TL;DR Music technology startups suck.
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
#12I kept waiting for the payoff, but the article never gave proof that Steve Jobs was behind it. Sounds to me like what happened is that Steve when negotiating with Warner Brothers said something like, "How can you charge us those rates for your music when I have a whole list of places online that have it for free?" At which point Warner said, "We'll take care of those. So the rates can stand."
Fairly clear here: "During one of these breaks I was by myself in the office of the CTO. He came in and we chatted about the state of technology and music. I then thought to ask a question of which the answer would shed light on the real reason behind the litigation and contention technology companies share with old media companies. I asked Howie, why is it that Warner chose to sue SeeqPod? He said that they maintain…
This sounds like the same thing dangero is referring to.
Re: How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup
#13I read this half asleep and a little inebriated but it seemed to evolve into some kind of bizarre self-aggrandizing pitch on how this Kasian Franks is a super-human with deep hard-to-duplicate knowledge and insights spanning multiple important and lucrative industries. Almost some kind of cred piece bolstered by his proxy encounter with Steve Jobs. Weird.
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 search engine, my app streamed the cached content as the direct URLs to the public files weren't always that reliable (slow, 404'd).
Re: How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup
#14Whoever uses "analyzation" publicly deserves to have a failed start up.
Re: How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup
#15I kept waiting for the payoff, but the article never gave proof that Steve Jobs was behind it. Sounds to me like what happened is that Steve when negotiating with Warner Brothers said something like, "How can you charge us those rates for your music when I have a whole list of places online that have it for free?" At which point Warner said, "We'll take care of those. So the rates can stand."
Fairly clear here: "During one of these breaks I was by myself in the office of the CTO. He came in and we chatted about the state of technology and music. I then thought to ask a question of which the answer would shed light on the real reason behind the litigation and contention technology companies share with old media companies. I asked Howie, why is it that Warner chose to sue SeeqPod? He said that they maintain…
Yeah, you can interpret that the way that dangero did. I think the interesting thing there is that streaming music services of that era (including Internet radio) were generally unlicensed and operating on slightly-questionable interpretations of copyright law that had them paying nothing. So, if Jobs' complaint was that there are these other companies that weren't paying a cent, and could play music anyway (including on Jobs' devices), that would "inhibit a deal" because it wouldn't be rational for Apple to pay either.
Depends, as always, what "innovative" means. Are cities against innovation in transportation? If the innovative thing is ignoring regulations that nobody else has thought to ignore, then yes, of course they are. (As with copyright, it's not obvious that the regulations are good, but they are what's on the books.)
Re: How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup
#16This 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.
Re: How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup
#17This 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 the corporate veil, and nobody else is affected. Apple doesn't have that option.
If Apple were forced to work with the startup, the startup would have to adopt the same risk profile and approach to the law as Apple. Arguably, that's exactly what happened here, through Apple calling attention to them.
(Note that I'm not expressing an opinion on whether the law is correct. It is what it is. I hear good reasons to believe that Aereo was wrongly decided, but they still took a legally risky approach and lost at the Supreme Court, and the option for an orderly shutdown via bankruptcy existed because they were a startup doing nothing else.)
Re: How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup
#18I read this half asleep and a little inebriated but it seemed to evolve into some kind of bizarre self-aggrandizing pitch on how this Kasian Franks is a super-human with deep hard-to-duplicate knowledge and insights spanning multiple important and lucrative industries. Almost some kind of cred piece bolstered by his proxy encounter with Steve Jobs. Weird.
I agree, although I think he sort of predisposed me to this attitude right off the bat with the desperate-seeming link to google results that are supposed to prove people called them an "itunes killer" (note: I could not find a single instance of anyone referring to them as an "itunes killer" in any of those results).
In fact, the first result (which is duplicated several times) is calling Songbird an 'iTunes killer' - quotes included - and mentions Seeqpod as one of the plugins, saying:
> it expands your library exponentially, assuming you’re down with the kind of quasi-legality involved
Re: How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup
#19TL;DR Music technology startups suck.
This is not a very HN comment even if true.
Re: How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup
#20This 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.
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