About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

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 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.

I would also add that Bandcamp was pretty publicly profitable prior to their sale to Epic. Given that they didn’t significantly grow the staff after the acquisition, they would have had to make huge blunders in a very short period of time they owned it. So at this point we’re talking about laying folks off purely for better looking numbers, not really for sustainability.

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.

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.

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.

They run something equivalent to Spotify at a much smaller scale.

You work for private equity. Private equity is the problem. You work for vampires.

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.)

Whatsapp was <50 people when it got acquired for ~$19bn and they had the ability to turn on $150million in revenue at the drop of a hat.

It's interesting people are talking about bloated software in this thread and their love of lean software. Large teams often lead to bloated software.

On an internet with billions of users online, there's a legit argument that most if not all technology companies are severely bloated.

Salary to ARR is only one metric for bloat. but yeah, absent that, as I said, it's some guess work.

Support for hundreds of thousands of bands and their bank payouts, and millions of customers. (They also sell vinyl, CDs, cassettes, and t-shirts.)

Edit: they reportedly had a good editorial team, but I'm not sure how many people you need for that part.

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.

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.

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

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.

Have you used Bandcamp? It's a way larger feature set than an iOS app for picture sharing.

Instagram was an outlier, and I think you know that.

This is HN. Start a thread about anything and someone will say they could build it in a weekend. Completely off base.

Infra. The "non-functional" requirements are going to be expensive and need a solid team. Scaling, reliablility, availability, dealing with huge amounts of bandwidth and storage, all that crap. I'd guess a dozen infra people minimum.

Epic is private, Tim Sweeney owns >50%, and their only real rival in the game engine space had recently torpedoed themselves which caused a large amount of gamedevs and even some publishers to swear off Unity.

There was no investor pressure.

Except Bandcamp wasn't at risk of shutting down before Epic. If it's being run unsustainably now, that's on Epic.

Self-replying to retract the above. From https://www.404media.co/bandcamps-entire-union-bargaining-te... it seems that Songtradr leadership had explicit knowledge of the members of the union bargaining team, lied about it, and laid every single one of them off. I no longer think it likely that Songtradr is operating in good faith.

What do tech unions even do? Doesn’t seem like they can prevent this at all

Yep, that's the one. Just a weapon to be used and then thrown away.

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.

That can change.

That doesn't sound like a powerful negotiating position, though; it sounds like desperation. Why would you do that intentionally?

Could you give an example of 1 of the perverse incentives that could cause that? It's very interesting.

Agreed but from what I've seen most layoffs were on the content/writer/social side of things.

Sounds to me that the focus is now on being a platform and not an outlet.

I still have no clue what Epic wanted to do with it.

Legally perhaps, but firing people particularly en mass is hard to do right, unless you don't care and you are just prepping for a fire sale.

You can lose people who might be key contributors. You can destroy morale in the rest of the company. Everyone else knows they might be next, so they will leave first chance they get. Finally, it signals to the market you are in trouble (hence why a lot of companies are doing it now: better to be just one more company doing layoffs when everyone else is doing it).

Legally yes.

Morale-wise no.

I am all in on owning things as well. To the point that I'll buy Blu-Rays where I can too, rather than sign up for an extra streaming service.

With music in particular, I definitely see discovery as a problem though -- particularly these days when "radio" isn't really a thing (at least for me). Spotify might be able to fill that gap, but I haven't really tried yet.

I'm also worried that "owning digital things" is going to become harder and harder as time goes on, but I haven't quite been able to put my finger on what the tipping point for that is going to be.

Or just go to another country - when I moved to Singapore most of my hip hop was removed from my library

Ownership is indeed the other reason I don't do streaming. I pay for a track or album, download it, and it's mine.

I do see this capability disappearing in coming years, however; especially with growing use of "AI" tools to, say, craft ever more complicated barriers to avoiding rent-seeking.

This is me as well. Streaming services don't serve my needs at all.

I find algorithmic suggestions pretty much useless, but they're easy to ignore so don't really enter into it.

Sounds like Bandcamp is perfect for you. You can stream full albums for free, then buy and download the odd ones that you really like.

bandcamp is still pretty generous with streaming. I own maybe a third of the music on bandcamp that I listen to.

I tried a couple streaming services a while back, and them rather annoying. I've discovered a lot of good new bands through Bandcamp, just reading about related bands in genres I like. The annoyances of the various streaming services just push me away, and yes, potentially to my own detriment in missing out of artists I might not discover any other way.

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.

Streaming is very different from radio: https://thebaffler.com/downstream/big-mood-machine-pelly When I pay for music I don't want harvesting of my listening habits to be part of the price.

Yes, however, if your goal is to give your money to the people you want to give it to, there isn't a better way.

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.

I never get tired of the classics.

Ditto. Also GPM was a bit buggier and more bloated feature-wise than YTM, but the ability to clean your ID3 tags in the web browser was wonderful.

And now YTM is getting podcasts so everything old is new again... but worse.

Any time I download music from Bandcamp, I drag it into Apple Music on my Mac and it syncs to all of my devices, sitting in my library like any other album.

It’s actually one of the reasons I use Apple Music over Spotify, the process to do this in Spotify is much more convoluted.

While not automatic, YouTube Music can do this. You can basically upload your own music. Create playlists that mix yt songs and songs in your collection. You can upload on one machine, and access the uploaded song from anywhere, so you're basically using their cloud.

You can deploy navidrome, point it at a hard drive full of your music, and then stream from the frontend or using an app like subtracks.

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.

> SongTradr needs demonstrate that Bandcamp wasn't financially viable

That's provably false.

> He notes that, according to its co-founder, Ethan Diamond, Bandcamp has been profitable since 2012.

> In addition, Bandcamp charges its customers (indie artists) just 10-15% commission rates as a retailer – and on Bandcamp Fridays, it charges nothing at all.

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/podcast/is-this-the-r... "Is this the real reason Epic Games acquired Bandcamp?"

https://towardsdatascience.com/why-is-bandcamp-profitable-an... "Why is Bandcamp profitable and Spotify not?"

This is pre Epic acquisition, and they seemed mostly hands of in their approach.

https://old.reddit.com/r/BandCamp/comments/11g0c07/its_the_o... "It’s the one year anniversary of Bandcamp’s acquisition by Epic."

[flagged]

Thanks. Not a lot of sleep this weekend.

Starbucks has lost several cases related to NLRA violations. You can find more information searching "Starbucks NLRA", but here are a couple

https://www.hrdive.com/news/starbucks-how-we-communicate-pol...

https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/nlrb-region-3-...

Around here (near Seattle) they are having to explain why the foam floor mats behind the counter used for anti-fatigue were removed as trip hazards, but only in stores attempting to unionize...

It's a power move to show any store can be shut down, and probably quite an effective method at that.

A union does not need to be recognized for anti-union actions to be illegal. There are a lot of protections in place around the protection of the worker's right to unionize, and if you get anywhere close to infringement you're in for a world of hurt.

If the union / workers attempting to form a union can demonstrate that the company knew about the union, and show that the action adversely affected the ability of the workers to unionize, then they definitely have a pretty strong foundation for a lawsuit.

> Perhaps not, if the union is not yet recognized.

That's incorrect. Most of the rights afforded by the NLRA actually apply regardless of whether or not a union exists; a union is simply a formal structure for exercising those rights.

In this case, firing employees could be considered retaliatory action. Retaliatory action is illegal regardless of whether or not the union has been recognized (in fact, it is illegal to retaliate against employees for supporting a union even if there is not sufficient support for the union to call an election).

Agreed. It’s one of the best music shows out there. Selfishly I hope Andrew Jervis wasn’t laid off but realistically it’s hard to imagine everything continuing as before with 50% of the company gone.

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

I'm excited for this vein of Leftism to end. We're seeing the DSA get chucklefucked due to their 10/7 Attack response, and we're seeing their NIMBY allies get chucklefucked in the legislatures.

Hopefully some new, more productive and positive ideology emerges.

Bandcamp is (was?) to music as Flickr is to photography. It's a portfolio site, that doubles as a means to buy things from that portfolio. It's the thing an artist's social media pages link to to say "here's my body of work for you to browse through." Where browsing through that portfolio — listening to 30-second previews of songs, etc — doesn't require signing up for any service, but is just a regular part of the public web.

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.

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 listen to, and I consider the possibility of even 1 paid milkshake for a musician much more important than some random number of listeners who heard the track on Spotify. I appreciate that you may see things differently, but I think that you're wrong.

Spotify has a catalogue that appeals to people that like pop music. Bandcamp provides an outlet for artists that aren't part of the pop music spectrum. I'm deep into electronic music and Bandcamp is the _only_ place that some artists are even listed, and it's become an amazing space for artists that want to release limited press special edition records - pre-ordered by fans to cover the manufacturing price. Prior to this I acquired a few cool records via Kickstarter, but Bandcamp is preferable.

Furthermore, Spotify are well known for paying artists next to nothing. Bandcamp are well known for letting artists take the majority of the purchase price of their music.

Not to mention, listening to mp3s is for chumps!

Bandcamp is the best there is (for now) if you want to financially support the artists you like. I spend a lot of time in record stores (both physical and digital) but they are mostly extinct now. There's a few I still frequent: Juno, Boomkat, Hardwax among them, but the more the world turns to services like Spotify, the less room there is for real music stores.

It's super annoying how the internet kills everything that was good. Bullshit for the masses over quality service for people that care.

It’s a loss to musicians to have a monopoly like Spotify (who likes to recreate popular songs with their own artists and label) be the gatekeeper to what is good music.

From a service perspective, it’s great. I have the worlds music at my fingertips. From a music perspective it’s horrible. I have one company dictating streaming payments and terms on an entire industry and you’re f&$ked if you don’t play nice. Ask Taylor Swift.

Can I buy music from Spotify? As in, be able to download a non-proprietary, lossless encoding of the music?

If not, Spotify is worthless to me.

on the flip side to this, I don't have Spotify because curating music is a hobby of mine. The research from various sources - forums, FB groups, Discogs, Bandcamp mailing lists, etc. is part of the journey.

> It finds music I like, regardless of musician effort.

This isn't really true...musicians must put forth a ton of effort just to be part of the songs that are recommended to you. Spotify favors and rewards those who promote their music on other platforms, since it scours the web for articles mentioning your name and people posting about you on social media in order to determine how far up in the "rankings" you should be when someone asks for a similar sounding song.

It probably depends on music genre, but Bandcamp hosts a ton of music that's not available anywhere else. Spotify is great for popular music, but a lot of small/niche artists have presence only on Bandcamp, both digital and physical. Pretty much all of my vaporwave/futurefunk/synthwave vinyl records are from Bandcamp.

I'd say you're very much in the minority then. Spotify is notorious for its weak recommendation system.

> It's apparent that you work for them somehow.

Because they understand what Bandcamp is charging for?

The page for Bandcamp Pro lists all the feature you get (and everything that isn't listed there, is stuff you don't get): https://bandcamp.com/pro

Yeah, I got into shopping for weird stuff on Bandcamp when we went remote, started out with postrock and postmetal stuff and then a Twitter thread about the strangest music made by trans women made me a fan of Bousfield.

Hah, it's just the one track "Hazer" that goes full grindcore, the rest of the album is a bit more... hard-mode in a Japanese rhythm game if it was super-distorted hyperpop.

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

Ok, but still, that isn’t something bandcamp claims to do. How can one be upset they didn’t get that?

Well, first of all, it’s transactional. I have no particular affinity for any given service I use. If another service comes along that has enough upside to overcome the momentum of switching, I’ll definitely do it, and I’m sure you would too, and maybe that will annoy the company. That goes the same for the company; if they have a chance to cash out, I’m sure they’d take it. And maybe that will annoy me.

But the bigger point is that you conflate selling to a bigger company with more resources with “f[ing] their users,” which is just naive.

Thing is, we are in a pretty ruthless society governed by sometimes insane amounts of money - and eventually, anyone will sell out given the right price, and no matter the purchase contract, eventually big-corp culture will seep in. See e.g. Atlassian, Apple, Oracle, Microsoft or Facebook who have been on the buyer side, and Minecraft and MySQL for infamous cases of companies that got bought out.

Would like to think i wouldn't sell, but if someone massive company is offering my money, the worry is always they'll build their own later and stomp me anyway.

Bandcamp did have investors, they weren't 100% bootstrapped. Those investors likely had board seats and a significant say in whether to accept Epic's offer.

Not to mention that COVID led to a steep increase in the site's traffic. It's possible that the added operational burden meant that Bandcamp was no longer the chill lifestyle business that it used to be.

I agree with you on not wanting to fuck the users over either. Personally I don't want to do that.

But the reality is, I have other things I need in life too, and those things require money. My dad is working into his 70s, what if I could fund his retirement? What if I could pay for my brothers uni? Or for my grandma's nurse?

When our basic necessities are not secure, we can't always make the ethical choice. Until then, people will keep selling out.

> If you wanted to build something bigger than yourself, work with great people, feel accomplished, then why sell? How is that few mill going to get you those things?

It's possible that the founders felt they had accomplished this, and after spending 15 (?) years running it, were ready to move onto something else. I've sure as hell never stayed at the same job for 15 years. I'd go nuts.

They may have also felt some obligation to early investors, often who are friends and family or early employees, to get them a nice return.

To back this view up there are plenty of artists who openly admit they "break even" when they've sold a 300-batch of records.

The operating costs include buying instruments/software/hardware, using a mastering service and pressing vinyl - all of which are not cheap.

They do it for the love of producing music - and watching their work sell out within _minutes_ of being released... which in turn inspires them to make another record (or ten haha!)

A few mil won't get you those things, but they'll guarantee your basic necessities. For example, my dad is working into his 70s. If I could fund his retirement I would.

And here's the kicker: you can always go build something bigger than yourself after selling. Having fuck you money means you can make the ethical choice next time.

Edit: on your comment about founders regretting their first sale. I'm guessing most founders are also well off, and don't worry as much financially. But even then, regret doesn't mean they made the wrong choice. I regret exercising my Shopify stock while I worked there, but it was still the best decision for me at the time.

> feel accomplished

Believe it or not you can buy that. Though I'm sure there's some corporate backed, non-replicable, behavioral science study that says otherwise.

Yeah they definitely do exist, but it's the exception. That's why everybody knows about valve and epic.

However, if Gabe's family had urgently needed money back in the day, would he have sold? Maybe.

That's what I'm getting at. You need to be in a very stable position to be able to turn down a big offer like that when it comes, and in general in our society we're always one or two emergencies away from being destitute on the streets.

Until we make sure people are taken care of, these companies will keep being the exception.

Well yeah, but almost nobody is in that position and that's the problem. You could always help out the people around you.

Until everyone in our society is taken care of by default, these noble businesses will keep being extremely rare.

Crunchbase says that was a Series A in 2010 with no further rounds, so I don't think that's inconsistent with my original post. They took some outside investment early on but their path looks nothing like the classic VC-funded growth trajectory.

Yeah same. I didn't read the articles often, but the ones I did I usually walked away with at least one new artist I enjoyed.

I'm not a bandcamp user, so maybe this is an obvious question, but if bandcamp were to shutter operations, would the files in your local backup still be usable by you?

Agreed, I despise actually using Qobuz.

Qobuz operates in (and is based out of) the EU.

This 7digital: https://us.7digital.com/