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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

#251

Post by Applejinx »

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.

Musicians have trusted it. Why should they trust you?

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#252

Post by wwarner »

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.

It's not a US thing, in my opinion. The industry based unions are currently very strong and some are on strike right now (nurses, auto workers, writers, actors). To me the idea of forming a new union to target a single employer seems like a losing strategy.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#253

Post by npteljes »

amrocha wrote: post #44
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…

Here's a hypothetical scenario: - You're running the successor to Bandcamp - You're making good money, employ a couple staff - Epic comes to you offering millions to buy your business The rational choice is to sell. Would you choose the stress of running a sustainable business over the payout? I know I wouldn't. There's no indication afaik that Bandcamp was in financial trouble before they got acquired. This is inevi…

It's also rational not to sell. Why not value a nice sustainable business over selling out?

I understand that many of us would sell, I would probably sell too. But different people do exist. Valve didn't sell, for example, and I'm sure they were approached many times.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#254

Post by sitkack »

gizmo wrote: post #192
constantly wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, first of all, it’s transactional. I have no particular affinity for any given service I use. If another service comes along that has enough upside to overcome the momentum of switching, I’ll definitely do it, and I’m sure you would too, and maybe that will annoy the company. That goes the same for the company; if they have a chance to cash out, I’m sure they’d take it. And maybe that will annoy me. But the bigg…

"It's just transactional" "I don't owe anybody anything" "You're just naive" These are the rationalizations used to justify antisocial behavior. It's nihilistic and destructive to society. I've heard people espouse this kind of logic even when talking about employees who have worked for them for 20 years. They exchanged labor for pay and therefore nobody owes anybody anything. Yeah, right.

I wish I worked with people that share your philosophy.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#255

Post by jlarocco »

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.

That's interesting - I usually don't like Spotify's recommendations.

Youtube was much better at that IMO, but I've tried to stop using it due to the Google connection.

I don't really know where Bandcamp stands - I've bought music there that I found on YouTube, but haven't used it to find new stuff.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#256

Post by jjulius »

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?

That would be the worst move Songtradr could make here. The ability to distribute your music while maintaining the rights to it is one of the main reasons - hell, if not the main reason - artists and labels (and fans like myself) love Bandcamp. Making such a change would, to my mind, royally piss off the entire community and, in particular, the artists that make the platform as successful as it has been. I can only imagine the negative press that such a move would generate.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#257

Post by Apocryphon »

hipadev23 wrote: post #217
mhitza wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SongTradr needs demonstrate that Bandcamp wasn't financially viable That's provably false. > He notes that, according to its co-founder, Ethan Diamond, Bandcamp has been profitable since 2012. > In addition, Bandcamp charges its customers (indie artists) just 10-15% commission rates as a retailer – and on Bandcamp Fridays, it charges nothing at all. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/podcast/is-this-the-r... "I…

> That's provably false. Then why did Epic sell this veritable cashcow?

"to focus on its core metaverse, games, and tools efforts.”

https://pitchfork.com/news/epic-games-sells-bandcamp-amid-la...

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#258

Post by sitkack »

heleninboodler wrote: post #200
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…

> 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? It's possible that the founders felt they had accomplished this, and after spending 15 (?) years running it, were ready to move onto something else. I've sure as hell never stayed at the same job for 15 years. I'd go nuts. They may have also felt some o…

Then sell it to the employees who have a vested interest in maintaining it.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#259

Post by tessierashpool »

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…

bandcamp was owned by Epic and lord only knows why they bought them or what their bigger plan was

this is incorrect. in addition to whatever lord you are speaking of, I also know. (unless you meant me, but even then, I think others share this knowledge.)

Epic bought Bandcamp to use it as a weapon in various lawsuits against Google and Apple over their pricing models. Bandcamp joined a suit against Google over its Play Store pricing in particular.

it didn't go anywhere, because Bandcamp already qualified for media app pricing, which rendered its role in the suit meaningless. but that was why Epic bought Bandcamp.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#260

Post by jeremyjh »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #242
jacobr1 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

It really doesn't sound easy to me to tell this from the outside. What if the R&D investments are all garbage? It is hard to scale an engineering org effectively, it can take off and start building some microservice fortress that never yields any business value if it has the wrong leadership.
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