SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

If you choose to centralize distribution on one web server that is your own choice, but the better phrase is "digital distribution is free if you want it to be".

I doubt we will see a return to pay-to-listen models in music. Reality has taken too big of a bite around the copyright extortion ring surrounding sine waves. The future of music is in patronage, merchandising, and live performances - which really, it has always been. Only extremely rare unicorn performers ever have the stars align to be able to monetize their music itself (in the past it was making it big with a label, today last decade it was topping itunes) while we are seeing the rise of music as a viable profession without extraordinary fame as long as you can provide a niche and be good at it, you can attract enough whale fans to support you regardless of if the tracks themselves are free - your real audience is those that not only want what you already made, but want you to continue to make.

Remember, as in all things IP, it is not the actual music file that is scarce or expensive to produce, it is the idea behind the music that took an artist hours or days to hand craft into a digital creation. The first iteration was the expensive one - all other ones are effectively free. It is essential that going forward we culturally recognize the distinction and move to seek sustainable business models around the former rather than the later, which we only invented as an imperfect way to translate ideas into the physical goods market back when they were less distinct than they are now (ie, costs of distribution did exist for paper books, so pigeonholing writing into markets via copyright was a reasonable train of thought when per-unit costs still existed and thus people could not effortlessly propagate the information on an individual basis).

The question is how this income is split between the services (which deservedly should be profitable) and the musicians.

Art has always had a shady connection to commerce in which the gatekeepers tend to profit more than the artists themselves.

From the article it sounds like their main cost is paying a ton of people a lot of money.

Just in the past 3 or 4 months I've found half a dozen or more artists on Soundcloud, then headed over to Bandcamp or Amazon to buy and download their music. It would be awesome if I could buy it right there on Soundcloud. Every song could have a "Buy MP3" and "Buy Album" button right there by the Like, Share and other buttons.

Maybe it wouldn't solve all of their problems, but it's better than what they have now.

I'm kind of baffled that SoundCloud isn't already raking in profits. Presumably their stakeholders simply haven't pushed for profitability yet.

Salaries dominate many or most business costs.

There might be a way to monetize sharing digital content using some micropayment system like you say. Though I think that will have to come about after the current players have left or been marginalized as they don't care so much about helping the artists make a living, instead wanting to maintain control so they can get the money.

While we can't archive all the content, the folk at the Internet Archives* are put heroic efforts in preserving the notable content. If Soundcloud doesn't make it, I hope they at least work with the Internet Archive to preserve the data.

1. https://archive.org/

Anyway, who cares. What about the last ten thousand years of content that nobody gives a shit about.

This obviously isn't the _only_ type of artist on SoundCloud, but they're a huge part of what makes SoundCloud culturally significant.

The simple truth of reality is that a lot of music is only available through soundcloud.

Smart? No. But it's how things really are.

>In a 2003 experiment, Fetterly et al. discovered that about one link out of every 200 disappeared each week from the Internet. McCown et al 2005 discovered that half of the URLs cited in D-Lib Magazine articles were no longer accessible 10 years after publication [the irony!], and other studies have shown link rot in academic literature to be even worse... Nelson and Allen... examined link rot in digital libraries and found that about 3% of the objects were no longer accessible after one year.

>Bruce Schneier remarks that one friend experienced 50% linkrot in one of his pages over less than 9 years (not that the situation was any better in 1998), and that his own blog posts link to news articles that go dead in days; Vitorio checks bookmarks from 1997, finding that hand-checking indicates a total link rot of 91% with only half of the dead available in sources like the Internet Archive; the Internet Archive itself has estimated the average lifespan of a Web page at 100 days. A Science study looked at articles in prestigious journals; they didn’t use many Internet links, but when they did, 2 years later ~13% were dead. The French company Linterweb studied external links on the French Wikipedia before setting up their cache of French external links, and found - back in 2008 - already 5% were dead. (The English Wikipedia has seen a 2010-2011 spike from a few thousand dead links to ~110,000 out of ~17.5m live links.) The dismal studies just go on and on and on (and on). Even in a highly stable, funded, curated environment, link rot happens anyway. For example, about 11% of Arab Spring-related tweets were gone within a year (even though Twitter is - currently - still around).

>My specific target date is 2070, 60 years from now... Even at the lowest estimate of 3% annual linkrot, few will survive to 2070. If each link has a 97% chance of surviving each year, then the chance a link will be alive in 2070 is... ≈0.16 (or to put it another way, an 84% chance any given link will die)... If we try to predict using a more reasonable estimate of 50% linkrot, then an average of 0 links will survive... It would be a good idea to simply assume that no link will survive.

Until relatively recently it wasn't expected that everything would stand the test of time.

Most probably housed spam, but some probably housed at least some work of value.

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNhFJjGcMPqpuYfxL62VVB9528NXqDNMFXiqN5...

It was the content that kept me coming back. Mostly the radio shows like WritheM and Electro Chill.

He's jumped from platform to platform until he just decided to do it himself.

Now a couple of them are developing their own solution. I sorta stopped following them after a while, but you've reminded me to check their progress.

In this way, I think it's also unique vs. other music sharing sites, in that people don't typically post their recording of a Chinese night market on their CDBaby or YouTube channel ...

Soundcloud:sound :: Flickr:photos

That said, a huge number of works that people create have always ended up in the trash, thrown out, or archived only in a few obscure places. What makes it a bit frustrating with digital is that it's relatively practical to save so much more--if perhaps not necessarily everything that's even been posted to a public site--but few really good mechanisms (or funding) to do so.

Come to think about it, isn't that how most other social feeds handle this problem?

Also, their iOS app doesn't cache songs. The lack of caching on its own has forced me to go back to Spotify for 99% of my music. I'm not about to pay $80/month for data just for Soundcloud.

For all we know Soundcloud was profitable last year. Maybe it's not likely.. but the article has no information at all on last year, yet they feel comfortable making this statement.

The auditor statement is standard boilerplate. It applies to every company that is losing money. That's right -- if the company is losing money, they may need to raise money in the future to continue. No kidding.

KPMG said in the report that the need for more investment represented “a material uncertainty which may cast significant doubt on the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

And again, this was in their 2014 report. So clearly they've last more than a year at this point.

From your link: "This accounting principle assumes that, a company will continue to exist long enough to carry out its objectives and commitments and will not liquidate in the foreseeable future."

80% of the tracks on my account are private. I mostly use Soundcloud as a musical post-it system so I can easily listen to my productions in different settings (car, friend's hifi system, earphones etc.), share tracks with label in a "secure" fashion.

I was really saddened to see they introduced ads even for people who actually pay for their service, I felt literally betrayed and angry but fortunately it did not last long. However it leaves traces.

I still find it amazing that they did not introduce basic filters for the stream, like "just grab house mixes at least 45 minutes long"...

Anyway, I am still quite happy with the service even if I could do the same on my own dedicated server, minus the social network thing.

I just wish them good luck but I hope that their longevity will not be due to ads served even to subscribers...

And then the state takes about 40% of the actual paycheck in taxes and social payments. Teslas and Mercedeses are not the car of the file-and-rank employees if that ~80k was the full company expense per employee.

Also, the amount you take home from 80k, while good for Berlin standards, is hardly enough to buy a 120k car (depending on your personal priorities, of course)

I'd prefer to have a screen that can sort my saved tracks in a meaningful way.

I've worked in a place that built and shipped 3 or 4 product lines: actual physical hardware with software, and did it with fewer than 50 people, most of them on the manufacturing line.

Joke aside, it is a great place to find free music. I am not surprised that it is more popular in countries I would assume does not have the same availability of streaming services.

Since I'm from Sweden I've been living the life with Spotify and similar services for years but still I've found myself go to SoundCloud to find the music which I cannot find on Spotify.

So the actual paycheck would be around 60k. I think that's pretty ok for Berlin?

Having worked in both, Germany and Silicon Valley, I'd say that the middle management hiring is certainly a bigger problem in Germany than I've seen on either the east or west coast in the US.

grrr. Now I really have to figure this out.