[fundamental]

Ideally I (and I'd assume other commenters) would have preferred to see bandcamp remain independent. It's not like there's a huge need to scale up quickly or provide large partnerships. Bandcamp was an effective way of paying small independent musicians with a good overall website which should have given bandcamp a reliable revenue source. Acquisition likely means the website will get worse, artists will be driven of onto other platforms (i.e. harder to discover ones), and if there's alternative financial incentives then small artists will likely end up making less (e.g. track streaming revenue).

I'd be disappointed if apple had made the purchase, though it would be less out of left field.

[HellDunkel]

I too would have prefered seeing bandcamp stay independent but they were a privately owned company so that would have required a huge amount of idealism (which eventually wanes) or ambitions to compete with spotify. You can‘t always get what you want.

[fundamental]

Personally I don't buy that line of argument. The endgame for a business is not a binary choice between acquisition or taking over the entire market.

[kevincrane]

Hard agree, I really hate the trend of businesses having to have "an exit", be it IPO or get swallowed by one of like 6 behemoth companies. I love a good "we know who we are and are happy being it" success story which I thought Bandcamp was.

[micromacrofoot]

It kind of is now (and I hate it).

If you don't sell, it's likely the large companies trying to buy you will copy you and use their piles of money to undercut you out of business (and if they don't, any VC backed startup can try).

So you either survive as small and unnoticed, or become big enough to be interesting (and then bought or killed unless you achieve absurd growth).

Tech is kind of a dark forest now (https://thoughtcatalog.com/christine-stockton/2021/02/heres-...).

I've worked for 2 companies that didn't sell and were obliterated this way.

[HellDunkel]

Dont get me wrong, I am not happy at all about this silicon valley „winner takes it all“ mindset. Let me explain how i see things. Bandcamp is for djs and indepenent music lovers. Although djing has managed to evaded streaming so far, it is almost inevitable to come. I am sure the folks at bandcamp were very clear about that and were looking to find a way to deal with the situation.

[Apocryphon]

> The endgame for a business is not a binary choice between acquisition or taking over the entire market.

That's been the state of tech ever since Web 2.0 or so.

[mkr-hn]

Bandcamp is almost as old as Web 2.0. That's why people are so confused about this. Why does a profitable 15-year-old company need to sell? They didn't say in the post, so all we can do is be frustrated.

[lghh]

Why did they have to compete with spotify? They are not a music streaming service (at their core) or a podcast publisher.

[HellDunkel]

Because streaming makes more sense and provides far better metrics for artist compensation.

[selfhoster11]

Except for those that, you know, prefer to own music. Their actual core audience.

[HellDunkel]

Can you really own music? See i have been collecting vinyl for 20 years and know about the pleasure it can provide. But with digital files scarcity, age, smell, looks, condition no longer matter. There is nothing left to „own“. The only thing you own is your hard disk.

[selfhoster11]

I don't care about the tactile aspect of a particular album (as opposed to the "feel"/"UX" of a particular format in general, which I do find fun) or piece of media.

I care about one thing, and one thing only: an irrevocable right to experience a particular piece of media where and when I please in the original form it was released, subject to natural degradation of the physical medium. Now that music is digital, I expect the "when" to be "at any point in my life, starting from when I purchased it", and the "where" to be "any device with the ability to play music".

Streaming is essentially asking for permission to re-experience a piece of media every time I want to do so, and Spotify's and YouTube's answer is often "no". My music library is simply a necessary evil that facilitates security against their whims.

[heleninboodler]

But strangely, better metrics for artist compensation somehow don't lead to better artist compensation. I've never heard a testimonial from a band about how much better the spotify compensation model is, but I've heard dozens of testimonials and articles about artists to whom spotify pays pennies while bandcamp pays their bills.

[throw_nbvc1234]

> It's not like there's a huge need to scale up quickly or provide large partnerships

Is "good enough" compatible with "capitalism"? Even ignoring the money aspect of things; you mention the website getting worse but I'm not sure the website has fundamentally changed (for better or worse) in a decade. Their iOS app isn't even compatible with ipads, it's locked to a phone aspect ratio with massive black bars surrounding it. Yet one could make the argument that things were "good enough" tech wise. Bandcamp (in my opinion) was a product/company that was good enough. But there's doesn't seem to be societal incentives to keep companies like that around in today's world... or maybe you just don't hear about them lol