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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

#561

Post by mst »

iainctduncan wrote: post #414
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…

Of course if they are doing really well, than their infrastructure/scaling problem could be the big issue (and thus the big expense), and it could be at the point where improving those margins is worth throwing developers at it. I have also seen some eye watering monthly AWS bills where it makes total sense to hire a bunch of devs to bring those down by even a few percent.

This is the point where I wonder if partnering with quinnypig's crew might not make sense in terms of effectively serving those clients.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#562

Post by jjulius »

crtasm wrote: post #557
jjulius wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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,…

It's the same when not logged in, the playcount is stored in cookies yes.

Thanks! I'm usually logged in on all devices so it's been a while since I've tested it logged out.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#563

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

vintermann wrote: post #515
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuck Spotify. They've played a major role in drastically reducing any chance of significant revenue flowing to musicians, in complete contrast to Bandcamp. People hearing your music is nice and all (I like it when people hear my stuff on BC), but it is orthogonal to the revenue that used to be associated with making recorded music available. There's far, far more music out there than anyone will ever be able to liste…

You know what Glenn Jones (American guitarist), Talisk (Scottish folk), Tonbruket (Swedish jazz), Daniel Herskedal (Norwegian jazz, tuba), The Books (New York, sound collage), Yom (French klezmer clarinetist), Kongero (Swedish folk a cappella), and Naragonia (Belgian accordion folk) have in common? That 1. I supported them on Bandcamp 2. I would never have found them if it wasn't for Spotify's discover weekly. I coul…

The problem with this angle is that Bandcamp also has discovery features through which you may have found a different (or maybe an overlapping) 8 artists too. There's a good chance they would not be the same, and there's a argument that it might feel more difficult (Spotify appears to work VERY hard at getting better at prediction, Bandcamp is more like human curation, which is to say less reliable but also occasionally more serendipitous).

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#564

Post by nerdponx »

heleninboodler wrote: post #216
toomim wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's a good thing. "Open this in the app" links are the worst advertising scum on the web.

Generally I'd agree with you, but for certain apps, it would be nice to be given the option . I never want to be forced to use the app, but sometimes when looking at a bandcamp page and checking out the music, I'd like to switch over to listening in the app, since I don't have to keep the browser window on top for it to continue playing. The only way to do that is to go use the (bad) search feature in the app to find…

Precisely. I specifically want to use the Bandcamp app, but there's literally no way to switch from web to app. There's no way to put a URL into the app, and the search is so incredibly bad that it's almost impossible to find the thing I'm already listening to, even when I'm already logged in in both places.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#565

Post by MichaelZuo »

hhsectech wrote: post #542
iainctduncan wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

Why can't a PE firm hire an actual super-genius, who can understand things with a fraction of the usual effort?

Sizable firms can easily afford a seven or eight figure compensation package for someone really really competent.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#566

Post by iainctduncan »

disposition2 wrote: post #533
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…

> 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. Just to add a conflicting opinion, I love the articles and often use the…

I'm sure you're right and some do find bandcamp through them. The really hard part is quantifying that though. Does it generate enough business for six writers? If it does, awesome, and I'm totally wrong.

My guess is the big content initiative was someone's brain child, and once companies get past a certain size, it's very hard to pull the plug on a leader's baby. Until the company changes hand and the next set of leaders want to eat the previous young and put their own babies in there.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#567

Post by DonnyV »

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…

I think your right about them focusing on the wrong thing. Content writing instead of sales. There music discovery is horrible and they don't push any of their artists. I mean they only make money when their artist do. You would think that they would promote them better or have a Spotify like interface to push they artist music.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#568

Post by MichaelZuo »

jeremyjh wrote: post #260
lotsofpulp wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is hard from the outside to distinguish between Amazon style "we are investing all our profits back into R&D so we can take over the world" and "We are bloating our team to grow at all costs and don't know what levers to pull" Considering Amazon was building physical warehouses, buying land, literally delivering to people, executing deployment of AWS which Netflix was famously using, all while being a publicly l…

It really doesn't sound easy to me to tell this from the outside. What if the R&D investments are all garbage? It is hard to scale an engineering org effectively, it can take off and start building some microservice fortress that never yields any business value if it has the wrong leadership.

There are third party appraisals for the value of physical things, and even quite a bit of software stuff nowdays.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#569

Post by pier25 »

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.

Anyone can get on Spotify. See Distrokid for example.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#570

Post by NoGravitas »

stana wrote: post #499
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…

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

Inshallah.
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