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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

#371

Post by lghh »

brink wrote: post #12
JohnFen wrote: post #3

And the small hope I have that BandCamp would remain a good thing after SongTradr acquired them grows even smaller.

I use Bandcamp a lot. Tbh, if I had acquired Bandcamp, in efforts for streamlining, I probably would have laid the editors off too. I've never read a single bandcamp article. Did anyone actually read them, especially enough to justify their cost?

I read them all the time and have discovered some of my favorite music through them. Bandcamp Daily has been a highlight of my day for years.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#372

Post by willsmith72 »

amrocha wrote: post #155
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…

A few mil won't get you those things, but they'll guarantee your basic necessities. For example, my dad is working into his 70s. If I could fund his retirement I would. And here's the kicker: you can always go build something bigger than yourself after selling. Having fuck you money means you can make the ethical choice next time. Edit: on your comment about founders regretting their first sale. I'm guessing most fou…

The people who get to have the option of a multi-multi million dollar exit are the ones who start at the beginning when the company is worth nothing. Most people who can't afford basic necessities also can't afford to take the risk of starting something new. In fact, I would say it's a terrible decision in that case, akin to buying lottery tickets. The far easier way to guarantee "basic necessities" in tech is train up, get a good job, be frugal. You could have enough to never need basic necessities within 10 years, max 20.

The vast majority of founders I see are relatively self-sufficient already and live comfortably. They're founders because they're addicted to it, love making something new, and potentially are chasing that mega-exit. 10s-100s of millions, not a few.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#373

Post by amrocha »

racked wrote: post #350
amrocha wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The rational choice is to sell. If you as the owner are already wealthy 'enough', then that is not necessarily the rational choice. It depends how much you care about the future of the business. In my dreams, if I ran such a noble business, I would hope that I'd have managed to extract enough value from the business to arrange for my own pension by the time others want to acquire it, so I can reject their offers an…

Well yeah, but almost nobody is in that position and that's the problem. You could always help out the people around you.

Until everyone in our society is taken care of by default, these noble businesses will keep being extremely rare.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#374

Post by maybaq »

alexalx666 wrote: post #307
alisson_dover wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I actually like Bandcamp website, its fast and efficient.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#375

Post by lethologica »

jmuguy wrote: post #352

I’m not sure what the experience is with other niche genres of music but I’ve found more black and death metal on Bandcamp in the past month than has ever been recommended to me elsewhere. I get the impression that HN posters who don’t use Bandcamp just see it at some place where a band can make a MySpace profile - but it has a serious network effect going on. For instance, the label 20 buck spin, has a boat load of…

Thanks for that link! I’ve recently gotten into metal (Holy crap what an awesome genre of music I’ve neglected to explore my whole life! I feel like a kid in a candy shop hearing all of these new amazing sounds) and started learning guitar because of it.

Having someone share their curated music is way more powerful in my opinion than some algorithmically generated playlist.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#376

Post by bsder »

foresto wrote: post #370
bsder wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The keywords you want for that file transfer are "Magic Wormhole". Yes, it works on Windows, Linux, and OS X.

Magic Wormhole is great, but sometimes unbearably slow for bulk transfers. (I imagine the public relay server used for the common NAT-to-NAT case is sometimes overloaded.)

His comment was: "how do i transfer some file(s) between two computers in the same room".

All the problems with NAT traversal should be avoided in that case.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#377

Post by justatdotin »

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…

excellent point and excellent example

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#378

Post by JohnFen »

southwesterly wrote: post #170
sitharus wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On point 5, bandcamp doesn’t own any rights to the music on the site. The artist agreement is limited to the service of selling music, if that changes the artists can revoke their agreement.

That can change.

If it did, I'd probably stop using Bandcamp.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#379

Post by amrocha »

dharmab wrote: post #219
amrocha wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you can get that for cheaper, but then you're not the customer you're the product. If you tried rolling your own solution you'd be paying more than 20$ per month.

I pay $0 a month to host a website. A number of artists I've bought from have you pay with paypal and a download link is included on your receipt. That's what, nine cents per transaction plus five percent, and minimal egress charges from a cloud provider.

Hosting costs money and you're getting that for free, so there's something else going on there.

You're paying for PayPal on their margin.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#380

Post by foresto »

bsder wrote: post #376
foresto wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Magic Wormhole is great, but sometimes unbearably slow for bulk transfers. (I imagine the public relay server used for the common NAT-to-NAT case is sometimes overloaded.)

His comment was: "how do i transfer some file(s) between two computers in the same room". All the problems with NAT traversal should be avoided in that case.

Fair, but my comment is for other readers, too.

(Also, being in the same room doesn't always mean direct connection is allowed. I've seen wifi networks that forbid it.)

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