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SoundCloud's Collapse

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Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#211

Post by bogomipz »

Kurtz79 wrote: post #83
DigitalJack wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good grief, what the heck does Spotify do with 3000+ employees?

Definitely NOT making a mobile app with decent UI. Jokes aside, having to negotiate with tons of artists and their labels/managers, I imagine their legal/business department is significantly bigger than that of most tech startups.

They negotiate with very few artists and their managers directly. The reason is that there are very few artists who have that kind of control of their content.

AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles and Taylor Swift come to mind, but there are very few artists who have a say in whether or not their catalog can or can not be streamed. Those artists made wise business decisions at some point and/or were able to throw their weight around. Here are some notable hold outs as of 2016 anyway:

https://consequenceofsound.net/2016/02/which-artists-are-sti...

Using Pink Floyd as an example, the decision was there's and not their record label EMI:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/pink-floyd-catalog-ar...

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#212

Post by bogomipz »

thinbeige wrote: post #36
xfer wrote: post #10

> According to one former SoundCloud Berlin employee, a lack of direction from Wahlforss, who served as chief technology officer, made things worse, with some engineers going rogue and rebuilding their colleagues’ work in their preferred programming language. Does this happen at other startups?

Great quote and I had to smirk when reading this. It happens all the time. I remember a time when hiring RoR guys. Even the codebase was already in RoR, every new RoR dev said 'OMG we have to rewrite the entire app, the codebase is a mess'.

Sorry, what is RoR?

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#213

Post by codegladiator »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #104
codegladiator wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For it to be a startup, you have to have a large target market. Making up your own definition of startup ? A start-up is just a newly established business.

Actually, I'm using http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html That's like calling a newly established barber shop a startup. It's not. The GP is working on a podcast hosting company. The market for people who want to host podcasts is miniscule. Large enough to sustain a company, sure. But that's not a startup.

So by that logic, a startup which which provides barber to your doorstep to trim your hair is not a startup ? Also, what about start-ups selling fruits/vegetables ?

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#214

Post by rythie »

skrebbel wrote: post #132
sgentle wrote: post #47

Never do a music industry startup unless you have a billion dollars, can raise a billion dollars, or plan to be acquired by a company with a billion dollars to spare. That's the table stakes for going toe-to-toe with the big three. They'll bleed you to death with licensing fees, deputise you into their copyright enforcement police, upload their songs to your platform on one hand while suing you with the other, and al…

Well, Spotify managed just fine. They didn't have those billions when they started out in Sweden.

Who said you need billions to get started, you need a billion to keep going, when the music industry notice you. Spotify have raised $1.56bn to date: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/spotify

Which included $1bn in debt just last year: https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/29/stream-with-the-devil/

They wouldn't have raised that, if they were "just fine".

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#215

Post by parasubvert »

Open source remains an important force of continuity for technology professionals, as even though SoundCloud is failing, they brought us a very important piece of infrastructure that will carry on: http://Prometheus.io

It has been catching on like wildfire everywhere I look, even big conservative companies. It feels like the new Nagios (in a good way).

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#216

Post by jamescostian »

vec wrote: post #210
wolco wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is the big loss. Having a place where one could discover new music has so much value over being served the same songs by the same few artists

Does it though? I'd like this to be true, but in practice it seems like most people (me included) strongly prefer hearing songs they already know most of the time, enjoy songs more with repetition, at least up to a point, and are more than willing to learn to like almost anything with high enough production value. Some people are music snobs as a hobby and most go on discovery quests from time to time, but it honestl…

I think most people like variety. Yes, some people always listen to the same 50 songs, and some people never listen to the same song twice. But most people don't go their whole lives without expanding their musical tastes.

While iTunes and Google Play gave chart toppers the spotlight, SoundCloud turned amateurs into professionals. "Nobodies" could put their music on soundcloud and get them streamed millions of times, and that recognition could eventually get them a chance to sign on a dotted line

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#217

Post by dboreham »

wolco wrote: post #180
skewart wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure that's true. Their key problem is that they didn't understand how much value there is in up-and-coming, amateur, and underground music. The record labels only have power when it comes to their catalogue. SoundCloud could have truly disrupted the labels by providing an alternative way to promote, monetize, and discover music. But they somehow got off that track.

And that is the big loss. Having a place where one could discover new music has so much value over being served the same songs by the same few artists

If that were true then MP3.com would have been a stunning success 18 years ago.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#218

Post by drenvuk »

Is it not possible to make a browser extension or app to "wrap" youtube and turn it into a soundcloud like service? Seems to me they could transition a lot of their users over to it and possibly save money.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#219

Post by cookiecaper »

bogomipz wrote: post #155

>"In November 2014, SoundCloud closed a deal with Warner Music Group, giving the label an undisclosed cut of revenue from ads, a 3%–5% stake in the company and protection against past copyright infringement from the label." This sounds like terms dictated by the Mob. It's quite telling that the deal also conferred ownership on a content holder in order to be able to license and pay handsomely for their content. This…

>This sounds like terms dictated by the Mob.

The simple fact is that copyright protections are far too strong. The copyright cartel doesn't need a shady network of 400 pound men to enforce their schemes; they just use the U.S. Attorney's office instead.

How many bright technical entrepreneurs have been crushed by rent-seekers milking the royalties out of a 40-year-old track? Copyright has completely lost the plot. We need to rein it in, with the awareness that this will be no small task, as it amounts to taking away a license to print money from some of the largest companies in the world.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#220

Post by dkersten »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #119
dkersten wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I personally buy into that definition too, it IS very much a valley centric definition that much of the rest of the world doesn't follow. At least, not to the letter. So be aware that you may be speaking to people outside of your bubble when throwing around black or white definitions like this, because they may have their own differing definitions. Besides, there have been multiple "podcast startups" (by the va…

If podcast hosting is used as a stepping stone into a more general market, that could work. But the GP indicated they were small and moved slowly, so they can't really leverage that. It doesn't matter whether it originated in the valley. It's not like calling an elevator a lift. A startup is a technical term with a precise meaning. You can call your bar a startup if you want, but that doesn't make it true.

> A startup is a technical term with a precise meaning.

My point is that it's really not. The term existed before the valley-definition and it exists outside of the valley-definition. Yes, Paul Graham and others popularised that definition (and I personally think it's a good definition and usually use t as that), but it has existed and continues to exist with other meanings, so it's far from a "precise technical term".

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