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

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#301

Post by lotsofpulp » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 11:46 PM UTC

jeremyjh wrote: post #260

lotsofpulp wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Because they were publicly listed with public financials, you know they were not losing money:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/profit...

You also know from using Amazon that they were near flawlessly executing 2 day shipping across the US with prices competitive with Walmart and other successful retailers.

They also had a pricing advantage against incumbents due to not having to collect sales tax in all states until 2016.

It’s mostly the verifiably not losing money part though so you knew they weren’t overextending, and they were delivering what people wanted.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

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Post by tracerbulletx » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 11:48 PM UTC

hipadev23 wrote: post #278

matthewn wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

Why do you think it's a good thing for companies to run at maximum efficiency? Have some slack, spread the knowledge around, let people go on vacation, have a bench, have replacements. Have a world that's more than capital owners and slaves.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

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Post by pdntspa » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 11:48 PM UTC

mardifoufs wrote: post #98

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.

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.

Real, living breathing DJs. They are a way better way to discover new music.

Listen to a set and pull out Shazam whenever you hear something you like. It can even dump all that into a spotify playlist

For me its the only way to fly

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

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Post by aurnik » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 11:48 PM UTC

nomel wrote: post #271

tomphoolery wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Discover Weekly specifically requires artists to "pitch" their songs to Spotify. If you're already following the artist, their new releases that have been pitched are supposedly guaranteed to show up on your Discover Weekly. Otherwise, I believe it's someone at Spotify who picked that song which then distributes it to "relevant" listeners.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

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Post by paulddraper » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 11:49 PM UTC

alexalx666 wrote: post #292

matthewn wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

compare this to instagram before being acquired for $1B

Instagram was an outlier, and I think you know that.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

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Post by hipadev23 » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 11:50 PM UTC

tracerbulletx wrote: post #302

hipadev23 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Why do you think it's a good thing for companies to run at maximum efficiency? Have some slack, spread the knowledge around, let people go on vacation, have a bench, have replacements. Have a world that's more than capital owners and slaves.

It's a SaaS. That's a 10 person team at maximum efficiency. They could be a lifestyle business with 30. They've still got 50% more headcount to reduce.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

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Post by alexalx666 » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 11:50 PM UTC

alisson_dover wrote: post #300

alexalx666 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

compare this to instagram before being acquired for $1B

Have you used Bandcamp? It's a way larger feature set than an iOS app for picture sharing.

Yes I used it, it looks like a website from 2004, clearly their core competencies can not be about building their own file upload, payment etc. but creating Customer Friendly Sexy Branded landing, working with labels etc. which they failed to do with 100 ppl

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

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Post by Fezzik » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 11:51 PM UTC

armini wrote: post #291

sp332 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Support for hundreds of thousands of bands and their bank payouts, and millions of customers. (They also sell vinyl, CDs, cassettes, and t-shirts.) Edit: they reportedly had a good editorial team, but I'm not sure how many people you need for that part.

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I mean, the big difference is I have used bandcamp and it took me about 5 seconds to figure out how it worked… I read all your info pages and I have no idea what Kuky is. The stock images with all the latin words make it seem like it is just a scam.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#309

Post by ruined » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 11:52 PM UTC

diziet wrote: post #222

willcipriano wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

practically, mats can be much thicker

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

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Post by DocKitKat » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 11:53 PM UTC

avitous wrote: post #265

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…

I too loved Bandcamp for its sane approach to acquiring new music; unlike "most people" I refuse to use the streaming-only services, and insist upon buying albums and listening to exactly those selections I choose (and I prefer to listen to albums in their entirety, even today). Perhaps I'm just old and set in my ways, but choices made by others, especially algorithmically generated "options maximizing my engagement"…

I too listen to albums in their entirety and don’t interact too much with autogenerated content.

But I was on Apple Music and now I’m on Spotify. The amount of new albums I get to listen to would put a massive dent in my bank account if I was buying them as I go.

I still purchase Vinyl and the odd CD, but that is reserved for my top must have records. A flat rate for music just makes sense to me, and allows me to check out and discover so many more new artists than in the old days, where my music taste was much narrower and confined to more mainstream “classic” rock and the like.