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

441–450 of 640 posts

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#441

Post by diogenes4 »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #432
zaps wrote: post #416

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 ne…

Because profit has somehow become the goal. Take away profit as a target and then you’re just left with people doing what they want.

> you’re just left with people doing what they want.

God forbid

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#442

Post by winternett »

nomel wrote: post #279
winternett wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Spotify is a terrible alternative for the musicians. Myspace and Mp3.Com used to be the road map to how sites should be run, but venture capitalism and publicly traded companies ruined the entire ecosystem.

> Spotify is a terrible alternative for the musicians. I'm not a musician. I'm a listener trying to find music that I like to listen to. Do you have a recommendation for us on the other end of the speaker wire?

Junodownload is where I buy music most. They have a wide variety of options and fair pricing. It's much easier to find and browse music there. Our link: https://www.junodownload.com/labels/Ruff+And+Tuff+Recordings...

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#443

Post by amrocha »

npteljes wrote: post #253
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…

It's also rational not to sell. Why not value a nice sustainable business over selling out? I understand that many of us would sell, I would probably sell too. But different people do exist. Valve didn't sell, for example, and I'm sure they were approached many times.

Yeah they definitely do exist, but it's the exception. That's why everybody knows about valve and epic.

However, if Gabe's family had urgently needed money back in the day, would he have sold? Maybe.

That's what I'm getting at. You need to be in a very stable position to be able to turn down a big offer like that when it comes, and in general in our society we're always one or two emergencies away from being destitute on the streets.

Until we make sure people are taken care of, these companies will keep being the exception.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#444

Post by anonzzzies »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #432
zaps wrote: post #416

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 ne…

Because profit has somehow become the goal. Take away profit as a target and then you’re just left with people doing what they want.

And that’s a bad thing?

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#445

Post by manxman »

mbesto wrote: post #397
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... )

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

Whatsapp was It's interesting people are talking about bloated software in this thread and their love of lean software. Large teams often lead to bloated software.

On an internet with billions of users online, there's a legit argument that most if not all technology companies are severely bloated.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#446

Post by alisson_dover »

zaps wrote: post #416

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 ne…

I do believe that the original founders had a fantastic vision that they mostly realized. But at some point they decided to sell the business and move on. Unfortunately that meant that the vision, and, more importantly, the full control over that vision have vanished. Don't know what the solution is for businesses like that... A worker owned co-op? A non-profit? Some legal structure that is capable of withstanding investor pressure and just existing as a fairly successful business.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#447

Post by amrocha »

dharmab wrote: post #425
amrocha wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> so there's something else going on there Cloudflare free tier as a CDN. They're on the record about why they do it- mainly, it generates large sales leads, makes it easier to hire, and provides them a community of willing QA testers for new features. Hosting costs for a small website are literally pennies a month if your content can be cached. Plenty of truly free origin hosts available. GitHub Pages is a popular i…

Right, so Cloudflare makes their money one way or another. If at some point they decide it's not worth it to host free content anymore then you're out of luck.

That's what I mean, there is a cost of doing business and someone has to pay it. It sounds like Bandcamp was a shitty partner too, but the larger point still stands I think.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#448

Post by alisson_dover »

iainctduncan wrote: post #422
zaps wrote: post #416

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 ne…

They do exist, but yeah they are rare. Both Ableton Live and Reaper refuse to take outside investments or sell. The Live owners are famous for telling them to screw off. Major reason I use both of them. The music tech business is getting rocked by acquisitions recently.

I am really worried about Ableton. Feels like music production industry is going through a consolidation stage (NI/Izotope) and Live is absolutely the prime real estate in the business.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#449

Post by iainctduncan »

threeseed wrote: post #344
alexalx666 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

compare this to instagram before being acquired for $1B

Instagram had no revenue at acquisition. Headcount always grows disproportionally whenever you start dealing with payments. Not just directly taking them but all of the associated compliance and legal issues.

Ah good point! I didn't think about international payments in my first WAG - you're right that that would certainly need some people. So I would up my initial guess based on that, like maybe up another 25-30%, but that would still land us at around where songtradr is going if they are laying off 50%.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#450

Post by jbm »

ShamelessC wrote: post #364
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…

> Background, I work in diligence for software aquisitions. It shows. I don't see lay-offs from this perspective. Instead, I think about each of the employees impacted by the company's reckless behavior. Did the employees have any say in this matter? No? Then who cares if the job they were there to do was unimportant in the first place? That is absolutely the fault of the company. Your stance is not effective when tr…

I hated my life when I worked at this style of company.

When I worked at (a beverage company), one of the unfortunate realities was that the company did not really compete to make their money. The profit at the entity I worked at was completely based on the price of ingredients that was set by a parent company. We could have reduced complexity and improved efficiency by large margins easily, but it didn't matter because the parent company would have clawed back a larger share and pumped their profits, while our efforts were of no benefit.

In this aimless zombie corporate mode, they hired people without much thought, and everyone was busy looking busy (8 hour meetings were common for "developers"). However, if you are doing something for real, people don't see any point in helping you out; so even if you really do want to improve things (in my case, I wanted to help the poor souls on 2ch who had to work on the weekend because of poor internal communication that prevented hand-offs), no one wanted to lend a hand.

Since profit is not a big deal, and everyone simulates being busy, no winds up in charge, and the inmates run the asylum. If you are the guy in the unimportant job, you suddenly realize it is a bullshit job and are constantly in fear of your job vanishing. Moreover, since you cannot accomplish anything, it is nearly impossible to find a new job when the company inevitably encounters reality.

Post reply on HN