About half of Bandcamp employees have been laid off

Capitalism is why we can't have nice things.

Nice things are over designed and built, adequate things are most profitable.

Capitalism! Exploited by greedy leeches in a society indoctrinated to do nothing about it!

Epic sold it, did anybody here open the article? Its the line under the title...

Funding is drying up due to high interest rates. That’s why these kinda of layoffs happen more frequently right now.

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...

Now that "everyone" works from home, a lot of companies figure it cost a lot less to hire Indians to do that than Americans.

Jokes aside, why is this happening so much recently?

It's cyclical and very well understood at this point.

A business will hire a bunch of people to meet demand and then lay them off to make the company's earnings look better the following quarter.

At this point, I have no sympathy for anyone targeted by these layoffs if they work for a company that has been known to do them. Real 'leopards ate my face', vibes.

Who told you that? AFAIK that was definitely never true about computer tech jobs.

I really hope not ... one of the very few music stores that are not in the business of screwing customers or artists, or both

It's not Epic doing this, but Songtradr, which is the company that purchased Bandcamp from Epic.

Almost the worst. That still belongs to Embracer, but Epic isn't far off. But Epic can't be attributed for this fail since they had sold Bandcamp off already.

Read the article subtitle

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.

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

I imagine it's because they wanted more music for Fortnite events. Probably wanted that Rocket League soundtrack clout

They had more money than sense. Now they have no more money and Bandcamp wasn't ever profitable.