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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

#311
post #94
post #79

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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.

Any time I download music from Bandcamp, I drag it into Apple Music on my Mac and it syncs to all of my devices, sitting in my library like any other album.

It’s actually one of the reasons I use Apple Music over Spotify, the process to do this in Spotify is much more convoluted.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#312

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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.

100 person companies are really small. Some local car dealerships have 100 employees. I think these layoffs are more about redundancy at the buyer than the people not being useful at Bandcamp probably.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#314

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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

This website from 2004 is more usable than many of the websites from 2023, it is clearly working well enough (or I guess those other websites aren’t doing their jobs right.)

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#315

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> Perhaps not, if the union is not yet recognized. That's incorrect. Most of the rights afforded by the NLRA actually apply regardless of whether or not a union exists; a union is simply a formal structure for exercising those rights. In this case, firing employees could be considered retaliatory action. Retaliatory action is illegal regardless of whether or not the union has been recognized (in fact, it is illegal t…

I love this legalizing and philosophizing. Bottom line is half the employees lost their jobs, and even if there is some sort of anti-union or NLRB-initiated action here, it will be years before there's a fine or lawsuit. By then the business will be unrecognizable.

Which is why vicious, "take the company out back and Ol' Yeller it" level approaches should be the norm for the NLRB. Make examples of a few high-profile companies, and eventually negotiating with a union will appear more appealing than risking the consequences of union busting.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#316

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

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A global, international marketplace with about 100,000 sales totalling $3.5 million day. If you can swing serving that from a couple hundred petabytes in your living room then go ahead.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#317

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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.

A lot of the time IPO investors, both public and institutional, value company cash on hand at more than $1 per dollar during an IPO. An extra 500 million in the bank might make the company IPO for a billion dollars more.

Peloton is an example of a company that did a huge unnecessary fundraise before IPO. I'm sure it makes a bunch of numbers and ratios look better on paper. Psychologically, I think it also helps companies lock in evaluation closer to their IPO Target for when people look back at the history of the company.

It's pretty similar too the idea of inflating employee head count. You can say "we made $10 million with only 10 employees last year. Wait until you see how much money you're going to make now that we have a hundred employees"

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#318

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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!

Agreed, I despise actually using Qobuz.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#319

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I was under the impression (perhaps mistaken) that music you purchased in iTunes had to stay in iTunes. Can I take my files where I please or do they have to reside in the Apple walled garden?

iTunes purchases have been DRM free since the mid 2000s. Most, but not all are also available in Apple Lossless format, which means you can convert them to whatever format you prefer without any quality concerns.

AFAICT, iTunes doesn't sell music in ALAC, just AAC. Do you have a source for purchases being downloadable as DRM-free ALAC?

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#320
post #294
post #291

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How is your business that you plugged different from Bandcamp, apart from being smaller? Sounds like you're both in the same business?

our platform facilitates micro transactions with minimal fees because we take away the bank burden as much as possible. We focus on the creators, as long as they create great content people will reward them. platforms turn to crap when people find the need to sell other things. why should i sit through amazing youtube content only to be sold nordvpn? surely the community can do better with micros transactions.
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