Audio’s opportunity and who will capture it | Hacker News Reader

Audio’s opportunity and who will capture it

matthewball.vc

94 pointshunglee219 comments

It's really hard to sell innovative audio experiences. That's why the opportunity gets squandered, and innovation usually flows through side channels that don't directly or drastically alter existing audio experiences. This is true from end to end in all audio media.

I've tried to do it, and I'll tell you that no VC in their right mind should give money to a consumer audio (content or tech) startup without asking them how they'll get an ad to consumers without them having their hardware or software stack to recreate the experience exactly while at home. Otherwise you're just another booth at CES and just another box on the shelf at Best Buy. Both of which are next to impossible to demo in, and you're fighting an uphill battle against the recognizable brands.

It's not surprising that the features driving new audio stacks having nothing to do with improving the content itself or fidelity, since neither of which are easy to advertise in meaningful words.

Tangent, I think killing off dumb pipes like TRS connectors on phones could be the next side channel for innovation since it gives an outlet for a smart pipe but we'll see. Audio markets are change averse.

As to TRS channels, it's intereting to read "Schiit Happened". There's a huge barrier to entry into audio hardware imposed by a few big incumbents. Removing RCA/TRS/etc would decrease innovation. How many innovative lightning-based headphones have you seen?

i have recently wondered why there seem to be no audio only games.

voice input to give game commands and audio responses. like an audio version of text based roleplaying games. but many other games are possible.

what would prevent that from working?

This was a great read, and impressively dense with graphs and historical survey information about all media markets. I happen to have been wondering just today what led to the rise of a phenomenon like the Beatles at just that point in time, and whether it was a specific technology, and then this answered it: portable transistor radios!

I'm presently building heysync[1], an app to bring asynchronous audio to work chat, and I thought there might be more about remote work and audio communications in here, but it made a compelling point that the largest visible motion is in entertainment audio today. At least it did note at the end that entertainment isn't the whole audio market ;P

1 - https://heysync.chat

fwiw I am desperate to asynchronize our stand-ups (which have become far too long brain dumps & q&a sessions, to very few party's benefit). good luck with your app.

Off-topic, but long standups just means you're doing it wrong; talk to the manager or scrum master, quote classic texts, try to keep everyone's reports to two sentences.

BTW doesn't Telegram have a satisfactory push-to-talk button that sends audio clips asynchronously?

> doesn't Telegram have a satisfactory push-to-talk button that sends audio clips asynchronously?

Telegram does let you send audio! When I first started building heysync I was quite surprised to find out that WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram/iMessage all support basic audio messages decently, but I didn't know anyone who used them.

Heysync is a little different in that it sends automatic transcriptions alongside its audio snippets, to let you either read or listen at your leisure, and it puts audio messages right out in front in the app.

As rektide mentioned, most of those apps miss key features, like not being able to preview a message if you want to, and then they also mentioned that using 'personal' communication tech with coworkers isn't everyone's cup of tea. Heysync is work oriented by being roughly IRC or slack-alike shaped in its features, i.e. channels, DMs, markdown+syntax highlighting, and so on.

I hope this isn't excessively self-promotional! I'm pretty excited about this whole area. (Also, the downvote's not me; I thought your suggestion and question were quite fair.)

"let's hang around after standup g discuss" happens some but since we have so few other contact points mostly we just let each other brain dump at standup.

even if we did let some pepe go, I still feel like we would just shuffle around how & where we synchronously waste time. I really want to retain the sense of human contact of voice & often video, but in a way that we can thread, reply to async, & come back to latter, none of which would be easy & convenient with our current predominantly synchronous systems.

signal has a decent voice-message feature. weirdly from what I can tell there's no way to preview your message before sending it? blah. also, weird, but I don't want to be using signal & other what feel like "personal" communication tech with my coworkers.

> I really want to retain the sense of human contact of voice & often video, but in a way that we can thread, reply to async, & come back to latter, none of which would be easy & convenient with our current predominantly synchronous systems.

Yes! That is exactly the thing we need, and it's unbelievable that it doesn't already exist. I have heard that Slack is working on some stuff in this area too (akin to in-channel snapchat stories, I think?), and as long as we end up with better tools somewhere, I'll be happy.

This would be cool!

> Today, music-making software and workflow tools remain relatively underdeveloped versus gaming and video (e.g. YouTube), but many, such as SoundCloud, Anchor and Splice, are tackling it.

It seems so odd to me that a place like SoundCloud are possibly missing out on an opportunity to have a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) built into their app. They are the hub for a lot of UGC, probably direct competition with Bandcamp. I don't know if Bandcamp has decided to tackle that route yet.

What would be the upside for SoundCloud?

Anybody making any sort of music has already dabbled with a number of tools, has preferences and tastes in this area, some dearly paid-for gear, etc. Offering an entry-level DAW won't make sense. A pro-level DAW could be a welcome upgrade for some, but...

But audio is a low-latency thing. It's hard to implement from within a browser, to say nothing of running VST plugins. It's damn hard to maintain a proper desktop app even for one platform, and it will always miss some feature a competitor has.

And SoundCloud would invest into it for what reason? For what bottom line gains?

I fail to see so far.

People who would make beats but are intimidated by Ableton or Fruity Loops or Pro Tools. Garage Band kind of serves that role, but a simple, browser based DAW for a subscription seems like a great way to take a slice of the amateur producer market.

Maybe just buy one of these: https://filmora.wondershare.com/audio/best-free-daw-online.h...

I think maybe I was projecting a bit of what I feel would benefit me as an amateur. I do think that an entry level DAW could make the case for a paid artist subscription through SoundCloud.

That was quite the read! Thanks for sharing it. I do wonder what the future is for at-home concerts. The Travis Scott Fortnight event was really neat and kind of mesmerizing; the track was highly anticipated, which helped a lot. It was neat that you could interact with it a bit. The article mentions the production value that TV stations add to sports broadcasts: while the article talks about commentary a lot, what I appreciate about football broadcasts are the slow-motion replays, the sound captures, and the dramatic shots of notable players and coaches. From the concerts I've watched on TV, there's quite a bit of newer production strategies that could probably be used like modern audio production techniques and audio-synced CGI effects.

> And this is what makes audio such a great category in 2020 – it’s not just growing faster than it has in decades, it’s diversifying and changing faster too. The cause: technology

And funnily enough, the word technology means the study of art and crafts. From the Greek techkne that means art/craft.

I love technology and am a technologist in nature, and I think people understimate how impactful technology is, it literally defines our specie. From discovering ways to make fire, knifes, arrows, all the way to the digital transfer of data. Changes in technology always makes history.

> This dynamic stems from audio’s technological simplicity compared to other media types. We can see this in how much earlier recorded audio emerged than recorded video or video game arcades, and live audio (radio) versus live TV or online gaming. Or how much easier it was to make and record music than shoot and press a film, or design a video game.

This is not true for ML. Good realistic speech synthesis is a lot more tricky than images (videos however are another thing entirely).

Photography also preceded audio reproduction while moving images developed slightly later, so the analogy does hold generationally.

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