The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Called SoundCloud Go.

Their blog post: https://blog.soundcloud.com/2016/03/29/ ... dcloud-go/
Wired likes it: http://www.wired.com/2016/03/soundcloud ... c-service/
Engadget doesn't: http://www.engadget.com/2016/03/29/soun ... -hands-on/

It's not as indie-friendly as they want to pretend: http://airplanemo.de/blog/to-soundcloud-love-dave

JB

Man, do I need to pull all the songs I've posted there now?! WTF. This goes to what we were talking about in terms of business models where you charge creators, like their other subscription offering. Still, I have to figure that somebody could build a SoundCloud clone that would be cheap enough to run that they could be profitable even from charging creators for premium services. I wonder if a more micro-payment kind of model could work? Like, don't want to pay $15/month for a fancy upgrade? How about, you want to upload a song and it's over your free quota we charge you $0.50, and only bill you if you accrue $5 in charges...? There's got to be a way other than pulling a YouTube/SoundCloud/Gracenote and setting up a "free" crowd-sourced data gathering tool that you then turn around and sell without paying the people who put the data in.

Yeah, you know my position: charging the creators who put content on your service is a sign that you have a bad business plan.

I wouldn't mind like, a nominal fee-- charge my credit card $1 a year, just to make sure that I'm legit and not uploading warez or stolen songs. But SoundCloud charge you to have a larger upload allowance, and then puts ads against the stuff you upload, without giving you a kickback on that ad revenue. It's odd, and they are confused. My sense is that they are kind of flailing.

JB

Somebody's gotta pay Amazon for the S3 storage and network bandwidth usage, I get that. I just think there's got to be a sustainable way to wrap that service and charge enough of a nominal fee on top. There's also the cost of putting up enough piracy prevention to keep from being sued out of business, too, so, yeah, that would have to be passed along to somebody or factored in to the markup. So it's not like this is a business that could ever really be a huge money maker, but there's got to be a way to at least make it sustainable without a big sellout.

If they start charging listeners to listen to stuff, I hope they'll give me a refund on my Pro account. Because holy crap do I feel ripped off right now.

Also it frustrates me how even with a Pro account my stuff gets encoded at 128kbps and sounds like an artifacty hot mess compared to what I uploaded.

a non-artifacty hot mess?


OOOOOOOOOH

That was what I was implying yes.

Meanwhile: https://twitter.com/boysnoize/status/715075699883638785

YouTube had a rocky start as well, then got their act <sortof> together. It's about setting reasonable expectations and providing a reasonable response process. The reality is they will get hit from all sides so they need to scale their operations accordingly. You'd think by now any new service would have learned at least that much.

Did YouTube really get its act together? I remember before they launched their subscription a lot of independent artists and indie labels were reported as being bullied by YouTube into having to either accept unfavorable terms or leave the platform or something:

http://videoter.com/youtube-bullying-in ... rd-labels/

I don't recall reading what the resolution was to that.

I was just responding to the Boys Noise post and random copyright notices. YouTube depended on external audio ID and hadn't really figured out how to positively identify label's content vs otherwise and was trigger happy to shut down anything that "may be" claimed by the labels. At SFL Austin they were able to detect when the DJ took over and started spinning tunes during breaks and if I recall we were able to get the live feed up again pretty quickly. YouTube's audio ID is pretty insane now.

Whether this is agreeable to everyone is another issue entirely. I'm just geeking out on the fact that they knew if people couldn't rely on positive IDs then their platform would suffer greatly. Once they monetized video instead of muting or suppressing them entirely the whole nature of YouTube changed (for better or worse).