About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off • Hacker News Board

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#271

Post by nomel » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 11:15 PM UTC

tomphoolery wrote: post #195

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.

> It finds music I like, regardless of musician effort. This isn't really true...musicians must put forth a ton of effort just to be part of the songs that are recommended to you. Spotify favors and rewards those who promote their music on other platforms, since it scours the web for articles mentioning your name and people posting about you on social media in order to determine how far up in the "rankings" you shoul…

Is this assumed or is there public info about their algorithm?

In the first song of my Discover Weekly, if I google the very unique artist name, I get exactly four hits: their bandcamp page, their website, their Spotify page, and their YouTube channel that hasn't been updated in a 9 months, with that last video having 120k views. The rest is unrelated to them.

This doesn't refutes what you're saying, but I would have exactly 0 chance of finding them on my own, with the effort they're putting in.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#272

Post by jtriangle » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 11:15 PM UTC

colinsane wrote: post #263

golergka wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

funny thing: i recently happened into the solution to that age-old question of "how do i transfer some file(s) between two computers in the same room". i now run an anonymous FTP server on my laptop, open to the LAN. prior to this Dropbox _was_ one of the solutions, but recently i've used that FTP server for the job several times with both Linux and Windows users. yet, you jest.

Samba also works just fine for that job.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#273

Post by jasonjayr » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 11:16 PM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #223

Kye wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

To where? Because as a buyer of music I like BC's deal and would love to make sure alternatives have similar arrangements?

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#274

Post by uptime » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 11:18 PM UTC

phatfish wrote: post #198

nkozyra wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say you're very much in the minority then. Spotify is notorious for its weak recommendation system.

I listen to music a lot, but never got algorithmic recommendation systems. It just seems too soulless. Personally i still listen to the radio (streamed online obviously), in the UK NTS Radio (nts.live) and Rinse FM (rinse.fm) are good. Very few adverts, NTS is pretty much listener funded, not sure what Rinse do as I rarely hear ads. The shows get archived on SoundCloud so you can ID tracks and find them on Spotify la…

yep. Add wfmu.org which also has archives and has live chats every show.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#275

Post by pkilgore » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 11:19 PM UTC

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?

Leave.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#276

Post by alexjplant » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 11:20 PM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #121

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…

See, for me I like that Bandcamp is just a store . That I see an artist I like on social media, click their bandcamp link, and if I like their music I buy it. I don't use its recommendation features, and the only social feature I use is the ability to follow an artist and thus get news-bulletins about their work. Once you get to an artist's page, the UI is simple and clean and Just Works. I can see their releases, bu…

Sweet Jesus... this is Danza/Frontierer/Car Bomb levels of heaviness but with experimental pop instead. I'm gonna have to ease myself into this album.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#277

Post by ghostbrainalpha » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 11:22 PM UTC

s1artibartfast wrote: post #209

NewJazz wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Could you give an example of 1 of the perverse incentives that could cause that? It's very interesting.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#278

Post by hipadev23 » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 11:22 PM UTC

matthewn wrote: post #264

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…

Bandcamp had 118 employees total. That doesn't smell bloated to me. (Source: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bandcamp-layoffs-oakland... )

[flagged]

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#279

Post by nomel » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 11:23 PM UTC

winternett wrote: post #90

reactordev wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a loss to musicians to have a monopoly like Spotify (who likes to recreate popular songs with their own artists and label) be the gatekeeper to what is good music. From a service perspective, it’s great. I have the worlds music at my fingertips. From a music perspective it’s horrible. I have one company dictating streaming payments and terms on an entire industry and you’re f&$ked if you don’t play nice. Ask Tay…

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.

> Spotify is a terrible alternative for the musicians.

I'm not a musician. I'm a listener trying to find music that I like to listen to. Do you have a recommendation for us on the other end of the speaker wire?

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#280

Post by nomel » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 11:25 PM UTC

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…

> People hearing your music is nice and all

As a listener, this is my entire concern, use case, and reason for paying for a streaming site: finding new music to listen to. I don't think I'm unique. Artists should get more, which is why I pay for Spotify Premium, but the use case of a listener is important. Bandcamp doesn't address that, for me.