My obligatory show HN link: https://octave.is is the Vimeo to Soundcloud's Youtube. No crap comments, no ads, no garbage on your artist page.
SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
201–210 of 348 posts
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#202Soundcloud 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.
Well, they do accept money -- they have a €5/month donation plan available here: https://soundcloud.com/pro
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#203[deleted]
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#204Soundcloud 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.
$44million is an awful lot of donations.
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#205Earlier 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…
> "but to a first approximation, nobody actually uses Freenet"
There's a very good reason for that. The people that know about Freenet and could promote it won't because of the issues it has with CP. Due to the distributed nature of the platform, and the high volume of CP that is supposedly hosted there (I've never used it, but that's what I've heard) you basically can't use Freenet without hosting CP.
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#206Soundcloud 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…
Us dorks who have been hacking away on ways to 'decentralize' the net feel vindicated by this kind of thing.
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are these meant to be rhetorical? You decide when you're going to stop calling it a startup. They are venture-backed and founded within the past decade. I'm going to call them a startup. As for question number two, I'll let you count how many publicly-traded companies aren't profitable that have been around for decades. I didn't register an opinion on whether SoundCloud should or shouldn't be profitable, I merely sai…
There is operating at a loss because you are reinvesting (see: Amazon) and there is operating at a loss because your business isn't viable. Soundcloud is somewhere in between those two extremes.
Very true--Amazon would never have a going concern statement issued in its audit, because it voluntarily reinvests what would otherwise be operating profit. I was thinking more along the lines of a company like Sprint, where they are only solvent through issuance of debt and outside investment.
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
err, yes they do.
enlighten us. :)
Sure!
> Mixcloud streams the mixes and radio shows of its registered users and pays performance royalties by way of its agreements with licensing collectives around the world.
http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6221953/mixcloud-...
That's why MixCloud is for mixes and SoundCloud is for individual creators (or their PR machines who effectively control the rights to the material).
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 m…
I was merely responding to GP who just mentioned music. And I think that most of what is released on soundcloud has no substance but that is fine.
> 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.
No, not at all. What I meant to imply is that if something is of worth culturally then at least some people would put some effort in keeping it alive. Like I said, it needn't be a CD. A pirated rip that is spread over bit torrent would be just as good.
The bible is still around because people painstakingly copied it not because some single entity kept one copy alive for good.
As far as general sounds are concerned, there are other places like freesound.org or archive.org. Thus I don't think soundlcoud has a monopoly on sound.
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#210My obligatory show HN link: https://octave.is is the Vimeo to Soundcloud's Youtube. No crap comments, no ads, no garbage on your artist page.
That's exactly what I wished Soundcloud would be. Thanks for the tip!