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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

#271

Post by neukoelln »

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).

I don't know where you have those numbers from, but they are very inaccurate. The average household income in Berlin in 2012 was 1650€ net per month [1], so that would be about 20k per year. According to what you wrote, Berlin streets should be essentially free from cars, but I can assure you that this is not the case. Let me give you some real numbers. I am married and have a small child. I earn 55k gross, which is ~38k after taxes. My wife earns significantly less, providing another 7k per year. I don't know right now how much she earns before taxes, but our gross income combined is well below 80k. So we have about 45k per year and we easily get by. We have a nice flat, eat out several times a week, take ~3 vacations a year, are paying into a private pension plan, and are still saving money. Granted, we don't own a car, but we could if we wanted. I have no idea if the reported 80k are accurate, but I would be very surprised, as it would be far above the average income for software developers in Berlin (and I think most of their employees are devs).

[1] bit.ly/1Tb8tMz, best I could find right now

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

#272

Post by neukoelln »

roel_v wrote: post #142
_ak wrote: post #37

> While SoundCloud brought in €17.35m ($15.37m) in 2014, it lost a total of €39.14m ($44.19m). Employee wages during that period also increased 42.5% to €17.9m, meaning that the average wage per employee for that year totalled €79,980. Wow, that is ridiculously high, especially so for Berlin.

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.

Companies with hundreds of developers typically have their fair share of junior developers as well that will earn below average.

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

#273

Post by neukoelln »

_ak wrote: post #37

> While SoundCloud brought in €17.35m ($15.37m) in 2014, it lost a total of €39.14m ($44.19m). Employee wages during that period also increased 42.5% to €17.9m, meaning that the average wage per employee for that year totalled €79,980. Wow, that is ridiculously high, especially so for Berlin.

That would be ridiculously high, but do you believe it? Especially 80k on average?

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

#274

Post by herval »

camillomiller wrote: post #31
petercooper wrote: post #2

I hope this is just an alarmist headline. SoundCloud is pretty essential in its space, it's one of the few services that lets you natively get audio on to Twitter, the main place musicians share snapshots of their work and remixes, and a key part of numerous podcasts and ways to embed easily shared audio on the Web. This is one startup I absolutely don't want to see go down the pan.

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…

I'm absolutely certain those cars don't belong to the employees. Also do take in consideration the average would include salaries from execs and teams in SF and NYC.

Also, the amount you take home from 80k, while good for Berlin standards, is hardly enough to buy a 120k car (depending on your personal priorities, of course)

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

#276

Post by jordanlev »

badloginagain wrote: post #171
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 Grooveshark shut down, I lost some fantastic artists. There was a low-distraction music station for programmers [writhem radio] I would listen to, which was gaining some popularity and would have music guests DJ their new stuff. When Grooveshark died, that set of original music spun by the DJs was essentially lost- which sucked because that was my go-to for "work music". I've only started to find the tracks agai…

This is certainly not a replacement for what you've lost, and I don't know if it's even the kind of music you're referring to... but you might be interested in: http://musicforprogramming.net/

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

#277

Post by jeffbr13 »

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.

They use some track-recognition technology to generate tracklists and then remunerate copyright holders from the advertising income, I believe.

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

#279

Post by imtringued »

URSpider94 wrote: post #195
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…

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

If the provider decides to shut down or no longer renews the licence for a piece of content then the content will disappear. Torrents on the other hand only require that at least one seeder has to actively seed the content. Soundcloud has to host the initial seeder anyway which means that they are in practice not worse for longevity than a central file server as long as soundcloud continues business.

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

#280

Post by kyzyl »

weisser wrote: post #258
ghaff wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

See also physical books, letters, LPs, etc.' Until relatively recently it wasn't expected that everything would stand the test of time.

Indeed. I, for one, am very grateful that most of my high school papers have since faded into the abyss ;-)

... or so I hope.

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