way naive lost hiker in the mountains will walk downhill with it getting steeper and steeper till they slip and fall to their death. In the case of a companies they run on thinner and thinner margins until some event drives them negative.
when a living thing stops growing it starts dying
a person who watches their health might become smaller and live longer and better because of it
the growth first mindset is not wise
Unfortunately those sort of things (that are genuinely good) attract the wreckers like a flame attracts a moth.
It will only work if there is laser-like focus on the primary organizational objective: letting artists make a living.
Falling of a cliff when blindly chasing growth is just one problem. In the current era, the probability that they will get involved in policing the politics of their members and issue statements on everything from the state of rain forests to Palestine is close to 1.0. The organization will thus be torn apart by internal rivalries.
Web properties, just like any property even in the physical world, become more expensive to operate in the long term. Very rarely do I hear of companies spending less money to operate something in the future than they did early on. Part of this is scale, as things become more popular, it takes more people to keep it running. Another part of it is macroeconomics, stuff they rely on, particularly labor (landscapers in the physical world or server admins, for instance) can become more expensive due to a number of factors. A lot of people, like the author of this post, assume that once a web property is built, it exists forever (like a statue or monument), but that's of course not the case.
When a company needs to make decisions to increase their margin, a lot of people attribute it to "growth," and use it almost in a derogatory way. I think a more charitable way to see it is that it's not necessarily growth (although I'm sure that is a factor), but just to even keep the website running, a lot of times the same decisions need to be made (i.e., layoffs, charging for stuff that used to be free, etc).
When you think about it this way, it really seems like either these sites make decisions like this to continue to exist, or they cease existing. This seems to track pretty well with a lot of cases I can think of. I think some very ideologically motivated people can work extremely hard to keep operating costs down to avoid this scenario (Craigslist comes to mind), but this is not easy, and it's very far from being the "default".
The only thing I can think of is that there is no care for said future, "I'll squeeze as much as I can now, I got mine, so screw everyone else".
That would be my charitable reading of parent post, and does anybody believe that Bandcamp was profitable?
https://blog.bandcamp.com/2016/05/19/bandcamp-downloads-stre...
Either things changed and Bandcamp suddenly was no longer profitable, which makes no sense, or the owners sold out for their own profit.
Agri-Mark is a "producer co-op," which means that it's owned by dairy farms. There are also very successful "consumer co-ops," as well as "worker co-ops."
There are many nice things about co-ops:
- They can be economically competitive.
- They're democratically run. (Larger ones often elect a board and/or appoint management.)
- They're strictly voluntary associations.
There are also reasons why you don't see more co-operatives:
- They don't have huge incentives to scale. There are plenty of amazing grocery co-ops, for example, that have one or two excellent stores but no desire to expand.
- They raise capital through their members. Details vary, but they tend to scale more like bootstrapped businesses than startups.
But a musicians' producer co-op could absolutely build something like Bandcamp. It would be a lot of work, and it would require some genuine organizational talent.
A lot of the big open source foundations (the Linux Foundation, the Apache Foundation, etc) are essentially producer co-ops for open source software, even if that's not what the paperwork says.
I think we should absolutely build more co-ops, for things that really matter.
Wow, actually brilliant idea to keep out the nasty investor-owned firms away!
> The Mondragon Corporation already appeared in Robinson's earlier Mars trilogy, as one of the Terran groups involved in the colonization and terraforming of Mars; the coop is also portrayed as the inspiration of both the bogdanovist movement [52] and the libertarian-leaning Praxis Corporation[53] two of the main forces leading the revolution for the independence of Mars.
Red Mars was one of the best sci-fi books I've ever read, but Green Mars starts pretty slow so I didn't get very far into it. I think I'll start the trilogy over.
What's contentious about unionization is that the unionizers want to take over an existing organization that's already survived and become profitable. That's a lot easier to do than it is to build a company with that (or any other) structure. (And it's going to be contentious no matter how it's organized.)
Edit: You may not feel entitled to earn what you make, but others might just call that loser talk and no capitalist would ever say that.
Of course it does. Why would labour settle for anything less than every last cent (within some reasonable margin of error) of value that it produces? Labour is highly mobile and holds all the power. Labour is able to produce value even without capital. Capital, on the other hand, doesn't function without labour. You are simply not going to keep labour around to maintain capital operation if you don't give back all the labour value it produces.
In practice, we can also demonstrate that this is the case as even when unions roll into town – which really reenforces how much power labour wields – you never see the needle move more than small percentages that are within the margin of error. A $10 per hour job might be able to push for $11 per hour, but never does a $10 per hour job suddenly jump to a $100 per hour job.
Does that mean company is exploited by its workers if it generates no profit?
If you simply mean the company underpay its employees, how can you come to that conclusion? Looking at market values? Lines of code?
> it is objective reality.
Care to elaborate? business give people jobs, and therefore the business becomes an exploiter? Objectively
Maybe centuries ago that was true. In the modern economy, workers are already extracting the full amount of value they generate[1]. Profit for a business comes from the additional value its capital is able to generate on top of the labour value.
[1] Within reason. The market is never perfectly efficient. Sometimes workers see slightly less – sometimes slightly more – but not anything hugely out of line.
Can you provide a concrete example of capital generating value without the involvement of any labor?
Not all the way there, but surprisingly close.
Let's face it: labor is soon to be obsolete. All economic models that include labor will become antique notions, similar to factoring in horsepower.
Gonna be a rough road: all folks in power can think of is, how to keep workers slaving away at something, anything, so long as they don't revolt.
People in the US have consumer items, pointless dictatorial jobs, and insane stress from having the welfare state stripped for parts by venture capitalists. We aren't even enjoying what we have even though materially, a good fraction of the population have more than so many others. If you lose your pointless job, you lose your home, healthcare, and transportation and are considered a surplus person.
These are all political choices.
If we fix some baseline combination of quantities of "labor" and "capital", and compare it to some later combination where both have been increased, there are a number of possible differences to take.
There are V(l_0, c_0) , V(l_0 + dl, c_0), V(l_0, c_0 + dc), V(l_0 + dl, c_0 + dc).
One could call V(l_0 + dl, c_0) - V(l_0, c_0) "the contribution from additional labor", and V(l_0, c_0 + dc) - V(l_0, c_0) "the contribution from additional capital", or one might call V(l_0 + dl, c_0 + dc) - V(L_0, c_0 + dc) "the contribution from additional labor" and V(l_0 + dl, c_0 + dc) - V(l_0 + dl, c_0) "the contribution from additional capital".
In a linear approximation, these two ways of assigning quantities to these names for quantities, could be the same. But I wouldn't really expect them to be the same in practice, at least for large values of dl and dc. (note: I am using "dl" and "dc" instead of \Delta l and \Delta c, because it is more convenient to type. I don't mean to suggest that the changes are extremely small or infinitesimal, as might be suggested by using the letter d instead of \Delta.)
As such, I think that "the additional value that an additional amount of capital is able to produce" is a meaningful value if "quantity of labor" is held constant, and that "the additional value that an additional amount of labor is about to produce" is a meaningful value if "amount of capital" is held constant.
When both values are changed, then how much to attribute the increase in value produced to, is I think inherently somewhat ambiguous, but also not a completely meaningless question.
Given the four values V(l_0, c_0) , V(l_0 + dl, c_0), V(l_0, c_0 + dc), V(l_0 + dl, c_0 + dc), assuming that all four of the differences I mentioned previously are non-negative, then clearly the additional value from either cannot reasonably be said to be more than V(l_0 + dl, c_0 + dc) - V(l_0, c_0). Nor, I think, can the value attributed to the change along one axis, be reasonably estimated as less than the minimum of the differences along that axis. Also, I think probably a more reasonable upper bound on either contribution, is the maximum of the two differences for the respective axis.
Now, maybe your goal is to talk about the deserts, rather than causes? But if we are talking about what things are causally responsible for how much of something is produced, I think it's pretty clear that this analysis in terms of differences of these 4 terms, is on the right track.
The core claim is that simply buying things and managing things produces value all on its own and it's transparently false as if the thing wasn't produced, you couldn't buy it.
The other core claim is that there's a legitimacy to the idea that if you buy something that is socially useful, you get to derive the exclusive right to the fruits of it which makes no sense.
If the employer is paying you more than the value you would generate without being attached to them, then you're benefitting from that substantially. If your earning potential would be $1/hr on your own, but by joining ABC Corp you are leveraged and can earn them $3/hr and be paid $2/hr, then is that exploitation? To me that seems like a fair exchange that is mutually beneficial and grows the pie for everyone. And to be clear, ultimately the fact that you can earn more when attached to a business derives from the fact that you are able to wield and command some of the resources that the business is capitalized with, which you otherwise would not have access to.
The immediate objection will be that the surplus value is not typically fairly split between the employer and employee; maybe in some cases that's true? But from what I've seen, that's not as true as it may sound at first. The majority of people are able to earn essentially zero unless they are attached to a Real Job(tm), because most people at least in modern society have absolutely no idea how to optimally generate value on their own: there's a reason people get so upset when they're laid off or fired, it's far from trivial to figure out how to make your own money, it's much easier to just find another job. And the margin on labor costs are typically not >50% in most industries, which means that the actual divvying of surplus value is not really that abusive, it's a lot closer to the situation I mentioned in the first paragraph than most anti-capitalists would suggest.
I'm sure a lot of people would reject my framing altogether, and argue that it's only because we live in a capitalist society that it's so hard to get by without joining a company, or they'd argue that even if my logic holds workers deserve a lot more than an equal split of the surplus value, but I think this at least explains where a lot of us who do think capitalism works are coming from. It's not an unconsidered position, even if people disagree with the underlying moral framework.
One thing to keep in mind is that the US GDP is ~20T, if everyone made an equal amount before taxes, that would be somewhere around 120k (a little more or less as workers are about half the economy).
You can see from that comparison that the level of exploitation is far higher than than you supposed.
That doesn't even make sense. This sounds like your language compiler must implement a bunch of optimizations mine doesn't.
Unions seek to organize the affairs and interests of a unit of labor to extract a fair share of productivity for the people actually doing the work. The alternative is all that value gets captured by C-suite or investors, with decreased mobility of the people doing the work into the class of investors.
Unions also have a side effect of creating a selection pressure against exploitation of your workforce to attain profitability. Without the unions spooking the management drones, you get things like Walmart and McD's going and outsourcing what was previously done via payroll to State benefit programs.
With you thusfar. Business is generally something engaged in by two individuals consisting of an exchange of value in good faith projected to leave both parties coming out ahead.
>that you deem to be satisfactory to obviate the need for state welfare benefits...
Specifically severed this to illustrate how little it takes to go from uncontroversial to "what are you on?" As an employer in the United States there is an implicit assumption you are engaging in business in good faith. This was part of the reason things like minimum wages ended up being a "Gentleman's Agreement" like affair. If you couldn't even keep up with Federal minimum wage, that reflected poorly on you as a business operator.
>the mention of which in this context is a non sequitur.
The mention thereof is far from a non-sequitur. Given that there is no dearth of evidence that the fact that places like Walmart and McD's have worker populations disproportionately represented in State Benefit's programs, up to and including HR supplied documentation on how to on ramp to said programs; that a preponderance of the evidence at least suggests at some level this is reflected in some aspect in the grand corporate calculus of "How do I get the most for the least?" When it becomes a part of your Corporate Strategy, we have issues.
Outsourcing your workers living expenses to the American taxpayer is not acceptable.
Deliberately paying people a wage so low, then handing them a "how-to" guide for food stamps is deliberately tilting your extraction of labor far more in your favor than the worker's, because you're turning around and telling the worker "Don't forget to file for <insert welfare program here> this month in your off time!" After all, I'm sure employees were not encouraged to engage in this activity on the clock.
So you're absolutely right. I come from different priors. You should have your shit straight enough as an employer to keep your employees contributing to, instead of being doled out to from, the tax rolls.
If you cannot do this, you should be strongly disincentivized from doing up to and including paying extra corporate tax to recover the costs of the people you're stiffing.
Back to the original topic at hand. How does a Union try to "take over" a company? A Union can't by definition, because at that point, the company would be a co-op. The Union is fundamentally limited to acting as an extraction to divert value delegation in the counter management/investor direction. The Union still has no implicit control outside of "you do what you want, but this group of laborers is not playing ball unless..." and channeling it down through a handful of savvy, experienced, and one can only hope, good faith represeentatives.
In no way shape or form does that line up with your contention that a union "takes over" which with it suggests taking possession of the assets and investments that make up the company.
Part of the blame there lies with the government allowing corporations to offload their labor costs onto it. That's one of many ways in which the government gives handouts to corporations which is the literal antithesis of the market economy.
The problem is that these structures are often self-defeating. A B-Corp has no incentive to grow, so B-Corp often don't grow.
Had Bandcamp restructured into something like a non-profit foundation, that might have been pretty cool. Maybe even being musician owned.
What about the people who sell sites like Bandcamp? It seems to me they want their pockets lined as well.
To me it points to something fundamentally unsustainable. If cycle of “people who love music/support the artists” create sites/publications/etc. and then invariably sell out to some larger corporate body who dilutes or destroys the operation - what is going wrong?
Besides protecting a community's investment, this would better align the short & long term profit interests of corporations with their communities.
It's clear that ethics, values and internet protocols need more alignment. The open source community, their licenses and tools, are a good example where similar issues have been (and continue to be) hashed out.
First they came for the manufacturers, but I didn't buy raw steel or wood by the train load. Then they came for the programmers and consultants, but I didn't need any software written or any business advice. Then they came for literally EVERYTHING in retail, and I squirmed, but bought Prime anyway. Then they came for my TV and music, and... Hey! Wait just a dad-gummed minute here!
That's one way of putting it. Another might be that the original owners/creators of Bandcamp decided to sell it, to a company that didn't have any connection whatsoever with Bandcamp's business or mission, and a less-than-stellar reputation.
If we're going to play the blame game we might as well start here.
But incentives only go so far. There was little incentive for Musk to do what he's doing at Twitter, but he did it anyway after he got caught in a trap of his own devising.
"Bandcamp and MySpace were both built by people who genuinely love music."
MySpace was sold by "Tom" to a large company which then, eventually, abandoned it... just like what is likely to happen to BandCamp. Tom made out like a bandit.. just like the owner of BandCamp likely did.
Too bad too, because back in the aughts (even after the News Corp acquisition) bands still relied on it for an internet presence, advertising shows, etc.
It’s almost as if, at the end of the day, it’s really all just a bunch of humans exercising their free will to make companies and do as they please…
https://blog.bandcamp.com/2022/03/02/bandcamp-is-joining-epi...
Lots of people would donate to it. If you want a real example, go to
I did some work for them back in the 80's, and they're still around.
Bandcamp 2.0 can cut the labels in, or not.
I am not actually sure I agree with the author's premise at all. Nothing digital is forever, if anything, the opposite is true. The internet is completely ephemeral. And it's only through the persistence, hard work, and money of dedicated people that anything is preserved.
Secondly, hoarding lots of data on the internet != a community. Maybe it's the activity that a community could build itself around, or maybe it's the public space that they use. But the reason places like Geocities or MySpace collapsed is because they held feverishly onto all of the data but none of the community.
And maybe it's worth it to hold onto stuff that's been abandoned (even if it's borderline hoarding), but I would argue that it is entirely irrelevant to what went wrong with the Bandcamp situation.
It’s understandable that they would rather secure their family more, and switch to a new adventure.
I look at those Japanese family run businesses who have made baozi on the same street corner for hundreds of years.
Fortunately, a lot of the world’s small businesses are run by people who stick around and don’t sell out.
He sold for money. He planned on continue to lead the team (CEO). So he was part of the plan to fire everyone before Epic sold to this new company
They took it from being a company with a culture that they built, and a community of employees and users and musicians, and said "We are ok with this all going who knows where if we cash out now for enough money." They know damn well anything could happen from then on. Any hiring or firing decisions from that point on are a part of someone's money-making plan that (almost always) ends in another sale (whether private or IPO). Did anyone honestly think Epic was going to be a good custodian?
No one has to do that. Songtrader and other giants and all the PE big funds in the world can't make someone do that. The world is full of companies that never sell 50% of the shares because they care about what they have built more than cash and would prefer to keep a modestly profitable business going that employs their friends and families and continues to embody their values. Some of these even take outside investment from private equity funds - I've done diligences for them - where the deal is very clearly that less than 50% is ever going to be for sale. (These are called "minority" or "growth" investment, less common, but they exist a plenty.)
Ableton famously refuses to take outside investment because the founders care more about the thing they have made and their position in the music and technology culture than they do about being as rich as possible. And they have been an excellent new owner for Cycling 74.
I hope bandcamp makes it, because I still think it's a great alternative to other options. But I'm under no illusion that it's the same thing it was in the beginning. That ship sailed with the first transaction.
I mean, sure, "they" being "capitalist overlords", created a world where the Bandcamp founders would need to sell out in order to have am assured secure life for themselves and offspring. But they did sell out. Epic is just doing what Epic does.
Epic did nothing with them, and now they are being sold to a company that will almost certainly just destroy their value.
Why? This is dumb. I can see why Bandcamp’s owners would sell, but no rational buyer would buy Bandcamp, it is a company that is only valuable because of the goodwill that it has. Their niche is very-online music enthusiasts who are into the community feeling. We’re going to notice and leave as soon as the cash-in change happens.
Why didn’t Epic and this other company whoever they are just light some little piles of money on fire instead. At least they could have warmed their feet.
"need" is a bit twisted, i'm not sure anyone "needs" a million or so. If they really wanted to get out of it and keep it nice they most likely could have set up a non-profit or something, raised some money from the community and probably still get a small rent in some way. Also it's not like the CEO of such a company (smallish but still) is strapped on cash already.
> But they did sell out.
That's it.. There's no excuse and as you said, everyone knew this kind of constant downhill had a very high probability to happen. They definitely took the 90% chance coin-flip to hose the community and get "an actual bit of capital" much of money.
The end-game of private equity/IPO gives incentive for people to create great things in the first place. That they inevitably die on the vine after several acquisitions is still better than having nothing in the first place.
> The companies that buy up sites like Bandcamp are interested in nothing except ensuring the executives’ pockets get lined appropriately
I like how it presents things as if Bandcamp's original management had no part in selling.
This is not China. They were not forced to sell. They were the ones who had to decide whether to do it or not, but somehow they are not to blame for any consequences.
The users of bandcamp -- both artists and fans -- will likely be on far more stable ground if bandcamp earns a reasonable profit. If the owners view it as an asset instead of a charity endeavor or a labor of love. Because in the latter case, people eventually want to move on, as the original creator did after 15 years.
That literally is fine. There was never a need to turn it into a highly profitable service. If it was paying bills and salaries, it was an absolute success.
I'd be surprised if the employees were in it for the guiding mission of "build an artist-centric and fan-centric platform, putting middleman profits after great experiences, until the day I get tired and cash out."
Either way, there's no slippery slope here. I do believe already that most business owners are acting immorally in the pursuit of personal gain. I don't believe "wanting to get richer than other people" is actually a defensible motivation for actions that either worsen the experience of other people or prevent others from getting a share of that wealth.
edit: the content of the comment I'm replying to completely changed while I was writing my reply, but I'm just going to leave this here.
> It seems doubtful whether any employee genuinely excluded the possibility of the owner eventually leaving when they signed up. It's not some rare or obscure edge case.
Of course they know it's a possibility, but surely most hoped the temptation would be resisted. Again, the whole point of the platform was to focus on artists first, and fans second, and growth somewhere behind that. But all that is only talk without contractual obligations, and so we see the company sold out and gutted because they can.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by the last paragraph though.
The employees themselves signed up, received compensation, and then spent that, partly, on self-interested things, without exception as far as I know.
So it would be pretty odd for them to hope that the owner wouldn't also have some self-interest.
They expected the owner to get paid a salary, yes. They did not expect the owner to go trade the entire mission of the company for a huge payday. These are different things.
The owner sold the company to Epic, which did keep the company's mission the same for a year afterwards, it's then Epic which made this recent decision.
Some things probably work best when the aim is to break even, not to increase profit. Which has it's own set of challenges.
The problem is that people want the experience to be frictionless and that is best achieved by a corporation. Maybe someone could clone Bandcamp feature list but payment processing will be a hassle .
Regardless artists make more on merch and doing shows than streaming . I see many artists investing in merch sales (and I will buy that) and or “collector edition” products.
Is it capitalism ? Sure. Can it be truly solved . Not really. People don’t want to be bothered to make their own websites with a shop and do everything themselves. Open source will get you 90% there but honestly just doing shows and selling it in person is profitable and giving away the music online or stream using twitch .
Why is payment processing considered a hassle? Set up a Paypal account, create a link and have customers pay through that. Done.
Payment processors are in the business of making it easy to pay people. Use any of the myriad of payment processors to get money from people.
Is it slightly less frictionless than standing up a half-million dollar website with options to pay via CatCoin? Yes, but is it really worth it to optimize for 1% of customers who can't be arsed to pay with anything other than their favorite, obscure method of payment?
The most important role is to prevent fraud and keep reputation high. Making it easier to pay is way down the list or using a US credit card from Laos location wouldn't trigger alarms and prevent the transaction requiring a manual override
Or?
Seems like a common theme: people build a community around something, it becomes something really cool, and then a bunch of businesspeople insert themselves and liquidate the trust that’s been built
The problem is money, it pits people against each other. It draws in all of these sociopathic businesspeople. It turns people into ass kissers. It liquidates trust. It destroys community
Build a culture where people think money = God and this is what happens. It consistently brings out the absolute worst in people
So do the people who let the business people in just get to dodge the blame? "Oh well, we can't expect anyone to have principles in the face of so much money, so we shouldn't hold anyone to a standard?"
This applies to all the actors here as long as they abstain from getting involved in politics in a way that perpetuates the rules of the game.
Internet Archive is doing a pretty incredible job of just that.
https://winners.webbyawards.com/2017/specialachievement/130/...
https://archive.org/details/2017-Webby-award-video
“The Internet Archive…is building a home for Universal Access to All Knowledge, open to everyone, everywhere, to use as they like. Open to all societies of the future that care to build on our triumphs and learn from our mistakes.” -- Lawrence Lessig, narrator
EDIT: TLDR Build public goods if motivated and resourced, defend them through legal, logical, physical, and technological controls.
[0] https://time.com/6266147/internet-archive-copyright-infringe...
And that's something to celebrate? No, it's something HN nearly universally somehow overlooks in every single conversation about Internet Archive, because they get a pass (the end justifies the means essentially).
Internet Archive should be illegal because it violates human rights.
You raise some interesting points, but the kill-it-with-fire solution ignores the great (necessary!) benefits the archive provides to humanity, by protecting useful public/published information from constant churn.
Humanity is just beginning to find its moral/ethical way forward, in this new integrated world of information, by feel in the dark.
In the meantime, its unavoidable that many things will be imperfect balances, and people will disagree where the balances should be.
I'm glad that organizations don't try to cater to every single law in every country. But it's weird that this urge to force their own laws on the entire world seems so prevalent amongst Europeans.
British Library archives every publication, print and digital (including websites and social media posts), made in UK. They started to do this before exiting EU.
They don't just do it, but are obligated to do it.
> violating basic consumer rights, including the right to privacy
It's an openly published stuff that was openly available at some point and didn't require any credentials like login and password for access.
It's like pinning a piece of paper on a public lamppost and then complaining that someone wrote the text down and told others.
> and the right to be forgotten
By the way, did you forget about Herostratus already or should I remind you that you must bear no memory of this arsonist who burned Temple of Artemis?
> They make it intentionally difficult, and often impossible, to get content removed from their archive.
I did read about people sending GDPR requests and getting their personal data removed. I suspect that using just "I want this deleted" as a reasoning will result in rejection though.
British Library that operated in EU requires a legal reason for material removal, not just "I don't want this here".
> (especially if you don't control the domain)
It's reasonable to prove the right to manage the data first.
> Internet Archive should be illegal because it violates human rights.
Publishing stuff openly makes it available to everyone. 100% of people. Why do it and then be mad that someone remembered it?
I will rephrase one of the most widely used quotes in American movies: "You have a right to remain silent. Everything you post may be remembered".
Eventually it just caused my blood pressure to rise and I eventually decided to step away. But for a few years, there was something very interesting going on.
I also had something similar to a community on there for years.
There's no doubt that Twitter used to be the main platform for promotion of solopreneurs and technical content creators.
For me it's almost all gone.
There was always plenty of misinformation, but you'd still find out about the facts an hour or more before it'd be reported on mainstream media. Of course, by the time it hit mainstream media Twitter would pretty much instantly become useless due to all the "thoughts and prayers" retweet pollution, and spammers hijacking the hashtags.
Can't say I ever loved it, though.
I imagine there are still many communities that aren't completely ruined yet, your mileage may vary.
The brand value of the word "Twitter" was probably in the billions, and Musk just wiped it away. It was ruined so thoroughly that we can only intelligently talk about it by calling Twitter by its former name because its new name is confusing to even say in conversation.
Twitter's advertising revenue fell off a cliff almost overnight due in no small part to their owner's policy of loudly and publicly attacking individual Twitter advertisers for leaving Twitter.
Twitter had tens of thousands of the most famous celebrities in the world actively participating every day for free, and Musk managed to screw that up in myriad ways, not least of which by falsely labeling them as paid subscribers.
For some godforsaken reason, Twitter's opinion on who and was "notable" or not was a significant status symbol, and Twitter started selling that status symbol for $8/month.
Twitter had a truly impressive internal talent pool, and it's largely gone, ruining their ability to pivot at a time when the whole plan appears to be "wildly pivot."
Twitter was nicely profitable in 2018 and 2019[0], then went on an overzealous hiring/spending spree in 2020 and was in not-great financial shape by the time Musk happened. Maybe the previous owners could have turned it around, but we'll never know.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income...
He could redo his thesis: "If you don't make money, your business will be destroyed".
In other words, "Even if you make money, they will ruin your business".
Wasn't that the author's thesis?
It happened to me with the new UI of K9. I would never installed that app if I saw it in its current UI. I installed it precisely because it's old odd UI suited my needs. Given the U shape of their votes on the Play store I'd say that about half of their users share my point of view. I keep installing the last version before the new UI.