622
About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
The layoffs are related to the sale of Bandcamp to Songtradr.
https://variety.com/2023/music/news/bandcamps-layoffs-songtradr-1235758123/
I'd forgotten who was selling to who, thanks.
That's often how it works. Duplicate middle management particularly is usually less needed after a merger.
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.
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
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/Dq09UQ40lUY?si=YwS4BAytLKu7a2lL
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
One of the shit things about mergers is sometimes you get transferred to another division with a culture that doesn't gel with you at all.