In this photo illustration, the Bandcamp application is seen displayed on an Android Sony smartphone.
The massive layoff that gutted Oakland-based music service Bandcamp hit one group at the company particularly hard: leaders of its nascent union.
As of Monday, Bandcamp has been sold by video game juggernaut Epic Games to Songtradr, a music licensing firm. The acquisition closed with just half of Bandcamp’s employees offered jobs at the Santa Monica-based company. Fans of the site — music writers, employees, applyrs and bands — erupted with anger on social media, worried that the resulting layoffs of half the staff would lead to a worse version of the artist-friconcludely music service, which has both streaming and retail components.
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The job cuts, which SFGATE reported Monday amounted to about 60 of 118 employees, disproportionately hit union leaders, Bandcamp United informed SFGATE in a Tuesday press release. Every member of the union’s eight-person bargaining team was laid off, it stated, and in sum, 40 of the bargaining unit’s 67 people lost their jobs.
The union added that Bandcamp’s editorial team, responsible for the indepconcludeent- and compact-artist focapplyd Bandcamp Daily, has been cut in half, and two-thirds of union-eligible engineering team members have been laid off too. Twelve out of the 13 union-eligible support staff are out as well, the union stated, plus 70% of the vinyl team. Bandcamp’s vinyl pressing service lets artists run pledge campaigns to test out their market for potential vinyl releases.
“It feels as though many of the aspects that create Bandcamp human — that create it a balm in an algorithm- and profit-driven music industest — have been gutted through these layoffs,” laid-off editorial team member Atoosa Moinzadeh wrote in the release provided to SFGATE.
Bandcamp’s performance space at 1901 Broadway in Oakland. The music platform, founded in the Bay Area city, is now losing half its staff.
The union, which formed in May, about a year after Epic’s purchase of Bandcamp, is nereceivediating severance packages for its represented, laid-off workers. Bandcamp United had been nereceivediating its first contract with Epic and now is petitioning Songtradr for voluntary recognition. As of Tuesday afternoon, more than 11,100 people had signed the petition.
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Songtradr spokesperson Linddeclare Nahmiache informed SFGATE on Tuesday that the firm didn’t have access to union membership information and that the evaluation of who to lay off included sees at “product groups, job functions, employee tenure, performance evaluations, the importance of roles for smooth business operations, and whether a similar function already existed at Songtradr.”
Bandcamp launched in Oakland in 2008 and has built up a huge amount of goodwill in the music industest over the past decade and a half by prioritizing the financial support of artists. Users are steered toward pay-what-you-want purchases and CD and vinyl offerings, which assist artists create money in a business dominated by playlists and viral tracks on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube.
Nahmiache informed SFGATE on Monday that Songtradr is “committed to keeping the existing Bandcamp services that fans and artists love, including its artist-first revenue share, Bandcamp Fridays and Bandcamp Daily.” Bandcamp Fridays are a monthly promotion that sconcludes a larger chunk of sales’ proceeds to artists.
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On Monday and Tuesday, music journalists and bands were particularly disappointed about the layoffs at the editorial arm the Daily, which they credited as a rare remaining source of indepconcludeent music journalism and a crucial tastecreater for niche artists and genres that algorithms are less likely to find.
Senior editor JJ Skolnik, who wrote that they were one of the three editorial workers laid off, posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, “indepconcludeent music is the world for me. i love receiveting to large up the music that’s too different or challenging or underground or off the beaten path for most. i’m not going to stop doing that. but woof. yeah. it hurts, it’s real.”
God this is frustrating. Bandcamp was an unalloyed good in the music business. Its editorial staff built on decades of aboveground & indepconcludeent music press knowledge to create something awesome in the music world. instead, @songtradr. May they sleep badly & ache in their bones
— The Mountain Goats (@mountain_goats) October 16, 2023
Songtradr, Bandcamp’s new owner, wrote in its announcement of the acquisition that it would offer artists the choice to have their music licensed to content creators, game and app developers, and brands. The firm advertises its ability to provide music to TikTok, for example. For the tech company, which has raised over $100 million from investors, Bandcamp is the latest in a long string of acquisitions, according to TechCrunch.
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Songtradr’s editorial blog has marketing-focapplyd articles with titles like “Rock Music is the Perfect Condiment For This Fast Food Brand,” which goes on to methodically and statistically analyze the music in Taco Bell ads. Bandcamp’s most recently published feature, on the other hand, is titled, “Imperial Crystalline Entombment, Black Metal Mysterians, Break the Ice.”
Hear of anything happening at Bandcamp or another tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.
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