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by rb2e 996 days ago
oh No, they sold Bandcamp... According to Jason Schreier https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1707416234461909487
4 comments

I always advise people to at least have a backup spot to send people to even if they don't maintain their own website, and I take my own advice. I expected something like this, so I've been dropping every album into an item in my Ko-fi shop: https://ko-fi.com/s/7e9f22c63b

Ko-fi is 25GB for free and 200GB for paid accounts, so most things will fit. I'll probably cross-post it to Patreon's new shop feature in the near future just to be safe.

edit: and confirmation

https://www.songtradr.com/blog/posts/songtradr-bandcamp-acqu...

That's a bit disappointing. As a user I just want Bandcamp to be owned by someone who gets it and leaves it alone. As far as I could tell, Epic barely touched Bandcamp. I'm unfamiliar with Songtradr but they have more incentive to integrate the core product into their services as they're in the industry and a smaller company (more need to make the acquisition work for them.) I hope it goes well.
I'm somewhat hopeful about the synergies here. Giving musicians an easy path to monetize their catalog, as well as market their availability to be commissioned by brands, is a good thing... especially when artists are being dually hammered by Spotify's deci-cents-per-stream industry baseline and live music promoters' anticompetitive behavior.

That said, there are ways Songtradr could abuse their new position of trust. I hope they're smart enough not to do that, but I also hope that an archival project for free downloads on long-inactive Bandcamp accounts is underway...

Self-reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37696171 makes me less hopeful that they're operating in good faith...
Interesting. I didn’t know about the union aspect and regardless, not retaining staff is a great way to stop understanding what’s important to preserve.
Hopefully they don't mess it up too badly. Bandcamp is the only way for a Linux user not in the US to get non-DRM music these days :(.
Are Junodownload, Boomkat, Bleep, Qobuz, etc. available in your country?
Some of them seem to be, so that is one alternative (though they don’t have the genres I listen to). Qobuz is only available for streaming