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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

#501

Post by RockRobotRock »

winternett wrote: post #19

As a musician once on there, I joined, spent a lot of time carefully designing my page and uploading my catalogue, and then I paid $20 a month for their premium service for absolutely no traction on the site beyond external promotion I did. The UI on BandCamp has been vastly outdated for ages now, it was very hard to navigate and find new music by genre. i only go there to buy music if I have a direct link. It's a pr…

A lot of the things you dislike about the platform are things I like about it. No bloat. You buy music and download it.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#502

Post by amatecha »

piperswe wrote: post #199
dylan604 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I should pay attention in case Bandcamp continues to stumble, and take advantage of any fire sales to which that might lead.

Bandcamp doesn't really have any say in pricing, that's all up to the artists/labels.

Yeah, it's actually freakin' awesome sometimes. I got the entire discography of one of my favorite artists for like.. $10 or something? I think I bumped up the price because I felt bad and felt they deserved more haha

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#503

Post by phatskat »

FormerBandmate wrote: post #268
btown wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternate, equally speculative but less cynical take on 4-5, largely advised by Songtradr's announcement here: https://twitter.com/songtradr/status/1709986126117630051?s=2... This may have been a last-minute accelerated deal process where Epic would have all but shuttered Bandcamp if a buyer couldn't be found, before they needed to announce massive layoffs to assuage investors. Songtradr is given an opportunity to se…

What do tech unions even do? Doesn’t seem like they can prevent this at all

They would have to do what any union does - leverage worker power. If the majority of Bandcamp engineers agreed to halt work until x demands are met, it would drive Bandcamp as a service into the ground. Tech workers also hold the keys to everything - they could take the site down, lock up the music, etc.

They maybe can’t prevent it, but they could leverage BC/Epic/whomever into providing some kind of decent severance for those left out in the cold. In theory.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#504

Post by amatecha »

drcongo wrote: post #99
constantly wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, first of all, it’s transactional. I have no particular affinity for any given service I use. If another service comes along that has enough upside to overcome the momentum of switching, I’ll definitely do it, and I’m sure you would too, and maybe that will annoy the company. That goes the same for the company; if they have a chance to cash out, I’m sure they’d take it. And maybe that will annoy me. But the bigg…

I'm a Bandcamp user, the sale to Epic fucked me over.

Same. The best online music service since Napster got screwed and it's never coming back. The writing is on the wall and it's clear that the "enshittification" officially begins.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#505

Post by amatecha »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #323
wutwutwat wrote: post #25

Bandcamp is an odd site. It's existed for a very long time and is simple (or was when I last used it a couple years ago) in terms of application requirements. Basically what I'm saying is it feels very much like a rails app you could build in a weekend. Direct upload mastered files to s3 from the artists, activejob to convert to various formats and throw back to s3 via activestorage, subdomain model scoping for artis…

With that said, if they do tank, it can seriously be replaced by someone in a weekend, maybe 2 :) That's even more true for Twitter, and look what's happened... nothing.

Well, I mean.. Mastodon? Nearly 2 million monthly active users across some 10,000 servers. https://joinmastodon.org/servers

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#506

Post by shiroiuma »

watwut wrote: post #494
shiroiuma wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

Inheritance assumes that the founder's kids actually want to run their parent's company. Many times, they don't, so they sell. Running a company is a pain in the ass, so it's understandable many people don't want to be bothered.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#508

Post by lotsofpulp »

tacocataco wrote: post #492
shiroiuma wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Sounds like the perfect recipe for corruption.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#510

Post by WJW »

tacocataco wrote: post #492
shiroiuma wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

And if the loan doesn't get paid off? That city/state is now in a huge hole, having spent money that could've been used to build schools and maintain roads on buying companies off their retiring owners.

In any case I don't see why you would need the detour via local government? A bank could lend the money to the group of employees just fine.

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