Well, perhaps I should clarify that I gave up because my assessment of the costs paralleled the research and numbers in the blog post. No way could I run this

Well, perhaps I should clarify that I gave up because my assessment of the costs paralleled the research and numbers in the blog post. No way could I run this as a 'side project' on beer money, because if the site became even remotely popular, the escalating costs of the hosting, CDN, encoding etc. would have just slammed me quickly, and I didn't have any monetisation strategy in place. I basically wanted to build what SoundCloud was in its early days, before they lost touch with their user base. The other main point about the copyright infringement in the article wasn't on my radar at all, because I wanted my site to be for music creators to share ideas and collaborate, rather than post commercial music on - but thinking back, THAT could have become a huge problem too, if, as you have suggested, nefarious people had simply used my platform to share non public domain music.