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How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup

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Re: How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup

#21

Post by acqq »

asadhaider wrote: post #13
ansible wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So did SeeqPod have some means by which the artists ( cough , excuse me) the labels were getting paid? They said they were paying a lot for bandwidth, so they weren't just a search engine, but also a streaming service?

I built a third party app using their API, I always wondered the reasons for shutting down the site as it just went down one day with along with its API and a vague message on their homepage. They had a web crawler indexing all publicly accessible songs or mp3 files which made up their search, the API let you query this database including a cached version of the song hosted on their servers. They weren't just a searc…

So they were like a "jukebox" for playing the copyrighted content, streaming it themselves, just like Google's YouTube does. The conceptual difference is that the users themselves upload the material to YouTube, whereas SeeqPod cached the content of other sites (like Google search does, albeit not with music and videos).

I'm not surprised that they were on the list of "problematic" companies of record companies. It's fascinating though to read that Sony wanted to actually be involved with SeeqPod in a bid to compete with others.

It seems that SeeqPod's doom was "just" that they didn't have such power to confront the record companies like Google did?

Re: How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup

#24

Post by hellofunk »

geofft wrote: post #17
JohnyLy wrote: post #2

This is why large companies should be more regulated. They should not be able to put pressure on labels or producers and get all the benefits. What Apple did by killing this startup is not ethical. Plus, by killing it, they tried to get a monopole. Microsoft got so many fines at the time because they had the monopole on PCs. If a large company tries to destroy startups just because they feel threatened, they should b…

I didn't downvote you, but I suspect you're being downvoted because there's a growing suspicion in these comments that this startup was breaking the law. Large companies are more regulated in that regard: Apple can't deploy a questionably-legal music streaming service as easily as a startup can. Startups can afford to do this because the risk is that they shut down, the founders walk away basically intact because of…

>there's a growing suspicion in these comments that this startup was breaking the law

It is very fascinating to me still how the threads in HN tend to always reveal a much larger picture than the tone of the original piece. These discussions often have more insight than the articles that everyone is making popular!

Re: How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup

#25

Post by musesum »

I saw Kasian Franks speak at a meetup in Oct 2007. A friend suggested that I check out SeeqPod since I had worked at an earlier music streaming startup. As I recall, he made a negative comment about the labels, near the end. His position seemed precarious. Warner sued a couple months later.

Re: How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup

#26

Post by zlnimda »

jevgeni wrote: post #16
JohnyLy wrote: post #2

This is why large companies should be more regulated. They should not be able to put pressure on labels or producers and get all the benefits. What Apple did by killing this startup is not ethical. Plus, by killing it, they tried to get a monopole. Microsoft got so many fines at the time because they had the monopole on PCs. If a large company tries to destroy startups just because they feel threatened, they should b…

1. Apple was not a monopoly at that time. 2. How do you rigorously tell, which company is big and which is small? 3. This is a competitive market and ethics is not something that should be regulated. If people have a problem with a company's ethics, they should just stop using their products.

Ethics and moral is regulated in some countries, because it's part of the law. USA are so retarded on that point, that's all.

And people who buys Apple products doesn't care what could do that company just because they are inspired by all the ads and hype around their products.

Re: How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup

#27

Post by sjwright »

danieltillett wrote: post #19
brianmcconnell wrote: post #10

TL;DR Music technology startups suck.

This is not a very HN comment even if true.

Silicon Valley s1 e4:

  So Pied Piper, drop it on me. What is it?

  Well, we started off as a music app.

  Yuck.

  Yeah. Gross. Ugh.

Re: How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup

#28

Post by rimantas »

jevgeni wrote: post #16
JohnyLy wrote: post #2

This is why large companies should be more regulated. They should not be able to put pressure on labels or producers and get all the benefits. What Apple did by killing this startup is not ethical. Plus, by killing it, they tried to get a monopole. Microsoft got so many fines at the time because they had the monopole on PCs. If a large company tries to destroy startups just because they feel threatened, they should b…

1. Apple was not a monopoly at that time. 2. How do you rigorously tell, which company is big and which is small? 3. This is a competitive market and ethics is not something that should be regulated. If people have a problem with a company's ethics, they should just stop using their products.

Was Apple ever a monopoly? And just being a monopoly is not illegal.

Re: How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup

#29

Post by rimantas »

zlnimda wrote: post #26
jevgeni wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Apple was not a monopoly at that time. 2. How do you rigorously tell, which company is big and which is small? 3. This is a competitive market and ethics is not something that should be regulated. If people have a problem with a company's ethics, they should just stop using their products.

Ethics and moral is regulated in some countries, because it's part of the law. USA are so retarded on that point, that's all. And people who buys Apple products doesn't care what could do that company just because they are inspired by all the ads and hype around their products.

I'd argue that Apple has done more positive and socially responsible thing than many other big (and small) companies. And generally people buy Apple products because they are great products. You can only fool once with advertising, however people keep using Apple.

Re: How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup

#30

Post by gutnor »

geofft wrote: post #17
JohnyLy wrote: post #2

This is why large companies should be more regulated. They should not be able to put pressure on labels or producers and get all the benefits. What Apple did by killing this startup is not ethical. Plus, by killing it, they tried to get a monopole. Microsoft got so many fines at the time because they had the monopole on PCs. If a large company tries to destroy startups just because they feel threatened, they should b…

I didn't downvote you, but I suspect you're being downvoted because there's a growing suspicion in these comments that this startup was breaking the law. Large companies are more regulated in that regard: Apple can't deploy a questionably-legal music streaming service as easily as a startup can. Startups can afford to do this because the risk is that they shut down, the founders walk away basically intact because of…

> Apple can't deploy a questionably-legal music streaming service as easily as a startup can.

There is an illustration of that. Big companies using a lot of contractors normally go through intermediary contractor agencies simply to avoid the risk that the contractor become legally recognized as employee. The cost of those intermediaries can be as much as an extra 20% of the contractor rate - that's significant.

As a small startup, initially Uber could operate directly with contractor driver and save that amount. Now they are a big company and the news in California illustrate the kind of risk the intermediary agencies are shielding big business from.

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