Today, Epic Games’ sale of Bandcamp to Songtradr closed and at least half of Bandcamp’s staff was laid off. This is heartbreaking. We love our jobs, the platform we’ve built, and the Bandcamp community. We’re glad we have our union — coworkers who have each other’s backs. We’ll be moving together to decide our next steps. On Wednesday we return to the bargaining table with Epic Games, and we’ll keep you updated. Love and solidarity to the whole Bandcamp community. Thank you for your support.
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No boycott/strike calls yet as far as I can see, but watching this like a hawk
I don’t mean to be insensitive to others plight and hope it all gets sorted but most of my clients could lay off half of their employees and not skip a beat. There is a plethora of bad employees wasting valuable time and money!
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you can’t walk into an organisation and know who is doing good work and who isn’t.
this is a lay off based on statistics not humans.
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This is a bad take. We know that some of the employees layed off were well respected music journalists, not some useless corporate bloat.
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Proof is found in how many people post on Internet forums all day instead of being productive in their job, or being productive in making music. Having a low post count is admirable.
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I’d imagine this is speculation.
Again, I’d say speculation here as my comment referred to an actual situation in my day-to-day activity.
I think folks here are emotionally biased, didn’t mean to offend anyone!
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Omg the alternatives people are mentioning…
Web3…. Crypto…. NFTs…
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It has started.
SDEM has removed their whole catalogue from bandcamp.
I have no clue what it does for people that bought an album, they most likely lost the ownership over the digital release.
I still have 333 albums left to download.
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And finally, “well in my personal world experience 50% of people I know nothing about are expendable widgets”. There is unreal pandering for profits even in niche forums. It’s inescapable whataboutism, but nevertheless predictable.
Hopefully a team of geeks, nerds and artists rise from these ashes again. Maybe it’s time Elektron opens a user portal. They’d just need profiles networked with a front end portal for each user here. The first production site would be overrun with talent.
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I don’t get it, why do people leave now? To punish the founders of bandcamp?
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…what a shame…and let’s always keep in mind, bandcamp actually IS indeed a profitable company…the last record store of the planet and a rare and valid place for independant artists…
but once venture capital is in da house, there can’t be enough profit…
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This is what I wonder as well. Do I like what happened? No, but I also don’t want to torpedo the future of the platform prematurely. Plus it punishes any listeners they had through BC as well. It seems like a real knee jerk, poorly thought out reaction.
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Why is that so bad though? If I asked you if you were interested in being able to create verifiably limited digital releases, potentially earning secondary sales, use a single global currency without having to donate a portion of your sales to PayPal, you’d tell me “no thanks”?
Yeah, the onramps – exchanges – are awful, but the possibilities are interesting. It’s not like you have to choose one or the other, either.
From my point of view all this stuff is hypothetically very cool but practically speaking it’s really unstable at the moment. Crypto has how many iterations now that seem to be constantly going in and out of use? NFTs? None of this is as convenient as using “real” money.
I’ll pay a fee to use paypal and know that my money is going to be worth what it’s worth over exchanging it for Xcoin with absolutely no guarantee and way more risk.
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This 
Yeah i don’t really get that either. But 
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All decentralization has done is make it so you can be decentrally screwed over. I don’t see that changing. At least in the traditional systems there is some modicum of oversight and accountability.
I would happily ‘donate’ a potion of my sales to PayPal, as it happens they just paid me over $2000 because someone tried to screw me on a gear sale. That would be money gone into the void otherwise.
And one reason I make music is because it is available to everyone, artificial scarcity does not interest me whatsoever.
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This is crucial imo! The problem of our artist/music business model will definitely not be solved by making things artificially scarce. That’s like the one really good thing about music in the digital age, it’s just that all the systems built around it are fucked.
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You can’t. The created media probably isn’t enforced by the crypto system, only a “receipt”. Or, if it enforced, then the media player/viewer needs to be backed by the crypto system, which is a networked technology, which means my enjoyment, or my buyers’ enjoyments of the media is tied to the network, which is a terrible UX. Such a player/viewer would require its own maintenance and thus becomes another point of failure, and one which lacks the convenience of drm-free solutions. Also, this renders the whole scheme into a kind of DRM, which is broadly agreed to be frustrating for end users.
Obviously that sounds lucrative for creators, but
- this is what “publishing deals” already do
- is this really a “secondary sale”? Surely this is more that the original “purchaser” has just rented the artwork from me. And rentism largely sucks. Do musicians really want to be landlords? (TBF the answer is yes, my last-but-one landlord was an artist…)
There isn’t a “single global currency”. You’re masking the fact that you’re trying to sell us into your own personal (or your organisation’s) token. When users only have one use for your token (renting art through your network), all you’re really doing is tieing your tenants into your own closed system. This is like when you go to a fairground, or an arcade, and you have to use tokens to buy rides, and there’s always one or two tokens left so you either buy more tokens to make up one more ride/game/whatever, or waste a couple by leaving. Only, in the crypto world, these tokens can be exchanged for other tokens, but yet another tricksy party can arbitrage the value of the “spare” tokens.
Paypal are annoying, and expensive, for sure. But they at least provide easy to use interfaces to real money. They have functional network effects that already benefit their users (a bit). I’m not saying that justifies their position, and I prefer not to use them, but it makes their fees more valuable to me than crypto seems.
That’s right: no thanks.
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That’s a complicated one.
My one foray into marketing involved making a HTML5 “game” that required the player to do some clicking and then eventually they got a coupon for a few bucks off of a product. Previously, the company was offering the coupons for free. Few people ever redeemed them. But our game drove redemption up massively.
There is probably a better marketing term, but I think of it as the Tom Sawyer’s Fence effect. (In one of Mark Twain’s books, Sawyer is assigned to paint a fence. Passers by inquire as to what he is doing, he tells them he is a skilled painter and is reluctant to let them try. At the end of the day the fence is painted, Sawyer has done almost none of the work and he has acquired a stack of trinkets people have given him in exchange for the privilege of painting)
In a more modern example, I’m told that if you go to a Porsche dealer and inquire about a car, you will be told that there is a six month wait for your preferred configuration. But if you put money down, a car that exactly matches your specifications will magically appear. This may be why music gear is announced six months before it is available.
Maybe the answer is that point of sale and distribution is only a fragment of the picture. Marketing strategy is extremely important as well.