Crap, I liked BandCamp.
I don’t hate Epic Games as some do, but I really don’t like this news. Bandcamp is special and I don’t see its ethos fitting in at all.
Yup. Bandcamp was, without question, the best place to buy music to actually support artists. Now if I want to buy music my options are Amazon, Apple, and Epic. To borrow an overused meme:
I’m old enough I got stuck in a previous paradigm I never moved on from so this doesn’t mean anything to me.
I buy CD’s and/or vinyl I play on an old school hi-fi or rip to my desktop.
Likewise. I just can’t believe in anything being permanent online.
So yeah, CDs and vinyl here as well.
Although when I do buy CDs or vinyl from Amazon, if there’s an AutoRip option that comes with it free as many do, sure, why not? I have been giving thought to canceling my Prime account since the latest price raise however, so I’ll likely lose all that anyway.
I’ve got bad news for you about physical disks, if you somehow haven’t noticed yet.
I’ve got an enormous collection of CD’s and DVD’s and have had quite a few instances now of degraded or outright unplayable disks that used to be fine. It’s pretty distressing, the whole point of physical media for me was long-term storage, but apparently I was wasting my money.
With MP3’s and the like, I can keep the collection alive by moving it from disk to disk and keeping backups, plus it doesn’t take up physical space which is sadly at a premium for us these days.
Yeah, I’ve read articles like that before, but haven’t yet experienced it with any of my thousands of CDs and/or DVDs (audio, films, or games). Of course, with that many on my shelves, I’m not capable of constantly checking them, but every time I’ve pulled one out to play, it’s been fine, going back to the mid-1980’s and my very first purchases.
Possibly the fact that my home is climate controlled 100% of the time helps with that.
But I’m not denying the possibility of degradation disaster either. Which is why in many cases, I’ve gone to vinyl for those albums that are my favorites.
All true. My proper storage spaces (catalogue-able) ran out long ago, so I’ve taken to stacking things up a bit. Digital does certainly have its advantages. But also disadvantages. So for now, I’m sticking with the old ways that have always worked for me. We’ll see if my Amazon AutoRip stuff is still there after I cancel.
EDIT: Credit to that article you linked for mentioning a few aspects I hadn’t seen covered much before, such as manufacturing processes.
Damnit, Tencent just bought a stake in Offworld Industries. Ughhhhh… MIcrosoft, you were supposed to do this and bring Squad to Xbox
Well, I mean I rip’em too, more for convenience of replay than worries over how long they’ll last.
That said, the demise of CD’s is greatly exaggerated, I’ve had some that are going on 15 or 20 years at this point and still play fine.
If the ETA for the demise of my music collection is a point outside of how long I’m gonna be hanging around, I can live with that. ;)
Btw, this behavior of getting locked in somewhere along my journey in life isn’t limited to my music collection. I also 30 or 40 years ago got stuck on khaki’s, t-shirts and sweatshirts. So I own half a dozen khakis I rotate with some combo of t-shirt or sweatshirt depending on how cold it is.
I think in our case it’s the humidity that’s the problem, I’m glad to hear it hasn’t been a problem for you.
Well, if I ever can’t afford my energy bill, it may certainly be a problem!
Wow. As a metal fan, Bandcamp was the place to go to support all the smaller obscure stuff the streaming sites don’t carry.
I’m not sure how this will affect things!
In terms of media, back when I was doing historical document editing and whatnot, the big question was how to preserve stuff going forward. One reason you still find a lot of microfilm is that one, it lasts like 150 years before deteriorating too much, and two, anyone with a primitive setup can read it. Digitization is key to making documents available to more people, whether scholars or the general public, but there is no confidence at all that most current media will be viable twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now.
There are lots of bands that only do a digital release on Bandcamp (not counting streaming), is the thing. But I totally get preferring physical media when it’s an option if you’re willing to budget more for records to support the same number of bands.
You can download the auto-rip MP3s.
But then all I’ve got is compressed MP3s, which I then have to back up and move around.
I’d rather just have one “permanent” copy on my shelf.
And at the moment, vinyl is still looking like the way to go.
That said, these days when I’m in the mood to listen to an album, it’s generally a lot easier to just fire up YouTube or Amazon, so maybe 80% of the time, that’s what I do. It’s just nice knowing that I do have an uncompressed version around if I desire.
Amazon and Apple are literally hundreds of times larger than Epic. And Epic are still offering the better rev split to artists than both.
Yeah, archivists really have a hell of a job don’t they? I mean, in the scope of history, even 150 years is nothing. I’m constantly simultaneously amazed by what we’ve lost and by the fact that we still have anything at all from thousands of years ago.
From a low tech/high durability standpoint that seems pretty reasonable to me.
Even though we are adding massive amounts of information–unimaginably large amounts–the prospects for actually preserving, organizing, and retrieving much of this data in the future are not that bright. Tech shifts are part of it, of course, as is the sheer volume of material. When dead trees were the rage, the physical amount of just new scholarly material was fairly manageable, even across the globe (though it was still massive). Now, even sub-categories like specific disciplines churn out so much stuff, much of it good and all of it significant in some way for future scholars, that it is impossible to keep track of it all, much less actually preserve it in any usable or reliable way.
It gets even worse when you think about government, corporate, or other official or formal documents. Information is power, much information is proprietary in ways that are far more complex than simply locking it in a vault, and the digital landscape means modifying, editing, manipulating, and deleting stuff is often a matter of trivial difficulty. I’m truly not sure what historians, say, in fifty years are going to be able to work with, or how they will work with it. Clearly we should be training new Ph.D.s in digital methods, digital humanities, digital forensics even.
They also offer the better rev split on EGS, in fact…