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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

#451

Post by jemmyw »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #183
nomel wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why I have Spotify rather than bandcamp. It finds music I like, regardless of musician effort. I found more new musicians in the first year of Spotify than decades before. It’s a loss for everyone if good music goes unheard.

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…

I think you've identified the major problem for musicians: there's so much music available today that the value of writing more has crashed. The value to listeners is now in the delivery infrastructure and recommendations.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#452

Post by chongli »

iainctduncan wrote: post #407
notatoad wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Infra. The "non-functional" requirements are going to be expensive and need a solid team. Scaling, reliablility, availability, dealing with huge amounts of bandwidth and storage, all that crap. I'd guess a dozen infra people minimum.

Can’t you outsource all that to AWS? Bandcamp seems like an extremely simple site to me. It has some customizable artist pages, static file hosting for large music files, a web music player, and some e-commerce features for buying music.

I wouldn’t call it “one person and a weekend” simple, but the site has been around since 2007. A dozen people could have built it fairly comfortably from a basic site at the start to the scaled up version of today. 118 people just sounds like “hiring for the sake of hiring” to me.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#453

Post by nluken »

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…

Your view of bandcamp seems like a cartoonishly perfect representation of a consultant’s perspective with very little understanding of what the company actually does beyond the balance sheet. It’s the kind of no-skin-in-the-game perspective that ruined Boeing, and it’s why most folks absolutely abhor private equity.

Bandcamp has been successful because of the trust they have within the internet music community. It’s not a very complicated product, but people buy music there because the whole thing feels like it’s a part of the music scene, not the tech or business scene. Given that the Daily is well regarded in that community, I highly doubt those six writers, who were likely paid significantly less than the median staff member, were the problem here. Even if they didn’t have the purely trackable ROI, they were a huge part of the platform’s only moat: its goodwill with the artists and listeners who used it.

I would also add that Bandcamp was pretty publicly profitable prior to their sale to Epic. Given that they didn’t significantly grow the staff after the acquisition, they would have had to make huge blunders in a very short period of time they owned it. So at this point we’re talking about laying folks off purely for better looking numbers, not really for sustainability.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#454

Post by artyom »

smadge wrote: post #423
NewJazz wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When a company isn't profitable you hire developers to build a product which can make you profitable. When a company is profitable, you fire all the developers and start collecting dividends.

Agreed but from what I've seen most layoffs were on the content/writer/social side of things.

Sounds to me that the focus is now on being a platform and not an outlet.

I still have no clue what Epic wanted to do with it.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#455

Post by rewgs »

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.

It's worth noting, though, that Justin can afford to not take outside investments for Reaper because he already "sold out" by selling Nullsoft to AOL for ~$50 million. I say this not to throw shade or anything like that -- I really like and respect Justin and am literally developing an extension of the Reaper API and a product built off of it as we speak -- but in the context of this discussion, it's worth noting that often the financial freedom to do awesome stuff and not sell out is enabled by wealth made somewhere else first.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#456

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#457

Post by iainctduncan »

alisson_dover wrote: post #448
iainctduncan wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can find interviews with them talking about this, they really don't like that side of the business. I don't know what happens if the owners die mind you, but I'm not worried about them changing their minds.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#458

Post by trinsic2 »

DavidPiper wrote: post #415
pavel_lishin wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 goi…

Yeah it seems like it's going in that direction. The new generation seems fine with streaming services, now. I worked for a few customers who want to retain their physical music in their homes with a media devices and stream it to all their devices in the home. Slowly but surely many home entertainment devices that store music have been slowly removing those features in favor of streaming services. This has been making it very hard for people to retain physical copies of their music without some sort of custom solution that has to be maintained.

For me, I refuse to use music streaming services, I rely heavily on my digital music collection most of which comes from Bandcamp. Bandcamp is the last bastion of physical digital music where there is direct interaction between musicians and music lovers. If it dies, we are screwed. If its possible, id actually like to see it be supported from donations like Thunderbird is if it was possible. I don't like the idea that it relies on commercialism.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#459

Post by Pxtl »

8note wrote: post #408
Pxtl wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also 7digital.... which is now, also owned by Songtradr. Or Amazon, which doesn't sell music in my country. Or Apple. Which seems to resent even still running the itunes music store, they don't even have a web front for it.

I miss google music. It did the job of a digital record store really well

Ditto. Also GPM was a bit buggier and more bloated feature-wise than YTM, but the ability to clean your ID3 tags in the web browser was wonderful.

And now YTM is getting podcasts so everything old is new again... but worse.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#460

Post by alisson_dover »

iainctduncan wrote: post #457
alisson_dover wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can find interviews with them talking about this, they really don't like that side of the business. I don't know what happens if the owners die mind you, but I'm not worried about them changing their minds.

Good point. I don't know if Robert Henke still has a big stake in the company. If he does - the company is safe.
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