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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

#341

Post by waveBidder »

whizzter wrote: post #226
reactordev wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had high hopes for SoundCloud but in the end, VC’s always win.

(I studied with one of the founders) Soundclouds problem was always that they started out as basically a free service for a particular niche(artist to label contacts), starting to charge(pissing off people who expected free forever) and then moving out of the niche made it so they never really had a footing for something people would pay for. The problem with so many "internet unicorns" from the 2000-2010 era is that…

free money for VC via low interest rates was a terrible strategy for creating innovation that would last.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#342

Post by letitbeirie »

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?

Not saying they won't try, but there are enough label-represented bands on Bandcamp that they would obliterate their back catalog (along with any network effects they're enjoying) overnight.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#343

Post by hipadev23 »

kristopolous wrote: post #316
hipadev23 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A global, international marketplace with about 100,000 sales totalling $3.5 million day. If you can swing serving that from a couple hundred petabytes in your living room then go ahead.

[flagged]

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#344

Post by threeseed »

alexalx666 wrote: post #292
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... )

compare this to instagram before being acquired for $1B

Instagram had no revenue at acquisition.

Headcount always grows disproportionally whenever you start dealing with payments.

Not just directly taking them but all of the associated compliance and legal issues.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#345

Post by notatoad »

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... )

it smells a little bloated

there's certainly operations that are leaner than that. a little down the thread there's people saying they could build bandcamp in a weekend, which is probably fanciful but also not completely off base. just on a pure technology level, bandcamp seems like a 3-4 developer sort of project. so they've got ~110 people running sales and support?

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#346

Post by solardev »

armini wrote: post #320
vosper wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is your business that you plugged different from Bandcamp, apart from being smaller? Sounds like you're both in the same business?

our platform facilitates micro transactions with minimal fees because we take away the bank burden as much as possible. We focus on the creators, as long as they create great content people will reward them. platforms turn to crap when people find the need to sell other things. why should i sit through amazing youtube content only to be sold nordvpn? surely the community can do better with micros transactions.

Kinda like Patreon?

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#347

Post by bee_rider »

colinsane wrote: post #263
golergka wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you could replace Dropbox quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

funny thing: i recently happened into the solution to that age-old question of "how do i transfer some file(s) between two computers in the same room". i now run an anonymous FTP server on my laptop, open to the LAN. prior to this Dropbox _was_ one of the solutions, but recently i've used that FTP server for the job several times with both Linux and Windows users. yet, you jest.

Sometimes I’ll just throw up

    python -m http.server
In a directory as a lazy way to transfer a file (especially to my phone).

It is not encrypted, and I wouldn’t be that surprised if it was also vulnerable in some ways, but it sure is easy (and it is only for lan, and pretty brief).

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#348

Post by tessierashpool »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #267

Until we have more information it seems that the Epic purchase royally screwed a company that by all accounts was operating just fine previously. I really hope someone spills the beans on this whole fiasco.

I hope the same thing, but they have six-month severance packages and NDAs, so it might be a while.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#349

Post by bastawhiz »

hipadev23 wrote: post #278
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... )

[flagged]

Sounds like you can do it better. Why not whip something up this weekend? Seems like an opportune time to compete with Bandcamp.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#350

Post by racked »

amrocha wrote: post #44
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…

Here's a hypothetical scenario: - You're running the successor to Bandcamp - You're making good money, employ a couple staff - Epic comes to you offering millions to buy your business The rational choice is to sell. Would you choose the stress of running a sustainable business over the payout? I know I wouldn't. There's no indication afaik that Bandcamp was in financial trouble before they got acquired. This is inevi…

> The rational choice is to sell.

If you as the owner are already wealthy 'enough', then that is not necessarily the rational choice. It depends how much you care about the future of the business.

In my dreams, if I ran such a noble business, I would hope that I'd have managed to extract enough value from the business to arrange for my own pension by the time others want to acquire it, so I can reject their offers and keep control to safeguard the business's integrity.

On the other hand, we are human. If the acquiring party makes an absolutely life-changing offer, it may be hard to resist. The story of Nullsoft and AOL comes to mind.

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