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Comment by dpflan | Hacker News Reader

Does SC help fledgling artists get "discovered" and get record deals (financing for their art)? Could an integration with something like Patreon help increase the value of using SC: first for creating content, then for allowing others to consume it.

Also, how has BandCamp done so well as an independent music service? Any lessons to learn there and to apply to SC?

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On your first point, 100% yes. I used to run a relatively popular new music blog, and have several friends who still do. SoundCloud used to make up 98% of my blog post music embeds. And that is absolutely where they went wrong, even from the get go. It would have been insanely easy for them in the last decade to implement: one-click .mp3 purchases for individual songs, artist merchandise stores, ticket sales, etc. You name it.

Instead they made a conscious decision to push ahead with bizarre business strategies and without providing any meaningful functionality updates to their core service (I even think they regressed in this regard, the dumpster fire that was song reposting was the final nail in the coffin for me).

Honestly I think the service needs to make a graceful exit to let another service emerge who actually wants to push things forward for developing new artists.

Does amazon still hold the patent for one-click purchases?

I can't believe they were ever allowed to have that patent in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent

Looks like it expires soon, and even so it's been restricted to a shopping cart model.

What in the world. Did not know this existed.

Gonna apply for the patent on two-click purchases...

> they regressed in this regard, the dumpster fire that was song reposting was the final nail in the coffin for me

Absolutely, repost spam (particularly repeat reposts of the same song so it would stay at the top) making the feed unusable was what drove me away. Then all the random bugs that persisted for ages, and frequent weird/unnecessary UX semi-redesigns. One bug I recall is that going to a song page then back to the feed would never put me back at the same point in the feed.

> It would have been insanely easy for them in the last decade to implement: one-click .mp3 purchases for individual songs, artist merchandise stores, ticket sales, etc. You name it.

Exactly.

SC was too focused on the social aspect instead of trying to be a useful tool for music/audio pros.

> Honestly I think the service needs to make a graceful exit

Couldn't agree more.

Bandcamp gets a cut of sales and has a small (I think remote) team. They scaled slowly with revenues/profits and don't have big marketing spend and lavish offices around the world and a huge workforce.

I always wonder what Twitter would be like if it went this route.

I mean, maybe I'm hanging my ignorance on the clothesline here, but the product is built, yea? Do they really need that massive warehouse in the Tenderloin, AND their global offices?

Kinda yeah. A big reason Twitter has the ad revenue it does and the celebrities posting that it does is because it throws lots of non technical people at ad agencies and talent management groups to get them on board. Those people need desks.

So twitter is nothing but marketing and PR ? Why am I not surprised ?

Bandcamp should be viewed as the indie record store of the digital age. It's can keep it's cool without being fancy, and niche users will spend money there to support the bands that they personally enjoy. Additionally, band camp doesn't require nearly the same server load that a social media company would, nor anything fancy technically.

Twitter on the other hand could never have been built without being venture funded from the beginning, the growth of their product was only possible because it could scale and have the kind of uptime it did, and that venture funding allowed them to hire the engineering talent that made it all possible. Maybe now, twitter could lay off 90% of their staff and figure something out, but it seems pretty unlikely that would be the case.

Exactly. The only problem with soundcloud is how much money they waste.

SC does not help getting discovered, although the discovery might have happened also through it. And the discovery is most definitely what is problematic with SC because once discovered, the label comes back at the catalogue with a vengeance :)

Patreon could help, but not every artist on SC is fine with staying indipendent when a big label approaches them, at least in the space I follow (electronic/EDM), simply because the real money is in live shows, and you get bigger shows if you have bigger "shoulders"

I think bandcamp is doing well because it's a different service (store first), for different customers (people that mostly can't care less for popular music), where the music uploaded (almost?) never is in copyright gray areas...

> SC does not help getting discovered

Maybe you're speaking statistically here, but every time I find an artist's music on SC, I end up finding 3-5 more artists like them that I really like. So, maybe it's anecdotal, but I certainly enjoy SC for its discovery aspects.

> Also, how has BandCamp done so well as an independent music service? Any lessons to learn there and to apply to SC?

If you mean financially, it's because they take a 15% cut of an artist's sales, up to $5k, after which it drops to a 10% cut and they also take out CC processing fees.

IMO, if SoundCloud were smart they'd find a way to team up with BandCamp right away. Unfortunately, I don't know what BandCamp would get out of it.

I actually make money off Bandcamp. My friend Dub Gabriel does so we'll with selling vinyl on Bandcamp he pays rent in San Francisco from it. SoundCloud was great for new hip-hop acts when you could combine a decent tune with see numbers gaming to juice attention.

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