Why I Never Built My SoundCloud Killer
blackhole12.blogspot.com
Why I Never Built My SoundCloud Killer
1–10 of 18 posts
Re: Why I Never Built My SoundCloud Killer
#2If you responded to the copyright takedown request(s) in an automated fashion, you might have a chance.
I don't know if it's a requirement for you to police it. Only to respond to the DMCA requests. So make the website, under a corporation (which is easy to do), then build a system which auto takes down pending moderation for every DMCA request.
Obviously, this won't scale immediately, but use mechanical Turk to review the requests initially. Once you know content is copyrighted, keep it. Use it to compare against other uploads.
YouTube doesn't screen every copyrightable material.
Once you get started, get some money, then try to make deals.
Re: Why I Never Built My SoundCloud Killer
#3I think it's interesting that pretty much every major media company has had to invent their own ContentID and that there are very few companies in the copyright space. Actually, the two companies I knew of were both run by the same founders and both acquired pretty quickly (Rightsflow acquired by Google/Youtube and Source3 acquired this past week by Facebook)
Re: Why I Never Built My SoundCloud Killer
#4I had considered building a SoundCloud clone a few years back, but dismissed it for pretty much the same reasons as mentioned in the blog. The cost of the encoding, storage and CDN endpoints was just too much for even a rudimentary song sharing service.
NB: I use SoundCloud to share my own recordings and song ideas, and to listen to other people's ideas and do collaborations with them. NOT to listen to mainstream music or podcasts. I wanted my clone service to facilitate that.
Which is why I had never really factored in copyright violations. But I am thinking as well as human moderation, couldn't such a service also employe a HackerNews style voting system - basically if a song started getting flagged by users as 'copyright violation', it would start to disappear down any searches or catalogues, until enough votes caused it to disappear from the service altogether?
Re: Why I Never Built My SoundCloud Killer
#5I think SoundCloud as a service to the consumer is great. Not so much on the business side... Which sucks because so much of the music in my playlist today I found originally through SoundCloud.
Re: Why I Never Built My SoundCloud Killer
#6I had considered building a SoundCloud clone a few years back, but dismissed it for pretty much the same reasons as mentioned in the blog. The cost of the encoding, storage and CDN endpoints was just too much for even a rudimentary song sharing service. NB: I use SoundCloud to share my own recordings and song ideas, and to listen to other people's ideas and do collaborations with them. NOT to listen to mainstream mus…
>couldn't such a service also employe a HackerNews style voting system - basically if a song started getting flagged by users as 'copyright violation', it would start to disappear down any searches or catalogues, until enough votes caused it to disappear from the service altogether?
depends what your users' interests are. if they genuinely want the site to only offer legal music, then sure it might work. but if most of your users are using the site as a free streaming service, it's not in their interest to remove music that they like.
Re: Why I Never Built My SoundCloud Killer
#7Can someone shine a light on how a site like Hype Machine is able to stay alive and prosper?
Is it b/c they don't host files and simply scrape the web for audio? Is that the key?
Re: Why I Never Built My SoundCloud Killer
#8> You can't detect copyright infringement without access to the original copy.
This sounds like an interesting problem. Somehow, buy borrow or steal the top 10,000 (?) tracks on spotify so you can finger-print them.. hmm probably more like 100,000 tracks.
But yeah, your co-founder better be a lawyer.
Re: Why I Never Built My SoundCloud Killer
#9Can someone shine a light on how a site like Hype Machine is able to stay alive and prosper? Is it b/c they don't host files and simply scrape the web for audio? Is that the key?
They are going to die unless people pay:
https://theoutline.com/post/1915/can-small-businesses-surviv...
They also update to use SC on the backend. They used to host the songs, but now it's some agreement thing with SC.
Was a die-hard HypeM user, and they lost me when they partnered with soundcloud bc offline listening was the _best_ feature of the app in an NYC subway...
Re: Why I Never Built My SoundCloud Killer
#10> You can't detect copyright infringement without access to the original copy. This sounds like an interesting problem. Somehow, buy borrow or steal the top 10,000 (?) tracks on spotify so you can finger-print them.. hmm probably more like 100,000 tracks. But yeah, your co-founder better be a lawyer.
1) you wouldn't go the fingerprint route until you have scale.
2) if you have scale, you'll say, hey, lemme fingerprint your whole library so we can automatically handle this for you.
3) I'm 99% a company sells this service, I forget the name.
EDIT: found this: https://tunesat.com/tunesatportal/home