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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

#391

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

NewJazz wrote: post #149
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…

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.

At one point - in the not too distant past - a common way of valuing tech startups was $1M per engineer...

You can see why companies might have been incentivized back then to hire anything with a pulse that claimed to be an engineer.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#392

Post by bgroat »

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…

A founder friend confided in me years ago, "It is MUCH easier to raise more money than it is to fire someone... I just keep raising and hiring and eventually everything will get done"

No surprise that this approach was very much a "Low-Rates Phenomenon"

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#393

Post by armini »

solardev wrote: post #298
armini wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What does your app do? I don't get it. (Read the website and still don't get it)

We’ve built a micro transaction engine that helps reconcile payments really quickly & cheaply. This means that creators from anywhere around the world can create amazing content & reward each other instead of having to sell merchandise. We’ve tested the model with two labels so far & we’ve seen it even promotes collaboration “can I pay you for this tune to remind in my track”. This could never happen on any other platform & we think it’s something special.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#394

Post by JohnFen »

amrocha wrote: post #363
gizmo wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally everybody has family members who could use extra money. If having family absolves you from ethical constraints we can dispense with the notion of ethics altogether.

Sure, and that's why most people would sell. Having a family doesn't "absolve you" from ethics, but it means that you have to weight doing right by your family vs doing right by your users. Most people choose their family, and nobody blames them for it.

> nobody blames them for it

I do.

If somebody has to do wrong by their customers to do right to their family, they've seriously messed everything up.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#395

Post by proxiful-wash »

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…

Seriously avoid any product with tencent before its too late.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#396

Post by proxiful-wash »

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…

I get the impression that people want evil tencent to succeed, but this really has no place in the free world. thanks for reading.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#397

Post by mbesto »

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... )

You don't know Bandcamp's revenue, so how on earth could you smell their bloat?

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#398

Post by famahar »

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?

Their articles are fantastic and they curate and promote such diverse and unique musicians. I don't know any other publication that goes so in depth with such niche music. I hate thinking about this in terms of profits. Those articles celebrated and expanded on music culture so much.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#399

Post by fencepost »

sitharus wrote: post #166
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…

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.

Pretty sure there's value in owning a platform where small independent ("undiscovered") artists release their work and where listeners go to find that work. In particular, it seems likely that having the metrics and historical data could give SongTradr insight into which artists seem likely to catch on, etc.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#400

Post by iainctduncan »

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... )

So we work for private equity mostly, and they are in the business of buying and selling steady growth, profitable businesses, as opposed to VC/bubble stuff, so our expectations are a lot leaner. But at a guess, I think we'd expect that to be a 40-50 person company. 118 seems high.

The app is tiny, it has changed very little in who knows how long. Infrastructure is obviously the big thing, so there would be a solid size infra team. Then standard business, product, marketing stuff. I just can't see that warranting more than 50 people unless it's raking it in. Sounds like they could be wasting money on marketing initiatives that may or may not be worth anything at all. Six full time writers seems pretty out there given the questionable ROI of those articles.

Obviously, take this with a huge a grain of salt as this is a guess based on being a frequent user of the app, and having done about 60 diligences and been a part of another 30 or 40 in review capacity. But it seems significantly oversized on what I normally see looking at business that have to be run sustainably. For whatever that's worth!

EDIT: someone had a good point that bandcamp takes international payments, which is complex. So I would revise my first WAG up based on that for sure. Thinking further I would probably guess 50-60 people - which is about what I guess it is after the layoffs. Still a total WAG, but slightly better informed...

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