That looks like sloppy reporting or at least a misleading headline. Although I guess anything "could" happen.
SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
191–200 of 348 posts
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
there are two excerpts from their financial accounts in there if that makes you any happier (and justifies my use of the plural :) one from the P&L and one from the staffing section The article is working on what's publicly available (there's a surprise), as they can hardly work on what Soundcloud hasn't released! My guess would be that if Soundcloud had managed to get into profitability that quickly then soundcloud…
Wait... _BETA_.companieshouse.gov.uk? Company records available for free? A website that is online 24x7 and doesn't close at night? I've obviously been living under a rock
yeah it's super useful, nice interface and all the docs are hosted on S3 which is interesting...
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#193Unfortunately, none of this is surprising. Soundcloud has no real revenue model due to a seemingly inability to court rights-holders, and the product is mediocre at best. Soundcloud provided an outlet for the indie and electronic music communities to share and consume music early on, and that has more or less remained their bread and butter to this day. Even if they were charging end-users for access, the viability of it is as a competitor to Spotify and Apple music, at the prevailing market price-point ($10 / month) is slim. Ultimately Soundcloud is a niche product competing against broad market products with no real path to revenue other than somehow bringing mainstream music onboard. And it seems pretty clear that mainstream music isn't interested in collaborating with Soundcloud.
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#194Soundcloud is absolutely ubiquitous in the electronic music community. I was talking about this with a friend recently who is a programmer and a (relatively) well known composer, and she made the point that soundcloud actually represents a very important cultural document; there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it…
> there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it were to disappear. I don't know. We would obviously loose a fragment of history but if those tracks were so important culturally then they would have been distributed more widely. For instance, pressed on CD or vinyl or utilized in a movie or pirated in some way. While I…
I think you're taking a rather narrow view. soundcloud has become a storehouse not just for music, but for SOUND -- ambient environments, spoken word, audio diaries, etc. saying that anything of value is released on CD already would be like saying that the personal correspondence of Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, etc is worthless because we already have their published books.
In this way, I think it's also unique vs. other music sharing sites, in that people don't typically post their recording of a Chinese night market on their CDBaby or YouTube channel ...
Soundcloud:sound :: Flickr:photos
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you used something like ipfs, syncthing, or generic torrents you could easily distribute anything you want at large scale at no cost, as long as people were interested in having it. If you choose to centralize distribution on one web server that is your own choice, but the better phrase is "digital distribution is free if you want it to be". I doubt we will see a return to pay-to-listen models in music. Reality ha…
If you used something like ipfs, syncthing, or generic torrents you could easily distribute anything you want at large scale at no cost, as long as people were interested in having it. The problem there of course is the "as long as people were interested in having it" part. You can publish stuff for free on Freenet, but to a first approximation, nobody actually uses Freenet. If a torrent/magnet URI runs out of seeds…
This. Torrents are a terrible solution for the long tail of content.
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#196Soundcloud is absolutely ubiquitous in the electronic music community. I was talking about this with a friend recently who is a programmer and a (relatively) well known composer, and she made the point that soundcloud actually represents a very important cultural document; there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it…
Soundcloud is so important for the programmer community that it is unthinkable that it will just disappear. All those background music I enjoy as I code, all those chip-tunes, livecoding musics etc. I hope they open some donation so that I can help.
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mixes get kicked off of SoundCloud because they have a higher chance of one of the X songs/samples in them being picked up in the copyright detector net. The fact that it doesn't happen, or that it happens less, on MixCloud only goes to show that MixCloud isn't playing ball with copyright holders, or hasn't been approached to do so. They don't have some magical blanket license to let anyone, anywhere, for free, uploa…
err, yes they do.
enlighten us. :)
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#198Soundcloud is absolutely ubiquitous in the electronic music community. I was talking about this with a friend recently who is a programmer and a (relatively) well known composer, and she made the point that soundcloud actually represents a very important cultural document; there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it…
agree 100% on EDM and soundcloud, OTOH there also are a LOT of musicians that deal with film scoring, it seems very used for demo / mockup purposes so that would be difficult for them as well if it closed
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll just go to my crib-sheet response: SoundCloud isn't for "mixes" as in DJ sets. That's what MixCloud is for. That's why DJ mixes get kicked off SoundCloud routinely, and I won't fault them for it. MixCloud is for mixes, SoundCloud is for creators, in my opinion.
Mixes get kicked off of SoundCloud because they have a higher chance of one of the X songs/samples in them being picked up in the copyright detector net. The fact that it doesn't happen, or that it happens less, on MixCloud only goes to show that MixCloud isn't playing ball with copyright holders, or hasn't been approached to do so. They don't have some magical blanket license to let anyone, anywhere, for free, uploa…
Actually quite the opposite - from what I read, MixCloud did get into arrangements with numerous labels/rights holders and therefore the risk of having a mix taken down is greatly reduced - and it's why MixCloud doesn't approve of people uploading individual tracks.
DJs are in the derivative work business, no matter how much they claim to be innovative or 'making something new!' by mixing tracks together, and while I'm an advocate for Copyright Reform, for now the way laws and commercial rules are written, DJs making and uploading mixes don't have a leg to stand on in the SoundCloud model.
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#200Soundcloud is absolutely ubiquitous in the electronic music community. I was talking about this with a friend recently who is a programmer and a (relatively) well known composer, and she made the point that soundcloud actually represents a very important cultural document; there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it…
> there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it were to disappear. I don't know. We would obviously loose a fragment of history but if those tracks were so important culturally then they would have been distributed more widely. For instance, pressed on CD or vinyl or utilized in a movie or pirated in some way. While I…
It's generally unfortunate when major batches of content--whether MP3s or an online magazine--end up inaccessible to the future. And I find it a bit worrisome that a relatively small non-profit plays such an outsized role in archiving the Internet.
That said, a huge number of works that people create have always ended up in the trash, thrown out, or archived only in a few obscure places. What makes it a bit frustrating with digital is that it's relatively practical to save so much more--if perhaps not necessarily everything that's even been posted to a public site--but few really good mechanisms (or funding) to do so.