I’m sorry for attempting to educate myself on the matter via the links you have provided in the thread to educate people on the matter! I’ll see myself out!
you misread the links i’ve provided on the matter and presented them back to me as if they were a gotcha
edit: let’s review this sequence in the interest of examining why what vikram said was wholly inappropriate.
i bring up something that people should be concerned about, i lay out clearly why one should be concerned, i have - and have spoken with people who have - a stake in this, and they agree: you should be concerned if you have a stake or have any interest in music currently hosted on bandcamp.
vikram then takes some of the source materials i’ve provided to be like “what countries” as if i have not already reviewed the links i’ve shared, as if new information is being provided. this is ignorant even to what’s been said in this thread by invested parties, including at least one person directly invoking that they may need to remove their music from bandcamp.
and having failed to understand the concerns raised, let alone offer any insight beyond irrelevant anecdata, vikram nonetheless finds it acceptable to tell folks “I wouldn’t worry too much”. then when called out vikram claims it was an attempt to educate oneself? of what? by whom?
anyway here’s some more education for you:
if you speak with people who have an investment in distribution via bandcamp, you’ll find that, should this proposal go through, a not-insignificant number of them will delete their music from bandcamp.
Two omissions I noticed immediately are Russia and Ukraine. Some of my favorite witch house and vaporwave musicians who I regularly buy from on Bandcamp are from those places.
13 Likes
not everyone can use Stripe, even if their country is on that list. it’s an entirely different system. a musician i know is on the “supported country” list but they can’t sign up for Stripe because their credit card is randomly not accepted.
1 Like
even beyond the direct implications of this specific proposal, let’s continue to examine why you absolutely should feel (an appropriate degree of) concern for this news
this has not been announced by bandcamp. there has been no newsletter, no blog post, no new terms of service, and apparently only a scant few users have been sent so much as a notification email - and even then, those emails contain a link that no longer works, as shown earlier in this thread.
thus, it’s a very reasonable inference that this marks an important inflection point in the enshittification of bandcamp (please note the ownership changes of bandcamp over the last few years for additional corroborating circumstances). the very clandestine nature of this action will drive people off the platform on its own. it also almost certainly foreshadows more user- and artist-hostile actions in the future.
3 Likes
let’s revist the countries thing just for a moment. i still can’t believe the audacity of vikram posting that table. like people have every country on earth memorized, or every country supported by paypal memorized such that they could immediately compare and see what’s excluded? just useless.
here’s a more useful way to understand. in a perfect world, where everyone could seamlessly switch to a different payment processor, we still lose support for at least 149 countries if this goes thru
3 Likes
I recently discovered that I didn’t have a bandcamp account, I had just been buying stuff with Paypal guest checkout all these years. Went to go redownload some stuff and simply didn’t have an account. There is a way to retreive those guest downloads, I forget what it was but they are all linked to your Paypal email, but anyway I ended up making a Bandcamp account using that email and then it linked all my purchases so I didn’t have to deal with that ever again. But if you’re in the same boat as me (unlikely) you might want to make a Bandcamp account now because I can’t imagine linking your Paypal purchases will work after a certain point.
3 Likes
i’m hoping the fact the payment page just gives an error now is because they are reconsidering this, but that seems unlikely since they haven’t even announced it and it seems like hardly anyone actually got an email about it so far
3 Likes
also being on a list like that doesn’t mean anything. In general the global financial system continues to slide in a direction that excludes much of the world from participating in basic shit we take for granted all the time as americans
When Russia invaded Ukraine and was sanctioned nobody was being discriminate enough to prevent Ukrainians from being unable to get paid or access their money even though it’s an allowed country for many payment processors. It seems kind of insane to punish people for being invaded, right? But economic coercion is one way western fascists love to exert influence on other countries, and it’s really not hard to imagine how much stuff like this hurts other people.
Also Stripe is funded by Peter Thiel lol so at the very least you should be pissed off about that!
9 Likes
Peter Thiel at libertopia in 2010 talking about how politics are bad because you actually have to appeal to the public with your ideas and beg for votes and so if you have opinions everyone hates you cant get anything done, but you can use tech to undermine the will of the people
9 Likes
Yeah a lot of independent ukrainian musicians sell their music on bandcamp (should I make a list?) and their works are not available for purchase anywhere else online
2 Likes
Make the Internet decentralized again
2 Likes
bandcamp still haven’t made one public peep about this other than silently updating help pages. journalists aren’t asking questions - none seem to even be aware of this yet? this still seems to be flying entirely under the radar outside of a few posts on the bandcamp reddit and one on hacker news.
ok i got an email today about this finally
pretty boilerplate…nothing about the countries able to use stripe or anything like that
1 Like
looks like they updated a section in the payments page here: Payments | Bandcamp
they’ll continue using paypal for countries that aren’t supported by stripe
5 Likes
hey thank you for posting that! i still haven’t gotten an email! what the heck…