About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

Why was Epic even interested in Bandcamp in the first place??

This fucking blows. Start downloading all your music you've bought, you soon won't be able to own anything online anymore.

I'm pretty sure they Epic bought Bandcamp for their battle with Apple and then did literally nothing with it.
Since I discovered bandcamp in 2017, I always downloaded all the music I bought
Epic doesn't care about any particular product or service. They are a publishers with aims to become a storefront, but plan to do so by passing off customers and devs and partners.
If you didn't download it, then what's the point?
I feel like back in March 2022 Epic did not really anticipate market conditions to continue to worsen. Big miscalculation on their part.
- Why wouldn't you plan for the worst?
  
  I really don't understand how on one hand all of these CEOs and investor types are geniuses and just built different but on the other hand they're hiring people and firing people because they couldn't predict the line on graph doesn't always go up.

I'm so fucking tired, you guys.

Stop reading the news and spend some time in your local community. It's the best way I've found to shake that feeling of dread and exhaustion
- We meet under the 5th street bridge at midnight, the code word is sic semper tyrannis

Man, I wish Bandcamp would catch a break already, I actually like (liked?) the platform. I like supporting artists I like and I like supporting platforms that sell DRM-free music. If Bandcamp goes away and no other DRM-free alternative comes up, it's back to piracy for me.

This has to end at some point. Practically everything is owned by like 5 companies, and they don't even acquire them for any particular reason, other than to prevent someone else from doing the same.

Reminds me of my monopoly strategy
- Yeah, it's their monopoly strategy too. Difference is that we're playing it with toy pieces, and they're playing it for real

Fuck you Epic for many reasons, but for this one in particular

Sweeney and his supporters talking about how they give devs a better cut while also making devs work overtime and file for unemployment.

Man… we can’t have anything nice… damn capitalists fucking every thing up

Wow, I don't think Epic ever did anything with Bandcamp. What a terrible way to end it. What will become of the artists who use it as their main platform? I source a significant amount of my music from these artist, from that site.

Why do you think this is the end?
- My apologies, I mean a terrible way for Epic to end their ownership. I hope that Bandcamp will continue and thrive but this move doesn't seem encouraging. Songtradr is monopolizing music at this point.

Could someone fill me in on why we’re panicking about it being sold? Epic never seemed to do anything to it and it seems Songtradr is keeping it’s the same, does Songtradr have a bad track record or something?

Sorry if this is a dumb question, I just feel out of the loop.

Effectively firing half the employees seems like a strong sign that the new owners are going to ruin what made Bandcamp good.
- Holy fucking shit they fired 830 employees. Considering what Bandcamp has done (nothing for years despite being pretty terrible UX-wise) and how simple it is, why the fuck did they originally have 1600+ employees?
  
  A startup with < 50 people could make it work. They don't need hundreds of employees. Lay off more and actually focus on development FFS.
Songtradr is a music licensing middle man, charging both artists and those looking to license their music, and somehow despite money coming in at both ends they were losing money in 2022. That does not bode well for the status quo at their new acquisition, Bandcamp, especially considering that their very first move was to fire half the staff. Songtradr doesn't care about artists or music fans, their singular and only priority is entangling artists and music distributors in their licensing scheme. They're middlemen. Middlemen are great for exploiting the free market for profit. Middlemen are at best an additional drain on profits for everyone else. Bandcamp was one of the few places you could buy digital music that really felt like ownership and not licensing locked behind DRM. The songtradr acquisition has the potential to kill development of that kind of digital and DRM-free distribution marketplace and limit investment in anything else that tries to do something similar. If songtradr continuing to lose money after the Bandcamp acquisition, it will be an example to all investors that DRM-free digital music cannot be profitable.
So far it looks like it's just the internet's usual doomspeak, with a side of anti-Epic circlejerking.

Anyone got alternatives?

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!