I work at SongTradr, and while I'm not involved with the acquisition, I wouldn't expect it to drastically change for end users. I hope that we'll drastically improve things for musicians, offering them more ways to earn money from their music.
Best case scenario in my mind is that bandcamp stays almost entirely the same, except artists get some additional settings on their music metadata that lets them turn on “offer my music for licensing on SongTradr” and set prices and terms. Nothing different at all on the bandcamp fan-facing experience, but it makes the music suddenly show up in licensing searches on some other b2b UX and is just another no-brainer income stream for the artist.
Maybe a stupid question but if songtradr focuses more on B2B licensing of music could't they hammer out exclusive deals and remove the music entirely from end customer catalog? I mainly think about licensing it to other streaming services.
People have already mentioned that some music disappeared from the catalog because artists pulled it. I wonder if this acquisition would make it more common.
While it's entirely possible, I've never heard of this specific thing happening. Companies want music that is popular. They might pay enough to make music exclusive in the B2B licensing, but they don't want music that nobody can listen to. The only thing I could think of is if a movie/game wants to buy out an album as their soundtrack, but again, I've not heard of this actually happening, at least pulling back a release.
Likely music disappearing from Bandcamp is likely because the artist signed with a Label and the Label wants exclusive ability to market the artist's music.
From what I can tell, Epic did the gutting today, and it's left to us to pick up the pieces. It doesn't make sense to me, letting everyone go before the acquisition, why not let the acquiring company figure out what to do with the employees. It stinks of internal politics.
Songtradr has done a good job with previous acquisitions, including mine. I'm no longer working on that product, but it's doing well. I don't agree with every decision being made for it, but I didn't before the acquisition, so... no big change there.
Based on the bandcamp employee throwaway that commented earlier, I wonder if epic just wanted credit for cutting a lot of jobs to make shareholders happy. That “16%” announced is a big number that would be less attention-grabbing if it didn’t include all of bandcamp.
What product of yours was acquired? I would like to enter the Music services business and it would be great to connect with someone that has hands on experience.
Music Services is a tough place to do product development in. Nobody is flush with cash, so all deals are percentage based... so you have to generate pass-through revenue. It's impossible to generate revenue from the general public, as they can get music from spotify/youtube for free, so you have to find a niche.
I know several startups in the music space that are begging to be acquired because they didn't realize they needed pass-through revenue, they thought they could do what another company was doing, but cheaper, but the problem is that few established labels are willing to move off their old providers, as they value their industry relationships.
