The beautifully written but not much known Rune Blades Of Celi ebooks no longer can be purchased, as the small publisher is just gone. Of course, the ones I purchased could no longer be downloaded. But want something bigger? Fine. The Wheel Of Time (is that large enough for you?) Complete Edition I bought for over a hundred dollars also can't be donwloaded any more. (And to be more on topic, one of my favorite artists have disappeared from Bandcamp and so did my purchases. And Bandcamp is better in this than others.)
You can download all these from torrent trackers.
Tell me true, if you can't buy them how on earth it is piracy to download them?
> Tell me true, if you can't buy them how on earth it is piracy to download them?
People would argue that it's up to the seller whether they want to make their creations available. If I don't want to sell you something, then I'd entertain the argument that downloading it anyway is in some sense immoral or unethical.
But in your situation, you've already fucking bought it! It's as if you placed a pick-up order at the bookstore, showed up to pick up your books, and they told you to eat shit. In which case, acquiring it through other means is completely acceptable, morally and ethically.
> People would argue that it's up to the seller whether they want to make their creations available.
But this gets complicated. I wanted to post a song from a somewhat obscure '80s band on my website and so tracked them down and asked for permission.
One of them (the songwriter) responded to say that the band has never had the rights to the music on that album and, in fact, they don't even have a recording of it themselves. In his words "as far as I'm concerned, you can do whatever you want with that stuff". I posted the song and sent him a high-quality copy of the album it came from.
> People would argue that it's up to the seller whether they want to make their creations available. If I don't want to sell you something, then I'd entertain the argument that downloading it anyway is in some sense immoral or unethical.
I would say another key distinction is between "don't want to sell/can't sell" vs "don't want you to buy". In the former it may be because the owner does not want to go through the trouble of selling it or is no longer around to sell it.
I know some people have given up because the effort to deal with "trolls" (particularly DMCA and fakes) has either turned their passion into a nightmare or it's not really their passion anymore and they don't want to deal with it.
To me, this is the baby that got thrown out with the bathwater in the whole NFT debacle.
Yes, yes just about the entire NFT thing was just the obvious financial scams you can’t pull off in the real economy anymore. But the idea of an independent way to show your receipts? I think that’s got some real value.
So you bought access to video X. Maybe on PlayStation (sorry). Maybe through a streaming service. Why does it matter how you get the bits that constitute video X? Why does it matter what software you use to consume those bits?
Unfortunately the answer is that IP rights treat the medium and the message as different things. You need that, to some extent, to encourage folks to package things well (eg 4k remaster an older movie). But what if we fixed that?
I want to live in a world where it’s obvious that I have a legal right to watch the Infinity Saga Supercut [0] when I have an active Disney+ subscription. And when I have the DVD of all the movies. And when I have a mix of BlueRay, dvd, digital purchases, movie channels, etc.
It should also be obviously ok for me to have the Infinity Saga stored locally, without DRM, and cached on a couple iPads. And if Infinity Saga is uploaded to YouTube, I should get to watch it with reduced or no ads.
I agree (or at least see the argument) if it's like the original creator who decided they want to keep their hands on the work (or maybe like if a company wants to withdraw one edition of a book to sell a new edition), but in cases where works are orphaned, or the rights are in limbo, or a huge corporation merges with another huge corporation and permanently deletes creators' works for a tax break, I don't think there's any real argument.
If I Johnny writer am like "Ok when I was 15 I thought that many consecutive slurs was funny, but now the alt-right is rallying around what was supposed to be satire, so I want it off the market" that's kind of reasonable. If James Writerson has classics that are kind of out of fashion and got converted to ebooks by Big Publisher™ which was then bought by Bigger Publisher™ who decides it's not worth the money to keep the classics on the market (but also refuses to release them back to the estate of James Writerson or to the general public), that's less reasonable.
For generating a cookie file, I suggest just using https://github.com/hrdl-github/cookies-txt
I should really write up a full Linux and windows setup guide and submit it.
Likewise, people who use bandcamp are likely to use GOG, which also has purchase archiving tools available on GitHub. I’ve used https://github.com/Kalanyr/gogrepoc for a long time, but there are actually multiple projects now.
> Tell me true, if you can't buy them how on earth it is piracy to download them?
My daughter, doing a journalism course assignment, once asked Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span (not a _huge_ artist, but reasonably well known towards the end of last century) about this. Maddy's comment was basically the same. She'd rather you bought something legally, but if it's not available (some of their back catalogue had disappeared) then Maddy thought it was fine to 'pirate' it.
Incorrect. They actually purchased them and could download them, DRM-free. (At least if the other services listed are like Bandcamp.) You should archive them yourself after downloading. The fact that you can download them again from the server, or maybe stream them, is an additional service, it's not the thing itself.
That being said, when something is not sold anymore, I'd say it's fair game to torrent it or upload it wherever.
All of my Wheel of Time volumes are still there; I checked. Granted, barring fire or a really thorough or oddly specific burglar, they're not likely to go anywhere (although I suspect my son will devour them once he's mastered reading English and can reach that top shelf).
The thing that really worries me and which no one seems to be talking about is the region locking of localisation for streaming content.
For context - we're a Polish family living in the UK(like 2 million other Polish people). We have a small child who loves Disney films, and because he is normally exposed to English(and speaks it fluently) I'd like him to at least watch cartoons in Polish. But Disney region locks most(not all, but majority) of Polish localisation to Poland only. When we visit Poland I can watch all Disney content in Polish on my UK account without any issue - but when we're in the UK these localisation options disappear. So Disney clearly has those options but chooses not to offer them.
So right now, at least we can still buy DVDs or have those shipped over. But it's clear that Disney wants to stop distribution of physical media - as they've already done in some regions.
What then for multilingual families? Just "suck it up" and don't have access to content in my language, because I don't happen to currently live in Poland?
While there is the bigger picture to consider, my solution to get access to Swedish content for my then-partner while we were in the US was to use a VPN. Mullvad worked for local content, but if you still have friends/family back home, a tailscale exit node might work better, especially for Disney+.
A few years ago I travelled to Romania for vacation, Netflix simply didn't let me play the content I downloaded at home on the flight back, and while I was there all of the subtitles in my language were not available
I don't pay for Disney+ in Poland because they don't have Russian. Even though it's a native language of 1M+ immigrants and 99% of their content is translated. They probably just don't want my money, I have no other explanation.
Well so from what I understand at least part of it due to Disney selling off the rights to various translations to local companies(so for instance the translation to Lion King in Polish is owned by a local media company, not Disney, even though they obviously own the rights to the film), so they don't necessarily have automatic rights to distribute that translation worldwide without permission.
But on the other hand......it's Disney. They should be able to consolidate, buy those rights back, and distribute all localizations they have globally.
raising bi-lingual kids is much easier when you can give them second language media, and it doesn't seem like it would be an expensive flag for Disney to flip...
might even be an opportunity to rebrand themselves as educational...
The time spent re-ripping my CD collection to FLAC, my DVD collection to MKV, etc, has been well spent. I can rapidly enough transcode from that to "Whatever I happen to need for where I'm listening to it," and our vehicles have quite the range of local music and audiobook content for road trips that doesn't rely on streaming anything.
You can get CDs for (usually) very little on eBay, same for DVDs, and I don't have to worry about the pissing matches between a corporate conglomerate that views me as "a wallet with eyeballs" and another one that views me as "eyeballs with a wallet" getting in the way.
Meanwhile, vinyl sales continue to skyrocket, and more and more people are interested in records, growing collections, refurbishing old equipment (both to produce and play records), etc. I expect these are rather heavily correlated, because in 50 years from now, nobody is going to be able to play any of the streaming "content" that flows around. "This is my grandparents favorite Spotify playlist" won't be a thing, but you can certainly go cruising through old photo albums, old record collections, etc.
I remain optimistic that we're in the starting phases of a rejection of the online [handwaves at everything digital consumer tech], and it's going to be aided greatly by stuff exactly like this. Profits and corporate pissing matches over "actually doing something people want to pay money for."
Google and Disney both seem to be demonstrating that once people lose trust in you, it's basically impossible to get it back. Nobody trusts a new Google product will last more than a year or two, which leads to it getting killed off for lack of use, and Disney/Pixar seem to have forgotten that the purpose of the entertainment industry is to "entertain the people who might want to see your movie." Other studios are doing fine, so there's clearly a demand, but Disney has been dropping an impressive string of box office bombs lately, because a lot of people no longer trust them.
I remain optimistic that we're in the starting phases of a rejection of the online [handwaves at everything digital consumer tech], and it's going to be aided greatly by stuff exactly like this. Profits and corporate pissing matches over "actually doing something people want to pay money for."
Your optimism is unfounded. Gen Z thinks it's cool to own an album or two, but they're not building collections. Scrap booking is popular right now, but it's not quite the same thing as photo albums. Everything is ephemeral and by and large they're just fine with that.
They're physical things, interacted in the physical world, without any way for the companies involved to claw back the content, or to data-mine the scrapbook, your albums, etc, for listening data and such (though I imagine a smart TV with a mic will try).
That's a good direction to see movement in. They're not doing "online scrapbooks" or something. And given the long standing records of "What you said 15 years ago online is used to ruin you today," ephemeral, or "not online in the first place," makes a lot of sense.
I'm certainly glad my entire school experience wasn't logged in great detail...
Gen Z is young, have no money, have no optimism for the future, are completely un-technical when it comes to computers, but are EXTREMELY technical when it comes to understanding apps, social media, and weird frustrations like this one.
It remains to be seen once they enter the job market, and despite the cultural perspective inevitably many do succeed, and start making money.
I wouldn't be surprised if they absolutely do focus more on physical media. They are rejecting Instagram look-obsessive culture, and look fondly at what we did in the 2000s when every Party meant a 50-photo Facebook Photo dump, 49 of which would never be "good enough" to make it to Instagram these days.
"Everything is ephemeral and by and large they're just fine with that."
Today.
Young people being fine with that when they are still in flux is not a new thing. A 21-year-old being nostalgic is almost the basis for a comedy sketch more than a serious concern. I'm not yet convinced they've broken any human patterns when they're still fitting fairly comfortably into the existing patterns on that. If anything I'd bet they're going to discover a larger desire for a foundation than anyone else because the "default" ones have been ripped away and they can't just sort of settle into an existing one easily.
Music is very important to me. So important that I never dared to trust streaming services. Not only do they require an internet connection (something that is not always available), but if the service experiences downtime, license changes, etc., that music is not available.
If I'm going to spend my money on music, I'm going to spend it on music in a form that isn't reliant on the ongoing operation of some service somewhere. I want to add it to my collection so I can actually listen to it anytime and anywhere.
I collect portable music players and hi-fi gear. The music gives me great joy, but the hardware also gives me joy. I’m likely an outlier in this realm.
I pre-ordered my new Peter Gabriel I/0 album two months ago on CD and enjoyed the anticipation of waiting. I steadfastly avoided his digital pre-releases. I was not disappointed! It a great album and a beautiful sonic experience.
I took a couple of my favorite tracks and mixed it into my Peter Gabriel minidisc mix-tape. I have numerous portable players to choose from in my collection to listen on the go including a few beautifully designed personal CD players.
I travel internationally frequently and I’ve noticed TSA occasionally doesn’t know what a CD player is. At least the younger agents.
I wish I could do that, but unfortunately my music taste is so varied/fluid that it would take thousands of dollars and a full day's work to purchase and download all the music I listen to these days. And a couple years from now I'd need to do it all over again to update based on my new taste.
I was amazed to discover, a few months ago, that iPeng is still under active development!
I went to set the alarm on my Squeezebox Boom one night and the time picker widget was completely broken. By the next week they'd pushed out an update to fix it.
That kind of dedication in a developer is fantastic to see.
> Such an old system (written in Perl), but still runs great!
This is the kind of hardware I love. Stable over time, no dependencies. I moved all my music to squeezebox system in 2004 and everything works wonderfully today.
Logitech Media Server is very common in the Home Assistant world. I'm in the process of setting a server up now actually, and I've never used it before.
At least so far, Bandcamp has not changed after the sale (neither sale). You can still buy music, and try it out for multiple album streams before buying (unless the artist or label disable it, which is rare), and download as FLAC.
Granted, not always useful if what you want is from major labels, but still, keep in mind that there are options.
> At least so far, Bandcamp has not changed after the sale (neither sale)
The second sale was just a couple months ago, and while you can still buy music and download it, it's not true that "nothing has changed" since then. There have been quite a lot of changes, just not on that one front. And it's only been two months, so it's way too early to conclude that Songtradr won't gut it more thoroughly.
Not much changed during the time Epic owned Bandcamp, sure, but that's because Epic only bought it in order to gain standing for their lawsuits with Apple. It didn't fit into their business strategy otherwise, so they had no need to mess with it - they literally just needed it to be a legal subsidiary as a pawn for an unrelated legal battle. The same is not true with Songtradr, which has its own motives and objectives that relate to Bandcamp's actual operations and business.
Wasn't there some recent article about how Bandcamp got acquired by a competitor and is more or less being left to rot on the vine?
I agree, the FLAC downloads are a major perk of it, and I'll happily buy music there. But I wouldn't trust it to be around long term at this point. It's too consumer-friendly to exist long term in this modern world we live in. :(
Bandcamp doesn't need to change, it can just keep going. That's what I meant with "neither sale", because there were also some (if fewer) doomsayers for the epic sale.
It got sold. Nothing changed. And again, you own the music, if it stops existing that sucks, but only for the future, everything you bought, you still have.
And fwiw, I don't think anything for Bandcamp will change.
Nothing, neither for good nor for bad, has noticeably changed about Bandcamp in the 5+ years I've been using it. I'd call that "leaving it to rot" - but hey, at least it hasn't gotten any worse. If the new owners keep the course, it'll be okay.
For what's it's worth, I use mp3caprice.com to download zipped music. The prices are pretty fair and I don't have to store another CD on the shelf. The bitrate is decent and I can find albums that aren't available anymore. The bonus for me is, since I subscribe to Mojo magazine, I can Youtube new artists and if I like them, go download the music.
That looks like piracy, but paying someone for it? Thanks, but I actually prefer to support the artists I listen to, and when I can’t afford to, or it’s impractical, to not pay those who prevent artists from getting money.
I buy mp3s so I will always have them. People think I am a crank- maybe so.
The difference with media today is that the control often stays in the hands of another party, often not the rights holder. I can accept that knowing that everything I buy I am just renting.
The thing that scares me is how a third party can make something effectively impossible to discover. In this generation that's done for profit. But you can imagine where that will lead when what everyone sees is curated in a way they aren't aware of.
There's like not one but multiple microgenres of music you could likely cobble together just out of working musicians' songs complaining about the music industry. In the modern world, probably the by-the-numbers majority of working artists in every medium can effectively self-publish to some degree or another, so as the intermediaries have grown more and more demanding and both creator- and consumer-hostile, they have also become less of a necessary evil for our ability to engage with the works creative people are putting out into the world. Piracy is the most natural and reasonable way to use current technology to consume media, and the massively successful propaganda campaigns to instill a folk belief that it's somehow wrong or doing harm are incredible, given how much quality of life for both the producers and consumers of the actual content is lost in the name of marginal gains in profitability and massive gains in control by intermediary conglomerates that are increasingly unnecessary. It is only by a combination of this mythology and the ever-tighter industry collusion with an increasingly authoritarian surveillance state to make laws to terrorize people who just want their music that this parasitic shape the industry has taken is surviving
To me, the notion that a transferrable market-monopoly ownership of intellectual rights to a creative work was ever about helping creators is the kind of ridiculous farce that people like economists can get away with because we've been trained to believe that fancy experts saying counterintuitive things about "incentives" must know something we don't, but even if you believe intellectual property has value, it is not of value for massive corporations to sit on a chokepoint between human beings and their access to their own cultural touchstones
Readit News
You can download all these from torrent trackers.
Tell me true, if you can't buy them how on earth it is piracy to download them?
People would argue that it's up to the seller whether they want to make their creations available. If I don't want to sell you something, then I'd entertain the argument that downloading it anyway is in some sense immoral or unethical.
But in your situation, you've already fucking bought it! It's as if you placed a pick-up order at the bookstore, showed up to pick up your books, and they told you to eat shit. In which case, acquiring it through other means is completely acceptable, morally and ethically.
But this gets complicated. I wanted to post a song from a somewhat obscure '80s band on my website and so tracked them down and asked for permission.
One of them (the songwriter) responded to say that the band has never had the rights to the music on that album and, in fact, they don't even have a recording of it themselves. In his words "as far as I'm concerned, you can do whatever you want with that stuff". I posted the song and sent him a high-quality copy of the album it came from.
I would say another key distinction is between "don't want to sell/can't sell" vs "don't want you to buy". In the former it may be because the owner does not want to go through the trouble of selling it or is no longer around to sell it. I know some people have given up because the effort to deal with "trolls" (particularly DMCA and fakes) has either turned their passion into a nightmare or it's not really their passion anymore and they don't want to deal with it.
To me, this is the baby that got thrown out with the bathwater in the whole NFT debacle.
Yes, yes just about the entire NFT thing was just the obvious financial scams you can’t pull off in the real economy anymore. But the idea of an independent way to show your receipts? I think that’s got some real value.
So you bought access to video X. Maybe on PlayStation (sorry). Maybe through a streaming service. Why does it matter how you get the bits that constitute video X? Why does it matter what software you use to consume those bits?
Unfortunately the answer is that IP rights treat the medium and the message as different things. You need that, to some extent, to encourage folks to package things well (eg 4k remaster an older movie). But what if we fixed that?
I want to live in a world where it’s obvious that I have a legal right to watch the Infinity Saga Supercut [0] when I have an active Disney+ subscription. And when I have the DVD of all the movies. And when I have a mix of BlueRay, dvd, digital purchases, movie channels, etc.
It should also be obviously ok for me to have the Infinity Saga stored locally, without DRM, and cached on a couple iPads. And if Infinity Saga is uploaded to YouTube, I should get to watch it with reduced or no ads.
[0] https://www.firstshowing.net/2021/the-infinity-saga-a-50-hou...
If I Johnny writer am like "Ok when I was 15 I thought that many consecutive slurs was funny, but now the alt-right is rallying around what was supposed to be satire, so I want it off the market" that's kind of reasonable. If James Writerson has classics that are kind of out of fashion and got converted to ebooks by Big Publisher™ which was then bought by Bigger Publisher™ who decides it's not worth the money to keep the classics on the market (but also refuses to release them back to the estate of James Writerson or to the general public), that's less reasonable.
https://github.com/easlice/bandcamp-downloader
I have a windows oriented “get past setup pain points” tutorial here: https://github.com/easlice/bandcamp-downloader/issues/21
For generating a cookie file, I suggest just using https://github.com/hrdl-github/cookies-txt I should really write up a full Linux and windows setup guide and submit it.
Likewise, people who use bandcamp are likely to use GOG, which also has purchase archiving tools available on GitHub. I’ve used https://github.com/Kalanyr/gogrepoc for a long time, but there are actually multiple projects now.
My daughter, doing a journalism course assignment, once asked Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span (not a _huge_ artist, but reasonably well known towards the end of last century) about this. Maddy's comment was basically the same. She'd rather you bought something legally, but if it's not available (some of their back catalogue had disappeared) then Maddy thought it was fine to 'pirate' it.
This is were you went wrong.
That being said, when something is not sold anymore, I'd say it's fair game to torrent it or upload it wherever.
Always download the flac of the music you purchase on Bandcamp. Then your purchases won't ever go away.
RCA Lyra protected music? Gone.
Paid $10 to Harvey Danger for 'Little by Little' and hey, I can still get it. That's a surprise.
For context - we're a Polish family living in the UK(like 2 million other Polish people). We have a small child who loves Disney films, and because he is normally exposed to English(and speaks it fluently) I'd like him to at least watch cartoons in Polish. But Disney region locks most(not all, but majority) of Polish localisation to Poland only. When we visit Poland I can watch all Disney content in Polish on my UK account without any issue - but when we're in the UK these localisation options disappear. So Disney clearly has those options but chooses not to offer them.
So right now, at least we can still buy DVDs or have those shipped over. But it's clear that Disney wants to stop distribution of physical media - as they've already done in some regions.
What then for multilingual families? Just "suck it up" and don't have access to content in my language, because I don't happen to currently live in Poland?
But on the other hand......it's Disney. They should be able to consolidate, buy those rights back, and distribute all localizations they have globally.
raising bi-lingual kids is much easier when you can give them second language media, and it doesn't seem like it would be an expensive flag for Disney to flip...
might even be an opportunity to rebrand themselves as educational...
https://35mm.online/
The time spent re-ripping my CD collection to FLAC, my DVD collection to MKV, etc, has been well spent. I can rapidly enough transcode from that to "Whatever I happen to need for where I'm listening to it," and our vehicles have quite the range of local music and audiobook content for road trips that doesn't rely on streaming anything.
You can get CDs for (usually) very little on eBay, same for DVDs, and I don't have to worry about the pissing matches between a corporate conglomerate that views me as "a wallet with eyeballs" and another one that views me as "eyeballs with a wallet" getting in the way.
Meanwhile, vinyl sales continue to skyrocket, and more and more people are interested in records, growing collections, refurbishing old equipment (both to produce and play records), etc. I expect these are rather heavily correlated, because in 50 years from now, nobody is going to be able to play any of the streaming "content" that flows around. "This is my grandparents favorite Spotify playlist" won't be a thing, but you can certainly go cruising through old photo albums, old record collections, etc.
I remain optimistic that we're in the starting phases of a rejection of the online [handwaves at everything digital consumer tech], and it's going to be aided greatly by stuff exactly like this. Profits and corporate pissing matches over "actually doing something people want to pay money for."
Google and Disney both seem to be demonstrating that once people lose trust in you, it's basically impossible to get it back. Nobody trusts a new Google product will last more than a year or two, which leads to it getting killed off for lack of use, and Disney/Pixar seem to have forgotten that the purpose of the entertainment industry is to "entertain the people who might want to see your movie." Other studios are doing fine, so there's clearly a demand, but Disney has been dropping an impressive string of box office bombs lately, because a lot of people no longer trust them.
Your optimism is unfounded. Gen Z thinks it's cool to own an album or two, but they're not building collections. Scrap booking is popular right now, but it's not quite the same thing as photo albums. Everything is ephemeral and by and large they're just fine with that.
That's a good direction to see movement in. They're not doing "online scrapbooks" or something. And given the long standing records of "What you said 15 years ago online is used to ruin you today," ephemeral, or "not online in the first place," makes a lot of sense.
I'm certainly glad my entire school experience wasn't logged in great detail...
It remains to be seen once they enter the job market, and despite the cultural perspective inevitably many do succeed, and start making money.
I wouldn't be surprised if they absolutely do focus more on physical media. They are rejecting Instagram look-obsessive culture, and look fondly at what we did in the 2000s when every Party meant a 50-photo Facebook Photo dump, 49 of which would never be "good enough" to make it to Instagram these days.
Today.
Young people being fine with that when they are still in flux is not a new thing. A 21-year-old being nostalgic is almost the basis for a comedy sketch more than a serious concern. I'm not yet convinced they've broken any human patterns when they're still fitting fairly comfortably into the existing patterns on that. If anything I'd bet they're going to discover a larger desire for a foundation than anyone else because the "default" ones have been ripped away and they can't just sort of settle into an existing one easily.
If I'm going to spend my money on music, I'm going to spend it on music in a form that isn't reliant on the ongoing operation of some service somewhere. I want to add it to my collection so I can actually listen to it anytime and anywhere.
I pre-ordered my new Peter Gabriel I/0 album two months ago on CD and enjoyed the anticipation of waiting. I steadfastly avoided his digital pre-releases. I was not disappointed! It a great album and a beautiful sonic experience.
I took a couple of my favorite tracks and mixed it into my Peter Gabriel minidisc mix-tape. I have numerous portable players to choose from in my collection to listen on the go including a few beautifully designed personal CD players.
I travel internationally frequently and I’ve noticed TSA occasionally doesn’t know what a CD player is. At least the younger agents.
Deleted Comment
Such an old system (written in Perl), but still runs great!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logitech_Media_Serverhttps://github.com/Logitech/slimserverhttps://hub.docker.com/r/lmscommunity/logitechmediaserver
I went to set the alarm on my Squeezebox Boom one night and the time picker widget was completely broken. By the next week they'd pushed out an update to fix it.
That kind of dedication in a developer is fantastic to see.
This is the kind of hardware I love. Stable over time, no dependencies. I moved all my music to squeezebox system in 2004 and everything works wonderfully today.
With how warm it was in standby I bet it cost more money in power bills than itself don'tcha know.
Granted, not always useful if what you want is from major labels, but still, keep in mind that there are options.
The second sale was just a couple months ago, and while you can still buy music and download it, it's not true that "nothing has changed" since then. There have been quite a lot of changes, just not on that one front. And it's only been two months, so it's way too early to conclude that Songtradr won't gut it more thoroughly.
Not much changed during the time Epic owned Bandcamp, sure, but that's because Epic only bought it in order to gain standing for their lawsuits with Apple. It didn't fit into their business strategy otherwise, so they had no need to mess with it - they literally just needed it to be a legal subsidiary as a pawn for an unrelated legal battle. The same is not true with Songtradr, which has its own motives and objectives that relate to Bandcamp's actual operations and business.
I agree, the FLAC downloads are a major perk of it, and I'll happily buy music there. But I wouldn't trust it to be around long term at this point. It's too consumer-friendly to exist long term in this modern world we live in. :(
It got sold. Nothing changed. And again, you own the music, if it stops existing that sucks, but only for the future, everything you bought, you still have.
And fwiw, I don't think anything for Bandcamp will change.
The difference with media today is that the control often stays in the hands of another party, often not the rights holder. I can accept that knowing that everything I buy I am just renting.
The thing that scares me is how a third party can make something effectively impossible to discover. In this generation that's done for profit. But you can imagine where that will lead when what everyone sees is curated in a way they aren't aware of.
To me, the notion that a transferrable market-monopoly ownership of intellectual rights to a creative work was ever about helping creators is the kind of ridiculous farce that people like economists can get away with because we've been trained to believe that fancy experts saying counterintuitive things about "incentives" must know something we don't, but even if you believe intellectual property has value, it is not of value for massive corporations to sit on a chokepoint between human beings and their access to their own cultural touchstones