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Comment by save_ferris | Hacker News Reader

I’ve lost a lot of faith in MuseScore over the last couple of years. Their UX still has some major warts over Finale that haven’t improved, and they completely screwed over their users by encouraging them to upload their compositions to MuseScore’s cloud library and then cutting off free access to the cloud library. They ginned up as much content as they could from users and then announced this huge change in access a few months later.

I’ve lost a lot of faith in this business model because early users get screwed the hardest and as time goes by, it’s harder and harder to justify using this app. Why is it that these projects so often promise the world early on only to continuously chip away at their own promises and undermine the faith of the community that gave them business to begin with?

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> Why is it that these projects so often promise the world early on only to continuously chip away at their own promises and undermine the faith of the community that gave them business to begin with?

As they say, never attribute to malice that which is explainable by incompetence.

I've seen this kind of thing 100's of times when some naive people get into product development. The team promises life-time subscriptions or other completely unsustainable business models because it _feels_ like the right kind of payment plan. They genuinely want to give their users the best features at the lowest prices.

Then the reality of maintaining and updating a large software product/service sets it. Engineers are expensive. Marketing is expensive. Operations are expensive. What started off as wide-eyed "wow, we're making a million dollars!" turns into "oh no, we only made a million dollars". Expenses start to rise faster than income.

Then someone who actually knows how to run a business steps in and does the Picard facepalm while reviewing the companies pricing plans. How did they ever expect to build a business with such a totally unrealistic model?

So the now battle scarred founders are forced to face the music. Change their pricing and product offering or watch their company evaporate. They aren't doing it to be mean or to squeeze blood from a stone, they are trying to keep their business solvent.

I expect that navigating this transition is one of the hardest things a fledgling business will ever have to do.

That does sound awful. Did they allow a grace period for people to download/migrate their stuff off the platform?

They did. OP also neglected to mention that this was forced by the music industry threatening to sue them into oblivion if they didn't put it behind a pay wall.

Musescore did have separate listings for PD or CC-licensed compositions, vs. "no copyright is intended, wink wink" ones. They could have allowed access to the ones that were properly licensed.

Except that people would often select the wrong license as it's a human controlled process.

Can you expand on this, or point to an article? I don't follow Musescore but I do follow music copyright stuff (which I assume this was about.

Yeah. Lots of things that were uploaded to this cloud service were transcriptions or complete rips of sheet music of in-copyright works. Sheet music is also copyrighted and when the music industry found out about the service, it got strong armed.

There's a lot of sheet music that's absolutely in the public domain, though. Most of what's on IMSLP falls under that. (IMSLP only provides raw scans however. There is an Open Scores project that's supposed to work on making machine-readable versions of those in Musescore, but I don't know if their output is freely accessible outside their cloud platform.)

If you listen to a MIDI video game track and use your ear to write a violin-and-piano arrangement, do you own the copyright to your arrangement, or does the original composer?

The original composer still owns the copyright for the composition but you own the copyright for the performance. Just like if you sang someone else's song.

Much like cleanroom-written code, these are often made without ever looking at the official sheet music, just hearing some synth midi and figuring out a neat way to replicate the general idea using traditional instruments.

But yes, apparently it would be violating US copyright law to rearrange music this way.

http://ostrowesq.com/no-you-dont-own-your-arrangement-of-tha...

There's no way that were completely unaware of this possibility when they started the service. They did this intentionally to get as big as they possibly could before the music industry came after them, leaving their users high and dry in the process.

You can't start a music platform without having some sort of peripheral awareness of how litigious that industry is. They could've tried to build it out more responsibly early on and chose not to.

>There's no way that were completely unaware of this possibility when they started the service.

Of course there is. You overestimate small companies, which might not even have a permanent lawyer on board...

The initial idea of the freely available library was wrong in the first place. You can't legally offer copyrighted stuff for free download. (or maybe you could if you paid all the copyright for each download)

Which they probably knew and ignored early on because "move fast and break things"

I don’t think Musescore falls in the “move fast” category at all. They were simply naive (and underestimating how much pop music would be transcribed and uploaded). In any case, I found their communication very clear.

The cddb model! Truly enraging.

ye olde bait'n'switch

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