Bandcamp Slashes Nearly Half Its Staff After Epic Sale (sfchronicle.com) 61
Aidin Vaziri reports via the San Francisco Chronicle: Epic Games has initiated layoffs at Bandcamp, the Oakland-based online music distribution platform it recently sold to Songtradr. Among those affected were members of Bandcamp Daily, the platform's editorial arm, as confirmed by former staff members on social media channels. "About half the company was laid off today," senior editor JJ Skolnik announced on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday morning. This move comes weeks after Songtradr's acquisition of Bandcamp was announced on Sept. 28. The company did not disclose how many employees were impacted by the cuts.
Songtradr, a Santa Monica-based licensing company, had previously stated that not all Bandcamp employees would be absorbed after the platform's sale from Epic, citing the service's financial situation as the basis for workforce adjustments. [...] The sale comes as the company cuts around 16% of its workforce, about 830 employees, in the face of lower profits that were outpaced by growing expenses.
Songtradr, a Santa Monica-based licensing company, had previously stated that not all Bandcamp employees would be absorbed after the platform's sale from Epic, citing the service's financial situation as the basis for workforce adjustments. [...] The sale comes as the company cuts around 16% of its workforce, about 830 employees, in the face of lower profits that were outpaced by growing expenses.
Epic Fail? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Epic Fail? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that's logical. Would you accept twice the workload for no additional pay?
I've seen that before right out the door of the "RTO" push after the Covid lockdown. 20% were fired, 20% more quit when they were offered jobs where they didn't have to work from the office and a good deal of the rest quit when they noticed that they could get a job where they are not expected to do the work of 2 people for the salary of one.
Re: (Score:1)
In my scenario, you get far less load but far more workload. Protecting yourself against palace intrigue is far more stressful than your actual job when you have woke power structure in your company.
This takes time away from your workload, because you cannot manage workload when you're desperately trying to make sure that you only use sanctioned language in every interaction, every document and so on. Once these people are out, you can actually focus on productive tasks, instead of endlessly checking every
Re: (Score:1)
"Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to offend. I don't quite notice that and it sure was not deliberate. You see, I'm autistic. I am certain you would not discriminate against people with special needs, would you?"
Two can play that game.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. That is the type of an unproductive person that goes to HR to make claims based on disability, that people with exceptional talent who would rather spend their 16 waking hours just working on their thing that they chose as their ultimate goal in life.
And that is the type that skilled managers strive to amputate from the work collective like a terminally infected limb, that is starting to spread the blood for the rest of the body. Before the blood is so toxic that entire organism succumbs.
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
That's a strange hypothesis in post-twitter sale world..
Don't do that stupid shit.
Twitter was full of thousands of worthless individuals who were handed a job promised by politics alone, and was proven worthless when an actual business owner took over. We can only hope and pray no company is or ever will be that bad again.
Re:Epic Fail? (Score:4, Informative)
...and was proven worthless when an actual business owner took over
Ha, get back to me on how great a business owner Elon Musk is when you can explain to me how him having lost over 2/3rds of Twitters value since buying it https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]. makes him a strong businessman. Until then all you have is right wing feel goods in regards to Musk and Twitter as he is massively in the hole in regards to this purchase.
Re:Epic Fail? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, not only are you spinning your own conspiracies but you're even making some up and attributing them to me.
At least from a financial perspective Twitter was just a plain bad buy for Musk or anyone else and he knew this which is why he tried to back out. Twitter was not a financially sound company prior to him buying them.
Upon purchasing however, Musk would compound Twitter's problems to a massive degree by firing virtually all of Twitter's moderators (the actual reason for the ADL problems). Most folks had noticed that Twitter was bad enough in terms of propagating hate speech and conspiracy when it was moderated and so was only going to get worse unmoderated. Turns out that's not the type of environment companies want to see their ads in as well so Twitter has since seen an epic drop in advertising revenue https://www.reuters.com/techno... [reuters.com]. since doing this.
Musk is in the bad place he is in with Twitter because of at least two big decisions he has made. That doesnt scream strong decision maker to me as these were genuinely dumb decisions to make with easily predictable outcomes.
Re: (Score:2)
Wow! Are you from Fox?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The corporate success story of the most brilliant management of the century.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Fiduciary duty has never meant maximum (short-term) return. Wrecking companies for short-term profit at the expense of long term stability or survival is happening all over the place.
Twitter is different, though. Musk is gutting the company without seeing any return. A city can save a lot of money by firing all of the trash collectors and maintenance crew. And things will be fine for a while, but eventually it will break down.
Re: (Score:2)
Success is always claimed while failure is always blamed
I'd like to think that Muhammed Ali said this.
Re: (Score:3)
Different people will have different reactions. For myself, if my company was acquired and immediately half the people were let go, my first reaction would NOT be "great, they got rid of the cruft, now I REALLY can get something done. Let's all get extremely hardcore [google.com]!"
My reaction would be more along the lines of "Dang, management doesn't give a shit about its (new) employees. My job is about to get a lot harder, because even if Bob was an unprod
Re: (Score:2)
I don't really get Elon's handling of the Twitter acquisition. I understand he wants to turn X into some kind of one-stop...something, and rolling Twitter in is part of that.
That said I still don't really understand the name change as opposed to chaning it to something like TwitterX or something - to retain the recognition and single something about it is new and different. What Elon did is like buying Hoover and changing the label on the vacuums to "XKCD" or something. Tweet is a verb - that used the be t
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I still don't really understand the name change as opposed to chaning it to something like TwitterX or something
This has been Musk's lifelong goal. He bought X.com as the new name for Confinity before it became PayPal. He was doing so bad for PayPal, he got fired a bit later while on a honeymoon trip (it's likely that domain cost over $1 million from whoever was squatting it). Back in 2017 he bought X.com back from PayPal who I guess had to keep it just in case someone tried to impersonate a brand nobody remembered. Or just to make Musk mad or try to get back some of the company money he wasted on it.
Musk seems t
Re: (Score:1)
>Musk seems to always stupid into accidental success.
"To a fool, genuine talent looks like luck".
See, there's this thing called reality. It tests us all the time. In case of Musk, he was tested with every company he led. And right now, he heads highly successful automotive company and highly successful aerospace company. Those two alone provide sufficient examples of two completely different fields where he could take something that was irrelevant on the market in a highly technical and complex field, an
Re: (Score:2)
The problem that you're missing is that many workplaces have a lot of people who make other people's jobs harder, not easier. And at IT companies with their insane growth from covid era, they seem to be overflowing with such people.
Remember, if task needs x amount of people to be done, adding more than x only makes it faster to do the task if following two criteria are met:
1. Task can be done in parallel by x+(number of people you added).
2. You hired correct people for the job.
If even one of the two is not
Re: (Score:2)
If you fire half of the staff, the rest will want to get another job as well. This is just bleeding Bandcamp out.
As a long time IT worker, I can assure that this is not correct. While most may now want to leave, there will always be people who will not leave no matter how bad it gets and how many get laid off. Some employees are terrified of leaving their jobs and will stay until they also get laid off, ignoring all the warning signs. I'll give you an example, although it's not the only one I know. About a decade ago, I worked for a Fortune 500 company and we needed another system admin guy and we hired one fr
I guess it's back to (Score:1)
Wait, what? (Score:5, Interesting)
Epic Games has initiated layoffs at Bandcamp, the Oakland-based online music distribution platform it recently sold to Songtradr.
How could Epic Games initiate layoffs at a company that it recently sold?
Don't you mean that Songtradr initiated layoffs?
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.latimes.com/entert... [latimes.com] explains it a bit more clearly:
The Bandcamp staff reductions were part of the September layoffs initiated by Epic Games. A representative for Songtradr told The Times that 60 of Bandcampâ(TM)s 118 employees were offered the opportunity to retain their position, and that 58 workers had accepted.
And:
Because the transaction was an asset sale, Songtradr had no legal requirement to retain employees or recognize the union.
So technically it sounds like Epic fired everyone at Bandcamp, sold the company's assets to Songtradr, and Songtradr hired about half of the enployees.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:4, Insightful)
"So technically it sounds like Epic fired everyone at Bandcamp, sold the company's assets to Songtradr, "
Only in the USA could you get away with that kind of shit. I'm glad I live in europe where employees are treated less like disposable cattle and we have laws preventing companies just firing everyone on a whim.
Re: (Score:3)
United States Attorneys [wikipedia.org] (not "US State attorneys") are political appointees within the executive branch of the federal government, and yes, they are nominated by the President and serve at the President's pleasure. The President can remove a US Attorney for any reason or for no reason at all.
As such, they have fewer job protections than at-will employees across the US as a whole, much less employees with contracts or in a recognized union. They are a bad analogy for the Bandcamp employees.
Re: (Score:2)
They are a bad analogy for the Bandcamp employees.
You are right about that. I just thought it was an interesting, relevant precedent. And thank you for correcting my post.
Re: (Score:2)
Off topic. That is not a normal job; and it's a political position where it is commonplace to replace most of them every change in president. Trump was so incompetent at appointing people one would be wise to purge as many people as possible from the system; especially the ones that look clean because they are probably the most dangerous crooks of the bunch. Oh, you can look at trump's own words about people who eventually turned on him to hear how inept he was in choosing his staff. Such as claiming he n
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Wait, what? (Score:2)
1. This is average wage, and the number is pushed higher by a few extremely high income outliers. Median and mode numbers would be a more valuable comparison.
Even so, a small wage reduction for good trains and healthcare seems a great tradeoff.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Okay, fair enough. Median income in the US is about $60K/year. Norway comes close to that and Luxembourg actually surpasses it, but those are special cases (Norway because of its oil wealth which it has managed quite well, Luxembourg because it's so small) Next up is Denmark, at $46K. German is at $45K. France is at $44K. Italy is $35K. Those are not "small wage reductions".
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure your data source there, Wikipedia's numbers are different. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
US is still high, granted, but the disparities across Europe not so stark as you indicate.
Re: (Score:2)
"and live in a very geographically dangerous area where there are potential adversaries all around"
If you think europe is dangerous then I guess you never leave your basement. I'd sooner go anywhere in europe than some american cities and towns where every halfwit has the right to own a gun and use them. And does.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Most nations in Europe provide better services and infrastructure than the USA so one doesn't need as much income to live nicely and with lower stress. They won't go broke if they leave the house and have an accident... or get shot.
As far as dangerous geography, that is something but not as much of a factor as it used to be. We waste ridiculous amounts of money on the military we do not hardly need... as you said, we are not located in a hot spot. (it's corruption and also to maintain our economic global
Re: (Score:2)
Well, the UK is getting more like USA these days.
France is the place to be with better job security.
Re: (Score:2)
Huh? You mean that you are not able to liquidate or sell IPs that you own in other countries?
Are do you mean that they should also sell their workers, like a slave trader?
Re: (Score:2)
You can do what you like with your IP but you can't just sack the staff because you feel like it. There's needs to be a consultation then there's redundancy notice and pay. Lukcily over this side of the pond the psychopaths didn't make the rules.
Re: (Score:2)
Epic Games has initiated layoffs at Bandcamp, the Oakland-based online music distribution platform it recently sold to Songtradr.
How could Epic Games initiate layoffs at a company that it recently sold?
Don't you mean that Songtradr initiated layoffs?
"had previously stated that not all Bandcamp employees would be absorbed after the platform's sale from Epic, citing the service's financial situation as the basis for workforce adjustments..."
Wait, how can a company spending money on acquisitions abuse the "financial" excuse to lay off enough to kill the very business they just spent money on?
I think we should be highlighting this stupidity above all. Don't buy even the competition if you can't afford it.
Re: (Score:2)
Where I previously saw a competent software developer I now see someone who has gotten a bit too high on his own ego, joining the ranks of others who seem to be convinced that they can just will their imagination into reality.
We'll have to see if he continues to follow this path. Though for the time being, I expect more weirdness to come.
Re: (Score:2)
Note that Sweeney is in this case not the one spending money to acquire.
Songtradr said "we want everything needed to run the company, but not the employees, you'll have to lay them off, and then we'll make job offers to the few we want to keep"
In my experience with one company selling off a piece to another company, it is common for the new owners to force the existing company to take the burden of getting rid of people as part of the sale, one way or another.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Epic also made a number of other acquisitions that have turned out to be not as smart as they thought it would be. Diversified too quickly in the hopes that their Fortnite metaverse would bring in enough funds to stem it all. But when that pretty much fell on its face they're now in a damage controll mode.
I don't see how I couldn't at least partially blame Sweeney her
Re: (Score:2)
They didn't kill the business after 1.6 years. They sold it because they do not think it is going to be profitable anymore, and only 60 of the 118 employees were offered contracts with the new owners. Epic's business model could have changed, or maybe it's just not as profitable as they thought. If it was a good business, then the new owners would have probably kept more than 50% of the employees.
Now it makes sense (Score:2)
I got an email from one of the bands that used to be on bandcamp at the end of September saying basically this :
Bandcamp
mer. 27 sept. 21 h 02
Gods Of Something
In about 10 -15 minutes I will start closing everything. I plan to private everything and change the password to something I can't possibly remember so this account will be inaccessible period. If you still want to get codes or free downloads now is the time. Once the Gmail is closed out there will be no other way to contact me.
Goodbye everyone, don't
So they trimmed the editorial deadwood... (Score:1)
...and kept the technical people who keep the platform actually running.
Today on Bandcamp: World's Tiniest Violin playing Symphony Concerto #1 for Everyone Who'll Miss the Condescending Blurbs About How Women Are Changing Rock ($3.99 or more).
Re:So they trimmed the editorial deadwood... (Score:4, Interesting)
Today on Bandcamp: World's Tiniest Violin playing Symphony Concerto #1 for Everyone Who'll Miss the Condescending Blurbs About How Women Are Changing Rock ($3.99 or more).
I know you're trying to spin hate towards band camp but the funny thing about your comment here is that it seems to me that there is more current good rock music by female artists than at any point in my life.
Re: (Score:2)
Part of the value-add of Bandcamp is discovery and highlights.
Maybe they were overloaded on that role, but it's *foolish* to think Bandcamp should go without any curation or human element.
And maybe those tech wizards can make a UI that doesn't blow ass.
This story makes no sense (Score:2)
How can a company fire half the staff *after* it sold the other company to a third company?