imagine seeing a site like bandcamp and having your goal being to take it over and kick people out. literally so psychopathic yet it's thought of as 'smart business' in our society
Capitalism is why we can't have nice things.
Nice things are over designed and built, adequate things are most profitable.
Look at this guy over here with adequate things, what are they too good for our normal level of trash?
Capitalism! Exploited by greedy leeches in a society indoctrinated to do nothing about it!
its called enshitification, bleed it dry and throw it away, cuz its more profitable to just make a new one.
enshitification has nothing to do with it. This is just plain definition of capitalism.
Imagine founding a site like Bandcamp and cashing out. No non-public company is forced to sell anything.
Probably a good time to go and download copies of everything I have on there..
I don't think I have the room for everything I bought on there... shit.
That's always a good idea.
Man, techworkers are really into getting laid off huh?
Jokes aside, why is this happening so much recently?
Funding is drying up due to high interest rates. That’s why these kinda of layoffs happen more frequently right now.
Also, everyone’s doing it so it’s harder for an individual company to be vilified for it. They get to blame it on “market forces”
Funding drying up is real, but if you see an established profit making company doing it, just remember that whenever they do layoffs, share prices rise. The execs get big bonuses for share prices, so sacrificing employees for those bonuses is worth it to them because they are parasites on society.
The whole stock market system is parasitic.
The current system is because it has incentives for short term profiteering over steady long term profits.
There could be tax reforms to more tax capital gains for stocks held for short periods of time and discounts for stocks sold after longer periods.
This wouldn't be a magic fix but a good first step.
Another thing that would help would be banning shorting stocks. Shorting makes it more profitable for investors to take a stable, profitable company that isn't experiencing exponential growth and intentionally run it into the ground than it would be to simply let it generate long term revenues.
It's obscene that we haven't banned it and acts like it writ large. It simply shouldn't be legal to sell somebody else's property that they've loaned to you with the intention of buying another one once the price drops. It provides absolutely no value to society, is incredibly risky, and creates perverse market incentives where economic recessions and market crashes can be more profitable for some than the good times.
It's fraudulent as fuck. Hedge funds who are also market makers (oh, sure, they claim to be 'separate' yet repeatedly get fined for their behaviour, all while not admitting fault of course). Definitely no conflict of interest there. That's before we even get into 'dark pools': https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dark-pool.asp
When a majority of trades for many companies are conducted with zero oversight, that allows bad actors to manipulate the markets. It's madness to me that this parallel system is allowed to exist. I just picked AAPL at random, 43% of trades were made 'off-exchange' yesterday. ~22m shares traded with zero price action or regulation.
https://chartexchange.com/symbol/nasdaq-aapl/exchange-volume/
For a stock to go up, the company has to make more profit.
To make more profit, they need to pay their workers less than the value of the goods or services produced.
Therefore, the stock price is a measure of how well a company can exploit its workers.
because of the eternal growth principle of capitalism. Objectively there is a point that a company cannot grow anymore. For example there cannot be infinite bands that will constantly enter bandcamp to increase their numbers. At that point the company holders find different paths, like temporarily increasing numbers by reducing the number of employees. In periods of recession and uncertainty this has a domino effect.
Around COVID tech gained a lot of popularity and especially stuff like AI/ML became the new trend, so tech companies starting hiring insane amounts of people. In the past year though companies have started realizing "oh shit, we hired way too many people" and started laying off employees (usually the most expensive/highest paid, or the most "useless" i.e. non-tech positions).
It's not really all that bad for juniors especially because now they get a big boost in their opportunities for work, especially ones that worked at the big companies that overhired a ton like Meta, because they can say "I worked for Facebook/Google/JP Morgan" or whatever the hell on there resume, which will make you EXTREMELY attractive to employers and have your application stand out almost anywhere.
At least for software development, you're kind of expected to be hopping jobs a lot because that's the only way you're really going to get more benefits and higher pay (unless you get really lucky and find a company that actually cares about retaining current employees! or you become self-employed which is probably even harder). There's practically an infinite number of jobs, many good ones, in the sphere because of how valuable tech is in the modern world, so you don't have to worry about not being able to find a position when you get some experience. That's why many companies will hire people who barely can even program, so long as they can write "hello world" in JS...
Of course there are other reasons, like outsourcing work, or the company just wanting more profit short-term, or feeling like they don't "need" as many employees since the tools for the job and the number&quality of applicants have gotten better...
this is incredibly inaccurate. we just hired for a single position and got well over 250 applicants. a junior dev friend of mine says he and none of his friends can find work. with all the layoffs tech jobs are just very scarce right now.
Fuck Epic games. And TBH, fuck the assholes at Bandcamp who accepted the offer.
Epic sold it, did anybody here open the article? Its the line under the title...
I’m sure this has nothing to do with their efforts to unionize /s
I love my job and can’t picture myself in another career but it does suck after being told that this field was the most stable career
Who told you that? AFAIK that was definitely never true about computer tech jobs.
Can vouch, everyone told me growing up that computer jobs were a safe and stable choice because "everyone needs computers."
That may be true with IT departments but maybe not as necessarily for developers
Are these actually developers getting laid off? I recall seeing similar posts like this last year and it turns out they just laid off middle management and sales positions, and kept the actual devs
Songtradr’s statement also confirmed that its purchase of Bandcamp had been completed, but it did not confirm if it would voluntarily recognize Bandcamp’s union that employees won earlier this year, despite pressure from employees and the Bandcamp community.
RIP Bandcamp
I really hope not ... one of the very few music stores that are not in the business of screwing customers or artists, or both
That is unfortunate, bandcamp is the main place that my fans get my music from.
Wasn't this pretty recent? Did they buy the company just to lay people off??
Buying and "streamlining" is a pretty common practice, yeah. ~~Epic~~ Songtradr bought them for the tech and userbase, not for their employees.
That's often how it works. Duplicate middle management particularly is usually less needed after a merger.
If another company buys another company, they ALWAYS get rid of a large portion of the workforce.
Mergers fuck things up, they don't make them better: https://youtu.be/Dq09UQ40lUY?si=YwS4BAytLKu7a2lL
I remember hearing that Harmonix was also acquired by Epic Games and there was a lot of speculation of a collaboration to reboot Rock Band using the Bandcamp library.
One of the lead developers at Harmonix was asked about this on Reddit and they only replied with an emphatic "No."
Seeing this now brings the bigger picture into focus.
Epic is literally the worst... worse than EA back in their prime of toxicity.
It's not Epic doing this, but Songtradr, which is the company that purchased Bandcamp from Epic.
Well rip. I really enjoyed indie music in flac.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
One of the worst tech labor years ever continues with the news that roughly half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off.
Epic Games bought the indie music platform back in 2022 for an undisclosed amount before selling it barely a year later.
Late last month, Epic Games laid off 16 percent of its workforce, or 830 employees, due to what CEO Tim Sweeney described as overspending.
Epic also revealed that it would sell the Bandcamp business to California-based music licensing company Songtradr.
Employees who did not receive offers from Songtradr were notified today and will be eligible for severance.
In an email to The Verge, Songtradr confirmed that 50 percent of Bandcamp employees have been extended offers to join Songtradr and reaffirmed from a previous statement the company’s commitment to keeping the Bandcamp experience the same.
The original article contains 212 words, the summary contains 137 words. Saved 35%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
