321–330 of 331 posts
This sounds like a serious mistake. All the ones that succeeded asked for forgiveness afterwards rather than wait until they had permission.
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…
Dalton Caldwell at YC Startup School 2010 did a great presentation on the subject talking exactly about the nuances of the music industry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTOlrN5-UGU In October 2010, Caldwell spoke at Y Combinator’s Startup School event at Stanford University about the failures of imeem and of the challenges still facing the music industry. At the event, Caldwell delivered a cautionary message for en…
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Yes, but you could argue that WhatsUp is even more impressive because it can be considered much latter stage and aquisition value also reflects that being 19x more than Instagram.
Where do I sign up for WhatsUp ? Sounds cools.
I read this article few hours earlier when crawling through the new section. It's a surprisingly interesting piece from Buzzfeed but there's a lot of bashing of the CEO, the CTO and one recently hired senior for label relations (who seem to be really odd). This is typical: SoundCloud was an iconic company, its founders worshiped and idealized. Once money runs out, people but especially former employees start to backs…
That's because it's the leadership's fault for the failure.
> business model is by design broken or to put it simply, you just can't do business with music labels.
If the business model is broken, they should pick something else. Again a leadership problem. Becoming yet another streaming service was a major error and completely preventable.
Contrarian here: Soundcloud is an incredibly valuable property. They have obviously had a few managerial cock-ups, but in reality they have massive user buyin, huge network effect, and anyone who can get some equity in them during this current time of massive negative sentiment is going to do VERY WELL. I wish I had a way to buy in at this point.
SoundCloud is still the only place, as far as I know of, where underground and loft electronic music is shared and recognized. It's a pretty big scene and I genuinely don't understand all of the huge negative words surrounding SoundCloud right now, but I guess as someone who uses it every day I don't really pay attention to their business decisions.
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> 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 provid…
The issue is that the companies do not have the originals to fingerprint since they are held hostage by media companies... :/ Maybe there is a way to fingerprint using pirated music or youtube audio?
As for youtube, it was filled with pirated content and was getting sued to oblivion until Google saved them.
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> 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.
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Are you being purposefully obtuse? He's saying that one could make the argument that meeting new people at the epicenter of your prospective user's culture would help growth ultimately. This is also referred to as "boots on the ground" marketing.
No, I find his sentence just odd. I googled 'content corpus' and couldn't find anything meaningful, thus my comment. I assumed something in the direction what you wrote, btw way better articulated, but I wanted to get it confirmed.
As a result, SoundCloud faced a notorious problem of wholesale transfer pricing [1] power. And it didn't have enough money to win or even participate in that battle.
[1] Wholesale transfer pricing = the bargaining power of company A that supplies a unique product XYZ to Company B which may enable company A to take the profits of company B by increasing the wholesale price of XYZ.
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).