How could one build a distributed Soundcloud?
Who's doing this to my internet?
161–170 of 306 posts
Re: Who's doing this to my internet?
#162Another song I loved by an artist I loved was available for sale, but on a tiny third-party music distribution site I'd never heard of, and for $1.50. $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song And then OP wonders why everyone is making free services plastered with ads instead of charging.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair You're putting all the responsibility on the consumer, and none on us, the technologists, the so-called innovators. Where are our innovative powers to come up with alternate busniness models? Where are our backbones to stand up against selling out the internet so that we can get rich quick? B…
I find comments like this to be sorta akin to putting your fingers in your ears and screaming "lalalalala I can't hear you!".
Whenever people say "free" in the context of information exchange, my belief is that they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of information. Information is a proxy for power, and the power comes from asymmetry. If everyone has a level playing field from an information access perspective, you cease to have functioning markets of exchange. The essential point of business is information arbitrage (I know something you don't know so I can buy low and sell high) and free access to information is antithetical to that view.
In short, everyone remembers the first half of that quote: "information wants to be free..." but conveniently forgets the second part: "... But information also wants to be expensive".
There is no "free exchange of information". It is always subsidized by the rich and powerful (no part of the internet's infrastructure is "free" and therefore any "free" exchange of information is a form of charity).
That is to say, it's hard for me to tell people to give up the information which is, in effect, their livelihood.
Re: Who's doing this to my internet?
#163There are many ways to support content creators who distribute via the web, such as Flattr ( https://flattr.com ) and Google Contributor (as nandhp mentioned). Patreon is becoming popular too ( https://www.patreon.com ).
As for music, my personal favourite site is Bandcamp, aside from having an interesting mix of music I believe it has a model that's good for artists and fans alike ( https://bandcamp.com ).
Re: Who's doing this to my internet?
#164Another song I loved by an artist I loved was available for sale, but on a tiny third-party music distribution site I'd never heard of, and for $1.50. $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song And then OP wonders why everyone is making free services plastered with ads instead of charging.
I get what you're saying but that doesn't answer why a hybrid model isn't more common than it is. Show me ads to monetize my free consumption of your service, but if I'm willing to pay (as many definitely are), allow me to subscribe to disable the ads. Why isn't this model more common? Is it because advertisers tend not to want to advertise on a platform where people can opt out of their ads?
There was a post on HN last week where the author provided a reasonable answer (or at least I think so) to this question.
The gist is that people who are willing to pay a subscription to disable ads are exactly the people that advertisers would like to target. When a service assembles a list of such people, the value of that list to the advertiser generally exceeds the sum of the individual payments provided by the subscribers.
You can increase the subscription fee, but then you'll have less subscribers and the ones who are left will be the most valuable to advertisers (i.e. they have the most disposable income). If you decrease the subscription fee, you will have more subscribers but not a lot more, because the primary obstacle for online subscription type services for most people is not the price but the idea of paying for something they are accustomed to getting for free.
So if you get 1000 people to pay $1.00 per month for your niche Swedish grunge music streaming service and double the price, a decent number of them will not like that and some of them will unsubscribe. But if you halve the price to $0.50 per month you won't see many new customers since many people aren't willing to pay even small amounts for music streaming. Advertisers, meanwhile, don't have these mental obstacles and just try to price things as objectively as possible. And they see a narrowly targeted list of people with a highly correlated list of interests and purchasing tendencies and value it appropriately.
This might explain why services like Hulu have gradually introduced more advertising into their paid subscription services. As long as two groups of people are are paying them (customers and advertisers) one will generally be willing to pay more. Economic forces on the internet seem to result in advertisers having more purchasing power here.
Re: Who's doing this to my internet?
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
The part that stuck out to me was when the author talked about her desire to have a long-term archive of her favorite music, but wasn't willing to "wait for 2 days for a CD to ship". I can understand not wanting to deal with CDs or not wanting to spend money on less-favorite songs on the album, but focusing on the delay just doesn't click for me.
If the only way you could get to Hacker News was over a dial-up connection, would you switch to dial-up or would you just go to a different site that loads a broadband speed? Waiting two days to then have to deal with the unpleasant experience of getting a physical CD sucks. Wait two days, then rip the CD, then move the file to your phone... or just find other music you like that can be immediately downloaded. I love…
Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.
Re: Who's doing this to my internet?
#166If paywalls don't work, and ads don't work, some kind of metered-browsing would be a solution. It's so far away from happening, it's hardly worth discussing, but imagine this: * let's say soundcloud could charge $.0001 (or something) for every pageview (or play, or some other interaction that the website chooses) * this fee is mostly transparent to the user, they've signed up once, and have access to all metered site…
What you're describing is very close to https://contributor.google.com/ where you can pay to replace ads with content of your choice. For the content publisher this is a completely transparent operation.
Re: Who's doing this to my internet?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm just not following the connection from ads on the internet to a basic income. I've heard some good arguments for as well as against a basic income. I've never heard ads on the internet as one of them.
The connection is in the "why". Why do website switch to an ad-based revenue model ? (and so, against their initial will). Because the people running it needs money. If you have a basic income, it's easier for people to run websites for free without ads.
I still don't get this line of thinking. Most basic income levels are just above poverty level. And, so, if a web page is run by someone making a basic income and showing no ads, that person will only ever stay at that level. They would still need to show ads or something to make more money. They are already doing this.
I just don't see this as a valid argument for basic income. It is fodder for basic income opponents is what it is.
Re: Who's doing this to my internet?
#168Really enjoyed this post, but I think some of her thoughts point to the root of the problem. > I started by trying to buy each of them separately. > $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song So she wanted to compensate each artist for the songs she loved, but only at an amount of her choosing? I'm assuming she was expecting 99 cents, so we're essentially haggling over $0.50 here. This shows why the advertising model is so pre…
To be fair, we're not haggling over 50 cents. We're haggling over 50 cents times however many songs the person plans to buy.
Re: Who's doing this to my internet?
#169I have deleted my Soundcloud account just yesterday.
I had some mashups (combinations of multiple songs into one) for years posted there and Soundcloud removed three of them in a single day. Although I don't have a written permission to use them, I think that this is a creative process that falls into fair use as long as I'm not trying to make any profit with it. Unfortunately, Soundcloud disagrees.
I deleted my Soundcloud profile and every track from it. It was kind of a rage response, but it had to be done.
Re: Who's doing this to my internet?
#170That's not your internet. That soundcloud content isn't yours, and neither is Soundcloud. Reddit isn't yours. Tumblr isn't yours. Github, where that posting is hosted, isn't yours either. This site, where you linked to the discussion because you don't have a local comment facility, isn't yours. And it's not mine either, no matter how many comments I leave or votes I make or imaginary internet points I win or lose.
Your client, your internet connection, and a server you pay for, on a domain you own, with bandwidth you pay for. That's your internet. You can use that however you want.
Nobody's doing anything to your internet (well, notable exception for mobile carriers and anti-net-neutrality-campaigners). They're doing things to their own internet.