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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

#201

Post by dzhiurgis »

reactordev wrote: post #167
winternett wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Spotify is a terrible alternative for the musicians. Myspace and Mp3.Com used to be the road map to how sites should be run, but venture capitalism and publicly traded companies ruined the entire ecosystem.

I had high hopes for SoundCloud but in the end, VC’s always win.

They still pretty much same. I don't get any audio ads, some ads in my stream, but never seem to be playing. Premium offering is stuck somewhere in 2009 when offline playback was a thing. Lack of integrations with Homepod & Tesla is somewhat becoming a problem. Still no way to filter your stream or get know what bitrate you are streaming.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#202

Post by egypturnash »

jtriangle wrote: post #169
Night_Thastus wrote: post #53

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 unfortu…

Alot of the time, you can just email their booking email asking to buy their album with cashapp et al and they'll gladly take your money and ship you a zip file of MP3's, assuming the band/artist is small enough.

There is slightly more friction involved in this scheme. Just a little.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#203

Post by heleninboodler »

projectazorian wrote: post #173
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…

> 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. Bandcamp did seem like a chill midsize lifestyle business before the Epic acquisition. I suspect that Epic's acquisition offer was too good for the founders and board to turn down. (While Bandcamp wasn't a c…

> While Bandcamp wasn't a classic venture-funded startup they did have outside investors

I don't think it's correct to say they weren't venture-funded. True Ventures lists them on their portfolio page. I don't know what that says about how much True Ventures put in, but they must have invested something.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#204

Post by toomim »

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…

> soundcloud (with a superior UI)

You lost me there.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#205

Post by toomim »

nerdponx wrote: post #71
some-guy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The UI is good overall, but the search system is the worst I've ever seen. And there's no "open in app" link on the mobile site. Been like this for as long as I've been using it. It's like they don't want to be more successful than they already are.

But that's a good thing. "Open this in the app" links are the worst advertising scum on the web.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#206

Post by heleninboodler »

shmde wrote: post #61
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…

Why is bandcamp so big ? I could do that in a weekend.

You sound poised to make somewhere in the neighborhood of $273M in a weekend, then.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#208

Post by willsmith72 »

Tao3300 wrote: post #146
willsmith72 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not at all as simple as a "rational choice". It completely depends on your objective. Why did you start the business in the first place? If it was to make a few mill and never have to work again, sure, sell. If you wanted to build something bigger than yourself, work with great people, feel accomplished, then why sell? How is that few mill going to get you those things? A lot of founders regret their first sale…

> feel accomplished Believe it or not you can buy that. Though I'm sure there's some corporate backed, non-replicable, behavioral science study that says otherwise.

I choose not, can you convince me otherwise?

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#209

Post by s1artibartfast »

NewJazz wrote: post #149
iainctduncan wrote: post #139

Background, I work in diligence for software aquisitions. There are a lot of assumptions on this thread. I don't know the answers in this case (not sure if anyone does?) but I think it is naive to assume that Bandcamp was wise to be employing all these people. While acquisitions tanking a company with stupid decisions are super common, it's also super common for companies who are trying to look like they are growing…

Isn't the pre-IPO / pre-acquisition playbook to cut staff lower than the optimum level to show profitability? But I'm spitballing here, anyone know more about whether Bandcamp was bloated? Bandcamp was shown to be profitable quite recently. Hard to justify slashing staff in half with that in mind.

There are a lot of counter-intuitive pre-IPO behaviors. Another one is to raise a huge amount of cash through unnecessary funding rounds.

You would think that massive dilution for no gain would be a bad idea, but there are usually a lot of perverse incentives at play

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#210

Post by sparrish »

ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #154
iainctduncan wrote: post #139

Background, I work in diligence for software aquisitions. There are a lot of assumptions on this thread. I don't know the answers in this case (not sure if anyone does?) but I think it is naive to assume that Bandcamp was wise to be employing all these people. While acquisitions tanking a company with stupid decisions are super common, it's also super common for companies who are trying to look like they are growing…

prior to this, bandcamp was owned by Epic and lord only knows why they bought them or what their bigger plan was. i also have no idea how much they staffed up under epic rule since they went from a small business to being owned by the fortnite money man. Entirely possible it's something like: 1. bandcamp is a sustainable normal small-to-medium business growing healthily 2. Epic has tons of fortnitebux and is feuding…

4 should be - bandcamp employees vote to unionize. Epic can't let that cancer spread to the game devs so they sell it off as quickly as possible.
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