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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

#411

Post by ipaddr »

iainctduncan wrote: post #400
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... )

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 s…

Accounting, human resources, sales (different than marketing), managers, security, operations, analysts, C-Suit, customer service, etc not including technical teams developers, sprint masters, qa, analysts, data warehousing, networking, support, devops, thought leaders.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#412

Post by nomel »

waveBidder wrote: post #337
nomel wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

does Spotify pay artists more for listens on premium? I seriously doubt it.

All the revenue goes into a big pot, then split up [1].

That pot is 95% premium users [2].

[1] https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/

[2] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/120314/spoti....

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#413

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

notatoad wrote: post #345
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... )

it smells a little bloated there's certainly operations that are leaner than that. a little down the thread there's people saying they could build bandcamp in a weekend, which is probably fanciful but also not completely off base. just on a pure technology level, bandcamp seems like a 3-4 developer sort of project. so they've got ~110 people running sales and support?

This is HN. Start a thread about anything and someone will say they could build it in a weekend. Completely off base.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#414

Post by iainctduncan »

iainctduncan wrote: post #400
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... )

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 s…

Of course if they are doing really well, than their infrastructure/scaling problem could be the big issue (and thus the big expense), and it could be at the point where improving those margins is worth throwing developers at it.

I have also seen some eye watering monthly AWS bills where it makes total sense to hire a bunch of devs to bring those down by even a few percent.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#415

Post by DavidPiper »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #353
avitous wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 also refuse to use streaming services, and prefer to curate my own music - but for me, it's less about algorithmic suggestions, and more about actually owning the things I've paid for. A streaming service or an artist can pull music from a service (see Neil Young), but they ain't going to be reaching into my hard drives and pulling the mp3s out of it.

I am all in on owning things as well. To the point that I'll buy Blu-Rays where I can too, rather than sign up for an extra streaming service.

With music in particular, I definitely see discovery as a problem though -- particularly these days when "radio" isn't really a thing (at least for me). Spotify might be able to fill that gap, but I haven't really tried yet.

I'm also worried that "owning digital things" is going to become harder and harder as time goes on, but I haven't quite been able to put my finger on what the tipping point for that is going to be.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#416

Post by zaps »

Switching to full-on Dirty Hippie mode here but, goddammit why why WHY can’t we just have nice things without profit motives or acquisitions or shareholders or growth hacking and just enjoy the ride and the gifts that these kinds of resources give to the world? Why is the default setting “always sell out”?

IUMA was the Bandcamp of the early aughts. It was THE place to go for discovering new exciting music that you never knew could exist, the equivalent of listening to pop radio all the time and then one day turning the knob left to the local college station. (“What is this?” “It’s NEW.”) This was what the internet was FOR—accessing the inaccessible. Then some corporation bought it and smashed it into ash.

I get it, really. I’m naive af. People need to eat. Infrastructure isn’t free. Licenses need to be licensed. But fuck, I’d rather these sites never existed in the first place than have my heart broken like some middle schooler seeing their crush dancing with the rich kid.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#417

Post by iainctduncan »

ipaddr wrote: post #411
iainctduncan wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Accounting, human resources, sales (different than marketing), managers, security, operations, analysts, C-Suit, customer service, etc not including technical teams developers, sprint masters, qa, analysts, data warehousing, networking, support, devops, thought leaders.

Yeah, we know all that, I mean that's literally what we do. But I can tell you that I have seen companies with the same feature scope range over an order of magnitude in seats. There's a lot of overhiring in this business.

We often look at private companies going from initial bootstrap to their first exit, and I'm telling you, those are a whole different ball of wax. They manage to do a shit ton with not very many people.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#418

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

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…

No Pentagram? Dang, I thought they'd have at least one album by the band that wrote the song for whom the label is named:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6V-EhW8xCk

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#420

Post by vonjuice »

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"…

Those people don't listen to music, they consume background sound. I don't care if it sounds snob, that's how most people treat music.
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