281–290 of 331 posts
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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.
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Something is old so now you can’t own it? Does a 40 year old house suddenly become public domain just because people like to visit? If you made something, you and your heirs have a right to that, it doesn’t just get confiscated because it’s popular. Some of Bob Dylan’s songs are over 50 years old; does that mean he shouldn’t own the stuff he created? That is just theft. Nobody has a “right” to anything I create unles…
Songs aren't physical things; they are ideas. And you cannot own ideas. Allowing people to own it in the first place was a compromise by the commons so people could make some money from creating things by owning it for a short time. The copyright extensions have stolen these ideas from the commons.
No a song is not an "idea", it is piece of work that someone produced. And a recording of that is very much a physical thing. Why shouldn't the creator of that be allowed to own it?
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Exactly, that article was written by a VC. That does not make it a universal definition.
If an ad hominem is the best criticism you can come up with, it seems correct to me.
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…
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The music industry takes $18bn / year revenue, and movies $62bn. Perhaps I'm missing your point, because that seems like a whole lot of "valuable" to me?
I was referring to the non-mainstream music that is what people originally loved soundcloud for. The figures you refer to are entirely dominated by sales for music and movies of mainstream genres.
I guess I'm failing to understand what your vision of a better music market would look like. Can you describe it?
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Best comment in the thread. It shows that one of SoundCloud's key problem is an oligopolostic industry they are dealing with.
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.
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Did they manage just fine? They had to cut the same extortionate deal with the big 4 records labels and give them an equity steak in the company as well[1]. Given the recent figures I think the jury is still out on whether Spotify and this whole "the more we make the more they take" business model is actually sustainable: "In 2016, Spotify lost just over $600 million ($601.4 million), up significantly from 2015's los…
" ...give them an equity steak... " I think I love that phrase.
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Intent matters. If they promote it, and honestly believe in it, and want to cash out at an IPO, then it's just good old investing. You don't have to think it's the best thing ever. Or that it'll surely work. But you can still think that it's a pretty decent investment, high risk, high expected payout.
not really. they will have to prove they could see a profitable exit. which in this case is dubious since there were other companies doing what they promoted years ahead of them and all had the same outcome. I could try to sell you a magic goose and I can really believe it will lay golden eggs any time now. interested? I even have ten of them myself!
of course not exactly the same thing, not in the same environment. sure, comparisons are important, but it's not beyond reasonable to doubt that for some stated reason soundcloud will be different.
and they're not dead [yet]. (I'm not affiliated with them anyhow, and I too think that their UI is pretty shit.)
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>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…
>"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…
It's one thing to have legal rights; it's another to get people to actually comply with them, and the odds in court of a One-Hit Wonder from 1982 against a big record conglomerate don't seem too favorable, especially when the alternative is to continue collecting a royalty check.
There are a lot of points of inflection for a copyright broker like a label to jump in and attempt to run down the other party's legal war chest (a technique commonly practiced by large companies).
>Well the copyright of the of recording is there to protect the record label's investment. They aren't going to finance a record and it's promotion if someone else can come along and also release the same recording and collect money for it. That was always the plot.
The plot is as defined in the U.S. Constitution:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
Today, the copyright regime stifles the progress of science and useful arts by cloistering our cultural, scientific, and creative heritage into the pockets of a few big corporations for a virtually unlimited period of time (the effective goal being "forever minus one day", as Jack Valenti put it).
Science and the useful arts are promoted by allowing rightsholders the opportunity to make a decent living out of their work for a while. They're not promoted by allowing rightsholders to make one popular thing in their 20s, live off royalties for the next 60 years, and then enable their posterity to be three or four generations of moochers for the remaining 60+ years left in the copyright.
We want to reward work, but not so much that creative people, let alone entire generations of their offspring, are deprived of the ongoing incentive to contribute. "Necessity is the mother of invention", after all.
Progress is not promoted by locking up cultural icons in impenetrable boxes. We're more concerned about a company's brand image than we are about free discourse or historical records.
Progress is not promoted by raining the force of the American government down on hackers and engineers who build communication systems that make copyright difficult to enforce, or by using arcane legal mechanisms like the CFAA and the RAM Copy doctrine to prevent developers from spidering the web.
I am all for allowing companies to profit, I'm a capitalist. But we need not take that narrative to its extreme and assume that we must allow corporations whatever is best for their bottom line without consideration to the larger social, cultural, and economic concerns at hand. People are creative and will find plenty of ways to cope with revised copyright laws. Remember, the primary goal of copyright is NOT to be a dollar-printing machine in the rock star's basement, but rather to promote the progress of science and useful arts, and we should structure things to ensure that is happening.
Copyright as it exists now primarily functions to serve corporate profiteers. The public only accepts it because it doesn't understand how draconian it gets, since most of the time their in-the-course-of-daily-life-infringements don't result in a lawsuit. We need to fix that.
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I don't follow. If they are coding the right things, then a real increase in productivity means better business impact. If they are coding the wrong things, then language doesn't matter. How can a programming language choice hurt the business through some mechanism other than productivity? You could say that such a behavior is "indicative of poor choices" but that's begging the question.
No it doesn't mean a business impact at all, unless it is proven by accounting. Programmer hourly rate * amount spent on doing such tasks = project money spent Now how has the project money spent impacted the overall project costs, compared with the solution that everyone else is using, including the training costs for the rest of team, setting up a new build infrastructure, possible extra tooling support, salary rat…
You're not understanding me. I'm saying that if the work would have this good business impact with the original language, then doing the same thing with better productivity (with the same worker) is better.
I'm not saying that improved productivity is guaranteed to mean business impact. Just that it either makes a good thing better, or it takes a bad thing and doesn't make it worse. If someone is doing the wrong work, their rate of production is not to blame.
> Now how has the project money spent impacted the overall project costs, compared with the solution that everyone else is using, including the training costs for the rest of team, setting up a new build infrastructure, possible extra tooling support, salary rates for new hires?
Other than 'salary rate', all of that falls under productivity. If all those costs are going up enough to drop productivity, then the entire premise goes out the window! The premise was secretly using a different language to increase productivity. Secretly using a different language to decrease productivity is so obviously a bad idea that it's not worth discussing.