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About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

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Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#11

It was not spectacular for a while according to musicians who sell there, and decision to sell out was just icing. Will there be a good faith player in this niche for once?

I wonder what challenges Bandcamp faced here. Is it really that management wasn't serving the market in good faith, or was there a problem with profitability?

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#12
post #3

And the small hope I have that BandCamp would remain a good thing after SongTradr acquired them grows even smaller.

I use Bandcamp a lot. Tbh, if I had acquired Bandcamp, in efforts for streamlining, I probably would have laid the editors off too. I've never read a single bandcamp article. Did anyone actually read them, especially enough to justify their cost?

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#13

I’m not sure how I feel about this as regards the product. As a user, I’m happy for it to just be maintained. It doesn’t need new features, it doesn’t need editorial stuff, it just needs to continue functioning as it has done for a long time. As long as there are enough staff to fix bugs and keep it running…that seems like a good thing. Better than the risk of people changing it for little reason.

[deleted]

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#14

I’m not sure how I feel about this as regards the product. As a user, I’m happy for it to just be maintained. It doesn’t need new features, it doesn’t need editorial stuff, it just needs to continue functioning as it has done for a long time. As long as there are enough staff to fix bugs and keep it running…that seems like a good thing. Better than the risk of people changing it for little reason.

The company was sold to epic, who then sold it off again a couple months later after staff unionized, and now they're laying half the company off.

That does not seem like a good thing in any sense of the word.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#15
post #10

I’m not sure how I feel about this as regards the product. As a user, I’m happy for it to just be maintained. It doesn’t need new features, it doesn’t need editorial stuff, it just needs to continue functioning as it has done for a long time. As long as there are enough staff to fix bugs and keep it running…that seems like a good thing. Better than the risk of people changing it for little reason.

It's worth noting Bandcamp was sold to Songtradr last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37695035 This doesn't seem like a good thing to me, as a user.

Yeah I was aware of that. I can’t see a reason to buy it and layoff staff other than “maintenance mode” though. Songtradr do licensing so having that catalogue available to them seems very useful.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#16

I’m not sure how I feel about this as regards the product. As a user, I’m happy for it to just be maintained. It doesn’t need new features, it doesn’t need editorial stuff, it just needs to continue functioning as it has done for a long time. As long as there are enough staff to fix bugs and keep it running…that seems like a good thing. Better than the risk of people changing it for little reason.

This is a plague on the software industry. No one wants a new design language every two years, or all the buttons in the frontend to be moved to different places with different icons. It's not "innovative" or "exciting" or "friendly." It wastes whole lifetimes worth of time for the users. Whole cottage industries are devoted to retraining on the pointless changes. Yet it always happens anyway. I'm not sure how incentives could be restructured to stop this kind of churn, but if left unchecked it can kill whole companies.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#17
post #12
post #3

And the small hope I have that BandCamp would remain a good thing after SongTradr acquired them grows even smaller.

I use Bandcamp a lot. Tbh, if I had acquired Bandcamp, in efforts for streamlining, I probably would have laid the editors off too. I've never read a single bandcamp article. Did anyone actually read them, especially enough to justify their cost?

> I use Bandcamp a lot.

Same here. I wasn't even aware Bandcamp had articles! But I basically just navigate to specific labels/artists/albums, buy what I need and resync my local backup of my collection.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#18
post #12
post #3

And the small hope I have that BandCamp would remain a good thing after SongTradr acquired them grows even smaller.

I use Bandcamp a lot. Tbh, if I had acquired Bandcamp, in efforts for streamlining, I probably would have laid the editors off too. I've never read a single bandcamp article. Did anyone actually read them, especially enough to justify their cost?

The author is reporting two seperate things.

1. Half the company were laid off

2. Two editors were laid off

I doubt editors account for the majority of that half, even if every last one was laid off.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#19
As a musician once on there, I joined, spent a lot of time carefully designing my page and uploading my catalogue, and then I paid $20 a month for their premium service for absolutely no traction on the site beyond external promotion I did.

The UI on BandCamp has been vastly outdated for ages now, it was very hard to navigate and find new music by genre. i only go there to buy music if I have a direct link.

It's a pre-soundcloud site, and even soundcloud (with a superior UI) was going broke years ago. I was unaware they had a staff of developers, I envision most of them were on the bench most of the time.

Bandcamp doesn't even allow YouTube video embedding for music videos, which is a huge mistake alone.

Music platforms should be heavily promoting any independent artist that pays them a monthly fee... They seem to think that monthly subscription money form hard working artists is simply for extra file storage above free accounts.

I can't wait until something far better with an artist focus comes along, and no that is not Spotify.

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