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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

#241

Post by freedomben »

piperswe wrote: post #68
silenced_trope wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Staffers did unionize, the union is trying to negotiate with the new owner.

At what point is a shop a union shop though? Is it when they vote to unionize, or when the union receives recognition and a collective bargaining agreement?

(That's not a rhetorical question, I'm genuininely interested in it from a philosophical and/or legal point of view)

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#242

Post by lotsofpulp »

jacobr1 wrote: post #185
heleninboodler wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

> 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"

Considering Amazon was building physical warehouses, buying land, literally delivering to people, executing deployment of AWS which Netflix was famously using, all while being a publicly listed company with audited public financials I think Amazon’s style is easy to distinguish from the outside.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#243

Post by JohnFen »

amrocha wrote: post #155
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…

A few mil won't get you those things, but they'll guarantee your basic necessities. For example, my dad is working into his 70s. If I could fund his retirement I would. And here's the kicker: you can always go build something bigger than yourself after selling. Having fuck you money means you can make the ethical choice next time. Edit: on your comment about founders regretting their first sale. I'm guessing most fou…

> Having fuck you money means you can make the ethical choice next time.

If you weren't able to make the "ethical choice" the first time, you almost certainly won't make it the next time, either. All of the motivations that informed your first choice will equally inform your next.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#244

Post by drewbeck »

piperswe wrote: post #64
shmerl wrote: post #4

Bandcamp is where I go to buy DRM-free FLAC music. I hope they won't shut it down.

Qobuz is another option, but I always prefer Bandcamp because Qobuz's UI is pretty bad and it constantly corrupts my session such that I need to clear the site's cookies to do anything.

Quobuz’s search is also world class terrible. I only use google to search them. But ya they do have a ton of stuff in lossless quality!

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#245

Post by JohnFen »

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.

> Believe it or not you can buy that

I don't believe it. That is, I believe it's true for some people, but not all. It's not true for me.

Buying stuff is not an accomplishment.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#246

Post by femiagbabiaka »

dspearson wrote: post #235

This is a naïve question, but why on earth are unions isolated to one company so often in USA? Surely an industry-wide solution would be more effective.

Industry-wide unions have been stomped out over time, some by direct actions from companies or the government, some from corruption, some from propaganda campaigns. It is one of the many sad parts of being in the U.S.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#247

Post by racked »

comprev wrote: post #113
nomel wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

on the flip side to this, I don't have Spotify because curating music is a hobby of mine. The research from various sources - forums, FB groups, Discogs, Bandcamp mailing lists, etc. is part of the journey.

Is there a place you share your playlists? Would be curious to have a listen.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#248

Post by drewbeck »

constantly wrote: post #93
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #46

This can’t be a hard business to replicate right?

No. And neither is Twitter, Facebook, or Threads. Anyone can replicate all of these apps in a weekend. If you’re talking about the difficulty of attracting a bunch of paying users, building trust in your platform, working through payments and fraud, then yeah it’s monumentally hard and takes a long time.

I don’t see Bandcamp having nearly the same network effects as those social media sites tho. Yes there are some elements — trust I think is the big one — but there’s very little if any relationship model on Bandcamp.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#249

Post by Applejinx »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #183
nomel wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 liste…

THANK you. Spotify is no Bandcamp substitute. Not even close. Not even remotely the same category of thing. Yikes.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#250

Post by npteljes »

fsckboy wrote: post #94
dfxm12 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can stream on bandcamp, through an app or the browser

can one stream a mix of music sourced elsewhere and bandcamp music? If people have to keep switching apps, I think that's going to limit the appeal to people who are a bit more serious/intentional about every "listen". There's a lot of those, but it's still a minority.

While not automatic, YouTube Music can do this. You can basically upload your own music. Create playlists that mix yt songs and songs in your collection. You can upload on one machine, and access the uploaded song from anywhere, so you're basically using their cloud.
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