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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

#541

Post by shit_game »

nluken wrote: post #453
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…

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…

> 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.

To provide an opinion from a user of the platform with "no skin in the game" regarding non-technical aspects of the platform, the social presence of Bandcamp was a significant portion of its appeal to me. I did not (and generally do not on other platforms) regularly seek out new media, and instead tend to rely on on various social media feeds and suggestion algorithms to help expose me to new music. I used to follow Bandcamp on multiple platforms until their acquisition by Epic, when I stopped following them for ideological reasons. The headlines/titles/posts that Bandcamp produced up until that point were far more alluring and generally attractive than any other music platform that I also followed, and their articles were generally of a significantly higher quality than others as well, with a large focus on the artistry present.

I discovered several artists through this form of interaction that I otherwise wouldn't have, and haven't since I began avoiding Bandcamp after their acquisition. I can't imagine that layoffs are targeting purely technical staff (as technical staff are the backbone of the observable functionality of the business), and I fear that the strategy taken by Songtradr will result in a tremendous detriment to the marketability and external usability of the platform. This cost-cutting measure seems to signify either a terribly-fated problem regarding changes to the company, or yet another act of private capital tearing down its competition. Given that Songtradr is in the market of licensing music, I am strongly influenced to believe the latter; using a buyout to cripple _the_ commercially-successful indie music platform (which serves as a competitive and independent means of releasing and licensing and distributing music) seems like a logical way to further capture a part of a market that has historically been dominated by media giants that use legal precedence to dominate.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#542

Post by hhsectech »

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…

"Hire a top drawer test automation engineer to lead the company in how to run QA properly - this should be a senior developer"

Trouble is, they are few and far between and PE doesnt know how to find them...they only understand money they dont understand talent. Furthermore, when they do stumble upon talent they dont know how to leave it alone and won't trust it.

PE mistakenly tends to think that they are there for more than just what they are...money.

They need to understand that they are just people with money. The same way I understand that I am just a techie that produces things.

I bought a loaf of bread today, but that doesnt make me a baker or an expert in baking or running a bakery.

Same applies to PE. Just because they buy businesses and invest in them, doesnt make them experts in whatever they buy.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#543

Post by Applejinx »

vintermann wrote: post #518
jmye wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m unaware of anything on Bandcamp that is remotely as useful to me as the auto-built playlists and artist/song radio tools in Spotify. That there’s “a lot” of music on either platform is meaningless if the tools to find things I’d like don’t work for me. I get the compensation model sucks for artists. I try to buy things from bands I like. But ultimately, if artists don’t like the Spotify model, they should pull th…

I think the auto-built playlists are bad. Not only because they slip in something jarring, but even the "This is..." playlists can't be trusted. They often mix artists with the same name who have nothing to do with each other. No, I think it's for active discovery Spotify is good. I have never enjoyed everything on the Discover weekly playlist, quite often it contains stuff that makes me ask "why did you even think I…

And yet you're listening to Spotify, still, instead of 'albums you bought'.

This is really the point. It's not new: radio was the previous way to have music discovery for 'free', or at least unmetered, with its own costs and issues.

If Spotify made no pretense that it even attempted to pay rights holders anything it'd probably fit its role even better, but it actively tries to supplant the whole concept of having to buy or own albums or music at all. It's designed to be what you have INSTEAD of buying music. When it hits, you don't need to buy music.

The music MAKERS might need you to buy their music, but Spotify is for helping you ignore that.

Heh. How about an ad-supported Spotify, except literally all the ads are for bands and live gigs and music? Bring payola to Spotify. You never pay for it, but you get radio levels of interstitials and they are all from music producers trying to sell their album or single, all for literal music. Albums used to get late-night TV ads and label promotion…

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#544

Post by watwut »

shiroiuma wrote: post #506
watwut wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they sell it, it was still inherited. But I literally seen handover to younger family member to happen.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#545

Post by vintermann »

Applejinx wrote: post #543
vintermann wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the auto-built playlists are bad. Not only because they slip in something jarring, but even the "This is..." playlists can't be trusted. They often mix artists with the same name who have nothing to do with each other. No, I think it's for active discovery Spotify is good. I have never enjoyed everything on the Discover weekly playlist, quite often it contains stuff that makes me ask "why did you even think I…

And yet you're listening to Spotify, still, instead of 'albums you bought'. This is really the point. It's not new: radio was the previous way to have music discovery for 'free', or at least unmetered, with its own costs and issues. If Spotify made no pretense that it even attempted to pay rights holders anything it'd probably fit its role even better, but it actively tries to supplant the whole concept of having to…

"And yet"? Did you respond to the wrong post?

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#546

Post by simpaticoder »

jemmyw wrote: post #531
simpaticoder wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah the no true Scotsman argument. I have favorite bands and genres, I support local bands when I find them, I go to concerts when I'm able, though I don't live in an ideal location for it. I play music and I try to get together with others to play. And I use Spotify. I'm not interested in owning albums, you can stream an album or individual songs. I spent years buying music, ripping the CDs, organizing files, etc. I'…

> I don't really get why it matters.

Support, experience, control. Physical media supports the artist. When you play a physical album you experience the whole album. When you own an album you control it and it cannot be taken away, edited or lost.

Streaming doesn't support the artist. Streaming obliterates coherence of albums. When you stream music you do not control it and it can be taken away, edited or lost without your knowledge or consent.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#547

Post by efxhoy »

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…

> Bandcamp has always felt like it should be someone's lifestyle business

Me too. Layoffs are terrible for the people involved but I honestly don’t see why bandcamp would need more than a handful of employees. The more people you have to pay the more money you have to extract from your customers and the whole point of bandcamp was to be a very slim layer between artists and customers.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#548

Post by thirdsun »

hondo77 wrote: post #215
shmerl wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple just can't get over their NIH obsession and support FLAC like a normal store.

I have my music download stores set to give me ALAC so that's a normal store for me. :-)

To be fair it really doesn't matter since it's quite easy to convert between lossless files.

I prefer ALAC too since I use iOS devices. However let's not pretend that Apple supporting FLAC wouldn't make things easier.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#550

Post by heleninboodler »

hipadev23 wrote: post #306
tracerbulletx wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think it's a good thing for companies to run at maximum efficiency? Have some slack, spread the knowledge around, let people go on vacation, have a bench, have replacements. Have a world that's more than capital owners and slaves.

It's a SaaS. That's a 10 person team at maximum efficiency. They could be a lifestyle business with 30. They've still got 50% more headcount to reduce.

> It's a SaaS. That's a 10 person team at maximum efficiency.

This kind of sounds like you think every SaaS business has the same staffing requirements. That's a very strange claim.

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