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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

#31

Post by ezconnect »

hamburglar wrote: post #24
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 The UI on BandCamp has been vastly outdated for ages now, it was very hard to navigate and find new music by genre.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.

He's thinking of engagement and discovery like youtube or the old MySpace experience for independent music creators. People land on the page and discover new artists and easy discovery of new ones.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#32

Post by diggan »

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 tank, it can seriously be replaced by someone in a weekend, maybe 2 :)

The technology probably could be replicated in a weekend, but as always, Bandcamp is more than just the technology. Labels, artists and the community trust(ed?) them as a place where people got treated more fairly and it wasn't focused solely on growth of the platform. To replicate that same thing that Bandcamp created might take the same amount of time, ~15 years.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#34

Post by adventured »

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 tank, it can seriously be replaced by someone in a weekend, maybe 2

It can't. The classic HN mistake here is to think the difficulty in replacement is engineering / building it. That's pretty much never the actual case. Engineering it [0] is the easiest part of building a replacement.

[0] this part: "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."

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#35

Post by silenced_trope »

basisword wrote: post #15
radlad wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apparently staffers are trying to unionize.

Assuming they want to run it maintenance mode and have it not burn a hole in their pocket, they probably want people not pushing for raising wages, benefits, etc. in the future or now -- they'll likely sell off what remains to private equity or maybe try to get AI to run the show.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#36

Post by hk1337 »

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…

I have never used it but looking at the front page, it comes across like Vimeo is to Youtube but for music.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#37

Post by NewJazz »

diggan wrote: post #27

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?

Could this be considered a union busting action? Especially if the union was planning to negotiate for remote work.

Edit: previously said strike breaking instead of union busting.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#38

Post by [deleted] »

Macha wrote: post #18
brink wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#39

Post by splittingTimes »

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 always enjoyed their weekly Bandcamp radio show. It was a great way to discover new artists, often from genres I would not necessarily listen to.

Not sure why they stopped it some years ago. Real pitty.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#40

Post by hamburglar »

Miraste wrote: post #16
basisword wrote: post #5

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 incent…

Agreed. I’ve seen a lot of complaining about how bandcamp’s UI is “stale” or “outdated” and as far as I can tell, what that means is it still works and does all the stuff it needs to do, but it would look different if it was built today and that bothers people. I don’t really get it, but then again, I still use Craigslist and old.reddit.

Edit: although, full disclosure, I haven’t looked at Reddit in months so if they shut down the old interface as part of the recent fit of user-hostility, I haven’t noticed.

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