[riversflow]

The only outrage I feel is that Tim Sweeney is using the compensation of starving artists, the main demographic on Bandcamp as I understand it, to try and make himself and EPIC richer or more relatively powerful. I don't give two hoots about "breaking up the App Store Model" and I doubt many/most musicians do either. I personally feel that 30% isn't even outrageous considering the value proposition.

Relatively rich/privileged software developers making their problem (App Stores wanting a 30% cut) the musicians' problem isn't noble, it's evil.

Edit: The way I see it, Tim Sweeney/EPIC is responsible for breaking the status quo that allowed bandcamp’s niche to operate the way they did, which seems a reasonable assumption. That acquisition turned the userbase into a pawn in the App store battle.

[_readyforit]

The thing is… 30% is a lot for the artists on Bandcamp.

Say I sell my album for $10 for easy math.

I think Bandcamp takes something like 10-15%, there’s a small PayPal fee (~1%) and the rest goes to me.

That’s ~$8.41 in my pocket.

If Google takes their cut at the beginning for providing…the App Store where the buyer downloaded the app… the artist’s cut becomes ~$5.89. For a $10 album.

It just doesn’t line up with the whole point of Bandcamp.

[CharlesW]

> The thing is… 30% is a lot for the artists on Bandcamp.

How do you feel about 10%, which is what it probably would be according to TFA?

[stale2002]

> I don't give two hoots about "breaking up the App Store Model" and I doubt many/most musicians do either

Well you should. Because regardless of if Epic bought bandcamp or not, the fee that google charges would come directly out of musicians pockets.

Regardless of who is running bandcamp, that feel would directly cause artists to not make as much money.

> I personally feel that 30% isn't even outrageous

Ok, and now the end result is that fee is coming out of artists pockets.

If you don't care about artist compensation, and want them to make less money, well fine. But don't pretend like you are on the side of artist compensation.

[hamburglar]

Yes, 100%. Epic or no, google announced that they were going to start taking an additional (and rather large) cut of payments for music sales which they have no part in. Bandcamp built a payment system that facilitates artists making money at zero cost to google, and now google wants to prevent that unless they get a cut.

You can argue that google provides the foothold that gets the app on the device, so maybe a small fee could be justified, but taking place in all transactions that enables in perpetuity despite providing no technical contribution to them is ridiculous.

Bandcamp could do a billion dollars a week in sales and it wouldn’t cost google a dime.

[spywaregorilla]

Sweeney / Epic donated $144 million to Ukraine. As far as virtue signaling goes, I think they've shown they do in fact have a fair amount of principles. Platform monopolies are real problems.