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SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

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

#261

Post by derwildemomo »

gryzzly wrote: post #62
camillomiller wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't think it will happen. Worst case scenario, someone's gonna make a very nice deal when buying them. What alarms me is the amount of Teslas, Mercedes-AMG M models and other kind of extremely expensive cars parked in their parking lots and in the area surrounding their HQ here in Berlin. In the last one and a half year I've witnessed such a crescendo of the car show-off level that's I'm worried about their…

You can't even consider buying a car like that with 80k in Berlin, after tax and insurances it becomes ~40k and if you got an expat family and possibly kids that’s enough for owning a bicycle and an OK flat and feeding your family. The offices are rented from an incubator with ties to the gov that has space in the building (and come to have meetings there with their expensive cars).

german here. a net income of 40k will put you somewhere in the top 20% of german households [1], . berlin is generally a really cheap city (see this [2] article from 2014.. cost of living/rents below german average), so saying "that's enough for owning a bicycle" is just not true.

[1] (https://www.bundesbank.de/Redaktion/EN/Downloads/Publication...)

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

#262

Post by babuskov »

colechristensen wrote: post #213
URSpider94 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Torrents are a terrible solution for the long tail of content.

This is false. There are a collection of private trackers run by motivated volunteers and paid for with meager donations which have collections far superior to the best paid services or archives anywhere or at any time in history. They do this by erecting and maintaining virtual economies where what you can get is limited by how much you've shared.

So, you're suggesting that SoundCloud seeds all the files instead of offering the download option. Perhaps this could work if "play-in-browser" vs "download" ratio is not too big.

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

#263

Post by beatpanda »

I seriously don't understand how this is possible. I was the multimedia editor of a college newspaper in about 2008 and we needed a place to host podcasts. We were looking around for a solution that could serve as infrastructure for audio files, and soundcloud was the only game in town.

It still is, and now, eight years later, podcasts as a business are booming. How are they not making enough money selling their product as infrastructure? Their API is so unbelievably good that even a cash-strapped community college was prepared to pay for their service. Are they really not earning enough revenue to keep it going?

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

#264

Post by duaneb »

dustingetz wrote: post #184
strgrd wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are living in the age of data impermanence. There is no mechanism to archive all of the content we are generating efficiently. Soundcloud represents but one of the many websites whose content will be lost forever to the digital dark ages.

When programming with immutability becomes ubiquitous, this problem will be solved. Immutable systems enable permanent & idealized caching at all layers. This is more of a research topic now but is where we are headed in 10 year timeframe i think. Anyway, who cares. What about the last ten thousand years of content that nobody gives a shit about.

This is not a technological problem, it's a money problem.

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

#265

Post by exhilaration »

tripzilch wrote: post #244
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…

If I really like a track I hear on Soundcloud, I download it with youtube-dl.

Thanks, I had no idea this was possible.

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

#266

Post by white-flame »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #205
sbierwagen wrote: post #176

Earlier 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. 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.

Regardless of content, my biggest technical problem with Freenet is that it's a cache, not storage. You don't know when something is going to disappear. Link rot is even more unpredictable on Freenet than the open internet, and if you upload something, you don't know if it's going to need re-uploading.

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

#268

Post by fapjacks »

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…

I can speak directly to this. I recently started making electronic music of my own, and have been building a small community of fans and listeners. I don't want to give the wrong impression here (it's still friends and family and only a few strangers), but if SoundCloud goes down, it will basically destroy the progress I've made so far. I am a bit freaked out right now with this news. I really hope the torch gets passed and I don't have my community pulled out from underneath me.

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

#269

Post by mst »

babuskov wrote: post #262
colechristensen wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false. There are a collection of private trackers run by motivated volunteers and paid for with meager donations which have collections far superior to the best paid services or archives anywhere or at any time in history. They do this by erecting and maintaining virtual economies where what you can get is limited by how much you've shared.

So, you're suggesting that SoundCloud seeds all the files instead of offering the download option. Perhaps this could work if "play-in-browser" vs "download" ratio is not too big.

And play in browser could be handled by something like torrent time, no?

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

#270

Post by multinglets »

aback wrote: post #110
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…

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…

This seems like incredibly abstract, spurious reasoning to say that something which as been around for many years will never be viable ever again.
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