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SoundCloud Will Be Worth More Than Spotify
- exolymph 11y agoUser-generated content is a fantastic business for the companies that win each category (e.g. music).
- dplgk 11y agoArticle states that users generating content aren't interested in money. Wrong. Users have to sell through bandcamp because for some reason, SC hasn't provided a market place. Article states how artists like Skrillex made a name for themselves but posting remixes of famous songs on SC. SC now removed remixes, citing copyright infringement, even on legal, commissioned remixes. SC flags your song if the title contains a famous artist's name or song title even if your song didn't actually sample the famous song. After 3 strikes, your account is banned, all fans and followers lost. Smart artists are leaving SC in droves. SC is hosting music from major labels. Users pay nothing to listen. How are they making money? The only users that pay are the artists uploading their own work. Yet those artists have no way to make money on SC. SC has sponsored tracks inserted into listeners feed. That doesn't pay the bills. Also, the promoted track is not based on the user's taste so they mostly hear songs they hate.
- ypeterholmes 11y agoExactly. Between solid tech and a massive userbase, Soundcloud once had the monumental opportunity suggested in the article. But they have played their cards quite poorly which means this article is ridiculous.
- aikah 11y agoI've been on Soundcloud for a looong time and unlike Spotify , it never was a radio but some paid cloud hosting for mp3 with social features. So sound cloud relied on paid customers who uploaded their music on the platform for promotion purposes. I don't think they ever had any opportunity to turn into a Spotify competitor. That's not how people use Soundcloud. I think however Beatport is trying to be the Spotify for IDM. not sure how it is working for them. Beatport was "the shit" back then and made a LOT of money. The problem with Beatport is that it works as long as djs are compelled to renew their catalogue. it became big thanks to "Electro", then Minimal techno , then it made Deadmau5 big, after Deadmau5 nothing really happened in the IDM world, so Beatport success kinda went down. Neither Dubstep nor HipHop ever were best selling genres on Beatport. And today, MP3 sells don't bring much revenue even for big names. I'd be surprised if TOP 10 beatport artists sell more than a 1000 units per best selling track today. It used to be different.
- wavefunction 11y agowhat does IDM stand for? The genres and artists you've mentioned are what I consider fads or the mainstream trends of electronic music for the past ~15ish years. There is plenty of interesting things going on in electronic music, depending on your tastes. Trap sort of replaced dubstep as far as accessible popular and mainstream EDM. Deep house seems to be popular these days. Drum n bass is having a weird spate of popularity and soul-searching at the same time. Future bass seems to be a defined genre now. *none of this post is offered in arrogance, merely stating my honest opinions which are devoid of value judgements.
- aikah 11y ago> IDM Sorry I meant EDM. D'n'B is kinda dead except for the UK scene which has always existed. First time I hear about Future Base , I checked some stuff and but to me it's just trap/dubstep again. While you mentioned "fads" ,well that's what drive the business. Right now there is no real enthusiasm toward something fresh and new, aside from a few live acts but they don't qualify as EDM in my book.
- joshjkim 11y agoIDM could also stand for "intelligent dance music" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_dance_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_dance_music lame term i think, but it exists!
- Symbiote 11y agoNot quite so lame as "electronic body music", which is one of my preferred genres. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_body_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_body_music
- koffiezet 11y agoAs a fan of the genre described by that term - I agree that it is a lame name. Really don't get it where that comes from tbh...
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- TD-Linux 11y agoThey seem to be moving in the direction of attracting more big-name labels, which are often Flash DRM-protected. This is the exact opposite of what I use Soundcloud for, but presumably they have numbers that disagree with my use...
- bitJericho 11y agoTc got the news wrong? Shocker there. Hn needs to ban tc.
- VOYD 11y agoAgreed, Very Wrong. I've been on SC for 4 years now, and never seen a dime. The original article is a fluff piece, fluffing up the "free exposure/audience building" falsehood.
- dano 11y agoUser generated content in the music business has been tried over and over again. MP3.com, MySpace, Garageband, and many others. The problem is that the consumer wants the hits, the names, the current hot artists. They don't want the long tail of unknown artists. Sure there are those who like to check out the new stuff and occasionally something pops. Soundcloud will eventually end up paying the same royalty rates as Spotify, Pandora, Rhapsody, Slacker, and all the rest thus eliminating this "SoundCloud has much better unit economics than Spotify." What is to stop Spotify from adding an artist upload feature? The macroeconomic factors on why all of the music delivery services are eventually going to fall in value has to do with Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon treating music as a valueless commodity. No one can charge more than iTunes for a song or streaming service. Apple sets the market price and operates their business at low margins due to ancillary revenue from hardware. If you're a music service and have no ancillary revenue to increase overall margins, you've got a classic business problem. The comparison to Youtube is also flawed because it doesn't mention that AdSense is the ancillary revenue that has kept YouTube afloat these many years. Furthermore, the content owners (copyright holders) will continue to raise prices and cut exclusive deals with different providers in order to maintain their cut of the pie. You see this with the content patchwork across Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and even Youtube Red. No player has all the licenses all the time. Music is a wonderful thing, but delivery is a commodity service where the players are competing on style and features. Content is ephemeral and a marketing illusion for the most part. If you want people to come, you have to have the stars.
- twelve40 11y agoTotally agree that delivery is a commodity. However, as a user, I ditched all services in favor of Soundcloud because of the discovery part. For example, Diplo and Tiesto post and repost almost weekly, combined with the rest of people I follow you get a stream of the very latest music of your taste, manually curated (reposted) by the top DJ's themselves. It's not just an "upload feature", its like Facebook for music: you hit play and get a tailored endless stream of awesomeness, 0 effort on your part. No need to hunt for and buy tracks one by one. No need to suffer through some unknown Pandora voodoo that turns up the same tracks of unknown recency, over and over. Just follow the people you like, and it will play the latest music you like, simple as that. I don't know if Soundcloud can manage to build a viable business, sometimes they make changes that piss off users and uploaders, and the current model doesn't look too lucrative. But for me as a user, the experience is night and day compared to the true commodity services (iTunes, Amazon, Google, Pandora, Spotify, etc etc), who I think will soon start to crack under margin pressure like Rdio, Mog and others.
- phatfish 11y agoBased on SoundCloud's Android app I would say this is unlikely. The information density has dropped to JUST fitting in 2 songs per screen on my phone! This makes it almost unusable for discovery on mobile, since I have to scroll... and scroll... and scroll... while trying to glance at track names in between flashy pictures. And the runtime in the stream disappeared quite a while ago for no reason I can think of. Ripping off Facebook really doesn't work for a music app. Spotify at least has something pretty usable (though that too has gotten worse).
- ajmalasver 11y agoMy experience has been that this is less of an issue with their UX and more of an issue with the stream itself. Once you start following a lot of artist and especially if you download tracks through the download gates, you end up with a lot of noise in your stream. I'm a DJ and I recently had my 3 year old Soundcloud account with lots of my published music and mixes removed because I had some copyright content in a mix. It was a major bummer but having a new account with a fresh stream without as much junk was a silver lining.
- mantenpanther 11y agoSame for iOS. Managing your own songs, e.g. building Albums/Playlists is also a challenge, there are just too many screens/modals with slightly different options. Also an important missing thing in the app is an offline-mode. I really like the idea of SoundCloud and still use it regulary, but they really need to enhance their UX in all clients.
- rfrank 11y agoNo it wont. The last year or so of policy updates has pretty seriously alienated a lot of the original user base, who have since started using Bandcamp and other outlets a lot more seriously. Move involvement from major labels just means that copyright enforcement will keep getting increasingly strict, and the content creators will keep moving to Bandcamp.
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- brianstorms 11y agoIf hope that SoundCloud can survive the transition from a brilliant service with innovative features (especially the user-annotated waveforms), to a "competitor" to the likes of Spotify or Pandora. I fear that the VC/investor zeal for monetizing the hell out of SoundCloud will ruin what has made SoundCloud so special, and that sure, it may some day be worth more than Spotify, but if so I suspect it'll devolve into something less than its present goodness, and an inevitable drop in valuation will follow, leaving VCs scratching their heads. So it goes with every good online music service. They come, they go. Investors cash out, users get screwed, same as it ever was.
- rshaban 11y agoUnfortunately, Soundcloud doesn't seem to have the technical staff to keep up – the new app remains a disappointment after months of adding-back features and streaming remains shoddy at best, with random interruptions that require manual intervention. I hope that in the coming months they catch up to Spotify's performance.
- Jordrok 11y agoI had only been using Soundcloud for around a month or two when they decided to push out the new version of their app so I had relatively little attachment to the old version, but even then it was blatantly obvious to me that they had butchered functionality in pursuit of a pretty UI. There are plenty of examples to pick from, but the one change I never understood was the comment system. Timestamped user comments set directly on the waveform of the song was the one truly unique feature they had and they stripped it out completely. Months passed before it was even possible to view or create comments from the app, and even now they're locked away behind an obscure menu and only display in a useless list, entirely removed from their original context. They've tried to backpedal slightly by bolting on some of the missing features, but the new app was clearly not designed with them in mind in the first place. I would be honestly surprised if they manage to catch up.
- shmerl 11y agoOut of such services I prefer Bandcamp. DRM-free music with FLAC option is a major plus.
- mark242 11y agoBlatant Show HN plug: https://octave.is https://octave.is is a paid version of SoundCloud without the ads, Youtube-esque comments, and other garbage that clutters up individual artists' pages. Consider it the Vimeo to SC's Youtube.
- mrxd 11y agoThis articles has some basic misunderstandings about what artists and DJs use Soundcloud for, and how money is made in the underground music world. Consumers buy tickets to a DJ's show, DJ pays indie label, label pays artist. So three things should be clear: first, DJs aren't on Soundcloud to get signed to a major label, they are trying to drive ticket sales; second, unknown DJs don't use Soundcloud to promote themselves because ticket buyers must be local. Finally, amateur artists don't care about developing a following like YouTube stars because their music is sold to DJs, not to listeners. Part of the appeal of a DJ is that you hear great tracks at their events that you never heard before, so they aren't going to want to buy viral Soundcloud hits that the audience has already heard. In short, the mainstream music economy is driven by MP3 sales/streams directly to listeners. The underground music economy is mostly about event ticket sales, and Soundcloud is valuable to artists if it can drive ticket sales. That's why its current monetization strategy is mostly about telling artists which cities their fans are in. Frankly, if I were Soundcloud, my next step would be to build a ticketing platform.
- collyw 11y agoI see quite a lot of friends of friends and other unknown artists promoting their work on Soundcloud, using it as somewhere to host the music. I don't use Soundcloud a lot, but I got the impression that was one of its main uses.
- usrusr 11y agoPerfect explanation. Soundcloud may be a valuable tool for a certain niche of (semi)professional users, but extrapolating that to Spotify (or YouTube) mass market appeal is wishful thinking at best, destructive to the existing user base at worst.
- kluck 11y agoI am not active on either platform. My guess is that both platforms have something missing. When I am shopping for music, which is what Spotify is supposedly for, then I think it is not enough to supply the music in digital form. The physical form that is independent of any current DRM annoiance and/or online website service is missing. For the music industry though, Spotify seems to be a pretty good model, where they can sell their stuff. Soundcloud seemingly is a place to get recommendations on artists that I might like or a place to listen to music from independent artists. While there seems to be a lot music on Soundcloud, it may be a little too much. You might get lost in the noise and the community and algorithmic recommendation filters might not be enough. For the ones actually creating original music, Soundcloud seems to be a "free beer" approach. People get to listen to your music, but all you get in return is limited publicity. That might not be an enduring model for music creators, just during their initial phase of getting known. Thus maybe another platform will emerge.
- owenwil 11y agoMy problem with Soundcloud is that they don't seem to be shipping anything. The website's discovery features don't update more than once a month, the page often cripples the latest version of Chrome by going to 100% CPU and overall it's just not a great experience. The company's mobile app is even worse -- it's often confusing to use, and feels like a design exercise rather than something useful. I would love to see an official Soundcloud app, so I can use it on my desktop 24x7, but it doesn't seem like that's happening either. I just don't understand what they're actually up to, other than being the place the random average person will plop their latest track.
- boredatnight12 11y agoI'd love to see some kind of Web visualization for their music and data set. :\