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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

#51

Post by fivre »

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?

i definitely read them. bandcamp had a very skilled editorial team that would reliably surface both new and interesting scenes and archival labels that wouldn't have found much reach otherwise, and ive definitely bought albums and found stuff i wouldn't have heard otherwise based on their recommendations

not everything, but their work definitely brought me to music i wouldn't have found otherwise

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#53

Post by Night_Thastus »

I'm really bummed. I love Bandcamp. It's the only place I can buy music FROM THE MUSICIAN with very little overhead, and download a high-quality lossless track. Amazon only lets me buy crap-quality MP3s. Apple is opaque about it, putting either lossy AAC or lossless ALAC in the same M4A containers. >:(

The only good alternative is Qobuz, which is frustrating to use and charges absolutely massive overhead.

But unfortunately it feels like Bandcamp keeps getting screwed over somehow or another. Most people these days want to stream, not to buy and download. :(

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#54

Post by josteink »

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?

> I've never read a single bandcamp article. Did anyone actually read them

I didn’t read all of them, but occasionally when they touched on a subject of interest, I really appreciated them, and they helped me find new music by both known and unknown artist.

They were clearly written by someone knowledgable and who cared. That’s getting increasingly rare these days and that’s a shame.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#55

Post by dylan604 »

diggan wrote: post #17
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?

> 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.

I'm not a bandcamp user, so maybe this is an obvious question, but if bandcamp were to shutter operations, would the files in your local backup still be usable by you?

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#56

Post by WCSTombs »

hamburglar wrote: post #40
Miraste wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

old.reddit.com still works.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#57

Post by chimeracoder »

NewJazz wrote: post #37
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.

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

Yes, it could be considered retaliation via constructive dismissal without cause. In theory the NLRB could force remediations including but not limited to reinstatement of position (ie, hiring them back). If the NLRB decides that the terminations were intended to break support for recognizing the union, the NLRB has the authority to force automatic recognition without an election.

That's assuming the union pursues that case, of course, and the whole process takes months.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#58

Post by a1o »

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 kinda doubt it would be THAT easy to replicate but if you can do it, sell it to me.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#59

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

Has anyone ever tried writing something into their company's sale contract that says 100% of staff must be retained for some duration of time to prevent new overlords from doing exactly this?

Obviously in Bandcamp's case this probably would not have helped, since they had already "sold" themselves to Epic before being offloaded to Songtradr. I'm just trying to think of how one could reasonably, enforceably stop an acquiring company from doing this to the acquired company as soon as the ink is dry on the acquisition.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#60

Post by piperswe »

dylan604 wrote: post #55
diggan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm not a bandcamp user, so maybe this is an obvious question, but if bandcamp were to shutter operations, would the files in your local backup still be usable by you?

Yes, the Bandcamp files are fully DRM-free. You can download the music in just about any DRM-free format, I always go with FLAC. The FLAC files are exactly the same as any other FLAC file, just losslessly compressed samples.
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