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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

#481

Post by psychoslave »

manxman wrote: post #445
mbesto wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s all about the evaluation chart you take. It’s easy to pick random criteria to justify any of the following claim. Humanity is bloated. Mammals are bloated. Multi-cellular organisms are bloated. Eucaryote are bloated. Life is bloated.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#483

Post by eru »

cmckn wrote: post #471
ekianjo wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You dont have all this in most small sized companies. Silos exist only when you grow big.

I’ve never seen these kind of roles even in huge companies. “Sprint master” as a job description? Can’t be serious.

Well, I've heard of 'scum masters' (sorry, scrum masters) as a job description. So 'sprint master' doesn't sound too ridiculous by comparison.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#484

Post by user_named »

bgroat wrote: post #392
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"

Why is it hard to fire? I thought it's super easy in the US.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#485

Post by danjac »

manxman wrote: post #445
mbesto wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bandcamp has (or had) 118 people. Their business is music, not a chat app, so it will have different needs, both technical and non-technical. Maybe their engineering team is slightly larger than WhatsApp, but not by orders of magnitude.

Now maybe their business model was flawed (I heard it was profitable, but perhaps not profitable enough). But otherwise 118 people for a global brand-recognized business is pretty lean already: I have worked for medium sized businesses around the same headcount you have never heard of, which don't even operate outside their home country.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#486

Post by weq »

JohnFen wrote: post #381
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.

This is me as well. Streaming services don't serve my needs at all. I find algorithmic suggestions pretty much useless, but they're easy to ignore so don't really enter into it.

I used to leech Mp3's with the best of them, trawling through blogs enmasse before music was consolidated by giant aggregators. DI.FM is different though, its a streaming service, curated by humans (who are the worlds best DJs), has a sustainable buinsess model and lets you download streams.

Its very intersting how my music taste has evolved over the years, the more genres and types i was exposed to, the more i discovered. Nothing beats going to a concert you dont know anything about and having the night of your life. Im one for nostalgia, no doubt, but i think listening to the same song, in the same tone, over and over again, is a simplistic view of music and ruines its potential magic. Music and moods are instrinically linked. What happens if i was to listen to my favourite rockband, but instead mixed into chillout music that ebbs and flows over 5 or 10 hours. I get to hear the songs i love, in different ways, evoking different emotions and memories. I find that extends the life of music, not run it into the ground, dulling all those memories that triggered your love in the first place. I kissed that girl for the first time listening to this song, fades if you listen to that song everyday.

Spotify is automated radio, warts and all. Popular amoung the consumerist sheeple, often coupled with tv and shopping subscription technoligies. Society has always had this cross section of music interest, chinstroker outlets always existed at fringes, hardly able to survive in the world they helped create. Music sells. Captalists like to sell things people love to buy. A victim of their own success. Such is the harsh reality of this economic system, things just cant be done, they have to be done to death, then revamped and rebranded and the cycle goes on.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#487

Post by Snild »

freeone3000 wrote: post #147
callalex wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just calling someone dumb isn’t constructive. Instead tell them what you think Bandcamp had to offer.

Bandcamp let me pay a musician for a song, regardless of how unknown or unpopular a band was. You’re three dudes in your mid-thirties playing open mic night and passing a hat around, and definitely cannot afford to get on Spotify or Youtube Music, but you can get on bandcamp and a few people can pay $5 for a song they liked when they were tipsy.

> definitely cannot afford to get on Spotify

How so? There aren't necessarily any upfront costs for getting on Spotify; several aggregators offer a "we take a cut of your earnings" model.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#488

Post by jjulius »

derefr wrote: post #383
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not 30 second previews of songs, in general: the whole song, often many times over. Plus multiple download formats, including losslessly compressed formats such as FLAC. Plus the best return to the musician of any similar platform.

I'm talking about what you get without having to sign in. Even with free albums, IIRC you can't fully preview the song without "buying" it, which means signing in first. The signed-in experience is mostly akin to the signed-in experience of the iTunes Store. It's what you get when not signed in that's unique.

>Even with free albums, IIRC you can't fully preview the song without "buying" it, which means signing in first.

Actually, you can! Fun fact, unless an artist/label has explicitly limited what you can listen to without having made a purchase, you can listen to most of the music on Bandcamp in full, without buying it, an unlimited number of times if you're not logged in. The way it works is that, if you're logged in, you get a set (~3?) number of listens before Bandcamp basically says, "Yo, you seem to dig this, you should prolly be a mensch and throw some dough to the artist(s)/label." If you're logged out, I'm not sure what the limit is (if there even is one?), but it's likely easily circumvented by clearing cache/cookies.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#489

Post by danjac »

user_named wrote: post #484
bgroat wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Why is it hard to fire? I thought it's super easy in the US.

Legally perhaps, but firing people particularly en mass is hard to do right, unless you don't care and you are just prepping for a fire sale.

You can lose people who might be key contributors. You can destroy morale in the rest of the company. Everyone else knows they might be next, so they will leave first chance they get. Finally, it signals to the market you are in trouble (hence why a lot of companies are doing it now: better to be just one more company doing layoffs when everyone else is doing it).

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