Throwaway, but I work at Bandcamp. We're all very frightened and don't know what the future holds. We were told that some, but not all, will get offers from Songtradr and it may be up to a month before we receive an offer. It's pretty depressing.
As many other commenters have pointed out, Bandcamp is a great service. For me, it's really the only place I purchase music because of its commitment to paying artists fairly and offering FLAC downloads of the purchased music.
Again, thank you and good luck!
As an aside, I support unionisation precisely as the counterpoint it is intended to be, and any management actions against unionisation should be treated with suspicion and I generally look at that kind of behaviour as the base reason why unions need to exist in the first place.
(Both sides can be corrupt, but if there's only power on one side, then the corruption is both more likely to occur and increase).
I hope the unionisation thing is totally unrelated to this situation.
I'm international, so I'm not represented by the union, but I support them for exactly the same reasons that you state here.
I don't think it's related to the unionization. I'm sure it didn't help, but Epic also spun off SuperAwesome today.
I feel like Bandcamp 100% fits better with SongTradr than Epic.
1. How are benefits/compensation? Competitive?
2. Are there a lot of international remote employees at SongTradr? Bandcamp has a lot of people around the globe and we'd love to know if SongTradr is likely to make offers internationally or if it'll just be near offices.
3. Do you like working there?
2. Lots of international employees. No exec-level requirements of working from an office, but some teams may have their own rules.
3. It's middle of the pack, but that's mainly because I get stuck doing jobs I hate because I'm the only one with the experience, and we've got a client breathing down our neck. it's the burden of being the Sr Dev, but eventually, I'll have trained my team well enough that I can do a bit of real innovation... until then, I really believe we're enabling artists to make a better living by opening up a market (sync) that has generally been reserved for artists that are already living comfortably.
FWIW, at least some ("one"?) musicians are cautiously optimistic about this:
It's impossible to know what Epic is thinking know, or even when they bought BC, but 6 months sounds like how long it would take to sell Bandcamp off as a retaliation for unionizing.
bandcamp staff unionizing might have been a consideration in deciding to sell the company, but i don't think it's fair to call that "union busting".
In my middle management experience, being profitable and owned by a company that didn't share the business domain was best as they mostly left us alone as long as we were profitable. When they finally got bought by a similar business, that's when they tried (and failed) to merge jobs. I've since left but they've recently been spun out yet again.
I really hope that Bandcamp will survive!
As I see it maybe there is a void which will need to be filled.