That’s one way to look at it. Either way bandcamp was going to do this with some company. Sounds like it was inevitable.
Probably was, doesn’t mean I should be happy about it.
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…agreed…good and reasonable questions…
but in this case, both sides started from some kind of underground…
and in a worst case scenario, it’s all back to free sound systems, free underground raves of all kind…resistance at it’s timeless best…sub and counterculture will always exist…
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Noooooooooooo
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I think it’s more like: 99% of all startups are created with the intention to be bought for billions of dollars one day. Golden exit or what they call that.
If Epic manages to sell/license “our” music for fair conditions to be used by game studios… why not. Let’s see how it ends.
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Thinking more, if it ends up anything like epics strategy to make the epic game store big they will just give away a ton of free content and do basically no work on making the app/store better. That said epic has money so if they give out free album of your choice passes or something artist will likely get paid. Honestly not sure how well epic games store has done, I mean I have it for free games and some sales but it is a pretty bad store app thingy.
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Hate to say it but it always was inevitable, and pretty standard procedure:
- Have cool idea and start company
- Build a solid base of users
- Grow beyond initial expectations
- Expand to cater for increased demand
- Bring in external investment
- Grow even more
- Sell to highest bidder
I hope but doubt it will stay for independent artists, if it does not doubtless something else will come along.
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At some point people want a chunk of change to retire with.
That’s the PR statement hé. You wouldn t believe the BS corps and startups put out.
I ‘d see this in the light of the acquisition wars in the game dev corp world. Microsoft recently gobbled up major gobbler Activision Blizzard for 69 billion $: Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard to bring the joy and community of gaming to everyone, across every device - Stories
Epic seems to be investing to remain on top and not get gobbled itself.
Facebook, Google and Apple do the same.
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Fair enough. I would have hoped bandcamp PR has some truth to it 
But yea, these things happen. If Epic does what they do with current copyrighted material (games/assets) it should be good. We shall see 
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This thread has reminded me of the fact you can play Defender on your Bandcamp artist account, and the background is your plays graph.
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Pretty soon they’ll have different skins for sale for your ship
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Literally never heard of Epic Games until now.
Having read bandcamps email, all I can think is,
Well that sucks.
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I think Bandcamp sold about $77 million US last around (keeping 10% of revenues, paying out the rest to artists). Epic made $5.1 billion US last year.
Hard to figure what Epic really has in mind.
They want to dominate obviously… adding music to their “repertoire” is a good step for them. Epic - as already mentioned - will be the biggest company in the world in the next 10 years when AR / VR is ready to be adopted by everyone - and of course Hollywood which already uses it heavily (imagine how much money they don’t have to spend for expensive props / environments)
Also could have been Steam. And with Steam I’d have bad feelings about the future of BC since they built their platform in like 1998 or so and they have done exactly nothing to improve their platform
since then other than keeping it compatible with all the operating systems.
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Not everyone mate.
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I mean of course…gobble up all the things. But Bandcamp is small potatoes.
They’ve eaten small shops before, and the result doesn’t look promising at all:
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What ever it is, it wont be good for us.
Big corps never are.
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not by the older lads obviously 
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I think it’s a good move for Bandcamp but I don’t see why it would make games music better, unless they setup a streamlined licensing deal.
If the licensing changes in epics favour I’m sure artists would go elsewhere.
There’s still a place for unity( who are also buying things ) … but epic certainly have bought very good 3rd party tools recently ( sorry … not a game dev thread )
Bandcamp is successful , I’m sure they’ll either ‘improve’ it or leave it to continue to gain market share .
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