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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

#471

Post by cmckn »

ekianjo wrote: post #462
ipaddr wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accounting, human resources, sales (different than marketing), managers, security, operations, analysts, C-Suit, customer service, etc not including technical teams developers, sprint masters, qa, analysts, data warehousing, networking, support, devops, thought leaders.

You dont have all this in most small sized companies. Silos exist only when you grow big.

I’ve never seen these kind of roles even in huge companies. “Sprint master” as a job description? Can’t be serious.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#472

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jmye wrote: post #351
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is more music on Bandcamp than you could listen to in a lifetime. More comes out in a week than you could (probably) listen to in a week. So when you sayd "finding new music to listen to", there's a hidden implication in there: you want to find new music that is on Spotify (which in turn implies things like major labels, artists seeking or expecting breakout etc. Bandcamp is an amazing resource for discovering…

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…

> but I’m going to continue to use a platform that gives me access to everything I’d ever want to hear for like, $10/mo.

I'm going to continue to use a platform that can only cost as little as it does because the people who create the art that motivates the entire existence of the platform get paid essentially nothing

well, uh, bravo, I guess.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#473

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

derefr wrote: post #383
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not 30 second previews of songs, in general: the whole song, often many times over. Plus multiple download formats, including losslessly compressed formats such as FLAC. Plus the best return to the musician of any similar platform.

I'm talking about what you get without having to sign in. Even with free albums, IIRC you can't fully preview the song without "buying" it, which means signing in first. The signed-in experience is mostly akin to the signed-in experience of the iTunes Store. It's what you get when not signed in that's unique.

That's incorrect. Bandcamp does not require sign-in for full preview, and you do not need to buy it either.

There are decisions that can be made by some artists, although I don't recall being offered "full preview requires signin" when I put my own album on BC.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#475

Post by simpaticoder »

jemmyw wrote: post #451
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…

I think you've identified the major problem for musicians: there's so much music available today that the value of writing more has crashed. The value to listeners is now in the delivery infrastructure and recommendations.

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.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#476

Post by iainctduncan »

iainctduncan wrote: post #400
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... )

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 they will get 20% year over year growth for about five years. While the bad rep of PE certainly came from somewhere, in my expereince over the last five years of working in the field, I would way rather be at a profitable, sensible, PE owned company than a VC funded "disruptor" gunning for the big IPO or google acquisition. Our world is positively normal compared to the FAANG scene. We see people who have been at at the companies for 10 to 15 years all the time.

Seriously, I feel like a broken record when I say "Hire a top drawer test automation engineer to lead the company in how to run QA properly - this should be a senior developer" etc.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#477

Post by shiroiuma »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #470
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…

> 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 existing company that's profitable? Someone who's "profit-hungry" usually. If the company is just a passion project, no one buys it and it just goes under when the owner gets tired of it.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#478

Post by slmjkdbtl »

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'm the opposite. Found Bandcamp UI pretty good, intuitive and no bs, discovered tons of good music through the Discover section on the bottom front page. Also the Bandcamp blogposts are the among the best music article. Soundcloud on the other hand I would only go via directly link. I guess it also relates to the genre you're interested in, my favorite artists probably never post to Soundcloud.

Re: About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

#480

Post by nerdponx »

fencepost wrote: post #399
sitharus wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On point 5, bandcamp doesn’t own any rights to the music on the site. The artist agreement is limited to the service of selling music, if that changes the artists can revoke their agreement.

Pretty sure there's value in owning a platform where small independent ("undiscovered") artists release their work and where listeners go to find that work. In particular, it seems likely that having the metrics and historical data could give SongTradr insight into which artists seem likely to catch on, etc.

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