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SoundCloud's Collapse

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Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#311

Post by yuhong »

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…

The fun thing is how this is thanks to an economy based on consumption and IP, making higher profit margins good. My favorite however is the Betamax case from the 1980s. I wonder how lawyers took over in the first place.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#312

Post by ranidu »

drizzzler wrote: post #225
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll give them an advance as bait for an exploitative and crappy contract which may well be run in a dishonest way. Given that most sales are downloads or streams now, the only thing big labels can bring to the table is a nuclear level of publicity. And by definition, that's going to be reserved for a tiny handful of multimillion-selling household names. Today's smaller bands and artists - which will be the majori…

Yes. Someone please build this. Message me if you need a designer.

Would love to chat! ranidu@theartistunion.com

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#313

Post by rhizome »

snom380 wrote: post #65
thinbeige wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's understandable that employees vent their frustration in public They still break an agreement. > YouTube is evidence that it _is_ possible, Music isn't their core. And btw the agreement between Youtube and the German GEMA took a decade.

Does the fact that it's not their core contradict what I'm saying? Youtube is still hugely popular for people to share their own recordings and remixes. I know that it took a long time for YouTube to figure out the licensing stuff. As I said, tremendously difficult, yes, but not impossible.

Does the fact that it's not their core contradict what I'm saying?

I'd say "yes." The PROs don't have as much leverage over YouTube as they do over music sites. YT can tell the industry, "fine, we'll just continue the way we've been going and you'll get nothing." Google has scads more money and lawyers than the record industry; Google makes the entire record industry's annual revenue every two months. UMG ain't shutting them down.

You'll notice that Google Play Music is not the same situation as YT, and is more like Spotify et al. The issue with pure audio streaming is that the music is a primary use of the service, so it's easier for the PROs to beat them down, legally. GPM could be prevented from operating just as other subscription streamers have been (threatened).

Put another way, YT still has a bazillion unlicensed items and the licensed streaming services have none. UGC audio sites are somewhere in the middle, but my contention is that they would have to let the PROs crawl up their buttholes just to unlock the doors every morning in order to settle the business model.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#314

Post by rhizome »

snom380 wrote: post #88
thinbeige wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does the fact that it's not their core contradict what I'm saying? Yes it does. Youtube is not about music, their focus lies somewhere else, music complements their product but they are not dependent on it and besides, it's a just one rev stream compared to their main rev channels. Another example: Apple has Apple Music to strengthen the network effect of their products, not because they want to enter the music bus…

Youtube is about user uploaded content, and without a content recognition system in place for video and audio and licensing in place with both the movie and music industry they would have been dead in the water, just like SoundCloud. What other revenue streams would they have that would have worked without that? As the article mentions, SoundCloud eventually did reach an agreement with the music companies, showing th…

So my theory is that the business model is not broken by design as you claim

If the solution is that they just charge $80/mo, then "well duh," but there are other, non-licensing, forces involved at that point. The labels would love their slice of that model, but good luck selling it.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#315

Post by mcguire »

flycaliguy wrote: post #278
mcguire wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people deserve many things. The world, unfortunately, does not give everyone what they deserve.

Thankfully society gave the world a legal system. Now when a business distributes music belonging to another business, compensation through the courts can be pursued in cases of piracy.

When should we expect the legal system to redress all of the other deserving, injured parties?

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#316

Post by flycaliguy »

mcguire wrote: post #315
flycaliguy wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully society gave the world a legal system. Now when a business distributes music belonging to another business, compensation through the courts can be pursued in cases of piracy.

When should we expect the legal system to redress all of the other deserving, injured parties?

Please be more specific of their need and I'll do my best to twist an answer around. In the mean time, I'll continue to feed my family using the modest wage I make mastering records that so many people think are just magic ideas that float in the air with no value.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#317

Post by flycaliguy »

mcguire wrote: post #315
flycaliguy wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully society gave the world a legal system. Now when a business distributes music belonging to another business, compensation through the courts can be pursued in cases of piracy.

When should we expect the legal system to redress all of the other deserving, injured parties?

Please be more specific of their need and I'll do my best to twist an answer around. In the mean time, I'll continue to feed my family using the modest wage I make mastering records that so many people think are just magic ideas that float in the air with no value.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#318

Post by the_common_man »

Myrmornis wrote: post #304
duncan_bayne wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By definition, there will be less money for non-mainstream anything , unless the target audience happens to be particularly rich. I guess I'm failing to understand what your vision of a better music market would look like. Can you describe it?

> By definition, there will be less money for non-mainstream anything Consider a market with genre A with 1 million listeners, and 10 million other genres with 1 listener each. We can agree that the definition of the word "mainstream" will be such that genre A is "mainstream", and yet there is much more money in the sum of the non-mainstream genres. > I guess I'm failing to understand what your vision of a better mus…

> The website can continue to play the role which people have come to love it for, without having to change much, and the employees will be reasonably and stably compensated for working on the website, indefinitely.

The issue is that such websites come to be abused and people upload copyrighted material (like youtube). Then the record company sues and the website cannot stay alive any longer.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#319

Post by thirdsun »

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 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.

I really don't agree with that. While there's room for performance improvements at Bandcamp (the site can be slow on fridays, which is release day for most albums), their user experience and design is just fine and very functional.

Discovering an album via recommendations in your activity feed and actually purchasing and downloading said album is a matter of seconds.

It takes me longer to remove 5 items from a Soundcloud playlist, which is a process that involves opening and closing a modal window 5 separate times.

If one of those platforms feels neglected and dated it's Soundcloud.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#320

Post by Myrmornis »

the_common_man wrote: post #318
Myrmornis wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By definition, there will be less money for non-mainstream anything Consider a market with genre A with 1 million listeners, and 10 million other genres with 1 listener each. We can agree that the definition of the word "mainstream" will be such that genre A is "mainstream", and yet there is much more money in the sum of the non-mainstream genres. > I guess I'm failing to understand what your vision of a better mus…

> The website can continue to play the role which people have come to love it for, without having to change much, and the employees will be reasonably and stably compensated for working on the website, indefinitely. The issue is that such websites come to be abused and people upload copyrighted material (like youtube). Then the record company sues and the website cannot stay alive any longer.

Shouldn't we be able to come up with technical solutions to that problem? For example, I know there are various sorts of "fingerprinting" technologies developed for identifying music fragments -- perhaps it would be possible to automatically identify copyrighted material using these sorts of technologies? Presumably Google does this already for YouTube, so someone make the technology available to indy websites providing upload functionality?
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