Hacker News Reader

Comment by rockarage | Hacker News Reader

This is a business I know well. Jukedeck is an example of how founders and investors do not conduct appropriate market research. There is a limited market demand for low-cost royalty-free music for videos. One could argue there is an oversupply* of royalty-free music relative to buyers. The quality is not good enough to disrupt the billion dollar Production music industry that is top heavy, a relative small amount of creators at the top get the majority of the money, the rest compete for the little that is left. Jukedeck has raised enough money ($3million #) to be around for a few years if they control their burn rate. But Jukedeck in its current form, is just another music startup destined for the Deadpool. (http://techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/)

* http://lmgtfy.com/?q=royalty+free+music # http://www.businessweekly.co.uk/tech-trail/investment-tree/d...

View on HN

Wow, that was harsh. If startups were assigned to the Deadpool based solely on whether their 1.0 products were ready to immediately disrupt billion dollar industries, there wouldn't be _any_ successful startups out there.

Personally, when I see a team of people who are passionate about what they are doing create something new and interesting, I like to cheer them on.

I think the technology is interesting and cool. Even if it isn't marketable in current form (what 1.0 product is), I wish them the best in iterating on it until it is.

What's harsh is burning through 3 million dollars while you're trying to figure out what's wrong. If my statments leads to a major change that saves the company that is a good thing.

3 million dollars is nothing. It took a million dollars to make a single very low-quality video game, circa 2008. Salaries are expensive.

The investment model is set up to let founders "burn through" money while they explore new approaches to old industries. The investors don't really care that the money is lost. To be an investor, you have to assume 9 out of 10 of your investments will be write-offs.

So if you're not defending the investors' money, and if the founders are happy doing this, then why are you intentionally being harsh? Let them do their thing. Yeah they might fail, but so what? It's the only path to success.

It's not really productive to try to save people or companies via internet comments. You're more likely to demoralize them than to change their minds. Unfortunately, demoralization is often someone's hidden motive.

I have actually helped a company where our initial interaction was via an internet comment, so don't make assumptions. Stating market reality is not being harsh, there is an abundant supply of royalty free music available at a very low cost or for free. If you're demoralized because someone states the facts of a competitive market than that is very unfortunate and you're not really fit to be an entrepreneur in a highly competitive market. From experience, working on a product that is failing is very demoralizing. I actually will like to see them do something novel and great with their technology.

Moreover there is great ideas* in this thread that can actually help the company.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10707389

I actually will like to see them do something novel and great with their technology.

As a developer, occasional FPS gamer, and musician, I'd like to see them tackle adaptive generative music that is actually convincing. I want music that takes cues from the gaming environment without obvious loop splicing points and without feeling mechanical.

Yes, that was I was expecting.

1. I upload a video 2. Jukedeck finds me the perfect audio for it.

I think you're missing the whole point for "ShowHN", which IMHO is really valueable,worthy comments/opinions you should take into consideration.

Actually not. Here are the rules for Show HN:

Be respectful. Anyone sharing work is making a contribution, however modest.

Ask questions out of curiosity. Don't cross-examine.

Instead of "you're doing it wrong", suggest alternatives. When someone is learning, help them learn more.

When something isn't good, you needn't pretend that it is. But don't be gratuitously negative.

Calling someone's startup "headed for the deadpool" is the definition of gratuitously negative.

It's still all in good faith and in a civil tone.

It's realistic. Nothing at all against Jukedeck, nice work and so on, but these automatic composition tools are also available to any other musicians out there, and (as you may have noticed) there's an oversupply of musicians who are demonstrably more passionate than any startup entrepreneur because most of them are willing to keep plugging away at their musical endeavor for its own sake rather than because they have any hope of becoming rich or even making an adequate living. Jukedeck is doomed for the same reason that a startup offering robotic table waiters to restaurants is doomed; there's an oversupply of humans willing to do a much better job for relatively little money.

That wasn't harsh, that was just pure, unadulterated envy :)

Envy of what, exactly?

While it's not easy to hear, I got one such advice once on a company I started, and in true entrepreneurial spirit ignored it and kept iterating away. It was 100% spot on.

I wish people were more frank about what they think of start-ups, and I wish there was an acceptable way of doing that without insulting people.

In Italy for example is the exact contrary of the silicon valley mindset where everybody will say "cool!". You will likely get criticisms like "it's nice but will hardly work" and so forth. This has the effect of discouraging people a lot. However as you said, the reverse is also dangerous. There must be a middle ground where it's possible to get balanced criticisms that make founders aware of the risks of a given business.

Not only balanced, but constructive and well thought. Saying "this sucks" or "I can't believe anyone invested in this" is useless. The above criticism, while not very constructive, is still grounded in facts (that I can't judge since I don't know the field enough) and goes beyond "this won't work"

Yep exactly, a good mix is "cool but make sure you think also at <constructive critics about what could be dangerous>".

You're not considering a handful of other variables here:

(1) Convenience - There's limited market demand for royalty-free music that you have to manually edit and sort through yourself. By virtue of making it simple enough for consumers (vs. professionals) to use, the market got a lot bigger. By way of comparison, you could have said that there was limited market demand for mobile apps prior to the App Store. But the convenience the App Store offered with respect to finding and installing apps made all the difference.

(2) Licensing - This is proof of concept for the overall technology. You could view Jukedeck as a play to simply generate the sort of interest you need to get larger players interested in licensing tech, rather than an end-game in and of itself. E.g. you could imagine Apple licensing the tech for use in iMovie.

(3) Legal risk - It's one thing to say some random music track on the Internet is royalty free. It's quite another to prove it. There's no easy way to guarantee that the supposed original author of a track didn't copy it from someone else. This might seem like an edge case, but per the above points, if Jukedeck licensed their tech to companies like Apple, those legal issues become much bigger deals. Algorithmic music simplifies the legal question quite a bit.

3 could be the big one, but how do you guarantee that even algorthmic music isn't infringing given the current legal system?

On the other side, if the generated tracks are 100% original, this tool could be of invaluable help for music producers looking for quick inspiration. As an amateur music producer I'd be willing to pay for this if MIDI export is added.

I think the project is great, maybe they haven't found the right niche just yet. Hint: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=midi+loops

That's a very interesting target, although It's doubtful it will meet the needs of their vc investors. It is an interesting project, but it is in the wrong target market.

They just need to make some numbers (and as you pointed some customer development). The music industry is pretty big and has many niches. I'm 100% sure many companies would LOVE to add AI composing capabilities to their DAWs/VSTis/AUs... including Apple in Logic Pro. They could try to license the technology.

If you're aiming for the musician market, I'm 100% sure you're wrong.

There's some basic algo-comp in Logic and Ableton already. But generally, musicians really hate the idea of having a machine writing all of their music for them.

This even applies to musicians who only work with loops, and to DJs who only work with complete tracks.

I think there are business models for algo-comp, but this isn't the best one. I'm not sure JukeDeck is necessarily heading for the deadpool, but it's maybe 50:50 at best.

Also, the production values on good stock music are very high - higher than here. Try https://www.shockwave-sound.com/ for some examples.

I think JukeDeck isn't quite up to the lowest quality tracks on there, and it's a very long way short of the better tracks.

> If you're aiming for the musician market, I'm 100% sure you're wrong.

Then why at least 3 musicians in this thread have requested MIDI export?

> Musicians really hate the idea of having a machine writing all of their music for them.

You don't get the point. I'm not saying that all your songs should be composed by a NN. This is valuable as a starting point (phrases, chords, chord progressions, melodies, etc). Then you build on top of that (or transpose accordingly). You know, there are those days as a musician when things just don't sound great and you need a spark.

I've been producing since I was 12 y.o. in MS-DOS. I know the market pretty well and I have producer friends that own recording studios and write songs for professional bands (rock, metal, etc). And I'm 100% sure they'd buy the concept because they've previously asked me for related tooling.

The technology is the key here, and could be used as another tool.

I wouldn't call a person a musician if he needs some software-generated content to jump start his creativity.

And "real producers/DJs/artists don't use Fruity Loops", yet some of them are making quite a lot of money from it...

A "real" musician probably takes cues from other music, other sounds in the world. Why discriminate against algorithmically created sounds?

Firstly, I didn't mention FL Studio at all. Why do you attribute a notion to me without any sign of me thinking so?

Secondly, there's a clear distinction between taking cues and reusing a harmony or a melody from another source. People have always done it and will do it more than ever, if they have the right tools.

Of course, it only matters if we still think about music as more of an art form than a production of non-material goods. Hope we still do.

I didn't attribute it to you, but your comment was analoguous to this common criticism of some popular artists today, and reminded me of them.

Similar ways of diminishing other people's work are used everywhere, but are typically a result of being more or less elitist. "Not a real X if you didn't do it in way Y or use tool Z."

For some, the process is more important than the outcome (or just as), but I think it's wrong to impose such opinions on everybody else. Just my opinion, of course.

> But generally, musicians really hate the idea of having a machine writing all of their music for them.

... unless they develop the algo that writes the music. E.g., think Autechre and their Max/MSP patches?

Wow.

I think this is the perfect example of "failure of imagination"

GoPro is a $2.5B company based around low cost equipment for amateur film makers. They produce film editors that let you edit your films around per-licensed sound tracks.

Let me say that again - you make your film around the sound track they supply.

The opportunity for Jukedeck isn't competing with the thousands of individual composers 1-on-1. It is building a platform that generates sound tracks automatically, and selling the platform as software both to end users and sub-licensing it to companies like GoPro.

But that's how most editors work anyway, even Hollywood ones - if they don't have a score to work with they take temp music from some film they already like and later commission something similar. I'm not sure why you think this is such a radical concept.

Of course the concept isn't radical. The difference is that it is suddenly a scalable business.

At the moment the per-unit cost of per film is constant. If software "composes" the music then the per-unit cost drops with each additional user.

That's the radical thing.

At the moment the per-unit cost of per film is constant.

But it's not. There's considerable spread in the price of music depending on the quality, specificity, popularity, and licensability* of what you want to buy.

* up to a particular number of copies made, or with restrictions on sublicensing or other contractual factors.

per-unit = per-film in this case.

You make a new film (which includes the entire range of things from Hollywood films, to pro-Youtubers to films you share with a couple of people).

For music you can

1) Get custom music written specifically for your film. This is usually expensive (unless you do it yourself, or know someone to do it for you) but has the advantage (if done well) of matching exactly what you want for your film

2) Find an existing piece of music and license it. This has variable costs (or maybe free), but won't be written specifically for your film and possibly will also be used elsewhere.

3) Use "template" music included in whatever software tool you are using.

AI-generated music has the advantage of (1) but the cost structure of (3).

It'll be a long time before it is useful for Hollywood films. But for Youtubers it is a completely different story.

nah, AI music enters more into case (2) than (1). you're fooling yourself if you think three genres and a couple of variations is equivalent to 'custom music written specifically for your film'

We have had this problem, even with commercially-purchased royalty-free music. The idea of getting generated music that will never trip "Content ID" is nice, since having our customers' tracks pulled is an un-solvable problem for our team and it's really painful from a support perspective.

Plus, the idea that I've paid for legit copyright use and I still have to deal with takedown BS is doubly frustrating.

Your case is an exception, the majority of royal-free music companies do not police their content this way.

I would use this for my personal videos. I've had videos taken down from Facebook before because, even though I was just sharing it with friends, I used a track that was protected by copyright.

Being able to construct a track with the right feel without worrying about copyright would be amazing for a simple video editor or on something like Instagram.

Sure, but most people want to use popular music, as a result the most popular video editor for istagram has licensed popular music* from the majors. This is not a novel business.

*http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/storytelling-socia...

Interesting. That doesn't scale though, because you can't upload the same clip to YouTube without it being flagged. Having rights to backing music is not great as a differentiator for a social network.

"Just sharing with friends" is still copyright infringement. The owner of the copyright--not you--gets to decide how the work is reproduced and distributed, unless you have a defense like fair use. (I'm not saying this is always a good thing; it's just how the law works.)

It's not Facebook's responsibility to enforce this absent a complaint from the copyright holder.

Yeah it is, but in the scheme of things it's pretty benign. I couldn't purchase the rights to use the song even if I wanted to, and I'm only using a portion of the track, so I'm not actually denying them income.

Yeah, but you're probably not willing to pay enough to make it profitable if your videos are for personal entertainment only rather than aiming at any kind of significant audience.

From the data I've found Pandora pays around 0.2 cents per stream. I'd be more than willing to pay that (or even 10x as much) to use a track on a video that a couple of hundred friends might see.

I really don't agree. I like the interface and it's simple. I make indie games, but I suck at music creation. As of today I'm a paying member, just bought some menu music.

Thanks so much - really glad to hear you made some music on our platform. I'd love to see the game you use it in when it's finished!

that's weird, there's plenty musician out there creating real pieces, with movements and all, and putting them online as CC-SA

why didn't you go for one of those sources?

honest question, as gf is having the same problem sourcing music for her channel

Maybe because it shortens the loop: 10 minutes to chose the music vs days.

Maybe it's not good enough for the final product but it could be good enough for testing and development.

The point of this isn't having infinite royalty-free music, it's the technology. The royalty-free music part is just a easily-implemented, temporary application that gives it a business purpose, while they try to build up the technology into something great. There's a lot more applications to good music generation than royalty-free music.

I disagree. I think the market is HUGE. Content creation is a big deal.

Agree to some degree, -I jokingly say that there is a lot of music that would be improved if the artist could just shut up while performing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com