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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

#221

Post by dminvs »

nkozyra wrote: post #119
mardifoufs wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to what? Genuinely asking, because I like Spotify's recommendation system yet I always have the feeling that it can be better... even with the recent enhanced shuffle playlist and efforts to provide more contextual recs.

YouTube music, Pandora, I'm sure there are others. Spotify likes to feed you back stuff you liked even if it's only tangentially related to what you're asking for. It also repeats the same recommendations for things like radio over and over again.

I had the same experience you describe with Pandora for years, has it improved recently?

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#222

Post by diziet »

willcipriano wrote: post #91
FireBeyond wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around here (near Seattle) they are having to explain why the foam floor mats behind the counter used for anti-fatigue were removed as trip hazards, but only in stores attempting to unionize...

I destroyed my back working without mats in the resturant industry. Every winter I get back pain and have to use a cane for a few weeks. Use mats if you are going to stand somewhere 8+ hours a day kids.

Do shoes with absorption work to a similar effect?

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#223

Post by rchaud »

Kye wrote: post #213
sitharus wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can, but not retrospectively.

"By continuing to use Bandcamp, you agree..." What's an artist who depends on the platform to do?

Move their music off it. It happens a lot. If a band's earlier Bandcamp album gets picked up by a label, they will insist on exclusive distribution, so the band will remove it from BC.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#224

Post by golergka »

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.

And you could replace Dropbox quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#225

Post by rchaud »

Tao3300 wrote: post #135
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…

> The UI on BandCamp has been vastly outdated for ages now That's what I like about it. It's essentially what MySpace was supposed to be.

Yup, that BC's UI hasn't changed since 2016 is a good thing.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#226

Post by whizzter »

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.

(I studied with one of the founders)

Soundclouds problem was always that they started out as basically a free service for a particular niche(artist to label contacts), starting to charge(pissing off people who expected free forever) and then moving out of the niche made it so they never really had a footing for something people would pay for.

The problem with so many "internet unicorns" from the 2000-2010 era is that they handwaved per-customer costs as hardware/network costs and assumed that as long as they scaled then salaries would be a minor part, we as an industry are now trying to dig ourselves out of that hole with a even shittier AD experiences just as that AD market is crashing down.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#227

Post by JohnFen »

nomel wrote: post #73
biorach wrote: post #42

Earlier 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.

Can I buy music from Spotify? As in, be able to download a non-proprietary, lossless encoding of the music?

If not, Spotify is worthless to me.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#228

Post by slenk »

nkozyra wrote: post #119
mardifoufs wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to what? Genuinely asking, because I like Spotify's recommendation system yet I always have the feeling that it can be better... even with the recent enhanced shuffle playlist and efforts to provide more contextual recs.

YouTube music, Pandora, I'm sure there are others. Spotify likes to feed you back stuff you liked even if it's only tangentially related to what you're asking for. It also repeats the same recommendations for things like radio over and over again.

You describing your experience with Spotify is my same experience with Pandora. It's awful, they have like 10 songs

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#229

Post by hatsix »

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.

Shown how? I keep seeing reference to a webpage on Bandcamp that was published over 5 years ago.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#230

Post by JohnFen »

freeone3000 wrote: post #147
callalex wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just calling someone dumb isn’t constructive. Instead tell them what you think Bandcamp had to offer.

Bandcamp let me pay a musician for a song, regardless of how unknown or unpopular a band was. You’re three dudes in your mid-thirties playing open mic night and passing a hat around, and definitely cannot afford to get on Spotify or Youtube Music, but you can get on bandcamp and a few people can pay $5 for a song they liked when they were tipsy.

> Bandcamp let me pay a musician for a song, regardless of how unknown or unpopular a band was.

This is what made me love Bandcamp. I get to pay the artists more-or-less directly, and as a person who tends not to be into the Big Music Names, Bandcamp is utterly amazing, chock full of smaller artists doing wonderful things.

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