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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

#21

Post by amrocha »

radlad wrote: post #11
throwaway290 wrote: post #9

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?

There's no indication that they faced any problems at all.

Epic bought them when investment money was abundant, they probably made an offer that the owners couldn't refuse.

A year later, cash is harder to come by, epic sells off businesses that aren't core. Songtrader, facing the same market conditions as epic, sees layoffs as a cost cutting measure regardless of profitability.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#23

Post by stryan »

brink wrote: post #12
JohnFen wrote: 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?

Their niche genre articles were actually pretty good, I would read them every now and then to find new bands to listen to. They hit a nice sweet spot of highlighting five or so releases per article so that you weren't overwhelmed with picks but had options, and the writing surrounding them was usually pretty good, you could tell the authors really cared about the music.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#24

Post by hamburglar »

winternett wrote: post #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 The UI on BandCamp has been vastly outdated for ages now, it was very hard to navigate and find new music by genre.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 pr…

I’m not sure where you got the idea that the premium service included promotion. Last I looked, the subscription simply unlocked some specific features. If you just paid for it and hoped that meant your band was going to be promoted, you threw your money away, but that hardly seems like bandcamp’s fault.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#25

Post by wutwutwat »

Bandcamp is an odd site. It's existed for a very long time and is simple (or was when I last used it a couple years ago) in terms of application requirements. Basically what I'm saying is it feels very much like a rails app you could build in a weekend. Direct upload mastered files to s3 from the artists, activejob to convert to various formats and throw back to s3 via activestorage, subdomain model scoping for artist pages, stripe integration for payments.

Bandcamp has always felt like it should be someone's lifestyle business, like gumroad, and never seemed like it was trying to be a "business" that needed to add features or obsess over hyper hocky stick growth. If it tanks it's because it should have stayed as a weekend side project lifestyle business and never been bought by someone that wanted to convert it into a money printing machine because it never can be that type of business.

With that said, if they do tank, it can seriously be replaced by someone in a weekend, maybe 2 :)

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#26

Post by [deleted] »

winternett wrote: post #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 pr…

[deleted]

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#27

Post by diggan »

Judging by the Bandcamp United's (Union about to form at Bandcamp) feed, it seems they were nearing the completion of their initial steps to ask SongTradr to recognize and negotiate with the union. The "Last Call" post was made just 4 days ago: https://union.place/@bandcampunited/111219165521125342

Wonder if it ever got started or SongTradr tried to nip this whole thing in the bud?

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#28

Post by MSFT_Edging »

wutwutwat wrote: post #25

Bandcamp is an odd site. It's existed for a very long time and is simple (or was when I last used it a couple years ago) in terms of application requirements. Basically what I'm saying is it feels very much like a rails app you could build in a weekend. Direct upload mastered files to s3 from the artists, activejob to convert to various formats and throw back to s3 via activestorage, subdomain model scoping for artis…

> With that said, if they do do tank, it can seriously be replaced by someone in a weekend, maybe 2 :)

The back catalog of independent music on that site would be a huge loss. Every single artist would need to find and agree on that mythical hobby site, it would have to be able to handle the rapid growth if they were able to re-locate.

I agree it should have stayed simple, but we continue to believe that things should grow forever or die in the doomed attempt, so we will never have nice things.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#29

Post by amrocha »

winternett wrote: post #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 pr…

What's wrong with a paid storefront for artists? Considering the rest of the ecommerce ecosystem, 20$ seems fair. Have you considered that 20$ is just the cost of doing business?

Discoverability is a problem yes, but I don't know that it's a solvable one. And if Bandcamp tried seriously to solve it, they would likely have to rely on investment money, and eventually enshittify the platform.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#30

Post by some-guy »

winternett wrote: post #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 pr…

While the feature-set isn't the best, I find their simple UI to be a breath of fresh air and easy to navigate.
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