91–100 of 158 posts
I would absolutely pay google $25 to store my music in the cloud. I have 150GB of the stuff and keeping it on my laptop has become impossible.
You can do this already. Write a music player client that can stuff your music into an encrypted blob and push it out on Amazon S3 or something. $22.50/month for storage. The problem is that that monthly price is a bit high for most people.
Isn't this just wishful thinking? Everybody hates labels, and so wishes them dead (and for the record, so do I). But just because everyone wants them to die doesn't mean they will die. Labels sit on content, and their monopoly is protected by the full force of the law. The number of startups in the field or the evilness of label people does seem a little bit irrelevant. There is only one way labels can die: if they c…
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There are several reasons that "signing" is the next, big logical step. Larger venues (most of which are owned by Clearchannel) will not give you the time of the day if you don't have a label behind you. It doesn't matter if you consistently sell out of venues a tier below them. Their booking agent won't even take your call. Sell a million mp3s of your song online? If one of the subsidiaries of the Big Four aren't be…
I've worked with multiple acts (Clark, Broadcast, Plaid) that have played (and sold out) the Bowery Ballroom without major label support. There is a very successful tier of well run larger indies like Warp, Domino, Beggars Banquet. They've worked out that not fucking your golden geese is a good long term play. But yes, even they struggle with the costs of big tours. Touring is expensive.
I came to this conclusion myself about 6 months ago, after Dalton Caldwell spoke at a YC dinner. I realized it was basically hopeless to start startups that touch label music, because even the ones that seem to be succeeding (in the sense of not being sued out of existence) are only allowed to live so the labels can suck investors' money through them. But by creating a startup-free zone around themselves, all the lab…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The situation isn't entirely hopeless. Even within the most aggressive labels (and by that I mean their legal departments) there are parties who do encourage innovation. These are the people that go to bat for artists and are trying everything imaginable to promote them. They try new advertising campaigns, are experimenting with alternate branding, and moving to the sports business model (ie endorsements). Its unfort…
This sounds naive. The people running the labels are very cynical, and the way they're compensated makes them even more so. They don't have equity. They're motivated by bonuses that come out of this year's revenue. So they're not interested in building stuff. They just want to extract large amounts of money, this year, from whoever they can.
This is in someways analogous to what YC, super angels, et al. have done with venture capital. Just like ~$20,000 is about all you need to get a talented founding team started, musicians today can do things on the cheap just as well. The entire system no longer hinges on the $100M home-run in either case.
Everyones been focused on investing in the killer app that will bring the music industry back to equilibrium. The Spotify's and last.fm's will certainly play their part, but its a fundamental shift in capital structure that the industry needs. Making it as a musician is, never has been, nor ever will be easy. There's extremely talented people out there though that, given a little cash and a little support, have the drive and persistence to make a career for themselves. Sans record label.
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I would absolutely not. What if they decide that the music branch of their business is expendable? "We're shutting down our servers in a month, gl;dd". Remember Microsoft.
If it was my music to begin with I hopefully have it backed up somewhere, so no harm done. I'll just go back to doing whatever I did before.
I probably would. $25/year for my collection would make it by far the cheapest file hosting available, and as I have a couple machines and a couple OSes, being able to consolidate everything, synchronize everything, and actually keep my ratings of songs across different systems would be wonderful. Most places I go I can stream music, so I wouldn't even need to keep most / any of it on my devices.
I came to this conclusion myself about 6 months ago, after Dalton Caldwell spoke at a YC dinner. I realized it was basically hopeless to start startups that touch label music, because even the ones that seem to be succeeding (in the sense of not being sued out of existence) are only allowed to live so the labels can suck investors' money through them. But by creating a startup-free zone around themselves, all the lab…
The situation isn't entirely hopeless. Even within the most aggressive labels (and by that I mean their legal departments) there are parties who do encourage innovation. These are the people that go to bat for artists and are trying everything imaginable to promote them. They try new advertising campaigns, are experimenting with alternate branding, and moving to the sports business model (ie endorsements). Its unfort…
> Nobody’s going to pay Google $25 a year to store their music in a cloud. I'd pay that to be rid of iTunes.
Me too. iTunes is just horrible. I'd love a non-iTunes way of getting my music onto an iPod.
edit didn't see the comparison below, but this works very well with Iphone/pod/pad