About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
theverge.com
theverge.com
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?
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.
Considering Amazon was building physical warehouses, buying land, literally delivering to people, executing deployment of AWS which Netflix was famously using, all while being a publicly listed company with audited public financials I think Amazon’s style is easy to distinguish from the outside.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/profit...
You also know from using Amazon that they were near flawlessly executing 2 day shipping across the US with prices competitive with Walmart and other successful retailers.
They also had a pricing advantage against incumbents due to not having to collect sales tax in all states until 2016.
It’s mostly the verifiably not losing money part though so you knew they weren’t overextending, and they were delivering what people wanted.
I have literally done diligences where part of our role was to weigh in on how much could be slashed, which is not very pleasant, but like I said, when the growth was dumb in the first place it can be the right call.
You would think that massive dilution for no gain would be a bad idea, but there are usually a lot of perverse incentives at play
Peloton is an example of a company that did a huge unnecessary fundraise before IPO. I'm sure it makes a bunch of numbers and ratios look better on paper. Psychologically, I think it also helps companies lock in evaluation closer to their IPO Target for when people look back at the history of the company.
It's pretty similar too the idea of inflating employee head count. You can say "we made $10 million with only 10 employees last year. Wait until you see how much money you're going to make now that we have a hundred employees"
You might need to sell, which may change the calculation.
You can see why companies might have been incentivized back then to hire anything with a pulse that claimed to be an engineer.
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.
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.
What's an artist who depends on the platform to do?
Labels can only write up contracts giving them rights because they pay for studio time (given them a financial buy-in to the creation of the music) and pay advances against royalties. Not so for indie distributors. I don't know if there are specific applicable laws, but it's absurd enough that everyone would immediately drop Bandcamp.
Music royalty rates, for physical records, radio and internet streaming, are also determined by a panel of judges: the United States Copyright Royalty Board.
I guess that only works for Darth Vader.
A small team can quickly copy how it works and get all the artists to move platform if they were to shoot themself in the head. Right now this doesn't happen because Bandcamp functions and exists and has a reputation for musicians.
Lose that, all the artists start looking for a new home and someone will make an alternative quickly.
This may have been a last-minute accelerated deal process where Epic would have all but shuttered Bandcamp if a buyer couldn't be found, before they needed to announce massive layoffs to assuage investors. Songtradr is given an opportunity to see the deal, wants to ensure Bandcamp's survival in its current form (because its demise would hurt the entire ecosystem Songtradr depends on).
But Songtradr isn't given time to put together a transition plan or identify the exact legal path to deal with the union (especially given that they're in an entirely different country with different labor laws!) and not expose themselves to liability. So they announce conditional openness to the acquisition (per the link above, the transaction hasn't closed yet), and this at minimum gives Bandcamp a stay of execution while they identify next steps.
Now, they've identified at least one next step - how much of the current Bandcamp costs they can carry during the transition - and that's 50% of current staff. A tough call to make, but if the alternative was shuttering the service, a very justifiable one.
They maybe can’t prevent it, but they could leverage BC/Epic/whomever into providing some kind of decent severance for those left out in the cold. In theory.
Their entire minimum revenue guarantee scheme to lure over indies and publishers is apparently extremely expensive for Epic and the store has yet to turn a profit on the whole. Before, they could run it off of Fortnite profits alone. That said, Sweeney has admitted that well is basically running dry and it's why they've been doing layoffs and the like everywhere.
If a company is in trouble, the first thing on the line are the subsidiaries and Bandcamp is a questionable acquisition on the Epic rep sheet, being a music store for a company whose main business is making videogames and selling a gaming engine to people. That means it either goes under or is sold off because it's seen as an irrelevant "aside" subsidiary.
There was no investor pressure.
this is incorrect. in addition to whatever lord you are speaking of, I also know. (unless you meant me, but even then, I think others share this knowledge.)
Epic bought Bandcamp to use it as a weapon in various lawsuits against Google and Apple over their pricing models. Bandcamp joined a suit against Google over its Play Store pricing in particular.
it didn't go anywhere, because Bandcamp already qualified for media app pricing, which rendered its role in the suit meaningless. but that was why Epic bought Bandcamp.
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.
(Source: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bandcamp-layoffs-oakland...)
Bandcamp has been one of the most functional and user-centered designs on the web for a long time now. They asked for far less commission on sales, and they provided options for downloading music in FLAC and even WAV formats, and were well ahead of the curve with “pay what you can” pricing. I have been a musician all of my life. I used Bandcamp exclusively to distribute my music online, and every musician I have ever known prefers it over every other option—by wide margins. Part of what we liked was how little it engaged in feature-creep and bloat.
Headcount always grows disproportionally whenever you start dealing with payments.
Not just directly taking them but all of the associated compliance and legal issues.
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?
I wouldn’t call it “one person and a weekend” simple, but the site has been around since 2007. A dozen people could have built it fairly comfortably from a basic site at the start to the scaled up version of today. 118 people just sounds like “hiring for the sake of hiring” to me.
I have no idea where they are in that scale of course.
At a large enough scale you will still need a lot of people dealing with infra. AWS is not magic
> 118 people just sounds like “hiring for the sake of hiring” to me.
You'll need 20+ people just to deal with copyright issues on a daily basis.
It's also most importantly not a single trusted entity that people can trust with their payments like Bandcamp is.
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.
Now maybe their business model was flawed (I heard it was profitable, but perhaps not profitable enough). But otherwise 118 people for a global brand-recognized business is pretty lean already: I have worked for medium sized businesses around the same headcount you have never heard of, which don't even operate outside their home country.
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 size infra team. Then standard business, product, marketing stuff. I just can't see that warranting more than 50 people unless it's raking it in. Sounds like they could be wasting money on marketing initiatives that may or may not be worth anything at all. Six full time writers seems pretty out there given the questionable ROI of those articles.
Obviously, take this with a huge a grain of salt as this is a guess based on being a frequent user of the app, and having done about 60 diligences and been a part of another 30 or 40 in review capacity. But it seems significantly oversized on what I normally see looking at business that have to be run sustainably. For whatever that's worth!
EDIT: someone had a good point that bandcamp takes international payments, which is complex. So I would revise my first WAG up based on that for sure. Thinking further I would probably guess 50-60 people - which is about what I guess it is after the layoffs. Still a total WAG, but slightly better informed...
We often look at private companies going from initial bootstrap to their first exit, and I'm telling you, those are a whole different ball of wax. They manage to do a shit ton with not very many people.
That being said, 118 still sounds pretty lean for the scale they are operating at.
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.
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.
So I use bandcamp all the time, I have purchased tons of music on it, and the articles have not made any difference to me as a user at all. The only thing I care about is the band I'm purchasing from! I use bandcamp for three reasons: lossless audio, no DRM, fair payments to the band. None of those are at all relevant to their article efforts.
As for most people abhoring PE, believe me, I am under no illusions about our clients. But most software company exits are now PE deals (something like over 75%), so while people might like to make public noises about hating PE, they sure like to sell their companies to them.
> I have purchased tons of music on it, and the articles have not made any difference to me as a user at all
n=1, but that’s true of my perspective as well so perhaps it’s a wash. I do think the editorial staff were more important to some genres than others.
> they sure like to sell their companies to them
I might suggest that this is a case where upper management’s desires directly conflict with the people making the noise (staff and users)
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 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.
If the the loan gets paid off, boom... co-op equally owned by the workers.
In any case I don't see why you would need the detour via local government? A bank could lend the money to the group of employees just fine.
It exists, just not in SV
And why do people assume that the kids are going to run it well or the same way the founder did? If anything, it seems like the kids of highly successful people are usually spoiled brats, and nothing like their parents. Did Bill Gates' kids create any successful software companies?
The second paragraph wasn't related to your response, it was related to prior posts by others and just an add-on for the discussion at large (in case anyone's even still reading it, which I doubt).
That's not actually weird, though. The idea that everyone should be expected to change jobs every few years is very recent.
> Who's going to buy an existing company that's profitable? Someone who's "profit-hungry" usually.
I didn't think this needed specifying, but there's a large difference between the goals "Create a great, enduring service and make a profit doing it" and "generate as much short-term profit as possible regardless of long-term consequences."
Sometimes people just want to do something different with their time after running their business for a long time and a PE deal is the easiest and most structured way of doing that.
Just to add a conflicting opinion, I love the articles and often use them for music discovery and purchases. Of course, the primary function is to purchase music from known entities but the discovery part keeps me coming back. In terms of ROI, to me the articles seem like a pretty smart marketing move…without them I would not have discovered all kinds of artists and made numerous purchases.
My guess is the big content initiative was someone's brain child, and once companies get past a certain size, it's very hard to pull the plug on a leader's baby. Until the company changes hand and the next set of leaders want to eat the previous young and put their own babies in there.
Can you provide a source for this? I don't doubt it, but I'm wondering if this is accurate for startups that have raised seed+ funding.
To provide an opinion from a user of the platform with "no skin in the game" regarding non-technical aspects of the platform, the social presence of Bandcamp was a significant portion of its appeal to me. I did not (and generally do not on other platforms) regularly seek out new media, and instead tend to rely on on various social media feeds and suggestion algorithms to help expose me to new music. I used to follow Bandcamp on multiple platforms until their acquisition by Epic, when I stopped following them for ideological reasons. The headlines/titles/posts that Bandcamp produced up until that point were far more alluring and generally attractive than any other music platform that I also followed, and their articles were generally of a significantly higher quality than others as well, with a large focus on the artistry present.
I discovered several artists through this form of interaction that I otherwise wouldn't have, and haven't since I began avoiding Bandcamp after their acquisition. I can't imagine that layoffs are targeting purely technical staff (as technical staff are the backbone of the observable functionality of the business), and I fear that the strategy taken by Songtradr will result in a tremendous detriment to the marketability and external usability of the platform. This cost-cutting measure seems to signify either a terribly-fated problem regarding changes to the company, or yet another act of private capital tearing down its competition. Given that Songtradr is in the market of licensing music, I am strongly influenced to believe the latter; using a buyout to cripple _the_ commercially-successful indie music platform (which serves as a competitive and independent means of releasing and licensing and distributing music) seems like a logical way to further capture a part of a market that has historically been dominated by media giants that use legal precedence to dominate.
Hahaha I don’t think that they have as glowing reputation as you think. I’ve heard creators complaining about lack of transparency, lack of communication, poor customer service, arbitrary decision making with no reason given, etc.
They could be trusted by a bunch of people to probably screw things up less than alternatives and to at least be -trying- to care about the community, while still having made more than enough mistakes to generate a bunch of justifiably unhappy people.
Think about how e.g. your favourite hosting provider nonetheless has a bunch of unhappy ex-customers.
(I'm not asserting what -is- the case here, mind, just trying to flag up a part of the possibility space that I've seen quite a few times over the years)
> 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.
And your comment reads like a typical HN armchair technologist.
> It’s not a very complicated product,
Yup, here we go. Classic "I could build this in a week".
>and it’s why most folks absolutely abhor private equity.
Actually it's not. Much of PE is what is driving people to start companies, because it provides a reliable exit path. I know many tech founders who are grateful PE exists, otherwise they would not have the capital available to them to grow their companies. People typically abhor large cap PE which focus on financial engineering. Many growth PE firms (the ones the parent and I usually work with) are value focused, which means focusing on profits (EBITDA) and growth.
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.
Please tell that to Apollo Global Management as loudly as you can. I mean, if they're one of your customers.
Trouble is, they are few and far between and PE doesnt know how to find them...they only understand money they dont understand talent. Furthermore, when they do stumble upon talent they dont know how to leave it alone and won't trust it.
PE mistakenly tends to think that they are there for more than just what they are...money.
They need to understand that they are just people with money. The same way I understand that I am just a techie that produces things.
I bought a loaf of bread today, but that doesnt make me a baker or an expert in baking or running a bakery.
Same applies to PE. Just because they buy businesses and invest in them, doesnt make them experts in whatever they buy.
Sizable firms can easily afford a seven or eight figure compensation package for someone really really competent.
Very frequently what we are doing is providing an outside voice with a direct line to the top to recommend things the CTO or VP Eng already knows and wants to do. I have had many technical leaders personally thanks us and say how relieved they were to have diligence done by real hackers, and how much this was going to help.
Songtradr just did a series D in 2021 for $50MM and recently acquired 7Digital for $23.4MM. I couldn't find a statement on how much it cost to acquire bandcamp, but it seems this might be motivated by Songtradr being cash poor and not wanting to dilute further.
"But within this discrepancy lies a paradox: Bandcamp, as comparatively threadbare as it may seem, with about $20 million in net revenue in 2022, is almost certainly profitable—based on the fact that the company has stayed lean and taken on no new funding since 2010"
https://www.fastcompany.com/90951664/bandcamp-spotify-vinyl-...
Songtradr - 45MM revenue / 157 employees = $287k/employee Bandcamp - 30MM revenue / 118 employees = $254k/employee
https://www.zippia.com/songtradr-careers-1401192/revenue/ https://growjo.com/company/Bandcamp
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.)
At its heart, tech is adapting to change and uncertainty through the fusion of creativity and process. Job changes are just another input.
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)
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 work as a consultant in tech diligence, but previous to that I worked for many many years for small, profitable, Normal Businesses. And the company I work for is a normal business that watches the bottom line and doesn't over hire because we have to be profitable. If you go work for a magic bean company that doesn't think being a sustainable business matters, you are, unfortunately, part of a ponzi scheme that can fall apart any time.
The "reckless behavior" in the above quote was not committed by the acquirer, but by whoever was responsible for leading + growing Bandcamp off this cliff.
In the same way you want to treat humans like humans, you need to treat businesses like businesses – i.e., if you're not making money or growing revenue fast enough to justify hiring the marginal employee, as a hiring manager, you're gambling with the prospective hire's career in pursuit of a collective gain.
If you're an employee joining an unprofitable company, this is part of the package and should be really clear in the interviewing/onboarding. If it isn't, again, the blame falls at the feet of the CEO, ultimately.
When I worked at (a beverage company), one of the unfortunate realities was that the company did not really compete to make their money. The profit at the entity I worked at was completely based on the price of ingredients that was set by a parent company. We could have reduced complexity and improved efficiency by large margins easily, but it didn't matter because the parent company would have clawed back a larger share and pumped their profits, while our efforts were of no benefit.
In this aimless zombie corporate mode, they hired people without much thought, and everyone was busy looking busy (8 hour meetings were common for "developers"). However, if you are doing something for real, people don't see any point in helping you out; so even if you really do want to improve things (in my case, I wanted to help the poor souls on 2ch who had to work on the weekend because of poor internal communication that prevented hand-offs), no one wanted to lend a hand.
Since profit is not a big deal, and everyone simulates being busy, no winds up in charge, and the inmates run the asylum. If you are the guy in the unimportant job, you suddenly realize it is a bullshit job and are constantly in fear of your job vanishing. Moreover, since you cannot accomplish anything, it is nearly impossible to find a new job when the company inevitably encounters reality.
No surprise that this approach was very much a "Low-Rates Phenomenon"
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).
It's hard to look someone in the eye and say they're done
Morale-wise no.
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.
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. :(
It’s actually one of the reasons I use Apple Music over Spotify, the process to do this in Spotify is much more convoluted.
Lack of a real library is why I ditched Spotify for Rdio years and years ago, and why I switched to Apple Music when that became a thing. And I still run a Plex server, partially for the PlexAmp player.
Or Apple. Which seems to resent even still running the itunes music store, they don't even have a web front for it.
And now YTM is getting podcasts so everything old is new again... but worse.
Our link: https://www.junodownload.com/labels/Ruff+And+Tuff+Recordings...
I think if most people knew the real way most modern music is produced and mastered now (on laptops), and how a lot of masters and music catalogues behind the scenes are literally re-encoded from mp3 backups, they'd see that lossless music is not an exact science.
Flac is also not universally supported by playback devices, and can become unsupported at any time faster than Mp3, so using more universal formats is not necessarily a bad thing.
That being said, I use HD lossless WAV copies for all of our own masters.
That's why I go with lossless encodings. They aren't a guarantee of good sound quality, but the odds of them being so are much, much higher.
Personally, I don't actually care about whether or not FLAC is widely supported across devices. My media center will do on-the-fly conversions and lets me stream to anything, and if I need a different format for some reason, I can just convert from the FLAC to whatever I need.
yet, you jest.
python -m http.server
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).
ruby -run -e httpdYes, it works on Windows, Linux, and OS X.
All the problems with NAT traversal should be avoided in that case.
(Also, being in the same room doesn't always mean direct connection is allowed. I've seen wifi networks that forbid it.)
I prefer ALAC too since I use iOS devices. However let's not pretend that Apple supporting FLAC wouldn't make things easier.
To each their own. For me Soundcloud wins hands down because of social network effect and gets me continuous stream of mixes. I really don't care what was the authors journey to releasing an album. A lot of music soon going to be generated anyway.
I really despise Apple Music for its album centric view and lack of good playlists. Spotify is somewhere in the middle.
Perhaps I'm just old and set in my ways, but choices made by others, especially algorithmically generated "options maximizing my engagement", hold no attraction for me whatsoever. Losing such freedom of choice would be painful in the extreme.
But I was on Apple Music and now I’m on Spotify. The amount of new albums I get to listen to would put a massive dent in my bank account if I was buying them as I go.
I still purchase Vinyl and the odd CD, but that is reserved for my top must have records. A flat rate for music just makes sense to me, and allows me to check out and discover so many more new artists than in the old days, where my music taste was much narrower and confined to more mainstream “classic” rock and the like.
For the few albums that are there sure, it works. Unfortunately the vast majority of the time there isn’t anything there. Most artists just aren’t on bandcamp. Or the artist is on there but only a subset of their albums are. Even if I started using it more, it would be so rare, as I’d need to go use Spotify or my own physical/digital collection most of the time, which means when the album ends I’m more likely to keep listening on the current platform, not think to switch back to bandcamp to see once again if the newest Metric album is suddenly there, or if any albums apart from one are there etc. Also the amount of similarly named artist/albums that are tributes or fan “sequels” or straight up just the same named artist a a little bit of friction to make search.
Bandcamp exists in an odd space where unless I’m willing to have my music choices heavily restricted it then it loses out to traditional a-la-carte purchasing of albums whether physically or on digital storefronts, or to just using a streaming service. If I was a young kid in primary school again, it would still lose out to pirating music as well I think.
A streaming service or an artist can pull music from a service (see Neil Young), but they ain't going to be reaching into my hard drives and pulling the mp3s out of it.
I find algorithmic suggestions pretty much useless, but they're easy to ignore so don't really enter into it.
Its very intersting how my music taste has evolved over the years, the more genres and types i was exposed to, the more i discovered. Nothing beats going to a concert you dont know anything about and having the night of your life. Im one for nostalgia, no doubt, but i think listening to the same song, in the same tone, over and over again, is a simplistic view of music and ruines its potential magic. Music and moods are instrinically linked. What happens if i was to listen to my favourite rockband, but instead mixed into chillout music that ebbs and flows over 5 or 10 hours. I get to hear the songs i love, in different ways, evoking different emotions and memories. I find that extends the life of music, not run it into the ground, dulling all those memories that triggered your love in the first place. I kissed that girl for the first time listening to this song, fades if you listen to that song everyday.
Spotify is automated radio, warts and all. Popular amoung the consumerist sheeple, often coupled with tv and shopping subscription technoligies. Society has always had this cross section of music interest, chinstroker outlets always existed at fringes, hardly able to survive in the world they helped create. Music sells. Captalists like to sell things people love to buy. A victim of their own success. Such is the harsh reality of this economic system, things just cant be done, they have to be done to death, then revamped and rebranded and the cycle goes on.
That's not the only alternative. I've never done that.
> Its very intersting how my music taste has evolved over the years, the more genres and types i was exposed to, the more i discovered.
I couldn't agree more! But streaming services (or old-school radio) doesn't work well for me when it comes to discovering new music. I get that plenty of people find that a great path and more power to them.
But for me, streaming services are like radio you pay for, and music radio has never been a thing of value to me at any point in my life.
And, financially speaking, "radio you pay for" makes no sense to me. If I'm paying money, I want to have the music available to listen to any time I want, on any device I want -- not just when a DJ decides it's time to play it, or only when I have an internet connection.
But don't get me wrong -- I am not saying that streaming services are stupid and shouldn't exist. I'm just saying that they don't provide value to me, personally.
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.
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.
For me, I refuse to use music streaming services, I rely heavily on my digital music collection most of which comes from Bandcamp. Bandcamp is the last bastion of physical digital music where there is direct interaction between musicians and music lovers. If it dies, we are screwed. If its possible, id actually like to see it be supported from donations like Thunderbird is if it was possible. I don't like the idea that it relies on commercialism.
Sure, maybe they don't pay as much as me buying the CD would for the artist - but I likely would have never found them any other way. Now, they get something every time I listen to their songs.
I would, however, enjoy much higher quality audio. Even with the top tier Pandora plan, it's still MP3's, albeit high quality MP3's.
It was only in the last few years that I learned that I was unusual in this.
Can I safely assume that you also listen to some albums multiple times to get to know them? If so I'd like to know which are some of your favorites.
Absolutely yes. Like with good books and movies, you can't really appreciate music fully on a single listen. And a lot of music reveals wonders only after you've become very familiar with it.
Also, with some of my favorite artists (Kate Bush comes immediately to mind, but she's not the only one), I often dislike their music on first listen. It's only after sitting with it a few times that I fall in love with it.
It would take too long to list my favorites, but here's what I've been listening to over the past week: Martina DaSilva, Oriana Curls, Yello, Frank Zappa, early Pink Floyd, miscellaneous Venezuelan salsa bands.
> Venezuelan salsa bands
Like Zeta?
> Like Zeta?
I'm actually new to the genre and still finding my way by listening to single songs from different groups to figure out the ones that appeal to me the most (that's why I didn't name a specific band). I hadn't come across Zeta, but they look like the right sort of thing. I'll check them out. Thanks!
And that's not entirely a bad thing, because it makes me value more the (few) bands or composers who stand that test.
Salsa is wonderful to explore, in particular if you're able to find a good group to watch live :)
There is no way I can and will buy the amount of metal music I consume lol.
Also the algo that suggests new music is awesome! I learned about a lot of new bands just by using that feature.
http://magnatune.com (correct, there is no 's' there... that's odd in today's world)
> Since 2003, we've found and recruited the very best independent musicians and shared revenue 50/50 with them. Much of our music is exclusively available here. Nobody has spent the time to curate a collection like we have.
They've got some interesting licensing (as in lack of royalties)...
Though... Not entirely sure anymore about this. It feels like it is just running as a zombie site that's paid up (no news in the past decade)... but it's still running and streaming.
The founder and CEO of Magnatune is John Buckman. Per his Linkedin he is still the CEO of Magnatune, in addition to some of his other projects like BookMooch and iLicenseMusic.
Magnatune is certainly in zombie mode, as Buckman started an espresso machine company that really took off and gave him notoriety, Decent Espresso. It uses an Android tablet to control and the app he wrote is written in Tcl/Tk. It's a fascinating project and how I became familiar with him and his previous endeavors.
Wonder if it ever got started or SongTradr tried to nip this whole thing in the bud?
Edit: previously said strike breaking instead of union busting.
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.
I wouldn't hold my breath [1] about that.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/02/union-nlrb-d...
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).
Yes, it could be considered retaliation via constructive dismissal without cause. In theory the NLRB could force remediations including but not limited to reinstatement of position (ie, hiring them back). If the NLRB decides that the terminations were intended to break support for recognizing the union, the NLRB has the authority to force automatic recognition without an election.
That's assuming the union pursues that case, of course, and the whole process takes months.
NLRB can't do shit.
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."
Then why did Epic sell this veritable cashcow?
https://pitchfork.com/news/epic-games-sells-bandcamp-amid-la...
If I had a mat like that I wouldn't have slipped.
Just get more comfortable shoes. As ugly as Crocs type shoes are, my back pain disappeared when I started wearing them. They don't -have- to be gaudy, I wear the Santa Cruz often which just looks like a typical loafer. They also make 'work shoes', which are apparently loved by nurses...
https://www.hrdive.com/news/starbucks-how-we-communicate-pol...
https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/nlrb-region-3-...
"Strike breaking" is a different epithet, you're looking for "union busting". Nobody at Bandcamp is on strike.
[1] https://blog.bandcamp.com/2016/05/19/bandcamp-downloads-stre...
[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/90951664/bandcamp-spotify-vinyl-...
Hopefully some new, more productive and positive ideology emerges.
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.
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.
If you tried rolling your own solution you'd be paying more than 20$ per month.
You're paying for PayPal on their margin.
Cloudflare free tier as a CDN. They're on the record about why they do it- mainly, it generates large sales leads, makes it easier to hire, and provides them a community of willing QA testers for new features.
Hosting costs for a small website are literally pennies a month if your content can be cached. Plenty of truly free origin hosts available. GitHub Pages is a popular ine.
> You're paying for PayPal on their margin
So? Bandcamp charges 15% for small artists.
That's what I mean, there is a cost of doing business and someone has to pay it. It sounds like Bandcamp was a shitty partner too, but the larger point still stands I think.
Why not to favorite what you’re looking at in the browser and then open favorites in the app…if it turns out you don’t like what hear, unfavorite.
Not sure why they stopped it some years ago. Real pitty.
> 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.
It’s a loss for everyone if good music goes unheard.
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.
Myspace and Mp3.Com used to be the road map to how sites should be run, but venture capitalism and publicly traded companies ruined the entire ecosystem.
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 they handwaved per-customer costs as hardware/network costs and assumed that as long as they scaled then salaries would be a minor part, we as an industry are now trying to dig ourselves out of that hole with a even shittier AD experiences just as that AD market is crashing down.
I'm not a musician. I'm a listener trying to find music that I like to listen to. Do you have a recommendation for us on the other end of the speaker wire?
As mentioned, my problem, as a listener, is discovery, which bandcamp doesn't address.
It's not as passive as just hitting play on a playlist, but I've discovered so many incredible artists and labels this way. I'd be genuinely devastated if Bandcamp goes away.
I prefer an automated process, rather than clicking about, navigating lists. It's ok that this is my preference.
No, recommendation systems, like Spotify uses, uses crowdsourcing and song analysis to drive the "radio". You can make "song radio" that has the same style/feeling as a song, artist, or genre.
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-denies-its-pl...
https://kotaku.com/spotify-music-streaming-fake-artist-ai-ap...
https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/fake-artists-have-...
https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/dispute-resolution/dispute...
https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/9/15767986/taylor-swift-appl...
And honestly, for some of this stuff, I understand Spotify’s position. At the same time, their willingness to promote fake artists with copy cat songs to circumvent paying royalties to BMG or such is why musicians are eating ramen and only a handful of musicians are eating steak.
https://open.spotify.com/track/6t6VE10ixs4wyyIgAbJzvz
https://open.spotify.com/artist/6RuIbUAQK9fmBq08AbY6XE
Honestly, I wish Spotify would stop "improving" their client and use that money to get more artists on their service.
Spotify likes to feed you back stuff you liked even if it's only tangentially related to what you're asking for. It also repeats the same recommendations for things like radio over and over again.
But yeah I still feel more can be done. Their new Hi-Fi package is supposed to have more options too.
Listen to a set and pull out Shazam whenever you hear something you like. It can even dump all that into a spotify playlist
For me its the only way to fly
Personally i still listen to the radio (streamed online obviously), in the UK NTS Radio (nts.live) and Rinse FM (rinse.fm) are good. Very few adverts, NTS is pretty much listener funded, not sure what Rinse do as I rarely hear ads.
The shows get archived on SoundCloud so you can ID tracks and find them on Spotify later if they were that good.
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.
As a listener, this is my entire concern, use case, and reason for paying for a streaming site: finding new music to listen to. I don't think I'm unique. Artists should get more, which is why I pay for Spotify Premium, but the use case of a listener is important. Bandcamp doesn't address that, for me.
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 new music, but a subset of all new music, just as Spotify is. It's fine to say you prefer what you can find on Spotify, just don't make the claim that Bandcamp somehow isn't up for this general task.
> which in turn implies things like major labels, artists seeking or expecting breakout etc.
This is nonsensical [1]. I follow YouTubers have their music on Spotify. Some are just spoof songs.
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 their music - 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.
But uh, bravo, I guess.
No, I think it's for active discovery Spotify is good. I have never enjoyed everything on the Discover weekly playlist, quite often it contains stuff that makes me ask "why did you even think I would like that crap, Spotify". But when it hits, it hits amazingly well.
This is really the point. It's not new: radio was the previous way to have music discovery for 'free', or at least unmetered, with its own costs and issues.
If Spotify made no pretense that it even attempted to pay rights holders anything it'd probably fit its role even better, but it actively tries to supplant the whole concept of having to buy or own albums or music at all. It's designed to be what you have INSTEAD of buying music. When it hits, you don't need to buy music.
The music MAKERS might need you to buy their music, but Spotify is for helping you ignore that.
Heh. How about an ad-supported Spotify, except literally all the ads are for bands and live gigs and music? Bring payola to Spotify. You never pay for it, but you get radio levels of interstitials and they are all from music producers trying to sell their album or single, all for literal music. Albums used to get late-night TV ads and label promotion…
That pot is 95% premium users [2].
[1] https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/
[2] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/120314/spoti....
If an artist is extremely popular with ad-supported listeners, that doesn't let them eat into the pool of payments from premium listeners.
Note, however, that listens are pooled by country, not per user. So premium accounts running background music in a hair salon 6 days a week will decide where your subscription money goes far more than the music you listen to.
Originally, this was because the big record companies demanded it. Now, the record companies are having second thoughts, but Spotify, which has adapted to the funding key favouring background music, are the ones resisting.
I see it very differently. I care about good music. There's an incredible amount of good music out there, and it's rare that an album is full of it. Your definition of "good" may vary, but mine isn't really influenced by the artist. Most albums are mostly not-good-music. I'm picky, and look at unrelated songs independently. This is why I don't really care for albums. I feel no debt to a single artist or a nothing-more-than-release-time-related collection of music, which is what most are.
Some albums I do considered a complete, single, work, but that's relatively rare. Daft Punk - Random Access Memories is a good example, in my opinion.
I don't see what concerts have to do with anything. Those are often related to luck and finances/privilege.
I spent years buying music, ripping the CDs, organizing files, etc. I'm very glad that I don't need to bother any more. I don't own the medium the music is stored on, I don't really get why it matters.
Support, experience, control. Physical media supports the artist. When you play a physical album you experience the whole album. When you own an album you control it and it cannot be taken away, edited or lost.
Streaming doesn't support the artist. Streaming obliterates coherence of albums. When you stream music you do not control it and it can be taken away, edited or lost without your knowledge or consent.
Physical media doesn't support the artist much better either, that's been a topic of conversation since I was a kid.
No, I'm the same way. Sometimes an album only has 1 good song; other times an album is great but I can't stand 1 or 2 songs. The important thing is that I listened to the whole album! I'm judging the songs in the context of their creators. I'm experiencing them together and in order, and that's a very different experience than interleaving songs. Interleaving is fine and can be an artform in itself (we used to call it a "mix tape") but I believe you owe it to the artist to listen to the thing they made in its entirety. It would be like reading a book collection interleaving the chapters. It's not fair to you or the authors.
That's how I feel about it. You ARE missing something.
>Physical media doesn't support the artist much better either, that's been a topic of conversation since I was a kid.
I have many musician friends, and they would ALL disagree with you quite strenuously. The money they make on streaming is ~0. The money they make selling CDs is almost all profit - and it's also the thing they made instead of sliced and diced and mixed with other things other people made.
I don't follow. You're free to listen to full albums, in sequence, on Spotify. You can listen to any song at any time in any order, from the album, or custom playlists. It's just a large catalog of music where you can click and play/queue anything you see, with some recommendation systems that create custom playlists you can choose to listen to.
I'm getting the impression that many people criticizing these streaming services don't understand what they actually are.
However any music I care about I buy as I plan to own my library for decades to come.
Plus, you're missing out on a lot of great music that never has been available on streaming platforms.
So far it's only happened because the musician himself pulled the music, and I wasn't really enthused after that to try and find it again. As the gp said, there's so much music now... I might be missing out on some music but if I've already got too much to ever listen to then why does that matter? In fact, having to make the choice to purchase is necessarily going to limit the amount available and my willingness to take a chance on it.
Streaming has opened up so much for me that I would never have found browsing music shops. Of course if Spotify disappeared then I'd have to find another service or buy the music then. A problem for it's time.
That 1. I supported them on Bandcamp 2. I would never have found them if it wasn't for Spotify's discover weekly.
I could list a lot more artists for which this is true. It's not even counting the ones I found indirectly.
This is maybe something artists should be aware of when they think they get such a good deal from Bandcamp and such a bad deal from Spotify. It's not as simple as that. I'm sure it's true that most people who promise you "exposure" are trying to exploit you, but that doesn't mean you can ignore how you actually got in front of the audience you have.
But some of the best stuff Spotify has found for me, has had ridiculously few plays and no obvious human curator connection.
Bandcamp just isn't in the same league, and I'd say Spotify is far better on serendipity too. It's far from predictable what it will recommend, there's not many human curators you can say that about (including the three I mentioned).
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.
In the first song of my Discover Weekly, if I google the very unique artist name, I get exactly four hits: their bandcamp page, their website, their Spotify page, and their YouTube channel that hasn't been updated in a 9 months, with that last video having 120k views. The rest is unrelated to them.
This doesn't refutes what you're saying, but I would have exactly 0 chance of finding them on my own, with the effort they're putting in.
https://medium.com/the-sound-of-ai/spotifys-discover-weekly-...
If not, Spotify is worthless to me.
Feel free to use Spotify to find artists and give them money however you want.
Also, nobody is stopping you from spending your time finding new music and giving money as directly as possible to the artist.
Spotify can be seen as a way to increase your exposure to new music, and for that it might be worth the $XX/month to many people, the ability to stream/cache it is a nice addition, but you don't have to rely on it as a way to give money (a pittance) to artists you like.
It is to me, though. I don't need another way to discover music. I have that well-covered.
And by "buy music", I wasn't referring to a way to pay artists (that would be a followup question if I didn't already know that part). I mean, can I download the music in a high-quality, open-standard, format?
I thought Spotify only did streaming, and I am not interested in a streaming service.
Could you share your secrets?
I've been doing this for decades and as a result, I have a very eclectic collection that covers almost all genres. This approach may not work for everyone, but it works very well for me.
Youtube was much better at that IMO, but I've tried to stop using it due to the Google connection.
I don't really know where Bandcamp stands - I've bought music there that I found on YouTube, but haven't used it to find new stuff.
It requires that you like songs, and listen, of course. I have around 1600 liked songs. It knows me well enough at this point.
My biggest problem with the Spotify recommendation is that it seems to be a bit "sticky", recommended recent listens more than anything.
It seems like it gives me recommendations too similar to what I'm already listening to.
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.
This is what made me love Bandcamp. I get to pay the artists more-or-less directly, and as a person who tends not to be into the Big Music Names, Bandcamp is utterly amazing, chock full of smaller artists doing wonderful things.
How so? There aren't necessarily any upfront costs for getting on Spotify; several aggregators offer a "we take a cut of your earnings" model.
Plus multiple download formats, including losslessly compressed formats such as FLAC.
Plus the best return to the musician of any similar platform.
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.
Actually, you can! Fun fact, unless an artist/label has explicitly limited what you can listen to without having made a purchase, you can listen to most of the music on Bandcamp in full, without buying it, an unlimited number of times if you're not logged in. The way it works is that, if you're logged in, you get a set (~3?) number of listens before Bandcamp basically says, "Yo, you seem to dig this, you should prolly be a mensch and throw some dough to the artist(s)/label." If you're logged out, I'm not sure what the limit is (if there even is one?), but it's likely easily circumvented by clearing cache/cookies.
Sites and apps now avoid giving any real promotional value to users because they can later sell it to them incrementally. It's a tactic to keep artists primarily promoting the platform in addition to promoting their work on the platform. Very little value overall, as now there are tons of competing music and social platforms available, but all of them offer the same desperately weak promotional value to musicians.
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
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.
Also funny since I originally heard NDAD through a Spotify recommendation before eventually buying her discography on Bandcamp
That's what I like about it. It's essentially what MySpace was supposed to be.
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.
You lost me there.
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.
Having someone share their curated music is way more powerful in my opinion than some algorithmically generated playlist.
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 :)
The back catalog of independent music on that site would be a huge loss. Every single artist would need to find and agree on that mythical hobby site, it would have to be able to handle the rapid growth if they were able to re-locate.
I agree it should have stayed simple, but we continue to believe that things should grow forever or die in the doomed attempt, so we will never have nice things.
The technology probably could be replicated in a weekend, but as always, Bandcamp is more than just the technology. Labels, artists and the community trust(ed?) them as a place where people got treated more fairly and it wasn't focused solely on growth of the platform. To replicate that same thing that Bandcamp created might take the same amount of time, ~15 years.
It can't. The classic HN mistake here is to think the difficulty in replacement is engineering / building it. That's pretty much never the actual case. Engineering it [0] is the easiest part of building a replacement.
[0] this part: "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."
- 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 inevitable in the current ecosystem.
There are many people who would not f their users and employees over when given the opportunity. Be like that.
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.
What did they do exactly? My music is there I bought years back.
Because that's what happened to a lot of companies who got bought out - eventually the MBA sharks wanted their returns. Minecraft, MySQL, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Reddit, TwiXXer, they all fell victim to enshittification.
Others just ossified with steady streams of Big Money coming in like Mozilla, Wikipedia or a ton of stuff from Adobe. Or they got closed down by Big Corp because they were no longer "profitable" enough like Google Reader.
Personally, I'm happy enough that HN still exists.
"I don't owe anybody anything"
"You're just naive"
These are the rationalizations used to justify antisocial behavior. It's nihilistic and destructive to society.
I've heard people espouse this kind of logic even when talking about employees who have worked for them for 20 years. They exchanged labor for pay and therefore nobody owes anybody anything. Yeah, right.
It's not naive, it's how these things go the majority of the time. I think that expecting otherwise is a bit naive.
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.
Having a family doesn't "absolve you" from ethics, but it means that you have to weight doing right by your family vs doing right by your users. Most people choose their family, and nobody blames them for it.
I do.
If somebody has to do wrong by their customers to do right to their family, they've seriously messed everything up.
And no, they haven't messed everything up, society has failed them
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.
If it was to make a few mill and never have to work again, sure, sell.
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?
A lot of founders regret their first sale because they realise they didn't want a cashout, they wanted to build something awesome
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!)
The thing is that the gap between "breaking even" and "life changing money" is huge for most artists. You wouldn't sell out for 50K per year, but 1M? Sell out for 2 years and you're set for life, then you can go back to making the music you love.
But very few artists can pull 1M per year, so it doesn't happen as often.
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.
I don't believe it. That is, I believe it's true for some people, but not all. It's not true for me.
Buying stuff is not an accomplishment.
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.
If you weren't able to make the "ethical choice" the first time, you almost certainly won't make it the next time, either. All of the motivations that informed your first choice will equally inform your next.
So it's not that choosing your family is unethical, but it does have consequences for your users. If family was taken care of them the ethical calculus shifts in the users favor.
The vast majority of founders I see are relatively self-sufficient already and live comfortably. They're founders because they're addicted to it, love making something new, and potentially are chasing that mega-exit. 10s-100s of millions, not a few.
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.
They had what, 400 employees, so 675k per employee.
Not necessarily. Whether or not that's the rational choice depends on what your goals are.
I understand that many of us would sell, I would probably sell too. But different people do exist. Valve didn't sell, for example, and I'm sure they were approached many times.
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.
Besides, my point is that there are multiple options, all of them rational. There is no single rational choice.
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.
Until everyone in our society is taken care of by default, these noble businesses will keep being extremely rare.
Bandcamp did seem like a chill midsize lifestyle business before the Epic acquisition. I suspect that Epic's acquisition offer was too good for the founders and board to turn down.
(While Bandcamp wasn't a classic venture-funded startup they did have outside investors.)
I don't think it's correct to say they weren't venture-funded. True Ventures lists them on their portfolio page. I don't know what that says about how much True Ventures put in, but they must have invested something.
I'll show myself out.
(Seriously though, I see your point and am not trying to bicker about this; I just think it's a funny situation)
That's even more true for Twitter, and look what's happened... nothing.
Downvoted solely for that comment. Honestly, I feel like it's so tiresome and lazy with the "X could be built in a weekend" or "Why does Y need so many employees?" comments. Sure, I've worked at companies that were easily overstaffed, and it's not hard to find some slack in any sizable company. But these kinds of comments pretty universally are completely lacking in insight of what it takes to operate and run a sizable business. It's basically just selfishness that people only comment on the limited slice (usually of programming work) that they understand.
Me too. Layoffs are terrible for the people involved but I honestly don’t see why bandcamp would need more than a handful of employees. The more people you have to pay the more money you have to extract from your customers and the whole point of bandcamp was to be a very slim layer between artists and customers.
Same here. I wasn't even aware Bandcamp had articles! But I basically just navigate to specific labels/artists/albums, buy what I need and resync my local backup of my collection.
1. Half the company were laid off
2. Two editors were laid off
I doubt editors account for the majority of that half, even if every last one was laid off.
not everything, but their work definitely brought me to music i wouldn't have found otherwise
I didn’t read all of them, but occasionally when they touched on a subject of interest, I really appreciated them, and they helped me find new music by both known and unknown artist.
They were clearly written by someone knowledgable and who cared. That’s getting increasingly rare these days and that’s a shame.
that's not what happened. they're not streaminlining for the sake of streamlining.
SongTradr is in the business of B2B sync licensing. Bandcamp's in the business of selling music to fans.
SongTradr's probably throwing out the articles not because they didn't move sales to fans, but because SongTradr doesn't care about selling music to fans.
they're probably more interested in converting Bandcamp creators to a sync licensing business model.
I've never read a single bandcamp article. Did anyone actually read them, especially enough to justify their cost?
yes. your experience is your experience. it is not universal. Bandcamp was making money with those articles, both for itself and its creators, for many many years.
Presumably Songtradr is making a big play on owning online music stores.
I knew it was possible after the Epic sale that they'd get screwed, but this worse than I expected.
I'm probably being too optimistic, but it's a nice psychological blanket
https://github.com/meeb/bandcampsync
(Disclaimer: author)
This was interesting:
> Bandcamp United is looking forward to bargaining with Songtradr in the near future regarding wages, working conditions, and benefits. It’s our hope that Songtradr honors our existing progress (including Union Security and and preserving our artist first mission in our Collective Bargaining Agreement) that we’ve already made at the bargaining table.
https://pitchfork.com/news/epic-games-sells-bandcamp-amid-la...
It turns out that all Bandcamp United members were laid off. https://www.404media.co/bandcamps-entire-union-bargaining-te...
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.
One strategy the acquiring company will use to sidestep it is enacting an internal reorg, where staff are assigned to new roles they may not want to fulfill, passively encouraging them to find employment elsewhere.
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
For Japanese artist I use ototoy.jp but that's a small subset of my library.
Guess I better get what's on my wish list while I can!
However, they do cap the number of times you're permitted to download our collection.
> on Bandcamp Fridays, an average of 93% of your money reaches the artist/label (after payment processor fees). When you make a purchase on any other day (as millions of you have, with more than $1 billion now paid directly to artists), an average of 82% reaches the artist/label.
DistroKid, for example, charges about $20/year to keep all of your music releases on 100 or so streaming and download services, but takes no cut of the proceeds.
This distribution method is far and away the norm nowadays, especially with dance music, because it gets music everywhere, right alongside artists signed to labels. Bandcamp appeals more to the hipster crowd.
When I first switched to iOS I didn’t see any way to play my music in Apple’s music player and I assumed the door was closed both directions.
Purchases, similarly, can be redownloaded on the computer. They're all DRM-free AAC, since the early 2000s.
I've mostly used Spotify in the past decade, but it seems to all work the way it always has. They just shove Apple Music (not the same as iTunes) in your face when you open the Music app, until you turn it off.
https://get.bandcamp.help/hc/en-us/articles/360007902173-I-h...
Because it doesn't need to be. Personally, I really like that their site hasn't been brought up to be in line with the current trends. That would make the site worse.
If you’re talking about the difficulty of attracting a bunch of paying users, building trust in your platform, working through payments and fraud, then yeah it’s monumentally hard and takes a long time.
IUMA was the Bandcamp of the early aughts. It was THE place to go for discovering new exciting music that you never knew could exist, the equivalent of listening to pop radio all the time and then one day turning the knob left to the local college station. (“What is this?” “It’s NEW.”) This was what the internet was FOR—accessing the inaccessible. Then some corporation bought it and smashed it into ash.
I get it, really. I’m naive af. People need to eat. Infrastructure isn’t free. Licenses need to be licensed. But fuck, I’d rather these sites never existed in the first place than have my heart broken like some middle schooler seeing their crush dancing with the rich kid.
Just an amazing company all round.
God forbid
This doesn't seem like a good thing to me, as a user.
Assuming they want to run it maintenance mode and have it not burn a hole in their pocket, they probably want people not pushing for raising wages, benefits, etc. in the future or now -- they'll likely sell off what remains to private equity or maybe try to get AI to run the show.
(That's not a rhetorical question, I'm genuininely interested in it from a philosophical and/or legal point of view)
That does not seem like a good thing in any sense of the word.
Edit: although, full disclosure, I haven’t looked at Reddit in months so if they shut down the old interface as part of the recent fit of user-hostility, I haven’t noticed.
Innovation almost always looks like throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. You have to "break" things to figure out what can be improved.
The problem is that we've gone all in on SaaS and pushed updates. Pushed updates were a huge win for security, and SaaS has some pros for some users and certain niches.
But long gone are the days where a company would invest time and money into beta test periods where they'd try out new features on focus groups who would give feedback and then the rest of us would wait for reviews from the early adopters before deciding if the upgrade costs and risks were worth it.
These days we get "upgraded" whether we opted in or not. And we're all the beta testers 100% of the time.
That has been the real plague on the software industry IMO. At least, it has ruined my enjoyment of computers and tech for the most part, and further driven to me towards native open source software (which I already used anyway, I just cling to it harder now because I feel like it is under threat). Now get off my lawn.
This is exactly why I don't use SaaS stuff, nor software that forces updates.
What has happened, for example: listening parties. Not a massive feature, but no doubt something that required a few person-years of effort to get right (and they did).
What hasn't happened but should: "buy my wishlist, now" (again, not crazy hard, but probably a good few person-months to get right.
BC's basic page layout and page flow have not changed noticeably in years. Thankfully!
10+ years of free money and excess and less than two years into higher rates without any significant market correction for stocks or housing we should lower interest again?
Epic bought them when investment money was abundant, they probably made an offer that the owners couldn't refuse.
A year later, cash is harder to come by, epic sells off businesses that aren't core. Songtrader, facing the same market conditions as epic, sees layoffs as a cost cutting measure regardless of profitability.
ps. I'm a very tiny musician on BC. I know of no changes that altered BC's utility for me as someone with an album there, or as an avid purchaser of recorded music.
They have the best margin-to-artist of any music distribution system I am aware of.