> I have purchased tons of music on it, and the articles have not made any difference to me as a user at all
n=1, but that’s true of my perspective as well so perhaps it’s a wash. I do think the editorial staff were more important to some genres than others.
> they sure like to sell their companies to them
I might suggest that this is a case where upper management’s desires directly conflict with the people making the noise (staff and users)
I suspect that there's not a lot of overlap between people who publicly fume about good companies being ruined by profit-hungry buyers, and people who start companies explicitly so they can flip them to profit-hungry buyers and ditch.
Does anyone still start businesses with the intention of building and maintaining a really excellent product/service in the long term? Do any of them hold on to that ideal after a few years?
Define "a few". You can't expect most company owners to want to continue running that company for decades on end; eventually, they want to do something else or retire. So at some point, they have to sell. Who's going to buy an existing company that's profitable? Someone who's "profit-hungry" usually. If the company is just a passion project, no one buys it and it just goes under when the owner gets tired of it.
If the the loan gets paid off, boom... co-op equally owned by the workers.
In any case I don't see why you would need the detour via local government? A bank could lend the money to the group of employees just fine.
It exists, just not in SV
And why do people assume that the kids are going to run it well or the same way the founder did? If anything, it seems like the kids of highly successful people are usually spoiled brats, and nothing like their parents. Did Bill Gates' kids create any successful software companies?
The second paragraph wasn't related to your response, it was related to prior posts by others and just an add-on for the discussion at large (in case anyone's even still reading it, which I doubt).
That's not actually weird, though. The idea that everyone should be expected to change jobs every few years is very recent.
> Who's going to buy an existing company that's profitable? Someone who's "profit-hungry" usually.
I didn't think this needed specifying, but there's a large difference between the goals "Create a great, enduring service and make a profit doing it" and "generate as much short-term profit as possible regardless of long-term consequences."
Sometimes people just want to do something different with their time after running their business for a long time and a PE deal is the easiest and most structured way of doing that.
Just to add a conflicting opinion, I love the articles and often use them for music discovery and purchases. Of course, the primary function is to purchase music from known entities but the discovery part keeps me coming back. In terms of ROI, to me the articles seem like a pretty smart marketing move…without them I would not have discovered all kinds of artists and made numerous purchases.
My guess is the big content initiative was someone's brain child, and once companies get past a certain size, it's very hard to pull the plug on a leader's baby. Until the company changes hand and the next set of leaders want to eat the previous young and put their own babies in there.
Can you provide a source for this? I don't doubt it, but I'm wondering if this is accurate for startups that have raised seed+ funding.
So I use bandcamp all the time, I have purchased tons of music on it, and the articles have not made any difference to me as a user at all. The only thing I care about is the band I'm purchasing from! I use bandcamp for three reasons: lossless audio, no DRM, fair payments to the band. None of those are at all relevant to their article efforts.
As for most people abhoring PE, believe me, I am under no illusions about our clients. But most software company exits are now PE deals (something like over 75%), so while people might like to make public noises about hating PE, they sure like to sell their companies to them.