SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses • Hacker News Board

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#231

Post by 6stringmerc » Thu, Feb 11, 2016, 6:38 PM UTC

tobz wrote: post #219

6stringmerc wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well then, color me surprised. If I can somehow, without paying at all, upload a two-hour mix to Mixcloud, with all copyrighted material, and have it not taken down.... that's great.

Yeah it is, and the player seems to work fine as well. For DJ stuff on PC I tend to use Traktor Pro and I can even upload the track list file (.NML I think) and it adds tags to the tracks. 90% of what I've used was purchased from Beatport, with the other minor amount being rips from CD purchases over the years.

It really does seem to be the proper platform for DJ mixes.

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#232

Post by pmarreck » Thu, Feb 11, 2016, 6:38 PM UTC

api wrote: post #206

cmyr wrote: post #103

Soundcloud 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.

So where's that decentralized SoundCloud?

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#233

Post by mful » Thu, Feb 11, 2016, 6:38 PM UTC

I use Soundcloud for hours every day, and would GLADLY pay a Spotify type premium for it. As others have noted, it has an incredible amount of music that exists nowhere else (including a lot of non-EDM), but it is a great listening platform for many other reasons. The biggest, for me, is that SoundCloud has far and away the best discovery mechanisms. The 'play related tracks' feature is the most effective radio I've found (better than Pandora, light years better than Spotify) and my feed is always full of new songs that I enjoy.

But SoundCloud has one big problem holding it back, in my opinion:

Getting a great SoundCloud experience requires a lot of upfront work. To have a good feed, you need to find and follow a bunch of artists and/or 'like' a bunch of tracks (from when I first started: the default feed, or low-data feed, gets stale quickly, and had many songs that did not align with my preferences). This sounds simple, but it's not, as SoundCloud is designed for discovery rather than building/organizing your music library. For example, there is no library-like simple list view, and you can't filter/sort your 'likes' as you can in Spotify/iTunes. Also, the radio-like features are not immediately apparent, making it hard to bootstrap your SoundCloud preferences by passively listening/liking tracks as you go.

Looking to the alluded future monetization: The ads are infrequent, and not at all annoying. Unless they ramp up the ads, it will not be a big incentive to pay for premium.

There is really nothing like SoundCloud if you like EDM or EDM-influenced indie music (think Miike Snow).

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#234

Post by cfcef » Thu, Feb 11, 2016, 6:41 PM UTC

cmyr wrote: post #103

Soundcloud 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…

Your friend might want to look into Archive Team, then. See how well their current tools support a crawl of Soundcloud, that the documentation is up to date, plan out how a pre-closure crawl would go, and do a small test run to check that everything goes as it should.

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#235

Post by Houshalter » Thu, Feb 11, 2016, 6:43 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #134

cmyr wrote: post #103

Soundcloud 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…

See also the original MP3.com. >it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it were to disappear. This is something I haven't heard a great deal about, and it's something that concerns me about other media platforms like Medium. Of course, in all fairness (and modulo archiving by organizations like the Internet Archive), media and writing hosted on a personal web site is at least as likely to just disappear at some poi…

Link Rot is a serious problem for the internet in general. From Gwern: http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs

>In a 2003 experiment, Fetterly et al. discovered that about one link out of every 200 disappeared each week from the Internet. McCown et al 2005 discovered that half of the URLs cited in D-Lib Magazine articles were no longer accessible 10 years after publication [the irony!], and other studies have shown link rot in academic literature to be even worse... Nelson and Allen... examined link rot in digital libraries and found that about 3% of the objects were no longer accessible after one year.

>Bruce Schneier remarks that one friend experienced 50% linkrot in one of his pages over less than 9 years (not that the situation was any better in 1998), and that his own blog posts link to news articles that go dead in days; Vitorio checks bookmarks from 1997, finding that hand-checking indicates a total link rot of 91% with only half of the dead available in sources like the Internet Archive; the Internet Archive itself has estimated the average lifespan of a Web page at 100 days. A Science study looked at articles in prestigious journals; they didn’t use many Internet links, but when they did, 2 years later ~13% were dead. The French company Linterweb studied external links on the French Wikipedia before setting up their cache of French external links, and found - back in 2008 - already 5% were dead. (The English Wikipedia has seen a 2010-2011 spike from a few thousand dead links to ~110,000 out of ~17.5m live links.) The dismal studies just go on and on and on (and on). Even in a highly stable, funded, curated environment, link rot happens anyway. For example, about 11% of Arab Spring-related tweets were gone within a year (even though Twitter is - currently - still around).

>My specific target date is 2070, 60 years from now... Even at the lowest estimate of 3% annual linkrot, few will survive to 2070. If each link has a 97% chance of surviving each year, then the chance a link will be alive in 2070 is... ≈0.16 (or to put it another way, an 84% chance any given link will die)... If we try to predict using a more reasonable estimate of 50% linkrot, then an average of 0 links will survive... It would be a good idea to simply assume that no link will survive.

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#236

Post by gibblz » Thu, Feb 11, 2016, 6:46 PM UTC

jlarocco wrote: post #144

aback wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when people argue that "digital distribution is essentially free," then ask why Soundcloud is losing money, since distributing music is literally their only real cost of doing business. we will continue to endure substantial cultural losses for so long as people continue to believe that content can & should be distributed and consumed for free. ultimately some sort of micropayments + blockchain-like-cloudserving migh…

Honestly, I don't think the solution even requires that much creativity or innovation. Just in the past 3 or 4 months I've found half a dozen or more artists on Soundcloud, then headed over to Bandcamp or Amazon to buy and download their music. It would be awesome if I could buy it right there on Soundcloud. Every song could have a "Buy MP3" and "Buy Album" button right there by the Like, Share and other buttons. May…

This functionality actually already exists. Artists can add a purchase link to the store of their choosing, and it will appear right next to the "Share" button.

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#237

Post by pmarreck » Thu, Feb 11, 2016, 6:48 PM UTC

greggman wrote: post #156

Soundcloud seems like the only service that allows other sites to use the music data. By that I mean the ability to use actually use the track's sample data for creative coding audio reactive projects like http://vertexshaderart.com On the negative side, as others have pointed out, they haven't done much to make the site better for various definitions of better. I've found searching fairly lacking. I'd love something…

TIL about vertexshaderart.com. Amazing and right up my alley and making me feel like I was under a rock!

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#238

Post by roel_v » Thu, Feb 11, 2016, 6:51 PM UTC

distances wrote: post #187

roel_v wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that 'ridiculously high'? That's say e4000/month after taxes (if total tax pressure is 40%). These costs also include e.g. the director's salaries, which I presume are more than 80k/year for a 10 year old company with 200 employees.

For developer positions in Berlin 4000 € after taxes would be a considerably high salary.

Glassdoor says 50-65k before tax for run of the mill 'software dev' in Berlin, with soundcloud being on the upper end of that range; and it seems I underestimated tax pressure with 40%. Considering that 80k is the average (including directors, mgmt, legal, ...), I wouldn't say that those salaries are 'outrageous'.

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#239

Post by tetraodonpuffer » Thu, Feb 11, 2016, 6:56 PM UTC

mful wrote: post #233

I use Soundcloud for hours every day, and would GLADLY pay a Spotify type premium for it. As others have noted, it has an incredible amount of music that exists nowhere else (including a lot of non-EDM), but it is a great listening platform for many other reasons. The biggest, for me, is that SoundCloud has far and away the best discovery mechanisms. The 'play related tracks' feature is the most effective radio I've…

you can pay a spotify-type premium for it, if you want to support them just upload to a pro account (even if you don't upload any music). I am going to do that myself as I just realized pretty much 90+% of the listening I do at work while coding is on soundcloud (I also have a subscription to google music, but don't use it as much for EDM)

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#240

Post by lavezzi » Thu, Feb 11, 2016, 6:58 PM UTC

gibblz wrote: post #236

jlarocco wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I don't think the solution even requires that much creativity or innovation. Just in the past 3 or 4 months I've found half a dozen or more artists on Soundcloud, then headed over to Bandcamp or Amazon to buy and download their music. It would be awesome if I could buy it right there on Soundcloud. Every song could have a "Buy MP3" and "Buy Album" button right there by the Like, Share and other buttons. May…

This functionality actually already exists. Artists can add a purchase link to the store of their choosing, and it will appear right next to the "Share" button.

You didn't correctly read what he said. He wants an option to directly buy mp3s (etc.) from SoundCloud directly with one click.