2020. 2. 14. 22:48ㆍ카테고리 없음
Never do a music industry startup unless you have a billion dollars, can raise a billion dollars, or plan to be acquired by a company with a billion dollars to spare. That's the table stakes for going toe-to-toe with the big three.They'll bleed you to death with licensing fees, deputise you into their copyright enforcement police, upload their songs to your platform on one hand while suing you with the other, and all the while cry about how extracting monopoly profits is so much harder than in the old days.Just go disrupt something safer, like organised crime or the international diamond trade. At least with those the law probably won't change out from under you. Dalton Caldwell at YC Startup School 2010 did a great presentation on the subject talking exactly about the nuances of the music industry.In October 2010, Caldwell spoke at Y Combinator’s Startup School event at Stanford University about the failures of imeem and of the challenges still facing the music industry. At the event, Caldwell delivered a cautionary message for entrepreneurs interested in music startups. Caldwell criticized major music labels for holding too much power, focusing mainly on the industry’s licensing deals for content. He said that the current state of the industry made success for startups bleak.While some commentators praised Caldwell for his harsh but realistic insight on the digital music startup industry, many critics (notably David Hyman, CEO and founder of MOG) felt that the lessons learned from Caldwell’s experience with imeem did not accurately portray the industry as a whole.
Does it though?I'd like this to be true, but in practice it seems like most people (me included) strongly prefer hearing songs they already know most of the time, enjoy songs more with repetition, at least up to a point, and are more than willing to learn to like almost anything with high enough production value.Some people are music snobs as a hobby and most go on discovery quests from time to time, but it honestly seems like most people most of the time want music they don't have to think too much about or devote too much attention to. Indie-only channels can't really deliver that. I think most people like variety. Yes, some people always listen to the same 50 songs, and some people never listen to the same song twice.
But most people don't go their whole lives without expanding their musical tastes.While iTunes and Google Play gave chart toppers the spotlight, SoundCloud turned amateurs into professionals. 'Nobodies' could put their music on soundcloud and get them streamed millions of times, and that recognition could eventually get them a chance to sign on a dotted line.most people most of the time want music they don't have to think too much about or devote toouch attention to.I agree with that statement - dedicating significant energy to finding new music is a fairly niche hobby.However, I don't think easy-to-find necessarily equals label-owned music.I often listen to music for hours at a time in the background while I'm working or relaxing at home. I'll aim for an artist or mood and then I'm happy to let 'related tracks' from artists I've never heard of play indefinitely. If there's a track I really like I'll look at who the artist is and make note.
I listen to a ton of 'indy' music this way. Mostly, I never know who the artist is.
Sometimes I discover new artists. All of this is very low effort on my part.In fact, it would be significantly more effort to listen to megastar pop music or classics. I'd have to find a way to play the tracks - YouTube most likely, which means a ton of poorly thought out ads, or else paying for the songs directly, which usually is just slow and annoying.I'd wager the biggest hours of music listening are for background music - at work, in stores and restaurants, while studying, while lounging around the house. I'm sure some people always want to listen to the same ten albums on repeat every day, but I suspect most people are driven more by ambiance. Indy music will do that job just fine.Of course people will always want to play nostalgic hits. But I suspect that's a smaller driver of music consumption by hour of attention (or at least partial attention) than many people assume. That means the labels have way less power than people assume.
They'll give them an advance as bait for an exploitative and crappy contract which may well be run in a dishonest way.Given that most sales are downloads or streams now, the only thing big labels can bring to the table is a nuclear level of publicity. They leave, push their listeners over on the younger version of them.It's like sailing. Every bit of air that hits your sail will end up behind you, dispersed. That doesn't mean your boat will stop. You travel by charting a course where you stay ahead of a pressure differential.Same in music. You need to find a source of new artists that will continually replenish you as you lose artists to platforms that focus on the stage after you in maturity.
The beauty of culture is it always replenishes. The difference is that Bandcamp doesn‘t need to make deals with major labels. Instead they have smaller and larger labels as well as independent artists coming to them.I really don‘t understand why Soundcloud tried to get into general, mainstream music streaming. Keeping their niche as paid host for DJs, radio shows, independent artists and small labels should have been their main focus.
As a paid service for listeners (in contrast to artists) it simply can‘t compete with Spotify, Apple and others. 'In November 2014, SoundCloud closed a deal with Warner Music Group, giving the label an undisclosed cut of revenue from ads, a 3%–5% stake in the company and protection against past copyright infringement from the label.' This sounds like terms dictated by the Mob. It's quite telling that the deal also conferred ownership on a content holder in order to be able to license and pay handsomely for their content. This is only one of the big 4 they were negotiating with too.
By the time they get done negotiation with the other 3 they would have likely given up 15% of the company. Note the big 4 all have stakes in Spotify as well1.At any rate I think this should have been a sign that they were going down the wrong path.
Propping up these labels and hitching your wagon to them, only to have to constantly renegotiate your deal with them every couple of years seems contra to a platform that gave artists direct access to music fans without the middle man.1. Yep, I remember this. I used to use SoundCloud for everything.
I built a following, a reputation, and then SoundCloud tried to commit suicide. They signed this stupid deal, they removed groups, and they tried to shove Soundcloud Go down everyone's throats.
I think all 3 oysf those things are related, despite PR claiming (vaguely) otherwise.I've been paying SoundCloud for years. They had a business model. I use(d) SoundCloud because everything on SoundCloud sounded different than everywhere else.There is so much content on SoundCloud, and they've been doing their best to bury it under tracks that I can find on Spotify. Back in the good old days, when SoundCloud was small enough to have advanced search (because they were still using postgres on the back end), I remember searching for Balkan Swing Electro, and there was a ton of it. There is no way for me to discover new things like that any more because groups are gone, search sucks, tags aren't freeform, and SoundCloud wants to be Spotify. SoundCloud owned the long tail of music, you could find everything that didn't sound like Justin Bieber making a remix with Diplo and Wiz Khalifa, and very little that did. I'm eagerly awaiting the next company that wants to own the long tail of music.My money is on Clyp right now.
This sounds like terms dictated by the Mob.The simple fact is that copyright protections are far too strong. The copyright cartel doesn't need a shady network of 400 pound men to enforce their schemes; they just use the U.S.
Attorney's office instead.How many bright technical entrepreneurs have been crushed by rent-seekers milking the royalties out of a 40-year-old track? Copyright has completely lost the plot.
We need to rein it in, with the awareness that this will be no small task, as it amounts to taking away a license to print money from some of the largest companies in the world. 'How many bright technical entrepreneurs have been crushed by rent-seekers milking the royalties out of a 40-year-old track?' Anything after Jan 1st of 1978 is now capped at 35 years, so these are becoming less and less See:'Copyright has completely lost the plot.' Well the copyright of the of recording is there to protect the record label's investment. They aren't going to finance a record and it's promotion if someone else can come along and also release the same recording and collect money for it.
That was always the plot.That being said artists don't have to sign contracts with record labels if they don't want. With technology and the internet it is possible today more than at any point in history to successfully release and promote your music without a record label. I thought this was the great promise of platforms like Soundcloud. If an artist decides they need the marketing muscle of a record label they can license their recordings to a record label and retain the recording copyright.
I really believe this is the future: See. 'That was the case for centuries. Why is that such a bad thing?' For centuries? Given that commercial recordings weren't widely available until the end of the 18th century I am not sure where you are getting this from.You are mixing different things - there is a songwriter copyright and the recording copy right.A song being in the public domain(the expire of the songwriters copyright) doesn't mean you get to use the recording however you see fit. It means you can use the song as in record the song yourself and not pay royalties to Elvis's estate or whoever actually authored the song.The terms of the recording copyright determine who owns the physical recording. Often after a number of years these can revert back to the original performer.
This is known as a 'reversion.' Upon a reversion the original performer can then license the original recording as they please - as reissues, for inclusion on compilations etc. This is why you can't upload an Elvis song to youtube - because Elvis Presley Enterprises own the recording. I actually didn't know about recapture rights, so thanks for sharing that. It is nice that such a compromise was thrown in there, though it's not clear to me that the copyright cartels would take such attempts lying down. Nobody is forcing artists to sign bad deals with record companies though.
I am no way defending record companies here but it seems kind of silly to make a deal with the devil and then complain about the terms afterwards. Anyone is free to try to negotiate for things like reversions and there is no such thing as a standard record deal. Artists such as REM, Metallica and Prince have all famously done negotiated reversions way before the 35 years.The US is actually unique in that reversion is non-assignable, so an artist can't give up the right to receiving their music back even if they wanted to give it up.The UK isn't nearly as kind in this regard.
Duran Duran were recently prohibited by an English court from claiming their reversions in the US. That is not how intellectual goods work. They require their own class of property laws called 'intellectual property' precisely because they are different from real property.Real property provides the basic needs of human life, and any single parcel or space can only be occupied or used by a single entity at a time. It exists in time and space as a physical good.
Persons and families are entitled to protect this property, with force if necessary, because they depend on it for their ongoing maintenance and habitation.Real property laws provide structure to our approach to real property so that we can live in a neighborly civilization instead of a smattering of independent militarized tribes.Intellectual property, on the other hand, exists in an abstract, non-physical space. The same intellectual content can exist with perfect fidelity in an unlimited number of minds, and because intellectual goods are not subject to physical laws of space and time, they can be shared and utilized fully and simultaneously by everyone capable of processing and storing them.This free-flowing nature makes intellectual goods extremely powerful, but it also gives them limited economic utility, because the supply is very hard to constrain.
This was true in the past, and it's 1000x truer with the advent of the internet, which allows us to transfer intellectual goods practically anywhere in the world perfectly, exactly, and instantaneously. Now you don't even need to stay on good terms with the neighborhood sage for access to the treasure trove of intellectual goods!Disembodied intellectual goods are useful, but they are not necessary for survival, and thus it is rarely if ever justified to use force in the 'defense' of them. This is very different from real property, which must be reserved and defended to ensure survival.To the extent that we do decide to use force to 'defend' such goods, we should tread lightly. The analog to real property is very weak indeed.Copyright essentially injects the government as a middleman into a voluntary and free market transaction, and says 'I know you THINK you want that, but we aren't going to allow you to buy it from him, because we say someone else deserves the money more than him'. Such interjections are another area where we should tread very lightly, and in recent decades, we have done anything but.Our current iteration of copyright-gone-amok constrains our speech and does a great deal of damage that no one with an audience is willing to talk about, because they're all too busy enjoying the money stream from it to comment on its destructive consequences.
Language like 'perfect fidelity in an unlimited number of minds' just doesn't add up in my head. Nobody can reproduce the sound of a recording in their mind without listening to a tape/record/cd/file of it.How is your speech being constrained by a record label anyways?
A recording of a performance belongs to the creators of that recording. You don't have the right to reproduce it without paying them. It has nothing to do with your speech and everything to do with people in the entertainment industry getting paid for their work. SoundCloud could have been a nice business if they hadn't got greedy.
From the beginning (or close to it) there have been various paid accounts for artists which a lot of people used. SoundCloud was the best place to discover new music from unsigned artists.
There were unsigned artists with tracks on it that blew up and eventually got picked up by major labels.But:- SoundCloud neglected the platform.- Then they did one of the worst redesigns of any site I've seen (try reordering a track in your spotlight paid feature in Chrome. Crashes the tab and has done for years. I need to open another browser to do that.).- Then it became overrun with major label artists.- Then they started offering features just to the big artists - various UI/branding options - (forgetting about the artists that got them to where they were).- Then they did the whole paid streaming mess which they were never going to succeed in. Anybody could have told them that, I really don't believe anyone in that company thought 'Go' would work. I think they just needed to do something.I'm not sure if they've taken so much money now that this isn't possible anymore but if I were CEO I would take it back to it's roots.
Focus on the unsigned artists. Fix the site. Offer a distribution system (like CDBaby/TuneCore) so that SoundCloud can be a one-stop show for unsigned artists. Now you've got paid accounts (for stats/spotlight/unlimited upload space) and a small cut of distribution on all paid platforms.I don't understand how in a world where more artists are getting big without label help nobody is offering a great platform for them. SoundCloud got very close in the past.
BandCamp has gotten close too (although it lacks the social/sharing/viral aspect of SoundCloud). If SoundCloud does end up shutting down it's due to greed and poor management. Instead of focusing on what they do well and what people use them for they've tried to go after the money and they were much too late making that move to get any of it. It is funny you mention Bandcamp as your flagship example considering how much 1993 duct tape is holding it together.
You cannot compare the UI and tech of the two; Bandcamp has neglected the same Courier New interface since they were a startup. SoundCloud engineering is worlds ahead. They were one of the biggest proponents and pioneers of containerized microservice architecture. They took a lot of beatings so that we wouldn't have to, and that's worth something to me.
Frankly I've never read an inspiring development article from Bandcamp a engineering team. Something must be terribly wrong at SoundCloud engineering besides the money crunch. They have done nothing to improve the core user experience for years. They've only made it worse on iOS.
Try scrolling down the feed a bit on Chrome - it heats your computer up and starts gobbling CPU. None of their paid plans get me higher quality audio, which is sorely needed because by default their audio quality is shit. As an app or paid service, it's trash.Yet it's the sole music app I use: all of my favorite artists and music are on SoundCloud. The only thing it has going for it is the community. I have no idea how Bandcamp is built behind the scenes, but from a user-facing perspective, their UI and UX seem way better than Soundcloud's.Frankly I've never read an inspiring development article from Bandcamp a engineering team.I don't know the actual user numbers, but I'm guessing this is because Soundcloud has had to scale a lot more than Bandcamp has and not necessarily because Bandcamp's engineering team is worse.But, hey, maybe Soundcloud did have a top-class engineering team.
Doesn't really change my opinion of it, since I've always considered it the worst and least user-friendly out of all the streaming platforms (mid-song user comments I can't disable; next song autoplay that I can barely find the playlist for, with seemingly no relation to what I was just listening to; horrible sound quality; hideous and distracting color scheme that distracts from the music, much unlike BC).That may be entirely the fault of the management and not the engineers, but still. 'It is funny you mention Bandcamp as your flagship example'I didn't. I said they had gotten as far as SoundCloud which was close to the right product but not close enough. SoundCloud engineering is worlds ahead.
They were one of the biggest proponents and pioneers of containerized microservice architecture.As a user, why should I care? After the redesign the product became abysmal to use. There are major bugs (like reordering spotlight in Chrome) which have been around for years with no fix.
That's a paid feature, broken in a major browser for years. There are also still (or at least there were recently) some pages using the old interface. They wasted time building Go instead of fixing the almost great product they already had. It is funny you mention Bandcamp as your flagship example considering how much 1993 duct tape is holding it together. You cannot compare the UI and tech of the two; Bandcamp has neglected the same Courier New interface since they were a startup.I really don't agree with that. While there's room for performance improvements at Bandcamp (the site can be slow on fridays, which is release day for most albums), their user experience and design is just fine and very functional.Discovering an album via recommendations in your activity feed and actually purchasing and downloading said album is a matter of seconds.It takes me longer to remove 5 items from a Soundcloud playlist, which is a process that involves opening and closing a modal window 5 separate times.If one of those platforms feels neglected and dated it's Soundcloud. Then it became overrun with major label artists.So what.
There also many excellent major label artist and it's good to have them. Many new album releases are missing on SoundCloud but available on Spotify from day one.Probably I am the only one but I find most 'DJ mixes' on SoundCloud lack in quality/creativity (I am into electronic music though). Maybe some like them I think 95% of them are subpar and sound like my nephew created a song with Magix Music Maker.
These mixes and 'the extended repetoire' are no competitive advantage over Spotify and Co. There also many excellent major label artist and it's good to have them.You're missing the point. I've no problem with major label artists but when you start dealing with them you start dealing with licensing. Then you waste time, don't develop the platform, and abandon the indie artists that got you to where you are. You need to take the point in context of the rest of my argument. When Spotify/Apple Music/Pandora exist why would you enter that market when it's not the market that you started in and you have no chance of beating them? Focus on indie music and you have a business where people actually pay money for the service and you become profitable.
Maybe some like them I think 95% of them are subpar and sound like my nephew created a song with Magix Music Maker.Well that's how music discovery works. You have to go through rubbish to find the gems. If you want pro level stuff every time you should use Spotify/Beatport etc. I've been on SoundCloud since the beginning (since before it even became the go-to place for electronic music) and it was a great way to discover really good songwriters.
You have to do some work to find them but that's part of the fun. SoundCloud tried to evolve into something completely different than it began as. Your expectations are a perfect example of how that skewed the public perception of it to the point where you and I believe it is completely different things - in reality it tries to be both but doesn't excel at either. You're missing the point. I've no problem with major label artists but when you start dealing with them you start dealing with licensing.You think all those mixes come for free? They have to be licensed as well once the embedded song snippets exceed 30sec which most of them do (also depending on the local jurisdiction).Soundcloud had to find agreements with the labels sooner or later anyway because of the mixes and just included the major label artists in the deal because why not. Otherwise they would have been sued (and they were sued by some)—again—because of the mixes.
Well that's how music discovery works.Ok, then let's agree on it's a matter of taste. But I'd like to revise my comment: 99% of the mixes on SoundCloud are cr.p. Maybe it's just my taste but I am also SoundCloud user from day one and somebody who spent tons of money on Beatport.
If they can succeed with this music selection and find listeners like you and who pay, great for them, but obviously they can't. Btw, you find the 1% good mixes also on Spotify or Apple Music. You think all those mixes come for free? They have to be licensed as well once the embedded song snippets exceed 30sec which most of them do (also depending on the local jurisdiction).Again you're not understanding what I'm saying.
You seem to think of music (or SoundCloud) as only EDM. When SoundCloud started it was largely amateur and indie 'analog' musicians and songwriters (i.e.
People playing instruments and writing their own music). None of that needs licensed. Those people, despite not making any money, were paying SoundCloud £9.99 per month to increase their storage space and see listener stats.
Obviously I don't know how many but there were badges on the profiles to indicate a paying user and there were a significantly high percentage. There was quite a large community of this type of music around a lot of genres. None of it needed licensed. If you stick to indie artists you don't need to deal with licensing. People doing mixes can use MixCloud which automatically licenses uploads some how.So, my point is, SoundCloud did not start off with DJ mixes or copyrighted material.
It started off very legitimately and had a decent business model. They could have made a nice business out of it but like most SV businesses preferred to sink a load of VC money and 'grow' with no ultimate business model.Edit: If they can succeed with this music selection and find listeners like you and who pay, great for them, but obviously they can't.My comment was nothing to do with listeners paying - it was about artists paying. Artists have always been able and willing to pay for spotlight/storage/stats. Again you're not understanding what I'm saying.How many times do you want to repeat this? SoundCloud did not start off with DJ mixes or copyrighted material.The CEO and CTO were themselves very much into EDM. SC positioned itself repetoire-wise as a DJ platform from very early on, most tracks, traffic, the first surge were EDM-based the first years. And 99% was copyrighted material stitched together.
I don't know where you have your information from but it's just blatantly wrong.Anyways, I think that our current discussion does not contribute to the initial points in any way and doesn't make us both feeling better, so I stop here. Have a nice day! But the underlying issue is that those DJ tracks many times technically did need permission from copyright holders to be posted.What the parent and I are saying though is that DJ mixes were a small part of the content in the early days. It wasn't created to host DJ mixes or marketed as that initially. Producers/songwriters/amateurs were the bulk of the content. SoundCloud could have built a decent business by banning copyrighted material and only dealing with original works. There was never any need to get into the messy licensing business.
DJ mixes' on SoundCloud lack in quality/creativityBy definition they are about selection. Creative live mixes are performed in live events.I use Soundcloud to discover new music in mixes. There’s something exciting trying to ID track using Shazam (cancer) or writing the time down and coming back every few months to find if someone else ID’d it.I’d really like if they defaulted mixes to 320kbps tho. And streams stop randomly on Safari, while Chrome crashes after few hours of playback.
Filtering options could be improved too, and Discover option is almost always suggesting me individual tracks - something I never listen to. Oh and there’s buffering problem between tracks that prevents to be used as continous stream.
This shows us, that company valuations are ridiculous and actually mean nothing.Is SoundCloud worth a billion dollars? Well, it might be on paper or in the imaginations of the founders, but what does it really mean?
To me, it's worth nothing.The real problem is: these companies start to operate from the perspective of 'having' those millions of dollars. This is why they hire too many people for too much money. They spent hundreds of thousands on marketing.But in the end, you know what? They need to beg for money to pay their debts. They need to lay off dozens of employees because they don't have the money to pay them.What if SoundCloud would have kept a small, yet highly skilled engineering team of maybe 20 people, some marketing and sales, and try to not outgrow themselves?
Probably they'd be having a huge surplus each year because their costs would be small and sustained.When I read stories like these, I actually feel good about my bootstrapped, down-to-earth startup. We don't make millions, we don't 'disrupt' the industry, yet we solve our customers' problems and delight them.
We won't ever run out of money, as we carefully check each and every expenditure, and have growing savings in the bank. Once you have investors, they want their money to grow, and this is not possible by staying small. We have invested in a startup we work with, and given the high risk of failure, I would not be happy with a meager growth rate of. Staying small!= don't grow business. I would never hire crazy so people in the startup can imagine spinning up new projects new microservice new crazy revolutionary database/big data/ new KV store/new cache layer out of curiosity.Till one point, when the business is so big, growing engineering team to over 100 is inevitable. But plently of really successful tech companies did not overgrow their team size for a number of years. E.g Facebook.Human captial spent is actually the most expensive even comparing space rental if you add up salary, bonus, and benefits.
I also will not recommend startups in their early stage (or even until they can break-even for a long time) to flu candidates over. There is really no reason to fly people over until you want to hire that person. Flying and hotel adds up big time too. Google can offer this because spending a couple millions doesn't matter to them.
Look at all of the really successful tech companies out there, they startrd with tools already available. I see this too often. Everyone has nice ideas and wanted to write something better because they don't like the interface or they had to hack around (look at you Jenkins). We are all guilty of that.
But if you hire people and they begin to create new fancy architecture that doesn't pay off, trust me, that money went to waste. This is not even a math problem.Again, find a company out there did not create their infratructure with common solutions and only begin to develop custom solution when they afford and they really needed it. Several years later. The irony is that the maths stays the same for a more modest 1.2x if you can get 80% of your investments to pay off.but when you have an 80% loss rate, you have to play the game more than a hundred times to reliably make your money back.but I doubt you're investing in hundreds of companies; which means, you're probably walking away with nothing.Remeber, those numbers only work at scale; in small numbers 80% failure for 5x return = you get nothing. Just like the soundcloud investors will.
Is SoundCloud worth a billion dollars?This reminds me of the current ICOs and the token economy. Early adopters try to push new currencies like crazy to cash out once popularity peaks.SoundCloud was never thought as a real business. Everybody involved in the music industry should have known that it's not possible to build a solid business based on the oligopoly of three music labels and with Spotify having a headstart of 50m users and being still not profitable.But still all these VCs with USV leading the way told us it's the next billion dollar unicorn. Old-school pump and dump. They negotiate with very few artists and their managers directly.
The reason is that there are very few artists who have that kind of control of their content.AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles and Taylor Swift come to mind, but there are very few artists who have a say in whether or not their catalog can or can not be streamed. Those artists made wise business decisions at some point and/or were able to throw their weight around. Here are some notable hold outs as of 2016 anyway:Using Pink Floyd as an example, the decision was there's and not their record label EMI.
There's a lot that goes on behind the scenes.You need sales people to sell ads, designers to build out the creatives (assuming the company you sold ads for doesn't have media that fits with your platform). Then you need account executives to manage the account. Then you need a billing department that collects the money.
Then you need engineering to build out your ad serving abilities.For IT you have the core that builds what some here have called a 'shitty' UI. Then you have people working on all kinds of invisible things like developer tools to support releases. People working on recommendation engines. People working on instrumenting data and metrics for business analysts.Then you have people who hand-curate music for each of the markets and local tastes that Spotify operates in. Then you need people to manage these people. I feel it is also a culture thing: Some artistic subcommunities seem to revel in the image of the 'starving artist' and making a lot of money is often regarded as 'selling out'. Certainly anything liked by the mainstream immediately loses its appeal for the groups that like to think the have exquisite tastes.
(almost by definition)So, websites like soundcloud find themselves in a bind: on one hand they can't start making lots of money because they would lose their artistic street cred, on the other hand their servers and bandwidth cost money. Blaming this lack of money for artistic on the economy seems a little bit off, this has basically been the case since Roman days.I feel sites like github have a nice middle ground, charging a little bit to professional users while offering the service for free to open source users. It doesn't lead to billion dollar valuations quite as fast as an advertising model though. I agree, GitHub is a nice comparison, and has been transformative in promoting a hobbyist's ecosystem while also being a viable commercial entity. However, I think you are being a bit unfair and leaning towards characterizing the artists as valuing obscurity and non-mainstreamness per se. The point about SoundCloud is that it provided access to the people making music from their bedrooms, the hobbyists of github. Arty music types were attracted to the platform not (only) out of a pretentious desire to avoid the mainstream but because many, most even, of our culture's musical gems are surely to be found in the long tail of not-(yet) commercial music.
I think you are right about the musical value in the long tail, but what I was driving at was that the monetary value is concentrated in the 'top', in a power law fashion. Since soundcloud has to pay for its employees and servers it needs money, but most of the ways of actually getting that money will chase away users.I think a self-hosted soundcloud where people host their own music but use the network for discoverability might be one of the few use cases where decentralization actually makes a lot of sense, because since the users are not (mainly) in it for the money the economies of scale from centralization don't matter as much. By definition, there will be less money for non-mainstream anythingConsider a market with genre A with 1 million listeners, and 10 million other genres with 1 listener each.
We can agree that the definition of the word 'mainstream' will be such that genre A is 'mainstream', and yet there is much more money in the sum of the non-mainstream genres. I guess I'm failing to understand what your vision of a better music market would look like.
Can you describe it?When I said 'valuable ecosystem' I meant culturally valuable, not necessarily revenue/year valuable. I am simply saying that it would be nice if our world satisfied the following:IF:Some sound engineers who are into electronic music create a website which allows lots of people to share underground electronic music with each other, and start employing people to work on the websiteTHEN:The website can continue to play the role which people have come to love it for, without having to change much, and the employees will be reasonably and stably compensated for working on the website, indefinitely.
When I read stories like these, I actually feel good about my bootstrapped, down-to-earth startup. We don't make millions, we don't 'disrupt' the industry, yet we solve our customers' problems and delight them. We won't ever run out of money, as we carefully check each and every expenditure, and have growing savings in the bank.When I read stories like these, I actually feel good about my bootstrapped, down-to-earth startup.
Download Soundcloud Likes
We don't make millions, we don't 'disrupt' the industry, yet we solve our customers' problems and delight them. We won't ever run out of money, as we carefully check each and every expenditure, and have growing savings in the bank.Then it's not a startup. A startup is designed to grow quickly. Everything we associate with startups stems from the fact that the successful ones do make millions within a decade.For it to be a startup, you have to have a large target market. That means any competitor that chooses to grow quickly will trounce one that moves slowly.
'Then it's not a startup. A startup is designed to grow quickly. Everything we associate with startups stems from the fact that the successful ones do make millions within a decade. For it to be a startup, you have to have a large target market.' I am sorry but where is that criteria codified?
This is nonsense. Here is an article with 14 founders being asked what defines a 'startup' and only one of them mentions market size:'Everything we associate with startups stems from the fact that the successful ones do make millions within a decade.' No, that's the sensational media coverage that associates that. Further what is meant by 'make millions'? Millions in revenue when you are losing millions is not really an indicator of success is it?
Also Uber, Spotify at 8 and 11 years old respectively both have millions in revenue but lose money. Are they 'successful'? If a rose by any other name smells just as sweet, then a business by any other name stays just as small.If a business is small and stays small, then at best it's a failed startup. If it's designed to stay small, then it's not a startup at all.You can argue any other point, but you can't avoid the growth criteria. And if you have that, either you grow quickly or your competitor will put you out of business.My point is that a podcast hosting company has no growth potential. The target market is too small.
A startup could use podcast hosting as a stepping stone toward a bigger market, but in absence of that, it's a business like any other. And there's no shame in admitting that.But it's really strange to insist it's a startup when it's not. Imagine insisting that a desktop computer is a chair just because you can sit on it.
Is SoundCloud worth a billion dollars? Well, it might be on paper or in the imaginations of the founders, but what does it really mean? To me, it's worth nothing.I was curious if this was true, so I asked a genie to see if you (as a bootstrapped founder) would trade $20 to own SoundCloud. No it doesn't mean a business impact at all, unless it is proven by accounting.Programmer hourly rate. amount spent on doing such tasks = project money spentNow how has the project money spent impacted the overall project costs, compared with the solution that everyone else is using, including the training costs for the rest of team, setting up a new build infrastructure, possible extra tooling support, salary rates for new hires?Somehow I feel many coders would profit to learn a bit more about business and project management. No it doesn't mean a business impact at all, unless it is proven by accounting.You're not understanding me. I'm saying that if the work would have this good business impact with the original language, then doing the same thing with better productivity (with the same worker) is better.I'm not saying that improved productivity is guaranteed to mean business impact.
Just that it either makes a good thing better, or it takes a bad thing and doesn't make it worse. If someone is doing the wrong work, their rate of production is not to blame. Now how has the project money spent impacted the overall project costs, compared with the solution that everyone else is using, including the training costs for the rest of team, setting up a new build infrastructure, possible extra tooling support, salary rates for new hires?Other than 'salary rate', all of that falls under productivity. If all those costs are going up enough to drop productivity, then the entire premise goes out the window! The premise was secretly using a different language to increase productivity.
Secretly using a different language to decrease productivity is so obviously a bad idea that it's not worth discussing. It depends on the outcome of the discussion - which depends on your capability as a manager.
Sometimes this behavior is because the manager is an arse who can't run a reasonable process of team decision making, and the covert development is a reasonable appeal from someone who is disenfranchised in the decision making process and is making a very valuable point. The employee so doing is highly engaged and valuable and firing them is an act of self harm. In other cases this is an act of aggression by an unreasonable and arrogant individual who doesn't care about the team or the company and is simply doing what they want. You have to judge - call it wrong (either way) and you have a problem that will cost you dearly.But be aware there are two sides to this coin and you might be the one that needs to learn. My questions are always: is this part of a pattern (conflict, poor performance, bad behaviour?); why don't I want to sit with this person for 2 hours with a coffee and understand whats going on?; why didn't the coffee heart to heart work out? Probably common, but they seem to have asked for it. 3 years ago, they published a presentation on slideshare 1 where they explained they were migrating from a monolith to microservices.
That could make sense for them, given their size, but they explained as well that 'rails is for pet blogs' (in the content of the presentation) and that they will take the opportunity to use many different languages. As I mentioned in comments back then, this was due to cause problems (although, I did not imagine it would go as far as people rewriting others apps).1. I read this article few hours earlier when crawling through the new section. It's a surprisingly interesting piece from Buzzfeed but there's a lot of bashing of the CEO, the CTO and one recently hired senior for label relations (who seem to be really odd).This is typical: SoundCloud was an iconic company, its founders worshiped and idealized.
Once money runs out, people but especially former employees start to backstab, blaspheme and blame loud and clearly. Why not before? Now when everybody is hitting SoundCloud it's easy and risk-free to join the hate. All the NDAs they once signed seem to be gone? To be fired also means fire and forget for them.I never believed in SoundCloud. The founders did a great job building a huge brand and DNA out of nothing but the business model is by design broken or to put it simply, you just can't do business with music labels.Btw, where is Fred Wilson? The biggest proponent and investor of SoundCloud who didn't miss an opportunity to tell us that sound is the future stays silent and hasn't commented this tragedy once.
A VC just for good times?EDIT: Why the downvotes? Mind to share your view? I didn't downvote, but:- Presumably the people inside the company has tried for years to pressure for a change.
When that doesn't work, and especially once a big layoff happens, it's understandable that employees vent their frustration in public. And that might be what it takes for outside people (investors etc) to make necessary changes at the top. It's not about backstabbing.If these employees didn't care at all about the fate of the company, they would just take the severance package and move to other jobs without saying much. The complaining you hear is most likely from people that care about SoundCloud.- You're saying that the business model is broken, because you 'can't do business with music labels'. YouTube is evidence that it is possible, it's just tremendously difficult.You need advanced algorithms to detect copyright ownership, you need a system to do revenue sharing, you need people to handle complain cases etc etc.The reason why they failed has to do with poor strategy and execution, and less to do with the business model.(This reminds be of all the people that said Apple could never get into the cell phone business because dealing with the operators would be impossible. Or that web search was a broken business model back then Yahoo-like portals were all the rage and web search truly sucked.). Does the fact that it's not their core contradict what I'm saying?Yes it does.
Youtube is not about music, their focus lies somewhere else, music complements their product but they are not dependent on it and besides, it's a just one rev stream compared to their main rev channels. Another example: Apple has Apple Music to strengthen the network effect of their products, not because they want to enter the music business. So, both used labels to complement their core products. Both would survive without deals to the labels. SoundCloud would not survive without those deals because then SoundCloud wouldn't have any product. As I said, tremendously difficult, yes, but not impossible.I disagree, 10 years negotiations sounds like something impossible for a company which core solely relies on music, who wants to fund a company for 10 years with an unclear outcome?? For Youtube it was a different story: In this ten years Youtube severely damaged GEMA's reputation by displaying billion times that it's GEMA's fault that user can't listen to music.
So, it's questionable if any other company with less power would have been able to strike a deal with the GEMA. Anyways, Youtube could have negotiated 100 years, they still would make revs through other channels. Youtube is about user uploaded content, and without a content recognition system in place for video and audio and licensing in place with both the movie and music industry they would have been dead in the water, just like SoundCloud.
What other revenue streams would they have that would have worked without that?As the article mentions, SoundCloud eventually did reach an agreement with the music companies, showing that it didn't have to take 10 years, but took longer still than they expected.So my theory is that the business model is not broken by design as you claim, but that SoundCloud got into the trouble it is now in by poor strategy and decision making. Does the fact that it's not their core contradict what I'm saying?I'd say 'yes.' The PROs don't have as much leverage over YouTube as they do over music sites. YT can tell the industry, 'fine, we'll just continue the way we've been going and you'll get nothing.' Google has scads more money and lawyers than the record industry; Google makes the entire record industry's annual revenue every two months.
UMG ain't shutting them down.You'll notice that Google Play Music is not the same situation as YT, and is more like Spotify et al. The issue with pure audio streaming is that the music is a primary use of the service, so it's easier for the PROs to beat them down, legally. GPM could be prevented from operating just as other subscription streamers have been (threatened).Put another way, YT still has a bazillion unlicensed items and the licensed streaming services have none. UGC audio sites are somewhere in the middle, but my contention is that they would have to let the PROs crawl up their buttholes just to unlock the doors every morning in order to settle the business model. No offense and I am no lawyer. But I think you get something wrong about NDAs.
It is useful to handle confidentiality of company information. During the process of signing contracts with music giants or even the strategy decision to do that, can apply to an NDA. But at some time this information will go public. An NDA could only apply if you later leak confidential details about contracts for example.There is also a lot of complaint about the management and it's behaviour, NDAs won't stop individuals to reveal someone has bad manners, but there is always a possibility to accuse them of slander.tl;dr obvious fact nda deals behind closed doors. Ooh: nice recommendation.I have somewhat mixed feelings about Soundcloud.
On the one hand I've discovered a load of cool stuff through them, as well as uploaded a few tracks of my own.On the other I received a takedown notice from them after a complaint from Sony about one of my remixes - my most popular track by miles and, at the time, the third most popular remix of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up (long story) - which left something of a bitter taste in my mouth. To add insult to injury the notice arrived on my birthday last year. Haven't really touched Soundcloud much since. Soundcloud is one the rare service I would be happy to pay for. However, their current subscription does not bring me anything interesting.
One idea would be to have a monthly limit, and propose an unlimited subscription at around $1 to $3.And how come I have to pay for the artist album through Bandcamp after listening on Soundcloud? Is there no way to implement a payment straight from Soundcloud?Also, there is an obvious return of the podcast scene: here again, plenty of ways to make money from that. Not showing up to company retreats, circulating pictures of yourself taking private jets and hanging out with celebrities in Ibiza, doing a Ferragamo ad - CEO Alexander Ljung sounds like Erlich Bachman.It's easy to write those things off as petty gripes but I think they are important in that illustrate a CEO who doesn't understand that those are bad 'optics' for employees who are seeing layoffs and lack of funds available to higher talent. And a CEO who doesn't understand the nuances of this might also not see the nuances of lots of other important areas of their business. Why does the board not remove him?
Contents.Track listing No.TitleWriter(s)Performer(s)Length1.' The Last Race' (From the motion picture, 1965)Nitzsche2:392.' ' (1969),3:233.' Paranoia Prima' (From the motion picture, 1971)Morricone3:194.' Planning & Scheming' (dialogue)Tarantinoas Dov &as Omar1:005.'
' (1971)4:096.' Stuntman Mike' (dialogue)Tarantinoas Pam &as Stuntman Mike0:197.'
' (1970)John Michael Hill,3:508.' The Love You Save (May Be Your Own)' (1966)Tex2:569.' Good Love, Bad Love' (1966), Floyd2:1110.' ' (1956)3:2211.' ' (1966), Alan Blaikley2:4712.' Sally and Jack' (From the motion picture, 1981)Donaggio1:2513.' It's So Easy' (From the motion picture, 1980)2:1014.'
Whatever-However' (dialogue)Tarantinoas Kim &as herself0:3615.' Riot in Thunder Alley' (From the motion picture, 1967)2:0416.' ' (1995), April March2:07Extra tracks not on the Soundtrack album. 'Violenza Inattesa' —. 'Gangster Story' —. 'Italia a Mano Armata (main theme)' —.
'La polizia sta a guardare (main theme)' —. ' (original, French version of 'Chick Habit') —. 'Funky Fanfare' —.
'Twisted Nerve' —Sales RegionCertification/salesUnited States 103,000.sales figures based on certification alone^shipments figures based on certification aloneSee also.Notes.