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About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
461–470 of 640 posts
Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
#462Earlier 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.
You dont have all this in most small sized companies. Silos exist only when you grow big.
Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
SongTradr needs demonstrate that Bandcamp wasn't financially viable and thus layoffs were coming regardless of unionization attempts. They acquired BandCamp two weeks ago and layoffs post-acquisition are extremely common. NLRB can't do shit.
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This is an egregious comment. Why are you assuming the GP was satisfied in making this point. You are assuming the worst in this person just because you disagree.
Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah but when i talk to artists, they tell me they love the process of creating music. they don't have the money or interest for procurement, warehousing or customer support. They just want feedback on their new beat...
Every band is eventually faced with making a tough decision: 1) Do it for the love of the music. 2) Become a business. Some bands are lucky enough to do both - not most. Survivorship Bias is key here, and the overwhelming majority of bands do not make any money or perhaps even lose money chasing their passion. "Just getting feedback" is cool when you're in it for the love of music. For the rest - you do need a way to…
Even then, I think Bandcamp fills the niche for musicians who want to continue doing it for the love of music and want to better serve their community. E.g. they can offer downloadable lossless music for free.
Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
#465Earlier 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…
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…
You are making some wildy off base assumptions. I'm not a finance guy, I'm a hacker. We do technical diligence. I was a developer for 20 years and am doing a music and CS phd right now. I've slung code in over a dozen languages, I'm the open source developer of Scheme for Max and the csound6~ port to Max, an electronic composer, and a gigging musician. I am currently bootstrapping a music education product in Python, Javascript, C++, and Scheme. You would be very hard pressed to find someone as embedded in the problem domain of bandcamp who also does acquisitions related work.
So I use bandcamp all the time, I have purchased tons of music on it, and the articles have not made any difference to me as a user at all. The only thing I care about is the band I'm purchasing from! I use bandcamp for three reasons: lossless audio, no DRM, fair payments to the band. None of those are at all relevant to their article efforts.
As for most people abhoring PE, believe me, I am under no illusions about our clients. But most software company exits are now PE deals (something like over 75%), so while people might like to make public noises about hating PE, they sure like to sell their companies to them.
Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
can you follow up on the recreating popular songs and how spotify wronged taylor swift?
There's a ton of stuff like this, where the original artist isn't on Spotify, but these "covers" are: https://open.spotify.com/track/6t6VE10ixs4wyyIgAbJzvz https://open.spotify.com/artist/6RuIbUAQK9fmBq08AbY6XE Honestly, I wish Spotify would stop "improving" their client and use that money to get more artists on their service.
Ugh… that last one. 65m listens followed by 40m and so on. This is exactly my point. Who the hell is this?
Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yes you can, but it gets very expensive in a hurry if you have a ton of load. So one justified place for head count is to bring down AWS bills. At the beginning, it makes sense to outsource it as much as possible, and later, a developer's salary to move the needle on your million dollar AWS bill is a no brainer.
I have no idea where they are in that scale of course.
Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You are making some wildy off base assumptions. I'm not a finance guy, I'm a hacker. We do technical diligence . I was a developer for 20 years and am doing a music and CS phd right now. I've slung code in over a dozen languages, I'm the open source developer of Scheme for Max and the csound6~ port to Max, an electronic composer, and a gigging musician. I am currently bootstrapping a music education product in Python…
Apologies on misunderstanding your role here, most of the speculation on this thread has been related to finances and staffing so I made an assumption there when I shouldn’t have.
> I have purchased tons of music on it, and the articles have not made any difference to me as a user at all
n=1, but that’s true of my perspective as well so perhaps it’s a wash. I do think the editorial staff were more important to some genres than others.
> they sure like to sell their companies to them
I might suggest that this is a case where upper management’s desires directly conflict with the people making the noise (staff and users)
Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
#469Earlier 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.
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Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You are making some wildy off base assumptions. I'm not a finance guy, I'm a hacker. We do technical diligence . I was a developer for 20 years and am doing a music and CS phd right now. I've slung code in over a dozen languages, I'm the open source developer of Scheme for Max and the csound6~ port to Max, an electronic composer, and a gigging musician. I am currently bootstrapping a music education product in Python…
> while people might like to make public noises about hating PE, they sure like to sell their companies to them.
I suspect that there's not a lot of overlap between people who publicly fume about good companies being ruined by profit-hungry buyers, and people who start companies explicitly so they can flip them to profit-hungry buyers and ditch.
Does anyone still start businesses with the intention of building and maintaining a really excellent product/service in the long term? Do any of them hold on to that ideal after a few years?