511–520 of 534 posts
this sucks but it's not a new technique music clubs of 15 years ago didn't pay artists for your "12 free CDs" either
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Not necessarily. Cost of users isn't linear with count of users and while it might go down as your userbase grows, you might not have the finances yet to handle that growth. You can't just "be ready to host a 100 million users, tomorrow" in the early stages of your business.
If you don't have a contingency plan for how you will handle - operationally, financially, infrastructure-perspective, monetization - user scaling at speed, then not only is your business a charity, it's a hobby, too. If there are credible signs you will acquire 100m users tomorrow, and you can't walk in to a VC and walk out with a big chunk of money for a small amount of equity, it means you don't have a real busine…
http://blog.shiftyjelly.com/2011/08/02/amazon-app-store-rott...
> All we got was about 300 emails a day to answer over the space of a few weeks, that left us tired and burnt out. For all we know most of the people who wanted our application, now have it. To add insult to injury Pocket Casts relies on a server to parse podcast feeds (allowing instant updates on your phone), and all these new users forced us to buy more hardware just to meet demand. Hardware that we are going to have to support indefinitely at our own cost.
Can you fault Shift Jelly for not being able to see through this?
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No, just what they repatriate. But they already have $22 BILLION in cash in the U.S., and they can borrow more for far less than their income tax rate, so why incur even a little tax?
The only reason for them to be concerned, is they've accumulated a vast amount of debt in a very short amount of time, all to put off dealing with the cash / tax problem. That debt starts to add up, even when you're paying record low interest rates on it. Right now they're losing a billion a year just in interest on their debt, that's up from nothing three years ago. At the rate they're taking on debt, they'll be los…
For everyone suggesting that artists are simply being greedy or unreasonable in expecting Apple to pay them during the trial period, I'd encourage you to consider the hypothetical I posted in the last thread about Apple Music's 3 month trial. It might help contextualize the artists' and labels' complaints: > Tomorrow, Apple announces that it will be introducing an "App Store Subscription." For $9.99/month users will…
I'm not making any statement on whether it's good or bad, right or wrong, but ... Software developers aren't immune to piracy's effects, either. Whether we like it or not, we're quickly shifting into a world where art is only viable as a labor of love. Everything being digital means copying is free. Scarcity has gone out the window. Now if only our increased productivity and automations led to lesser and lesser worki…
If any file hosting service can get shut down for piracy, Apple should be held accountable to the same laws.
Telling artists to work for free while they benefit sounds a lot like asking someone to work on spec, to which I respond: Fuck You, Pay Me (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U)
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That's the thing about "exposure" though. You have no control over it. You can't plan for it. You are missing the point. 100 million was just a number. The corpses of businesses that scaled past their ability to serve their customers are real. But part of your argument has merit: it's the same reason that "exposure" doesn't create album sales. There's no real chance (really, there isn't) that you have a product that…
> You can't plan for it. Sounds like a good way to get sued by your investors. > The corpses of businesses that scaled past their ability > to serve their customers are real. Turns out that a Rails App + someone calling themselves a "Serial Startup CEO" on LinkedIn don't necessarily equate to a business.
> Turns out that a Rails App + someone calling themselves a "Serial Startup CEO" on LinkedIn don't necessarily equate to a business.
Rails, like any other tool/framework, works perfectly well for certain kinds of problems. I would say this is very true for the kinds of businesses that most "serial startup CEOs" are solving. Twitter gave Rails a bad reputation because Twitter's problem was exceptionally bad for Rails at Twitter's scale. In most other cases it's just poor engineering discipline, whether it's in choice of tool or how it is used. It turns out that ActiveRecord isn't really a great tool for dealing with 450M+ write transactions per day. Wasn't designed to be.
Rails is powerful and ubiquitous for very good reasons. The tools that often get the most hate end up quietly doing their jobs or, worse, growing up and becoming better and everywhere. JavaScript, PHP, Lisp, C, Java? And that's just a few programming langauges...There's a holy war over Text Editors that aren't ever going away.
It's not a "web 2.0 startup" specific problem we're talking about. Rapid growth is notoriously one of _the most common_ reasons that companies fail (regardless of if that failure puts them out of business or not).
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Do consumers prefer SaaS? The reaction to Windows and Office becoming subscription software seems pretty uniformly negative.
For me it depends on the software and how much value new features bring to that software. For two examples: I've actually been pretty pleased with Lightroom/Photoshop as SaaS because these apps still often have new innovations that actually make my life easier as a hobbyist photographer. Thus I don't mind paying per month because I'd probably already be upgrading to the new version every year anyway and this is just…
Compared with Office 365, you don't get the free 1TB of cloud storage, the 50GB mailbox, the full online versions of Office, the ability to stream Office programs without installing them (so you can use them on, say, a cybercafe PC), the add-ons and extensions, the cross-platform tablet and smartphone apps, the free upgrade to the next version of Office, and so on.
Office 365 is a huge ecosystem play, whereas OO/LO have no ecosystems.
Otherwise, UI changes are annoying, but the basic Office UI hasn't really changed since 2007. It changes less often than, say, Gmail.
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Apple wants to give it away for free, not the artists. Apple needs the artists, hence they need to pay. Revenue rising with the new service will eat into the other revenue streams from sales. Subscription revenue has already been proven to be laughable with Spotify. Saying that Apple gets to keep all the extra profit because they paid the artists during arbitrary terms set by Apple is incredibly short sighted, as the…
This is simply false. Apple's deal shares more revenue with the artists than any other service. Therefore if users adopt Apple Music, the artists will get more in aggregate. http://recode.net/2015/06/15/heres-what-happens-to-your-10-a... My point is not that I believe that Apple should keep the excess profit. It's that if Apple's service increases the overalls profit for the artists it's reasonable that they should s…
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Have you considered that most of the money goes to the label rather than to the artist? [1][2] Unless you're paying them directly, you're still not paying the artist. Streaming and piracy don't even come close to the drain that labels put on income flow to artists. Artists made just about $23.40 for every $1000 their songs sold for in 2010, according to TechDirt [2]. I wish the world were as you described. But it's n…
Labels put up all the capital (in the Techdirt example, they're getting a return of about 1.5:1 on a hypothetical investment of $4.4 million) but a lot of their bets don't work out, so the acts that do sell well are to some degree subsidizing the ones that don't. This doesn't make as much sense in a world of flatened low-cost distribution channels, but many digiterati have never given much thought to the economics of…
For Taylor Swift, sure. But there is an increasing number of musicians owning their own recording equipment and producing pro-level recordings out of their home (just like starting a software business out of your home is increasingly common).
For these people, they put up the capital. While I won't condone piracy of any copyrighted works at all, it's not reasonable to assume that all musical artists are impacted by copyright infringement in the same way.
Home producers may well be absolutely thrilled to make a few thousand dollars in sales a year, in order to continue funding their own work. Why take that away from them through piracy?
[There's also the argument that small act home producers should be thrilled to get the exposure even if nobody is paying for their recordings. As a home producer myself, I find a small amount of comfort in that, but professional-level recording and music equipment isn't cheap... I'll fund it with other income as needed, but I'd rather have my music outfit be self-sustaining.]
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If you don't have a contingency plan for how you will handle - operationally, financially, infrastructure-perspective, monetization - user scaling at speed, then not only is your business a charity, it's a hobby, too. If there are credible signs you will acquire 100m users tomorrow, and you can't walk in to a VC and walk out with a big chunk of money for a small amount of equity, it means you don't have a real busine…
Accidents happen. Partners cheat. Here is a simple example from Shift Jelly about Amazon App store and their free app of the day. http://blog.shiftyjelly.com/2011/08/02/amazon-app-store-rott... > All we got was about 300 emails a day to answer over the space of a few weeks, that left us tired and burnt out. For all we know most of the people who wanted our application, now have it. To add insult to injury Pocket Cast…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Labels put up all the capital (in the Techdirt example, they're getting a return of about 1.5:1 on a hypothetical investment of $4.4 million) but a lot of their bets don't work out, so the acts that do sell well are to some degree subsidizing the ones that don't. This doesn't make as much sense in a world of flatened low-cost distribution channels, but many digiterati have never given much thought to the economics of…
Labels put up all the capital For Taylor Swift, sure. But there is an increasing number of musicians owning their own recording equipment and producing pro-level recordings out of their home (just like starting a software business out of your home is increasingly common). For these people, they put up the capital. While I won't condone piracy of any copyrighted works at all, it's not reasonable to assume that all mus…