Entire Bandcamp union team laid off in cuts to beloved Oakland firm

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, users 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-friendly music service, which has both streaming and retail components.

The job cuts, which SFGATE reported Monday amounted to about 60 of 118 employees, disproportionately hit union leaders, Bandcamp United told SFGATE in a Tuesday press release. Every member of the union’s eight-person bargaining team was laid off, it said, 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 independent- and small-artist focused 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 said, 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 make Bandcamp human — that make it a balm in an algorithm- and profit-driven music industry — have been gutted through these layoffs,” laid-off editorial team member Atoosa Moinzadeh wrote in the release provided to SFGATE.

The union, which formed in May, about a year after Epic’s purchase of Bandcamp, is negotiating severance packages for its represented, laid-off workers. Bandcamp United had been negotiating 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.

Songtradr spokesperson Lindsay Nahmiache told SFGATE on Tuesday that the firm didn’t have access to union membership information and that the evaluation of who to lay off included looks 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 industry 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 help artists make money in a business dominated by playlists and viral tracks on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube.

Nahmiache told 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 sends a larger chunk of sales’ proceeds to artists.

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 independent music journalism and a crucial tastemaker 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, “independent music is the world for me. i love getting to big 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.”

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. 

Songtradr’s editorial blog has marketing-focused 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 [email protected] or on Signal at 628-204-5452.