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 (for future funding or acquisitions) to have way too much staff (and thus, high a burn rate) instead of running a sensible, profitable business. It is not necessarily a good thing that they have tons of employees - sometimes it's entirely motivated by putting lipstick on a pig in order to look like a runaway growth success thing.
Songtradr is in the music infrastructure business. I think it's quite possible they are cleaning house to make Bandcamp a more viable business that is actually focused on their core business. Doesn't seem impossible to me that Bandcamp was way off base trying to make too much written content when really, it's about selling music.
But I'm spitballing here, anyone know more about whether Bandcamp was bloated?
prior to this, bandcamp was owned by Epic and lord only knows why they bought them or what their bigger plan was. i also have no idea how much they staffed up under epic rule since they went from a small business to being owned by the fortnite money man. Entirely possible it's something like:
1. bandcamp is a sustainable normal small-to-medium business growing healthily
2. Epic has tons of fortnitebux and is feuding with apple so they buy bandcamp as some kind of tangential play should they end up as a big alternative store on iOS. so they could have a music store offering (to compare to itunes? not that apple gives a crap about itunes anymore??) in addition to an app store?
3. the money music stops and everyone races for a seat. bandcamp is left hanging.
4. epic sells bandcamp to whoever just to get it off the books so they can focus on fortnite lootboxes
5. songtradr or whatever their name is tells the union to pound sand and cuts bandcamp down to a core team because they're planning to just gut the product and transition all these indie artists over to whatever platform they were running before. This is a music IP company. I don't think they want to handle B2C purchases or provide streaming music. They just wanted to buy a big pot of artists and IP to add to their collection.
In corporate environment, people really must be fooled by two numbers: head count and budget. This is true for other walks of life, too.
I initiated and lead a platform in Financial Service Industry which lead to massive productivity gains. Through standardized processes we could use an inhouse build No Code editor instead of individual app development. Costs went down from 1.5 Mio to sub 10k USD, time to market from 4 1/2 month for two dev teams to a couple of hours for a non-developer per app.
Reaction: "Dude, you are destroying careers. We get paid and promoted by budget and head count. We artificially inflate budgets and projects so that we get promoted."
I was stunned. We could do so many other things with the free capacity or help build value for the company.
Lesson:
People are sometimes able to comprehend abstract stuff ("Software can be used to automate processes and can scale. It serves 1000+ customers worldwide 24/7. We have 10 people employed."). Mostly decision makers sadly prefer power ("Woooha, your company has 1.000 devs?! How cool, you must feel like superman!")
Lesson still not really comprehended, but somehow ingested.
A founder friend confided in me years ago, "It is MUCH easier to raise more money than it is to fire someone... I just keep raising and hiring and eventually everything will get done"
No surprise that this approach was very much a "Low-Rates Phenomenon"
> I think it is naive to assume that Bandcamp was wise to be employing all these people
It probably was stupid, but stupid isn’t illegal, and companies will hide behind that fact to issue mass layoffs (which can be even stupider when they result in an inoperative team).
The financial argument behind a layoff is today made more irrelevant when the employees are smart and creative enough to be the key to company success. Good employees won’t take stupid, no matter how legal stupid is.
> sometimes it's entirely motivated by putting lipstick on a pig in order to look like a runaway growth success thing
The same can be said for the CEO and Board who created the mess. Except they get a big payoff no matter what, and have much larger leverage over the lives of the employees.
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.
is this because employee growth is easily verifiable? Put another way, don't companies ask for accounting statements etc to figure out if the target company is worth acquiring? (context - I have no idea how one company accquires another, so this is a noob q)
> Background, I work in diligence for software aquisitions.
It shows. I don't see lay-offs from this perspective. Instead, I think about each of the employees impacted by the company's reckless behavior. Did the employees have any say in this matter? No? Then who cares if the job they were there to do was unimportant in the first place? That is absolutely the fault of the company.
Your stance is not effective when treating human beings like human beings and not some `num_workers` configuration in some kubernetes yaml.
I'm really bummed. I love Bandcamp. It's the only place I can buy music FROM THE MUSICIAN with very little overhead, and download a high-quality lossless track. Amazon only lets me buy crap-quality MP3s. Apple is opaque about it, putting either lossy AAC or lossless ALAC in the same M4A containers. >:(
The only good alternative is Qobuz, which is frustrating to use and charges absolutely massive overhead.
But unfortunately it feels like Bandcamp keeps getting screwed over somehow or another. Most people these days want to stream, not to buy and download. :(
Judging by the Bandcamp United's (Union about to form at Bandcamp) feed, it seems they were nearing the completion of their initial steps to ask SongTradr to recognize and negotiate with the union. The "Last Call" post was made just 4 days ago: https://union.place/@bandcampunited/111219165521125342
Wonder if it ever got started or SongTradr tried to nip this whole thing in the bud?
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 pre-soundcloud site, and even soundcloud (with a superior UI) was going broke years ago. I was unaware they had a staff of developers, I envision most of them were on the bench most of the time.
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.
I can't wait until something far better with an artist focus comes along, and no that is not Spotify.
> 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 the value Bandcamp offers and you're criticising them for not being something they never claimed to be.
See, for me I like that Bandcamp is just a store. That I see an artist I like on social media, click their bandcamp link, and if I like their music I buy it. I don't use its recommendation features, and the only social feature I use is the ability to follow an artist and thus get news-bulletins about their work.
Once you get to an artist's page, the UI is simple and clean and Just Works. I can see their releases, buy and download them easily. That's what I want when shopping.
Imho, Bandcamp shouldn't even offer that kind of $20 "promotion subscription" thing you mention. Just sell music, take the cut, and be done with it.
Honestly my only real UI complaint about Bandcamp is that artists often move between labels and collabs and the label runs the bandcamp page so their music is mixed in with all their labelmates. That's where I find it gets very confusing. Like most of Lauren Bousfield's albums are at
and is not linked from her personal page at all. Another album (Palimpsest) is linked from her personal page, but if you click on the artist of that one it takes you to a different label (https://deathbombarc.bandcamp.com/).
So obviously something is horribly wrong with navigation in how it handles labels and the like.
This is an interesting perspective to say the least. I’ve been impressed with the work their developer team has done over the years.
I can’t say I shared your troubles finding new music on there. It’s been the best place for me to discover new artists. The recommendation systems, following artists, and their unique write-ups on artists, scenes, genres are quality.
You’re take on what they ‘should’ be doing seems very misguided. I’m surprised that you think Bandcamp Pro is a hands-off marketing and promotion service. They are absolutely clear about what they offer for $10/month, and no where do they say they’ll promote your music for you.
I’m not sure where you got the idea that the premium service included promotion. Last I looked, the subscription simply unlocked some specific features. If you just paid for it and hoped that meant your band was going to be promoted, you threw your money away, but that hardly seems like bandcamp’s fault.
Bandcamp always struck me as a place for producers to sell to DJ’s since you can get high bitrate MP3’s and lossless files.
A pattern I’ve seen is that artists will put a new release on Bandcamp a week before it’s available on streaming services. This lets them pull in more revenue by selling the album for $10 to enthusiasts before it’s released to the masses.
I'm the opposite. Found Bandcamp UI pretty good, intuitive and no bs, discovered tons of good music through the Discover section on the bottom front page. Also the Bandcamp blogposts are the among the best music article. Soundcloud on the other hand I would only go via directly link. I guess it also relates to the genre you're interested in, my favorite artists probably never post to Soundcloud.
What's wrong with a paid storefront for artists? Considering the rest of the ecommerce ecosystem, 20$ seems fair. Have you considered that 20$ is just the cost of doing business?
Discoverability is a problem yes, but I don't know that it's a solvable one. And if Bandcamp tried seriously to solve it, they would likely have to rely on investment money, and eventually enshittify the platform.
I’m not sure what the experience is with other niche genres of music but I’ve found more black and death metal on Bandcamp in the past month than has ever been recommended to me elsewhere. I get the impression that HN posters who don’t use Bandcamp just see it at some place where a band can make a MySpace profile - but it has a serious network effect going on.
For instance, the label 20 buck spin, has a boat load of artists on there. For metal, their profile page on Bandcamp is worth more than a 100 algorithmic playlists on Spotify.
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 artist pages, stripe integration for payments.
Bandcamp has always felt like it should be someone's lifestyle business, like gumroad, and never seemed like it was trying to be a "business" that needed to add features or obsess over hyper hocky stick growth. If it tanks it's because it should have stayed as a weekend side project lifestyle business and never been bought by someone that wanted to convert it into a money printing machine because it never can be that type of business.
With that said, if they do tank, it can seriously be replaced by someone in a weekend, maybe 2 :)
Qobuz is another option, but I always prefer Bandcamp because Qobuz's UI is pretty bad and it constantly corrupts my session such that I need to clear the site's cookies to do anything.
God damn. Bandcamp is where I get my music wherever possible - they're an amazing platform and product and I like the fact that my purchases are going to support the actual artists instead of vanishing into the Google or Spotify machinery.
I knew it was possible after the Epic sale that they'd get screwed, but this worse than I expected.
This is a naïve question, but why on earth are unions isolated to one company so often in USA? Surely an industry-wide solution would be more effective.
Bandcamp voted to unionize in March, although they are still fighting for recognition, as Epic has refused to recognize it so far (last I checked). I wonder who involved in that was affected by the layoffs.
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.
Has anyone ever tried writing something into their company's sale contract that says 100% of staff must be retained for some duration of time to prevent new overlords from doing exactly this?
Obviously in Bandcamp's case this probably would not have helped, since they had already "sold" themselves to Epic before being offloaded to Songtradr. I'm just trying to think of how one could reasonably, enforceably stop an acquiring company from doing this to the acquired company as soon as the ink is dry on the acquisition.
[+] [-] iainctduncan|2 years ago|reply
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 (for future funding or acquisitions) to have way too much staff (and thus, high a burn rate) instead of running a sensible, profitable business. It is not necessarily a good thing that they have tons of employees - sometimes it's entirely motivated by putting lipstick on a pig in order to look like a runaway growth success thing.
Songtradr is in the music infrastructure business. I think it's quite possible they are cleaning house to make Bandcamp a more viable business that is actually focused on their core business. Doesn't seem impossible to me that Bandcamp was way off base trying to make too much written content when really, it's about selling music.
But I'm spitballing here, anyone know more about whether Bandcamp was bloated?
[+] [-] matthewn|2 years ago|reply
(Source: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bandcamp-layoffs-oakland...)
[+] [-] ye-olde-sysrq|2 years ago|reply
1. bandcamp is a sustainable normal small-to-medium business growing healthily
2. Epic has tons of fortnitebux and is feuding with apple so they buy bandcamp as some kind of tangential play should they end up as a big alternative store on iOS. so they could have a music store offering (to compare to itunes? not that apple gives a crap about itunes anymore??) in addition to an app store?
3. the money music stops and everyone races for a seat. bandcamp is left hanging.
4. epic sells bandcamp to whoever just to get it off the books so they can focus on fortnite lootboxes
5. songtradr or whatever their name is tells the union to pound sand and cuts bandcamp down to a core team because they're planning to just gut the product and transition all these indie artists over to whatever platform they were running before. This is a music IP company. I don't think they want to handle B2C purchases or provide streaming music. They just wanted to buy a big pot of artists and IP to add to their collection.
[+] [-] _the_inflator|2 years ago|reply
In corporate environment, people really must be fooled by two numbers: head count and budget. This is true for other walks of life, too.
I initiated and lead a platform in Financial Service Industry which lead to massive productivity gains. Through standardized processes we could use an inhouse build No Code editor instead of individual app development. Costs went down from 1.5 Mio to sub 10k USD, time to market from 4 1/2 month for two dev teams to a couple of hours for a non-developer per app.
Reaction: "Dude, you are destroying careers. We get paid and promoted by budget and head count. We artificially inflate budgets and projects so that we get promoted."
I was stunned. We could do so many other things with the free capacity or help build value for the company.
Lesson: People are sometimes able to comprehend abstract stuff ("Software can be used to automate processes and can scale. It serves 1000+ customers worldwide 24/7. We have 10 people employed."). Mostly decision makers sadly prefer power ("Woooha, your company has 1.000 devs?! How cool, you must feel like superman!")
Lesson still not really comprehended, but somehow ingested.
[+] [-] NewJazz|2 years ago|reply
But I'm spitballing here, anyone know more about whether Bandcamp was bloated?
Bandcamp was shown to be profitable quite recently. Hard to justify slashing staff in half with that in mind.
[+] [-] bgroat|2 years ago|reply
No surprise that this approach was very much a "Low-Rates Phenomenon"
[+] [-] choppaface|2 years ago|reply
It probably was stupid, but stupid isn’t illegal, and companies will hide behind that fact to issue mass layoffs (which can be even stupider when they result in an inoperative team).
The financial argument behind a layoff is today made more irrelevant when the employees are smart and creative enough to be the key to company success. Good employees won’t take stupid, no matter how legal stupid is.
> sometimes it's entirely motivated by putting lipstick on a pig in order to look like a runaway growth success thing
The same can be said for the CEO and Board who created the mess. Except they get a big payoff no matter what, and have much larger leverage over the lives of the employees.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] DonnyV|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sarma17|2 years ago|reply
is this because employee growth is easily verifiable? Put another way, don't companies ask for accounting statements etc to figure out if the target company is worth acquiring? (context - I have no idea how one company accquires another, so this is a noob q)
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ShamelessC|2 years ago|reply
It shows. I don't see lay-offs from this perspective. Instead, I think about each of the employees impacted by the company's reckless behavior. Did the employees have any say in this matter? No? Then who cares if the job they were there to do was unimportant in the first place? That is absolutely the fault of the company.
Your stance is not effective when treating human beings like human beings and not some `num_workers` configuration in some kubernetes yaml.
[+] [-] Night_Thastus|2 years ago|reply
The only good alternative is Qobuz, which is frustrating to use and charges absolutely massive overhead.
But unfortunately it feels like Bandcamp keeps getting screwed over somehow or another. Most people these days want to stream, not to buy and download. :(
[+] [-] diggan|2 years ago|reply
Wonder if it ever got started or SongTradr tried to nip this whole thing in the bud?
[+] [-] winternett|2 years ago|reply
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 pre-soundcloud site, and even soundcloud (with a superior UI) was going broke years ago. I was unaware they had a staff of developers, I envision most of them were on the bench most of the time.
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.
I can't wait until something far better with an artist focus comes along, and no that is not Spotify.
[+] [-] biorach|2 years ago|reply
> 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 the value Bandcamp offers and you're criticising them for not being something they never claimed to be.
You need to do your own promotion.
[+] [-] Pxtl|2 years ago|reply
Once you get to an artist's page, the UI is simple and clean and Just Works. I can see their releases, buy and download them easily. That's what I want when shopping.
Imho, Bandcamp shouldn't even offer that kind of $20 "promotion subscription" thing you mention. Just sell music, take the cut, and be done with it.
Honestly my only real UI complaint about Bandcamp is that artists often move between labels and collabs and the label runs the bandcamp page so their music is mixed in with all their labelmates. That's where I find it gets very confusing. Like most of Lauren Bousfield's albums are at
https://laurenbousfieldanyev3r.bandcamp.com/
except her latest album which is here:
https://orangemilkrecords.bandcamp.com/album/salesforce
and is not linked from her personal page at all. Another album (Palimpsest) is linked from her personal page, but if you click on the artist of that one it takes you to a different label (https://deathbombarc.bandcamp.com/).
So obviously something is horribly wrong with navigation in how it handles labels and the like.
[+] [-] jcpst|2 years ago|reply
I can’t say I shared your troubles finding new music on there. It’s been the best place for me to discover new artists. The recommendation systems, following artists, and their unique write-ups on artists, scenes, genres are quality.
You’re take on what they ‘should’ be doing seems very misguided. I’m surprised that you think Bandcamp Pro is a hands-off marketing and promotion service. They are absolutely clear about what they offer for $10/month, and no where do they say they’ll promote your music for you.
They have provided an entire guide for _how_ to promote on bandcamp: https://bandcamp.com/guide
[+] [-] some-guy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tao3300|2 years ago|reply
That's what I like about it. It's essentially what MySpace was supposed to be.
[+] [-] hamburglar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nanidin|2 years ago|reply
A pattern I’ve seen is that artists will put a new release on Bandcamp a week before it’s available on streaming services. This lets them pull in more revenue by selling the album for $10 to enthusiasts before it’s released to the masses.
[+] [-] splittingTimes|2 years ago|reply
Not sure why they stopped it some years ago. Real pitty.
[+] [-] toomim|2 years ago|reply
You lost me there.
[+] [-] conradfr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slmjkdbtl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] RockRobotRock|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] te_chris|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amrocha|2 years ago|reply
Discoverability is a problem yes, but I don't know that it's a solvable one. And if Bandcamp tried seriously to solve it, they would likely have to rely on investment money, and eventually enshittify the platform.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jmuguy|2 years ago|reply
For instance, the label 20 buck spin, has a boat load of artists on there. For metal, their profile page on Bandcamp is worth more than a 100 algorithmic playlists on Spotify.
https://20buckspin.bandcamp.com/
I hope Bandcamp can survive this layoff. It is a real resource for music lovers and artists, not a glorified front end for flacs on S3.
[+] [-] wutwutwat|2 years ago|reply
Bandcamp has always felt like it should be someone's lifestyle business, like gumroad, and never seemed like it was trying to be a "business" that needed to add features or obsess over hyper hocky stick growth. If it tanks it's because it should have stayed as a weekend side project lifestyle business and never been bought by someone that wanted to convert it into a money printing machine because it never can be that type of business.
With that said, if they do tank, it can seriously be replaced by someone in a weekend, maybe 2 :)
[+] [-] JohnFen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmerl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] piperswe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chunk_waffle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zambyte|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|2 years ago|reply
https://archive.today/KY8rh
[+] [-] Pxtl|2 years ago|reply
I knew it was possible after the Epic sale that they'd get screwed, but this worse than I expected.
[+] [-] dspearson|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dzhiurgis|2 years ago|reply
0: https://daily.bandcamp.com/scene-report/
[+] [-] moneywoes|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meeb|2 years ago|reply
https://github.com/meeb/bandcampsync
(Disclaimer: author)
[+] [-] chimeracoder|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lowbloodsugar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] micromacrofoot|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|2 years ago|reply
Obviously in Bandcamp's case this probably would not have helped, since they had already "sold" themselves to Epic before being offloaded to Songtradr. I'm just trying to think of how one could reasonably, enforceably stop an acquiring company from doing this to the acquired company as soon as the ink is dry on the acquisition.
[+] [-] cushpush|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kundi|2 years ago|reply
If you're a musician and music lover who enjoys new independent music, we would love to invite you to join our community.
We're also hiring: https://formaviva.com/jobs
PS: I'm one of the community members