Bandcamp sold by Epic Games to Songtradr

HotStrange

@NeuM said:

@HotStrange said:

@FastGhost said:
Songtraitor laid off half the Bandcamp staff today.

Sheesh. Not a good sign.

Not uncommon when a business is sold. Them's the breaks.

You’re not wrong but the whole thing just feels pretty bleak. I hope I’m wrong.

NeuM

@HotStrange said:

@NeuM said:

@HotStrange said:

@FastGhost said:
Songtraitor laid off half the Bandcamp staff today.

Sheesh. Not a good sign.

Not uncommon when a business is sold. Them's the breaks.

You’re not wrong but the whole thing just feels pretty bleak. I hope I’m wrong.

It's unfortunate, but just a real-world effect of transfer of ownership. I'd seen enough of this in my prior life as someone in the workforce.

HotStrange

@NeuM said:

@HotStrange said:

@NeuM said:

@HotStrange said:

@FastGhost said:
Songtraitor laid off half the Bandcamp staff today.

Sheesh. Not a good sign.

Not uncommon when a business is sold. Them's the breaks.

You’re not wrong but the whole thing just feels pretty bleak. I hope I’m wrong.

It's unfortunate, but just a real-world effect of transfer of ownership. I'd seen enough of this in my prior life as someone in the workforce.

I’ve seen it happen as well. Kinda just have to brace for impact when you’re a part of it. Thankfully I’ve never been laid off myself. Well once but the business closed completely.

Tarekith

@Phil999 said:

@Mountain_Hamlet said:
There was a time when everyone just had their own website and they were therefore in control of what they were doing to a certain extent.

what exactly has changed? The cost of maintaining a website?

Since the late 90’s I wanted to have a website, but never managed to do it. What are your experiences with your website?

I love having my own site, I can put whatever I want on it and in whatever quality I want. It’s great being able to offer all my music for free in high quality, and not rely on other platforms and whatever encoding encoding they use.

These days with Wordpress or Squarespace, it’s really not that hard to do at all. I think I pay around $60 a year for hosting my Wordpress based site (and not hosted by Wordpress), so not that expensive either. I think people assume it’s harder than it is to make your own site, or that it’s too expansive.

Gavinski

@Phil999 said:

@Mountain_Hamlet said:
There was a time when everyone just had their own website and they were therefore in control of what they were doing to a certain extent.

what exactly has changed? The cost of maintaining a website?

Since the late 90’s I wanted to have a website, but never managed to do it. What are your experiences with your website?

I think probably the only thing that really changed is that social media became a thing and / or that various sites were created to allow you to quickly set up certain types of ecommerce. These social media sites could, at least as long as you were doing the 'right' kind of content, promote your work for you and potentially - emphasis on potentially lol - make you rich and famous with zero start up cost and no fees or at least no fixed recurring costs.

So, Facebook became the place to post mixed media stuff and longer posts, Twitter the place for shorter posts, Insta for shorter vids and for photos, Youtube the place to post long video content, things like Gumroad the easy way to set up ecommerce, Bandcamp a place to sell your music, Spotify a place to rent it. People can stream terabytes of your data from youtube without you or them ever paying a penny for that data hosting.

There were of course massive tradeoffs: giving up the level of control that you would have over your own site being one - at the risk of derailing this thread, ask Russell Brand whether he regrets using YouTube as a platform - as well as allowing a middle man to get a big chunk of your profits if you did manage to make any, etc etc. Youtube takes a huge slice of profits from ad revenue on your videos, and a smaller but also still huge slice from Superchats etc (though the revenue for these is tiny for most people anyway, if they even get any revenue at all).

People​ ​were passionate about Bandcamp because it was seen as much less exploitative than the competition, allowing artists to keep a far larger share of the profits than they had become used to with other web 2.0 platforms, but still without any monthly or annual fees.

Phil999

thank you @Tarekith and @Gavinski. Valuable information. Inspires me to finally create a website of my own one day.

Besides, I never really liked Russell Brand, but there are many more people deplatformed in recent years for just having an opinion or first hand knowledge, like for example Dr. Sam Bailey or Eva Bartlett.

Gavinski

@Phil999 said:
thank you @Tarekith and @Gavinski. Valuable information. Inspires me to finally create a website of my own one day.

Yes, I’m still debating whether to have my own website or use things like Gumroad and Patreon. These kinds of services are obviously convenient but there’s a lot to be said for having your own site, even if it’s less convenient in some ways.

Phil999

a website is clean. Those convenient services like Patreon have a lot of material that is not quite proper.

But the topic is about Bandcamp. This service was always good.

richardyot

@Gavinski said:

@Phil999 said:
thank you @Tarekith and @Gavinski. Valuable information. Inspires me to finally create a website of my own one day.

Yes, I’m still debating whether to have my own website or use things like Gumroad and Patreon. These kinds of services are obviously convenient but there’s a lot to be said for having your own site, even if it’s less convenient in some ways.

The main benefit of using a third-party if you are doing any kind of e-commerce is that they will handle all the backend and all the local taxes.

Hosting your own payments is pretty complicated, especially as you have to charge the appropriate taxes for every territory you sell to. It's a lot easier to let someone else do this for you. Hence the appeal of sites like Bandcamp and Gumroad.

Gavinski

@richardyot said:

@Gavinski said:

@Phil999 said:
thank you @Tarekith and @Gavinski. Valuable information. Inspires me to finally create a website of my own one day.

Yes, I’m still debating whether to have my own website or use things like Gumroad and Patreon. These kinds of services are obviously convenient but there’s a lot to be said for having your own site, even if it’s less convenient in some ways.

The main benefit of using a third-party if you are doing any kind of e-commerce is that they will handle all the backend and all the local taxes.

Hosting your own payments is pretty complicated, especially as you have to charge the appropriate taxes for every territory you sell to. It's a lot easier to let someone else do this for you. Hence the appeal of sites like Bandcamp and Gumroad.

That's useful info, thnx

Luxthor

@richardyot said:

@Gavinski said:

@Phil999 said:
thank you @Tarekith and @Gavinski. Valuable information. Inspires me to finally create a website of my own one day.

Yes, I’m still debating whether to have my own website or use things like Gumroad and Patreon. These kinds of services are obviously convenient but there’s a lot to be said for having your own site, even if it’s less convenient in some ways.

The main benefit of using a third-party if you are doing any kind of e-commerce is that they will handle all the backend and all the local taxes.

Hosting your own payments is pretty complicated, especially as you have to charge the appropriate taxes for every territory you sell to. It's a lot easier to let someone else do this for you. Hence the appeal of sites like Bandcamp and Gumroad.

Not just that, our last straw before we closed our shop was because of the one shady person threatening to destroy our e-commerce solution with a security breach. So you need to be on tip-toe with system administration and security patches too.

Gavinski

@Luxthor said:

@richardyot said:

@Gavinski said:

@Phil999 said:
thank you @Tarekith and @Gavinski. Valuable information. Inspires me to finally create a website of my own one day.

Yes, I’m still debating whether to have my own website or use things like Gumroad and Patreon. These kinds of services are obviously convenient but there’s a lot to be said for having your own site, even if it’s less convenient in some ways.

The main benefit of using a third-party if you are doing any kind of e-commerce is that they will handle all the backend and all the local taxes.

Hosting your own payments is pretty complicated, especially as you have to charge the appropriate taxes for every territory you sell to. It's a lot easier to let someone else do this for you. Hence the appeal of sites like Bandcamp and Gumroad.

Not just that, our last straw before we closed our shop was because of the one shady person threatening to destroy our e-commerce solution with a security breach. So you need to be on tip-toe with system administration and security patches too.

Jeez

Gavinski

@Gavinski said:

@Luxthor said:

@richardyot said:

@Gavinski said:

@Phil999 said:
thank you @Tarekith and @Gavinski. Valuable information. Inspires me to finally create a website of my own one day.

Yes, I’m still debating whether to have my own website or use things like Gumroad and Patreon. These kinds of services are obviously convenient but there’s a lot to be said for having your own site, even if it’s less convenient in some ways.

The main benefit of using a third-party if you are doing any kind of e-commerce is that they will handle all the backend and all the local taxes.

Hosting your own payments is pretty complicated, especially as you have to charge the appropriate taxes for every territory you sell to. It's a lot easier to let someone else do this for you. Hence the appeal of sites like Bandcamp and Gumroad.

Not just that, our last straw before we closed our shop was because of the one shady person threatening to destroy our e-commerce solution with a security breach. So you need to be on tip-toe with system administration and security patches too.

Jeez

But is it not simple enough to just use Stripe or whatever? That should be secure. Details of e-commerce is not something I know about tho. What 'solution' were you using?

Luxthor

@Gavinski said:

@Gavinski said:

@Luxthor said:

@richardyot said:

@Gavinski said:

@Phil999 said:
thank you @Tarekith and @Gavinski. Valuable information. Inspires me to finally create a website of my own one day.

Yes, I’m still debating whether to have my own website or use things like Gumroad and Patreon. These kinds of services are obviously convenient but there’s a lot to be said for having your own site, even if it’s less convenient in some ways.

The main benefit of using a third-party if you are doing any kind of e-commerce is that they will handle all the backend and all the local taxes.

Hosting your own payments is pretty complicated, especially as you have to charge the appropriate taxes for every territory you sell to. It's a lot easier to let someone else do this for you. Hence the appeal of sites like Bandcamp and Gumroad.

Not just that, our last straw before we closed our shop was because of the one shady person threatening to destroy our e-commerce solution with a security breach. So you need to be on tip-toe with system administration and security patches too.

Jeez

But is it not simple enough to just use Stripe or whatever? That should be secure. Details of e-commerce is not something I know about tho. What 'solution' were you using?

It was OpenCart, it’s not the fault of the e-commerce solution. We didn’t maintain it regularly. The shop was closed ten years ago.

Tarekith

The good news about a lot of hosting sites these days is that they can keep everything up to date for you if you want. I have Wordpress set to do this automatically for me, hasn’t broken anything yet. The e-commerce side can be a little difficult to implement, but things like PayPal and Venmo make it easy to add payment buttons to your website and they handle all the currency conversions and tax documents if you want too