Astiga for sale
Edit (DCG): we announced the new owners here. I'll leave the rest of this thread untouched.
In case you like Astiga, but are thinking "I could do that better", now is your time to prove it :-) As you can see above, Astiga is for sale, which means you can be the owner of a music streaming imperium. It feels a bit superfluous to repeat all the information on Flippa, so here is the short version: I am selling Astiga, not because there is nothing left to do (there is plenty that can be done), but because I have a lot of other things that I want to do with my life that aren't Astiga.
Will anything change?
Of course you are most interested what that will mean for you, the user. I of course want to make sure that Astiga ends up in good hands. However, the details depend on whoever buys it. If it does not sell (which is a real possibility), then I will still keep running Astiga, so don't worry that Astiga will be gone if it does not sell.
That said, if you do have any questions, please post them below, and I will try to answer them.
Comments
If it doesn't sell, while your intentions may be to carry on - if you wanted to sell before, I envisage motivation will decrease over time. I have been in a similar situation with my own music service ten years ago, so I do sympathise.
Having moved completely to Astiga Premium from Google Play, I'm a little concerned at this news as I'm sure all users are.
What are your anticipated timescales?
Thanks for being so open about it.
@Coyley Well, it ties directly into https://community.asti.ga/discussion/338/additional-sources-of-income . The problem is that the income it generates is not enough to justify spending a considerable amount of time on it, but is enough to come with an administrative burden (which also costs time, and is generally not fun), as well as if anything crashes and does not restore itself automatically, I am the only one who can fix it currently. I still like Astiga, but most of the functionality I use myself has been added already, and most new functionality falls in the CRUD category, which frankly is not the most technically interesting part to do. I do not mind if someone else gets to figure out what to do with that :-)
Speaking about time: the auction lasts until next month (30 days). If it does not sell then, it will be listed for 9 months. I have no plans with Astiga until the end of the auction. If it does not sell by then, then I have some experiments I want to run. Those experiments will not impact premium users, but will probably impact free users. Things you should think of here are quota and/or ads, with the goal being increasing revenue. As identified numerous times before, the free plan is too generous for premium to be worth it. Depending on how successful that is, that may be it. If that does not have the desired effect, then I can always make it open source, and have someone else host/maintain it, which would be the last option. I invested too much time in Astiga to just have it take up space on my hard drive without doing anything with it.
Anyway, that is still quite some time away. If you are an Astiga Premium user, then I would not worry. If you are a free Astiga user, then things might change. Of course if it does get sold, then I do not have any control over Astiga after it has been sold, so I cannot make any promises there, although I doubt anyone would buy it with the intention of taking it down and putting it in a figurative box.
Thanks, that's helpful. The last thing I want to do now is move again after setting up after Google Play Music.
Hope personal data stays safe if it sells
Buying Astiga does not give you a carte blanche to do whatever you want with the data - luckily Astiga is Dutch, so the GDPR applies to all users. Plus I of course look into the potential buyers. It is generally pretty easy to tell if someone is just out to buy 17 000 email addresses to spam to.
Does this mean you would like help with development? I am an experienced software engineer (with relevant music streaming and cloud storage experience). I would love to help this project if it's needed as it's very similar to a personal project I wrote about 12 years ago and had to close it down. I don't mind being paid if I can help this project out! Let me know
Seeing Astiga sold puts a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.
Part of the reason I love Astiga is because it's an independent service operated by a cool person who respects user privacy. Now that it's been sold, I genuinely do worry about what the new owner will do to it. I worry about existing features being stripped or locked behind premium, and I worry about my data being misused despite Astiga being Dutch and under the GDPR.
Take the Audacity situation for example. It was an independently-developed, free, open-source software that respected user privacy. Then it got sold to Muse Group, and they're trying to turn it into a data harvesting tool, and nobody's a fan of that.
The difference between Astiga and Audacity in this situation is that Audacity is open-source software and can be forked, and the data harvesting code can be removed. That can't happen with Astiga. I really don't want Astiga to be turned into a tool for harvesting user data.
You say it's easy to tell if someone just wants the user data, but it often really isn't. How else do you explain the numerous instances where an app or extension or service was sold and then turned into a data siphon, like with Audacity and The Great Suspender?
Please, do your best to make sure the new owners don't screw us all over. I really don't want to move my music again.
I don't think we do know that Astiga has been sold so far.
@sks316 @Coyley What I can say is that a sale has been agreed with another similarly minded indie developer, with a focus on product and a 10+ year background in music library software. The details are being worked out at the moment, and more information will be available at a later time.
I understand your concern, I really do. I believe I can safely say that I care more about Astiga than anyone else. I am flattered that you consider me a cool person. However, the buyer is someone who is just as passionate about music as I am (maybe even more passionate), and I fully trust them to make the right decisions.
Thanks for the update @Koen which is appreciated. Good to know the buyer is a music fan, that's reassuring.
Just a quick update to let you know that this is still ongoing... It just takes some time to get everything done.
Thank you for the update.
To wrap this up - Astiga has a new owner!