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SoundCloud's Collapse

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Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#251

Post by Dylan16807 »

glogla wrote: post #100
DigitalJack wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Last time I checked, Spotify had 70 million users. That's one employee per 23333 users. Is that too much? How many thousands users should you have per employee? Because if they want to have support at all (unlike, say, Google), they need quite a few employees.

The per-user costs here are web servers and customer support. The bulk of the servers are only doing one thing, so even though there are a lot of them, you could mange them with a hundred people. So that leaves customer service as a per-user cost. It's possible that the customer support department has 2000+ people, and that would be a satisfactory answer. But if that's not the case, then "employees per user" is pretty irrelevant, and the question stands.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#252

Post by bogomipz »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #240
bogomipz wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Then it's not a startup. A startup is designed to grow quickly. Everything we associate with startups stems from the fact that the successful ones do make millions within a decade. For it to be a startup, you have to have a large target market." I am sorry but where is that criteria codified? This is nonsense. Here is an article with 14 founders being asked what defines a "startup" and only one of them mentions mar…

I am sorry but where is that criteria codified? http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

Exactly, that article was written by a VC. That does not make it a universal definition.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#254

Post by k-mcgrady »

jameskegel wrote: post #172
k-mcgrady wrote: post #17

SoundCloud could have been a nice business if they hadn't got greedy. From the beginning (or close to it) there have been various paid accounts for artists which a lot of people used. SoundCloud was the best place to discover new music from unsigned artists. There were unsigned artists with tracks on it that blew up and eventually got picked up by major labels. But: - SoundCloud neglected the platform. - Then they di…

It is funny you mention Bandcamp as your flagship example considering how much 1993 duct tape is holding it together. You cannot compare the UI and tech of the two; Bandcamp has neglected the same Courier New interface since they were a startup. SoundCloud engineering is worlds ahead. They were one of the biggest proponents and pioneers of containerized microservice architecture. They took a lot of beatings so that w…

>> "It is funny you mention Bandcamp as your flagship example"

I didn't. I said they had gotten as far as SoundCloud which was close to the right product but not close enough.

>> SoundCloud engineering is worlds ahead. They were one of the biggest proponents and pioneers of containerized microservice architecture.

As a user, why should I care? After the redesign the product became abysmal to use. There are major bugs (like reordering spotlight in Chrome) which have been around for years with no fix. That's a paid feature, broken in a major browser for years. There are also still (or at least there were recently) some pages using the old interface. They wasted time building Go instead of fixing the almost great product they already had.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#255

Post by k-mcgrady »

res0nat0r wrote: post #247
lukaslalinsky wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a platform for producers, not DJs.

But the underlying issue is that those DJ tracks many times technically did need permission from copyright holders to be posted. Unfortunately dealing with this w/o a ton of money is just a failing exercise. Soundcloud is still good to get DJ mixes from DJ's I like, but I can seeing it go away just due to all of the costs that would accompany trying to ensure they have the right to share everything that is posted by…

>> But the underlying issue is that those DJ tracks many times technically did need permission from copyright holders to be posted.

What the parent and I are saying though is that DJ mixes were a small part of the content in the early days. It wasn't created to host DJ mixes or marketed as that initially. Producers/songwriters/amateurs were the bulk of the content. SoundCloud could have built a decent business by banning copyrighted material and only dealing with original works. There was never any need to get into the messy licensing business.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#256

Post by bogomipz »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #244
bogomipz wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"How many bright technical entrepreneurs have been crushed by rent-seekers milking the royalties out of a 40-year-old track?" Anything after Jan 1st of 1978 is now capped at 35 years, so these are becoming less and less See: http://www.songwriteruniverse.com/gosainkaplanrecapture123.h... >"Copyright has completely lost the plot." Well the copyright of the of recording is there to protect the record label's investmen…

That helps a little bit but it's not automatic and even when that's done the music is still under maximum copyright for another century.

Huh? There's two copyrights - the copyright for the physical recording which is now 35 years and there is the songwriter copyright which is country by country but generally 50 to 70 years. The latter favor the artists so that they can receive royalties for their lifetime. Without that the songs would fall into the public domain while they artists was likely still alive. See:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/sep/12/musicians-copy...

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#257

Post by nitrogen »

dboreham wrote: post #217
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

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

Everything was done by someone else before it was done in a way that people remember, sadly. Anybody remember Click-n-Run? No, just the App Store.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#258

Post by nitrogen »

meowface wrote: post #245
pmarreck wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't someone start a brand new music business model from scratch?

I can't really imagine how. Content needs to be licensed if you want to profit off of it legally, and I'm not sure how you can disrupt licensing unless you already have many billions of dollars to throw around.

Start a new "label" the way Netflix and Amazon have their own productions.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#259

Post by nitrogen »

bogomipz wrote: post #256
Dylan16807 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That helps a little bit but it's not automatic and even when that's done the music is still under maximum copyright for another century.

Huh? There's two copyrights - the copyright for the physical recording which is now 35 years and there is the songwriter copyright which is country by country but generally 50 to 70 years. The latter favor the artists so that they can receive royalties for their lifetime. Without that the songs would fall into the public domain while they artists was likely still alive. See: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/sep…

Without that the songs would fall into the public domain while they artists was likely still alive.

That was the case for centuries. Why is that such a bad thing?

And US copyright is definitely longer than 35 or 50 years -- try uploading an Elvis track to YouTube; I bet someone would notice.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#260

Post by erikpukinskis »

cupcakestand wrote: post #195
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.

How should this work? Once somebody is trending on such platforms, labels will come, give them tons of money, a contract and take over. And take them away from these platforms as well.

Great. They leave, push their listeners over on the younger version of them.

It's like sailing... Every bit of air that hits your sail will end up behind you, dispersed. That doesn't mean your boat will stop. You travel by charting a course where you stay ahead of a pressure differential.

Same in music. You need to find a source of new artists that will continually replenish you as you lose artists to platforms that focus on the stage after you in maturity. The beauty of culture is it always replenishes.

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