About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off • Hacker News Board

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#581

Post by 60secs » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 3:54 PM UTC

matthewn wrote: post #264

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…

Bandcamp had 118 employees total. That doesn't smell bloated to me. (Source: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bandcamp-layoffs-oakland... )

Bandcamp was profitable. Clearly songtradr thinks they can be more profitable. Assuming average comp of $100k x 60 employees x 1.3 for taxes and additional expenses thats about $7.8MM revenue.

Songtradr just did a series D in 2021 for $50MM and recently acquired 7Digital for $23.4MM. I couldn't find a statement on how much it cost to acquire bandcamp, but it seems this might be motivated by Songtradr being cash poor and not wanting to dilute further.

"But within this discrepancy lies a paradox: Bandcamp, as comparatively threadbare as it may seem, with about $20 million in net revenue in 2022, is almost certainly profitable—based on the fact that the company has stayed lean and taken on no new funding since 2010"

https://www.fastcompany.com/90951664/bandcamp-spotify-vinyl-...

Songtradr - 45MM revenue / 157 employees = $287k/employee Bandcamp - 30MM revenue / 118 employees = $254k/employee

https://www.zippia.com/songtradr-careers-1401192/revenue/ https://growjo.com/company/Bandcamp

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#582

Post by winternett » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 3:54 PM UTC

hondo77 wrote: post #214

winternett wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Junodownload is where I buy music most. They have a wide variety of options and fair pricing. It's much easier to find and browse music there. Our link: https://www.junodownload.com/labels/Ruff+And+Tuff+Recordings...

Too bad their prices for lossless downloads for the quick searches I just did are outrageous. Don't even need to get into the very limited catalog.

I really haven't found any problems in collecting 320k Mp3s as a producer myself.

I think if most people knew the real way most modern music is produced and mastered now (on laptops), and how a lot of masters and music catalogues behind the scenes are literally re-encoded from mp3 backups, they'd see that lossless music is not an exact science.

Flac is also not universally supported by playback devices, and can become unsupported at any time faster than Mp3, so using more universal formats is not necessarily a bad thing.

That being said, I use HD lossless WAV copies for all of our own masters.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#583

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 3:55 PM UTC

x0x0 wrote: post #176

ngcazz wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be ok to not be exceedingly profitable. Bandcamp produced loads of amazing valuable content. But greedy maniacs will always hate this. I am reminded of the Craigslist leadership who was mad insulted for the conscious decision to impose an upper bound to their growth which is a refreshingly moral thing to do under capitalism

If the median wage you can pay is capped at maybe $70k-ish, it's delusional to call someone a "greedy maniac".

median ... capped ... does not compute.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#584

Post by winternett » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 4:04 PM UTC

biorach wrote: post #42

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…

> i only go there to buy music if I have a direct link. > Bandcamp doesn't even allow YouTube video embedding for music videos, which is a huge mistake alone. > Music platforms should be heavily promoting any independent artist that pays them a monthly fee... They seem to think that monthly subscription money form hard working artists is simply for extra file storage above free accounts. You haven't really understood…

I know a lot of musicians that use it. I have been making music for over 20 years. What musicians want from sites like this is to be able to offload their marketing so that they can focus on making music, not to have boilerplate functional features (like bulk file uploads) for a fee.

Sites and apps now avoid giving any real promotional value to users because they can later sell it to them incrementally. It's a tactic to keep artists primarily promoting the platform in addition to promoting their work on the platform. Very little value overall, as now there are tons of competing music and social platforms available, but all of them offer the same desperately weak promotional value to musicians.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#585

Post by srg0 » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 4:08 PM UTC

Snild wrote: post #487

freeone3000 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even without a cut, there are several virtual distribution services like DistroKid and TuneCore which for a flat fee will take care of submitting whatever WAV one created to all streaming platforms. Getting it noticed is a whole other story.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#586

Post by iainctduncan » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 4:09 PM UTC

60secs wrote: post #581

matthewn wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bandcamp had 118 employees total. That doesn't smell bloated to me. (Source: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bandcamp-layoffs-oakland... )

Bandcamp was profitable. Clearly songtradr thinks they can be more profitable. Assuming average comp of $100k x 60 employees x 1.3 for taxes and additional expenses thats about $7.8MM revenue. Songtradr just did a series D in 2021 for $50MM and recently acquired 7Digital for $23.4MM. I couldn't find a statement on how much it cost to acquire bandcamp, but it seems this might be motivated by Songtradr being cash poor…

Interesting, thanks for posting. So what could also be going on is "synergies" as they call them. It is quite possible that Songtradr has staff/functions that they think they can share across the acquisition. This happens a lot when a portco (what Songtradr is to whoever owns them) buys an adjacent company.

Of course it's also possible that that it's specific places (i.e. the content) that are being gutted as they aren't seen to be worthwhile.

The things is that once a company sells, it keeps the name, but can instantly become a different company as far as culture goes. If we want to complain about bandcamp being crappy to its people, the finger should be pointing at the owners (whatever round it was) who a) made the hires and b) made the decision to sell. You are throwing your employees to the wolves when you do that. Once you've sold, the decisions are now ultimately made by a new entity with new priorities (for better or for worse).

This is one of the reasons I advise any younger devs I talk to to understand their employer's ultimate game plan. If the employer is hoping for an exit in the period during which you plan to work for them, you should be under no illusions that your job is safe or will stay the same, and you should be getting compensated accordingly. This is the cost of working in the gravy train - we get the high salaries, but we also get the uncertainty that comes with working in a business where exits are so frequent. The two are connected. (And I have been on the employee side during an acquisition twice now, so I've been there.)

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#587

Post by JohnFen » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 4:11 PM UTC

vonjuice wrote: post #420

avitous wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too loved Bandcamp for its sane approach to acquiring new music; unlike "most people" I refuse to use the streaming-only services, and insist upon buying albums and listening to exactly those selections I choose (and I prefer to listen to albums in their entirety, even today). Perhaps I'm just old and set in my ways, but choices made by others, especially algorithmically generated "options maximizing my engagement"…

Those people don't listen to music, they consume background sound. I don't care if it sounds snob, that's how most people treat music.

This is an interesting point, actually. I rarely play music in the background when I'm doing other things -- but I listen to a lot of music. When I do, I put an album on and listen to it with my full attention. In other words, I listen to music like other people watch movies.

It was only in the last few years that I learned that I was unusual in this.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#588

Post by PhasmaFelis » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 4:12 PM UTC

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…

> You can't expect most company owners to want to continue running that company for decades on end

That's not actually weird, though. The idea that everyone should be expected to change jobs every few years is very recent.

> Who's going to buy an existing company that's profitable? Someone who's "profit-hungry" usually.

I didn't think this needed specifying, but there's a large difference between the goals "Create a great, enduring service and make a profit doing it" and "generate as much short-term profit as possible regardless of long-term consequences."

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#589

Post by PhasmaFelis » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 4:15 PM UTC

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.

There's a middle ground between giving a company to your kids and selling it to someone who you know will suck it dry for short-term gains. You can also give (or sell) it to someone that you know and trust to keep it sustainable.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#590

Post by JohnFen » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 4:16 PM UTC

winternett wrote: post #582

hondo77 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad their prices for lossless downloads for the quick searches I just did are outrageous. Don't even need to get into the very limited catalog.

I really haven't found any problems in collecting 320k Mp3s as a producer myself. I think if most people knew the real way most modern music is produced and mastered now (on laptops), and how a lot of masters and music catalogues behind the scenes are literally re-encoded from mp3 backups, they'd see that lossless music is not an exact science. Flac is also not universally supported by playback devices, and can becom…

Regardless of how good high bitrate MP3s can technically be, my experience with MP3s has been poor. I can't remember the last time I got one that was of good enough sound quality that it didn't annoy me to listen to it.

That's why I go with lossless encodings. They aren't a guarantee of good sound quality, but the odds of them being so are much, much higher.

Personally, I don't actually care about whether or not FLAC is widely supported across devices. My media center will do on-the-fly conversions and lets me stream to anything, and if I need a different format for some reason, I can just convert from the FLAC to whatever I need.