Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 640 posts

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#321

Post by Sakos »

btown wrote: post #233
ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Alternate, equally speculative but less cynical take on 4-5, largely advised by Songtradr's announcement here: https://twitter.com/songtradr/status/1709986126117630051?s=2... This may have been a last-minute accelerated deal process where Epic would have all but shuttered Bandcamp if a buyer couldn't be found, before they needed to announce massive layoffs to assuage investors. Songtradr is given an opportunity to se…

Except Bandcamp wasn't at risk of shutting down before Epic. If it's being run unsustainably now, that's on Epic.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#322

Post by elabajaba »

btown wrote: post #233
ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Alternate, equally speculative but less cynical take on 4-5, largely advised by Songtradr's announcement here: https://twitter.com/songtradr/status/1709986126117630051?s=2... This may have been a last-minute accelerated deal process where Epic would have all but shuttered Bandcamp if a buyer couldn't be found, before they needed to announce massive layoffs to assuage investors. Songtradr is given an opportunity to se…

Epic is private, Tim Sweeney owns >50%, and their only real rival in the game engine space had recently torpedoed themselves which caused a large amount of gamedevs and even some publishers to swear off Unity.

There was no investor pressure.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#323

Post by CamperBob2 »

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…

With that said, if they do tank, it can seriously be replaced by someone in a weekend, maybe 2 :)

That's even more true for Twitter, and look what's happened... nothing.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#324

Post by armini »

alisson_dover wrote: post #299
armini wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Because it's a different business? No one needs to run anything. Bandcamp offers an easy way for musicians to have a fairly customizable online presence with a flexible pricing model, a merch store, and, importantly, plug into a larger platform's discoverability mechanism.

yeah but when i talk to artists, they tell me they love the process of creating music. they don't have the money or interest for procurement, warehousing or customer support. They just want feedback on their new beat...

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#325

Post by armini »

Fezzik wrote: post #308
armini wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

yeah fair point, we need to do better with the site... thanks for the feedback..

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#326

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

nomel wrote: post #280
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is more music on Bandcamp than you could listen to in a lifetime. More comes out in a week than you could (probably) listen to in a week.

So when you sayd "finding new music to listen to", there's a hidden implication in there: you want to find new music that is on Spotify (which in turn implies things like major labels, artists seeking or expecting breakout etc.

Bandcamp is an amazing resource for discovering new music, but a subset of all new music, just as Spotify is. It's fine to say you prefer what you can find on Spotify, just don't make the claim that Bandcamp somehow isn't up for this general task.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#327

Post by shagie »

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…

(dig, dig, dig... where did I get that... music... found it!)

http://magnatune.com (correct, there is no 's' there... that's odd in today's world)

> Since 2003, we've found and recruited the very best independent musicians and shared revenue 50/50 with them. Much of our music is exclusively available here. Nobody has spent the time to curate a collection like we have.

They've got some interesting licensing (as in lack of royalties)...

Though... Not entirely sure anymore about this. It feels like it is just running as a zombie site that's paid up (no news in the past decade)... but it's still running and streaming.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#328

Post by aendruk »

Zambyte wrote: post #69
shmerl wrote: post #4

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

7digital is another source I often use.

This 7digital? https://0x0.st/HJov.png I get the impression they really don’t want me to figure out how to buy music from them.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#329

Post by noirbot »

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.

I don't know the history exactly, but my assumption is that trying to bootstrap an industry-wide union from nothing is exceedingly difficult, while making one at a single company is much more viable. Presumably the idea would be to merge the company-specific ones into industry ones after they're more stable.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#330

Post by harimau777 »

armini wrote: post #324
alisson_dover wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's a different business? No one needs to run anything. Bandcamp offers an easy way for musicians to have a fairly customizable online presence with a flexible pricing model, a merch store, and, importantly, plug into a larger platform's discoverability mechanism.

yeah but when i talk to artists, they tell me they love the process of creating music. they don't have the money or interest for procurement, warehousing or customer support. They just want feedback on their new beat...

I think that's probably why they use Bandcamp. They aren't interested in setting up their own ecommerce presence.
Post reply on HN