Jobs at Bandcamp
How We Work
There is no Bandcamp office. Our team is sprinkled throughout the world, with arms, cells, pods, what-have-yous in San Francisco, Montreal, Los Angeles, the Pacific NW, a Carolina, Pittsburgh, Vermont, the British Isles and Berlin. We get together all day and night on Slack, design and document everything in a wiki, do a short daily hangout that is exactly like the start of Hill Street Blues, and meet in person a few times a year for strategizing, working head-to-head, and laser bowling. If you do not have a strong social structure outside of work then employment at Bandcamp will likely lead to heart disease and an early death. We’re hiring!
Public Relations Manager
Bandcamp is seeking a breathtakingly gifted individual to develop and execute PR strategies for the purposes of 1) attracting every serious music fan (both young and old) with our messages of direct connection and support, and 2) bringing on the top independent and soon-to-be-independent artists and their managers.
You will challenge the assumption that all music must inevitably be rented from a handful of billion dollar tech companies, and that concern for the artist and their ability to continue making music is somehow a secondary issue.
You will strive to make Bandcamp a part of every major story written about the state of the music industry.
When you are not busy promoting the company and our latest product updates, you will look for ways to improve our existing fan and artist-facing messaging, whether it’s on the site, in our emails, or on social media.
You are comfortable doing all of the above yourself, but are also experienced managing an external PR agency, and (at some point in the future) your own internal team.
About you:
- You are an amazing writer. People other than your mom frequently ask you why you’re not writing full time. You are obsessive about your copy and would sooner release the cyanide capsule hidden in your false tooth than a press release with an it’s/its error.
- You already know Bandcamp well and have a solid understanding of our business and where we fit in the market, and you absolutely cannot wait to tell our story to a wider audience.
- You are a natural, experienced public speaker, and are comfortable representing Bandcamp in one-on-one briefings with top-tier journalists, or in conference presentations to thousands. You do not get nervous, because you are well prepared and have done it a dozen times already and smoked it the last 11 times.
- You are happy to hear that even though you are more than capable of the aforementioned smoking, you will not be attending a bunch of conferences. Nor will you be sitting on a bunch of panels. Nor will you be working on a bunch of event sponsorships.
- In person, you are engaged, thoughtful, and positive. You are polished but not slick.
- You recognize that Bandcamp has grown to its current position of service-beloved-by-nearly-every-indie-musician-and-label-throughout-the-world while spending zero on marketing and PR, and that this low-key approach is part of our identity.
- You have already read this and this.
- You have six or more years of public relations experience at a major media company.
- You have connections to tech, music tech, and business journalists, but your strongest contacts are at mainstream publications like The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and several others that we would have listed if we knew half as much about this stuff as you.
- Ideally, you already live in, or are willing to relocate to, Oakland. Somewhat less ideally, you already live in, or are willing to relocate to, Brooklyn. Less ideally still, you live anywhere else in the world but are willing to have a work schedule that overlaps Pacific Standard Time by at least 4 hours each day.
To apply, please send cover letter, resume and writing samples to pr_manager@bandcamp.com.
Freelance Writers
Are you a passionate writer who loves and believes in Bandcamp’s mission? Are you obsessed with discovering and supporting independent artists on Bandcamp? Are you looking to write original stories about artists you admire, review the best new music and become a tastemaker in the Bandcamp universe? Then we, the team at Bandcamp Daily, want to work with you. We invite you to propose new stories for the site through our open call.
We are looking for album reviews, band profiles, feature stories, scene reports, fun, informative lists and anything else you can dream up. We will cover new releases so please pitch at least four weeks out for album reviews. We are looking for seasoned writers with years of experience as well as those just starting their careers.
The goal of the Bandcamp Daily is to shine a light on the world of music that exists within the site. We will focus on emerging artists, while also covering established acts who have unique voices and perspectives. We are relentlessly curious, equally excited by indie rock, digital cumbia, doom metal, trap music, afropop and everything in between. We have no genre borders or regional boundaries. We’re unflagging in our determination to uncover new music and—most importantly—to share it. If you are involved in a small scene or have identified a pattern in your city, we want to know about it… and we want to pay you to write about it.
We are looking for individuals who can produce elegant, clean copy on time. We are looking for strong writers with interesting perspectives and open minds.
So, how do you pitch us?
Send an email to writers@bandcamp.com that includes:
- Links to two or three clips, if you have them. Posts you wrote for your Tumblr or for your friend’s ’zine mean as much to us as pieces you wrote for a major music site.
- A list of your three favorite bands on Bandcamp and your favorite label (with one or two sentences explaining why).
- Three pitches. That means three clearly stated (and concise!) ideas with two to five sentences describing the piece. Please include a Bandcamp link to the artists you are pitching. For example if you want to pitch us a story about stylistic trends, album art or the explosion of skronk metal, it’s important to use Bandcamp bands as examples.
- Tell us something about how you use Bandcamp and/or how you would describe it to a friend who has never encountered the site.
Please send all of this in the body of the email (no attachments).
Bandcamp is looking for experienced generalist developers who are skilled in front-end, server-side, database, and app development.
- Superlative programming skills
- A history of developing successful, large-scale, public web software
- A love of the ruby programming language (or in an open relationship with a similar language)
- Experience writing software for mobile devices
- Experience with and opinions about writing beautiful client-side javascript
- A world-weary wisdom from fighting with and then making peace with CSS
- Wisdom from fighting with, making peace with, and in the end kinda sorta enjoying SQL (we use MySQL)
- The ability to find your way around and make things happen in linux
- Outstanding writing skills (a personal blog we can visit is a plus)
- Full-time availability
- You can live anywhere, but your work day needs to overlap at least four hours with the rest of your team
- Experience with statistics, data mining and visualization (we like to measure things)
- Familiarity with designing clean APIs
- Knowledge of threading concepts and distributed computing
- Experience with what’s at the end of port 11211
- Have you ever written a video game?
To contact us, check the HTTP headers.
Customer Support
Bandcamp is looking for a clever, convivial individual to join our interdisciplinary, ultradedicated, unusually well loved support team. You are a superb and compassionate communicator, obsessively detail oriented, and possess a strong desire to get to the bottom of how things work (or why they don’t). You are willing to spend the majority of your day crafting helpful messages because you, like us, believe that customer support is not a necessary evil, but rather a critical business function as powerful as any product feature.
You will:
- Use your expert knowledge of the site to field email inquiries from an amazing but not always 100% sober customer base of artists, labels, and fans.
- Follow new project developments to stay several steps ahead of potential support issues.
- Work closely with other teams to identify, report, and correct usability snags (and other surprises).
- Hone our help docs and internal processes with the objective of putting yourself out of a job reducing the support team’s load.
About you:
- Your writing is impeccable. Full stop.
- You are familiar enough with HTML/CSS/JavaScript to know when opening your browser’s page inspector will be especially illuminating.
- You are able to retain an enormous, ever-changing set of specific details, and live for the little blast of dopamine that comes from connecting the pieces.
- Extra credit: in addition to your sublime control of the English language, you are also proficient in French or Japanese.
- Extra extra credit: you are already a Bandcamp user (applicants with both Fan and Artist accounts are entitled to double drink tickets).
To apply, send a resume and writing samples (and/or a link to your blog) to the address given when you append the class obscure-movie-reference to this tag.
