Throwaway, but I work at Bandcamp. We're all very frightened and don't know what the future holds. We were told that some, but not all, will get offers from Songtradr and it may be up to a month before we receive an offer. It's pretty depressing.
For what it's worth in this depressing and anxious waiting period: thank you for your efforts, and I sincerely hope you can continue as you have been.
As many other commenters have pointed out, Bandcamp is a great service. For me, it's really the only place I purchase music because of its commitment to paying artists fairly and offering FLAC downloads of the purchased music.
Again, thank you and good luck!
As an aside, I support unionisation precisely as the counterpoint it is intended to be, and any management actions against unionisation should be treated with suspicion and I generally look at that kind of behaviour as the base reason why unions need to exist in the first place.
(Both sides can be corrupt, but if there's only power on one side, then the corruption is both more likely to occur and increase).
I hope the unionisation thing is totally unrelated to this situation.
Thank you, I appreciate it! A few quick questions:
1. How are benefits/compensation? Competitive?
2. Are there a lot of international remote employees at SongTradr? Bandcamp has a lot of people around the globe and we'd love to know if SongTradr is likely to make offers internationally or if it'll just be near offices.
1. Compensation is what I would call mid-tier competitive for each region. You won't get an SFO salary in Spain. You'll get more at FAANG or a more tech-focused startup, but I left a FAANG job to come here.
2. Lots of international employees. No exec-level requirements of working from an office, but some teams may have their own rules.
3. It's middle of the pack, but that's mainly because I get stuck doing jobs I hate because I'm the only one with the experience, and we've got a client breathing down our neck. it's the burden of being the Sr Dev, but eventually, I'll have trained my team well enough that I can do a bit of real innovation... until then, I really believe we're enabling artists to make a better living by opening up a market (sync) that has generally been reserved for artists that are already living comfortably.
Do you think this sale was intended as a union-busting move? It sounds like they're not retaining staff with the sale, and this timing seems to match with Bandcamp's staff unionization efforts.
It was probably mostly about cash balance for the company. I once worked in a company that was a niche business but very profitable and with predictable cash flow. That made it very quick and easy to sell when needed, basically a tradeable asset. Twice in the space of a few years it was sold when the current owner wanted some cash and another had excess cash. Sounds like this is the case with Bandcamp.
In my middle management experience, being profitable and owned by a company that didn't share the business domain was best as they mostly left us alone as long as we were profitable. When they finally got bought by a similar business, that's when they tried (and failed) to merge jobs. I've since left but they've recently been spun out yet again.
These decisions take time to make. Not sure when the union efforts started though - but not sure how likely this would be as a result of those efforts..
Bandcamp workers voted in favor of a union in March 16th of this year. It was one year and a week after Epic acquired the company.
It's impossible to know what Epic is thinking know, or even when they bought BC, but 6 months sounds like how long it would take to sell Bandcamp off as a retaliation for unionizing.
When Epic was announced as a buyer, it kinda struck me that Valve would've been a better steward for the platform in the short term, with potential synergy in the long term considering how many OST they already sell for games.
Seconded. Bandcamp is one of the few platforms that I really respect. It's done great things for artists and listeners. I'm happy to spend money there.
thanks for your contributions to bandcamp, I'd love to connect with you to explore opportunities working on www.kuky.com we're a platform that actually pays creators for their music.
