Bandcamp was fucked as soon as Epic bought them. We didn't know the specifics of how it was going to be fucked, but we knew it would happen.
About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
181–190 of 640 posts
Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just calling someone dumb isn’t constructive. Instead tell them what you think Bandcamp had to offer.
Bandcamp is (was?) to music as Flickr is to photography. It's a portfolio site, that doubles as a means to buy things from that portfolio. It's the thing an artist's social media pages link to to say "here's my body of work for you to browse through." Where browsing through that portfolio — listening to 30-second previews of songs, etc — doesn't require signing up for any service, but is just a regular part of the pu…
Not 30 second previews of songs, in general: the whole song, often many times over.
Plus multiple download formats, including losslessly compressed formats such as FLAC.
Plus the best return to the musician of any similar platform.
Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
> i only go there to buy music if I have a direct link. > 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. You haven't really understood…
This is exactly why I have Spotify rather than bandcamp. It finds music I like, regardless of musician effort. I found more new musicians in the first year of Spotify than decades before. It’s a loss for everyone if good music goes unheard.
Fuck Spotify. They've played a major role in drastically reducing any chance of significant revenue flowing to musicians, in complete contrast to Bandcamp.
People hearing your music is nice and all (I like it when people hear my stuff on BC), but it is orthogonal to the revenue that used to be associated with making recorded music available. There's far, far more music out there than anyone will ever be able to listen to, and I consider the possibility of even 1 paid milkshake for a musician much more important than some random number of listeners who heard the track on Spotify. I appreciate that you may see things differently, but I think that you're wrong.
Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
> It's apparent that you work for them somehow. Because they understand what Bandcamp is charging for? The page for Bandcamp Pro lists all the feature you get (and everything that isn't listed there, is stuff you don't get): https://bandcamp.com/pro
And nobody needs to pay that to be on Bandcamp, have their music available, and get paid.
Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I see, it's exactly the opposite. It's more like we hired all these people because we're growing so fast, so please give us money
That doesn't sound like a powerful negotiating position, though; it sounds like desperation. Why would you do that intentionally?
If the top line is also growing fast, and you have a good story on the unit-economic, part of the narrative is that you can eventually reduce costs and increase margin. It is hard from the outside to distinguish between Amazon style "we are investing all our profits back into R&D so we can take over the world" and "We are bloating our team to grow at all costs and don't know what levers to pull"
Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
#186I'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 unfortu…
Apple just can't get over their NIH obsession and support FLAC like a normal store.
Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
#187Anyone got a link that doesn't involve the company formerly known as Twitter?
Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
#188It 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?
According to what musicans? where? What is it the icing on top of?
ps. I'm a very tiny musician on BC. I know of no changes that altered BC's utility for me as someone with an album there, or as an avid purchaser of recorded music.
Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
#189Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
#190I’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…
That hasn't happened at BC.
What has happened, for example: listening parties. Not a massive feature, but no doubt something that required a few person-years of effort to get right (and they did).
What hasn't happened but should: "buy my wishlist, now" (again, not crazy hard, but probably a good few person-months to get right.
BC's basic page layout and page flow have not changed noticeably in years. Thankfully!