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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

#491

Post by js2 »

iainctduncan wrote: post #476
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…

Interesting little aside for those reacting to the fact that it's PE who pay our bills. While the world of vampire PE certainly exists, most of the time the clients I interact with are genuinely concerned with how to make the business better. And we are far more frequently telling acquirers to spend top dollar on new hires than advising on who to cut! The expectation is that the company needs investment , and that th…

> we are far more frequently telling acquirers to spend top dollar on new hires than advising on who to cut

Please tell that to Apollo Global Management as loudly as you can. I mean, if they're one of your customers.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#492

Post by tacocataco »

shiroiuma wrote: post #477
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ma…

>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? Define "a few". You can't expect most company owners to want to continue running that company for decades on end; eventually, they want to do something else or retire. So at some point, they have to sell. Who's going to buy an e…

Depending on the size, the city/state could purchase the company and loan it to the employees.

If the the loan gets paid off, boom... co-op equally owned by the workers.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#493

Post by toopok4k3 »

Kye wrote: post #213
sitharus wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can, but not retrospectively.

"By continuing to use Bandcamp, you agree..." What's an artist who depends on the platform to do?

Technically Bandcamp is a very simple payment and file host.

A small team can quickly copy how it works and get all the artists to move platform if they were to shoot themself in the head. Right now this doesn't happen because Bandcamp functions and exists and has a reputation for musicians.

Lose that, all the artists start looking for a new home and someone will make an alternative quickly.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#494

Post by watwut »

shiroiuma wrote: post #477
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ma…

>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? Define "a few". You can't expect most company owners to want to continue running that company for decades on end; eventually, they want to do something else or retire. So at some point, they have to sell. Who's going to buy an e…

I know companies that exist for years and years and even get inherited. I even work in one.

It exists, just not in SV

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#495

Post by troupo »

chongli wrote: post #452
iainctduncan wrote: post #407

Earlier 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…

> Can’t you outsource all that to AWS?

At a large enough scale you will still need a lot of people dealing with infra. AWS is not magic

> 118 people just sounds like “hiring for the sake of hiring” to me.

You'll need 20+ people just to deal with copyright issues on a daily basis.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#496

Post by nomel »

simpaticoder wrote: post #475
jemmyw wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The population of music lovers, people that have favorite bands, genres, albums, want more music. Those who listen passively and do not own or care about albums and don't go to concerts etc. can be safely ignored; Spotify is fine for them.

> Those who listen passively and do not own or care about albums

I see it very differently. I care about good music. There's an incredible amount of good music out there, and it's rare that an album is full of it. Your definition of "good" may vary, but mine isn't really influenced by the artist. Most albums are mostly not-good-music. I'm picky, and look at unrelated songs independently. This is why I don't really care for albums. I feel no debt to a single artist or a nothing-more-than-release-time-related collection of music, which is what most are.

Some albums I do considered a complete, single, work, but that's relatively rare. Daft Punk - Random Access Memories is a good example, in my opinion.

I don't see what concerts have to do with anything. Those are often related to luck and finances/privilege.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#497

Post by RF_Savage »

tessierashpool wrote: post #259
ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

prior to this, bandcamp was owned by Epic and lord only knows why they bought them or what their bigger plan was. i also have no idea how much they staffed up under epic rule since they went from a small business to being owned by the fortnite money man. Entirely possible it's something like: 1. bandcamp is a sustainable normal small-to-medium business growing healthily 2. Epic has tons of fortnitebux and is feuding…

bandcamp was owned by Epic and lord only knows why they bought them or what their bigger plan was this is incorrect. in addition to whatever lord you are speaking of, I also know. (unless you meant me, but even then, I think others share this knowledge.) Epic bought Bandcamp to use it as a weapon in various lawsuits against Google and Apple over their pricing models. Bandcamp joined a suit against Google over its Pla…

Yep, that's the one. Just a weapon to be used and then thrown away.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#498

Post by nomel »

waveBidder wrote: post #338
nomel wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

there's this neat website/app called bandcamp, you may have heard of it somewhere. it asks you to occasionally buy albums, rather than pay a fixed fee.

> trying to find music that I like to listen to

As mentioned, my problem, as a listener, is discovery, which bandcamp doesn't address.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#499

Post by stana »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #470
iainctduncan wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

As cheap money era seems to be ending, long term quality product/service might be the only viable strategy going forward.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#500

Post by nomel »

JohnFen wrote: post #387
mcsniff wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you re-frame Spotify as a way to discover music, it's not worthless. Feel free to use Spotify to find artists and give them money however you want. Also, nobody is stopping you from spending your time finding new music and giving money as directly as possible to the artist. Spotify can be seen as a way to increase your exposure to new music, and for that it might be worth the $XX/month to many people, the ability…

> If you re-frame Spotify as a way to discover music, it's not worthless. It is to me, though. I don't need another way to discover music. I have that well-covered. And by "buy music", I wasn't referring to a way to pay artists (that would be a followup question if I didn't already know that part). I mean, can I download the music in a high-quality, open-standard, format? I thought Spotify only did streaming, and I a…

> have that well-covered.

Could you share your secrets?

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