Beatport “Bloodbath” As Dance Music Startup Lays Off Engineers | Hacker News Reader

Beatport “Bloodbath” As Dance Music Startup Lays Off Engineers

techcrunch.com

47 pointsvyrotek47 comments

I feel bad for the people but this is just another company trimming the fat to increase their stock price (which worked [1]). I don't see why TechCrunch calls Beatport a startup as it is 10 years old and owned by another company.

1 - http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/sfxe

Well, slideshare is 7 years old and is owned by LinkedIn, but I suspect that many of us here would consider it to be a startup.

Interesting. What's you definition of a startup then?

Ballpark: Small business, less than 20 employees, and less than 5 years old, and started with unconventional debt (not bank loans). Bonus points to "startup" credentials when software development or new, emerging technologies are involved.

20 50K salaries multiplied by 5 years is five million dollars in labor, never mind the overhead. If you've burned through that much cash and you're still in business after five years, congratulations. Unicorns aside, it doesn't matter if you're in the red or in the black. You are an established business, and not some fledgling twinkle in an investor's eyes.

Funny, I posed this question a couple of days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6862721)...it is a new branding trend for IT companies though food and beverage companies have been doing it longer.

It suddenly occurs to me that "startup" is the new "indie", or "viral". It's become a genre rather than a descriptor of the source of the content.

I think that's an interesting interpretation of these events. According to TechCrunch's post, the people laid off were part of teams that "weren't making money." According to SFX, "To allow us to adapt and improve our service, it was necessary to make some organizational changes." Translation: the savings realized by cutting unproductive (or less productive) parts of the organization can be put to use in areas that management believes have higher productive potential.

Even if the motivation for "looking at the finances" more closely was the fact that SFX is now publicly-traded and has a new set of shareholders to answer to, what's the problem with this? Most companies (established or not) don't have the luxury of indefinitely letting performing parts of their businesses subsidize underperforming parts of their businesses. In many cases, the best and/or only source of needed investment dollars can be found in expense reduction.

As for feeling bad: layoffs are always unfortunate and it's worth noting that, from what I have seen at least, the good times of the past several years have left many, engineers especially, with the mistaken impression that they're impervious to the financial realities of their employers. It's always a good idea to understand the relationship between your role/team and your employer's finances regardless of how valued you believe you are in the org chart.

Surprised I've heard nothing about the bloodbath at Dr. Dre's Beats Music/MOG online service. They hired up a huge data scientist contingent, then fired them all. Strange considering how aggressive their recruiting was. Also strange to ponder hiring data scientists for a yet-to-be-launched service (with little data).

Really? any references to this?

Just did a quick google search, mostly because I would think being a data engineer for Dr. Dre, even if you got laid off soon after, would be hilarious to have on the resume. The first reference I found was this August 2013 story:

> Beats Music is also hiring to fill 13 positions, indicating that much work remains to be done if this music service is going to launch by the end of the year, as expected. The company is looking for everything from iOS and Android developers to visual designers and an ingesting specialist (the person at any music service who’s responsible from grabbing music from artists and labels and putting it into the system). In addition, it wants to hire a “data engineer,” a “data scientist” to focus on machine learning, and a “senior software engineer – recommendations,” indicating that some degree of machine recommendations will be built into the system.

Here's their current job listings:

Billing Software Engineer San Francisco Data Engineer San Francisco Data Engineer, Ingestion - Warehousing San Francisco Full Stack Web Developer San Francisco iOS Developer San Francisco Project Manager San Francisco Senior Android Developer San Francisco Senior Data Pipeline Engineer San Francisco Senior Software Engineer San Francisco Senior Systems Engineer San Francisco Senior Windows Developer San Francisco

PRODUCT

Data Analyst San Francisco Senior Product Manager San Francisco

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough: OP referenced people at Beats with a data background getting fired. This was the first I had ever heard about it, which is why I asked for references. I remember they were trying to ramp up a team from scratch crazy fast a few months back.

Posted details to another respondent.

A friend was let go, as was an acquaintance who was hired in senior management of the group (Todd Beaupré). Investigating his LinkedIn page, he had circular recommendations with five others on his team, all who had finished working there at the same time (not including my friend).

Beatport does one thing really well (sell music to producers & DJs - if you make the Top 10, you're the IT producer for a couple of weeks) and several things kinda half-assed (ie Beatport DJ is a poor man's Soundcloud).

This is just cleaning house before a refocus in 2014, a streaming service being a priority.

Timing sucks though. Sucks hard.

I can understand the desire to refocus as a streaming service, except that there's no way for DJs to consume streaming content in their DJ sets (no DJ software does this), and most DJs don't have internet connectivity when they're gigging.

My guess is that if they do pivot towards being a streaming company, they'll target EDM fans (consumers) instead of EDM DJs (prosumers).

That's what's holding them back from doing streaming apparently (at least this is what Matt Adell alluded to last week), there's no hardware support in the CDJ's, or for that matter reliable connectivity.

I can't imagine why a DJ would trust his live show to any streaming assets. A service interruption is certain to displease the crowd.

Beastie Boys known to let the stream ... drop!

songs that are added to the "Locker" are stored locally, so all tracks can be played without an internet connection. the Locker itself is DRM'd (not the tracks), so whitelisted applications (Traktor and Serato) can access the folder and play the tracks without issue.

Even if they have internet and software support, it's not reliable enough for streaming services. I was reading your post when the soundcloud feed I was listening to dropped out (literally). I don't think any EDM DJ would accept that risk. This would support your argument that they'd be targetting a new audience.

The idea wouldn't be you stream your whole set from “Teh Cloud™”, but you'd be able purchase assets/tracks on the fly, but ahead of time

I'm sorry, but isn't this exactly what beatport does now?

I'm not saying he explained it well ;)

> there's no way for DJs to consume streaming content in their DJ sets (no DJ software does this)

PulseLocker does exactly this. https://pulselocker.com/

edit: It's not "streaming" in the technical sense, but it is an unlimited subscription model.

I don't understand PulseLocker's subscriptions. What does the track count mean?

I can't imagine only 25 tracks being useful for anything. Heck, a single mix can be 30 tracks, and that's whittled down from 100+ easily.

You pay more per month if you need more tracks. The subscriptions I see go up to 1000 for $60. Then you can rotate tracks in and out.

FWIW, I'm not a DJ, so have no expertise here. But the founder is one of the guys from Dirty Vegas. I'm guessing he finds this model useful, or at least knows people who do.

Article: http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/09/pulelocker-a-streaming-and-...

My understanding is you get a DropBox-esque directory where you can download n tracks, in addition to whatever you own otherwise. The tracks are all DRMed and log the number of plays, etc. You could have 30 PulseLocker tracks, and they can co-exist with all your other music. If you find you don't like some of your current 30, you can swap them out at any time for different tracks. I think the idea is that you can try out as many songs as you want, but you'll probably buy them if you use them regularly (so you can free up more slots to try out more tracks). Of course, the 1000 tier seems pretty bountiful, but I don't know anything about EDM.

> Beatport DJ is a poor man's Soundcloud

More like Mixcloud, as Soundcloud specifically says not to use them for DJ mixes unless you have rights to all the music.

The amount of remixes and the like up on Soundcloud makes it seem like that isn't the case.

Woah. I guess I could have seen this coming..?

I utilized their API for just under two years (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fm.asot) and several months back they just pulled access from everyone without any insight. It took months of complaints before they started tending to developers (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/beatport-api) and so I removed the integration from my app. What a shame.

Can anyone from the Bay Area comment on the frequency of these mass firings among small companies? I'd never heard of it until recently, but I've seen a couple now - at least this one seems to make sense, since there's a change in direction. I've seen others which were wholesale re-orgs seemingly for the hell of it.

Not from the Bay Area.

I would much rather a startup do an announced layoff than the more common thing, which is to write phony PIPs and make it look like performance-based firings. A layoff, even when it's the right thing, is an admission of a business problem and a signal that the company won't be hiring for a while. But evil startups use "silent layoffs" to save their image ("we've never had a layoff") at the expense of those let go.

I do wonder what kind of backstory there was if they were afraid of people trashing the office. Usually people are pretty civilized when they are laid off-- especially if there's a severance, which would be jeopardized by bad behavior (if you vandalize the office, you get zero because the "severance" is charges not being pressed). Being laid off sucks, but it's not worth retaliating.

Constant re-orgs in small companies, for what it's worth, don't seem to be a new thing either.

In terms of having HR supervise the office firings...perhaps it had something to do with the fact that SF was a satellite office and may have had younger/less-tenured employees, and that the engineers being fired were pretty much the whole team. It's a different mentality if you get fired and there's no one else at the office to pick up your slack, and, if you're like the stereotypical engineer in SF with plenty of other job opportunities.

Get a pack of such people with "little to lose" and otherwise reasonable people may be unreasonable in these circumstances.

There's a few scenarios I can think of when a company thinks employees will trash an office: The firing is particularly brutal The company was particularly brutal to employees. Shitty conditions or pay The company can't trust that they hired professionals Someone at HR is just a douche and can't trust any of the above

There's likely more but that's all that counts. I hate the mentality. Unless you're hiring 16 yr olds at McDonald's, do you really expect riots from your professional workforce? They're better off being nowhere around such a shitty place. Hopefully none of this comes as an added ding to a recommendation "Oh you were one of those employees that they were afraid of? Maybe you'll shiv me in my sleep! Noez!!" yawn. I sense nothing but assholes from this place because none of this feels positive in any way. How not to fire someone right here.

> I do wonder what kind of backstory there was if they were afraid of people trashing the office.

It doesn't say nice things about the company if they thought laying off a whole office via a conference call was a good idea to start with.

The entire SF office for Beatport was hardly 18 months old. I've been told it was built as a small satellite office strictly to get SF-quality talent for specific promotional projects, since they couldn't get enough in Denver.

Thank goodness I declined that offer!

> “Once they went public, they started looking at the finances"

Boy does that speak volumes about their IPO process.

Well you have to take a look at the results of your IPO and think 'Alright, with what that cost and what we made, what position are we in?'

An IPO changes a lot of things about your company's situation; it's not unimaginable that they looked before and took a gamble that an IPO would help, and they afterwards they had to take a second, completely different look.

> SFX seems convinced the live music business is more lucrative than recorded music, which has become harder to sell in the digital age.

This is nice to hear. Let me get to the music easily, and I'll gladly pay for your shows & festivals.

It's December. Once done chopping down the trees, it's time to take the axes over the product/staff list in prep for Q1. Kids and start-ups don't get it. Most post-startup companies, especially those in the tumult of M&A by equity better be looking good to the people calling the dance.

Beatport likely doesn't experience a mad rush in the end of year, so they have a decent idea what the revenue/EBITDA is going to look like. 6 devs in SF and some in Denver could easily make that $1M loss on $12M revenue into break even or better... and fast.

Beatport killed the vinyl but will be dead in a few years too, Beatport hardly makes money anymore.

Most Labels dont make money off Beatport either. It's just a promotional tool(it cost more than it pays to produce tracks) it used to be "Get on the top 10 and get booked".

It will be very hard for young EDM producers in the future, and for the whole industry frankly.

cool, sounds like a sensible decision.

And the "turning our culture into corporate profits" angle is kind of ridiculous. That's what both companies were doing before and after these layoffs. Is it somehow better to monetize culture when you channel some of that money to unprofitable engineering teams?

Well, the good news for the rest of the tech community is now we have a new pool of engineers to recruit. And I don't mean the ones laid off.

I mean the one's who were kept by SFX. They'll have virtually no moral or illusions of job security and can probably be picked up incredibly easily.

From a consumer perspective, I'll only go to Beatport if no other store is offering a track I want. I'll even briefly consider ordering it on physical media before paying Beatport's ridiculous WAV surcharge.

> The company worried employees would destroy the office if not supervised

That's just, wow.

Would you expect anything less after hiring "rockstar programmers"?

Good thing they didn't hire any ninjas, or I'd be worried about safety of those HR guys.

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