Never do a music industry startup unless you have a billion dollars, can raise a billion dollars, or plan to be acquired by a company with a billion dollars to spare. That's the table stakes for going toe-to-toe with the big three.
They'll bleed you to death with licensing fees, deputise you into their copyright enforcement police, upload their songs to your platform on one hand while suing you with the other, and all the while cry about how extracting monopoly profits is so much harder than in the old days.
Just go disrupt something safer, like organised crime or the international diamond trade. At least with those the law probably won't change out from under you.
In October 2010, Caldwell spoke at Y Combinator’s Startup School event at Stanford University about the failures of imeem and of the challenges still facing the music industry. At the event, Caldwell delivered a cautionary message for entrepreneurs interested in music startups. Caldwell criticized major music labels for holding too much power, focusing mainly on the industry’s licensing deals for content. He said that the current state of the industry made success for startups bleak.
While some commentators praised Caldwell for his harsh but realistic insight on the digital music startup industry, many critics (notably David Hyman, CEO and founder of MOG) felt that the lessons learned from Caldwell’s experience with imeem did not accurately portray the industry as a whole.
I'm not so sure that's true. Their key problem is that they didn't understand how much value there is in up-and-coming, amateur, and underground music. The record labels only have power when it comes to their catalogue. SoundCloud could have truly disrupted the labels by providing an alternative way to promote, monetize, and discover music. But they somehow got off that track.
I'd like this to be true, but in practice it seems like most people (me included) strongly prefer hearing songs they already know most of the time, enjoy songs more with repetition, at least up to a point, and are more than willing to learn to like almost anything with high enough production value.
Some people are music snobs as a hobby and most go on discovery quests from time to time, but it honestly seems like most people most of the time want music they don't have to think too much about or devote too much attention to. Indie-only channels can't really deliver that.
I think most people like variety. Yes, some people always listen to the same 50 songs, and some people never listen to the same song twice. But most people don't go their whole lives without expanding their musical tastes.
While iTunes and Google Play gave chart toppers the spotlight, SoundCloud turned amateurs into professionals. "Nobodies" could put their music on soundcloud and get them streamed millions of times, and that recognition could eventually get them a chance to sign on a dotted line
Why do these two groups of people need to be served by the same service? Why couldn't there be a site for young producers to easily publish their music online and connect with the fans? If I make a song, I can't even imagine what would it take to get it to Spotify. I'd probably have to pay some agency. SoundCloud with its community is the perfect tool for this.
> ...most people most of the time want music they don't have to think too much about or devote toouch attention to.
I agree with that statement - dedicating significant energy to finding new music is a fairly niche hobby.
However, I don't think easy-to-find necessarily equals label-owned music.
I often listen to music for hours at a time in the background while I'm working or relaxing at home. I'll aim for an artist or mood and then I'm happy to let 'related tracks' from artists I've never heard of play indefinitely. If there's a track I really like I'll look at who the artist is and make note. I listen to a ton of "indy" music this way. Mostly, I never know who the artist is. Sometimes I discover new artists. All of this is very low effort on my part.
In fact, it would be significantly more effort to listen to megastar pop music or classics. I'd have to find a way to play the tracks - YouTube most likely, which means a ton of poorly thought out ads, or else paying for the songs directly, which usually is just slow and annoying.
I'd wager the biggest hours of music listening are for background music - at work, in stores and restaurants, while studying, while lounging around the house. I'm sure some people always want to listen to the same ten albums on repeat every day, but I suspect most people are driven more by ambiance. Indy music will do that job just fine.
Of course people will always want to play nostalgic hits. But I suspect that's a smaller driver of music consumption by hour of attention (or at least partial attention) than many people assume. That means the labels have way less power than people assume.
Probably because they realized that path would not be sustainable. Most people don't want to pay for music, period. Few would pay a monthly fee for a service that only offered relatively unknown artists. While SoundCloud does have a unique UI compared to other streaming services, it's not enough of a differentiator to compete with Spotify.
How should this work? Once somebody is trending on such platforms, labels will come, give them tons of money, a contract and take over. And take them away from these platforms as well.
They'll give them an advance as bait for an exploitative and crappy contract which may well be run in a dishonest way.
Given that most sales are downloads or streams now, the only thing big labels can bring to the table is a nuclear level of publicity. And by definition, that's going to be reserved for a tiny handful of multimillion-selling household names.
Today's smaller bands and artists - which will be the majority - get no particular benefit from signing to a big label.
They may get some smaller benefits from signing to a smaller niche label, but they certainly won't get a big pile of cash from that.
The situation is similar to book publishing, where a tiny handful of massively popular signed authors get most of the publicity and the cash, but there's a solid underclass of midlist writers who do better with self-publishing, because they earn more from direct sales and - ironically - have a more secure career too.
There was a massive opportunity for SoundCloud to become Amazon/Kindle for Musicians.
MySpace had that space for a while but lost it. BandCamp is close, but doesn't quite make it because the default artist pages suck, and it sees itself as a store, not so much as a marketing and PR outlet that also happens to sell downloads and physical media.
SoundCloud could have won that space, but apparently SoundCloud's management never understood that there's more money in hosting associated services - web pages, mailshots, blogs, and so on - than there is in providing hosting for audio files.
In fact YouTube seems to be quietly taking over for basic track hosting, with the added benefit of video. There's no reaction feature on the tracks, but I'm not convinced that was ever an essential USP on SoundCloud.
But I still think someone else with VC backing could win this space and clean up.
Most musicians who can figure out how to record and upload their own music to SoundCloud could just as easily create a generic website with squarespace or something similar to host a blog. The only value in a comprehensive social network for musicians would be the audience it could bring. A large audience is very hard to build.
Yes! This. SoundCloud should have focused on helping musicians promote themselves, connect with fans and monetize their music. And yeah, this space is pretty wide open right now. The ways people create and consume music are changing, and nobody is really taking advantage of it.
Man, now I really want to build what SoundCloud should have been.
Great. They leave, push their listeners over on the younger version of them.
It's like sailing... Every bit of air that hits your sail will end up behind you, dispersed. That doesn't mean your boat will stop. You travel by charting a course where you stay ahead of a pressure differential.
Same in music. You need to find a source of new artists that will continually replenish you as you lose artists to platforms that focus on the stage after you in maturity. The beauty of culture is it always replenishes.
They couldn't stay small due to user influx. They couldn't sustain their music offering without deals with the music industry.
VC money is just something they needed because they couldn't do any monetisation without deals with the industry (too much of their content is non-fair-use derivatives of the big 3's copyrighted content) and they obviously can't stream millions of hours of music without some sort of money.
Musical talent is not equally distributed. The Big 3 offer the most talented and/or trending artists (who are often struggling financially) a path to riches and fame that is difficult to refuse. Until a startup can replicate or disrupt this model, the labels will always have a monopoly on the best talent.
It's not just the marketing. With enough VC funding a startup could build an equivalent or better marketing apparatus. The Big entertainment companies have a monopoly on key distribution channels: radio, tv, in-store, stadium shows etc. The succesful startup will be the one that builds an entirely new distribution channel for musical acts.
The fun thing is how this is thanks to an economy based on consumption and IP, making higher profit margins good. My favorite however is the Betamax case from the 1980s. I wonder how lawyers took over in the first place.
Did they manage just fine? They had to cut the same extortionate deal with the big 4 records labels and give them an equity steak in the company as well[1]. Given the recent figures I think the jury is still out on whether Spotify and this whole "the more we make the more they take" business model is actually sustainable:
"In 2016, Spotify lost just over $600 million ($601.4 million), up significantly from 2015's losses of just under $258 million. This means losses increased by 133%."[2]
Who said you need billions to get started, you need a billion to keep going, when the music industry notice you. Spotify have raised $1.56bn to date: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/spotify
I can't really imagine how. Content needs to be licensed if you want to profit off of it legally, and I'm not sure how you can disrupt licensing unless you already have many billions of dollars to throw around.
The difference is that Bandcamp doesn‘t need to make deals with major labels. Instead they have smaller and larger labels as well as independent artists coming to them.
I really don‘t understand why Soundcloud tried to get into general, mainstream music streaming. Keeping their niche as paid host for DJs, radio shows, independent artists and small labels should have been their main focus. As a paid service for listeners (in contrast to artists) it simply can‘t compete with Spotify, Apple and others.
>"In November 2014, SoundCloud closed a deal with Warner Music Group, giving the label an undisclosed cut of revenue from ads, a 3%–5% stake in the company and protection against past copyright infringement from the label."
This sounds like terms dictated by the Mob. It's quite telling that the deal also conferred ownership on a content holder in order to be able to license and pay handsomely for their content. This is only one of the big 4 they were negotiating with too. By the time they get done negotiation with the other 3 they would have likely given up 15% of the company. Note the big 4 all have stakes in Spotify as well[1].
At any rate I think this should have been a sign that they were going down the wrong path. Propping up these labels and hitching your wagon to them, only to have to constantly renegotiate your deal with them every couple of years seems contra to a platform that gave artists direct access to music fans without the middle man.
Yep, I remember this. I used to use SoundCloud for everything. I built a following, a reputation, and then SoundCloud tried to commit suicide. They signed this stupid deal, they removed groups, and they tried to shove Soundcloud Go down everyone's throats. I think all 3 oysf those things are related, despite PR claiming (vaguely) otherwise.
I've been paying SoundCloud for years. They had a business model. I use(d) SoundCloud because everything on SoundCloud sounded different than everywhere else.
There is so much content on SoundCloud, and they've been doing their best to bury it under tracks that I can find on Spotify. Back in the good old days, when SoundCloud was small enough to have advanced search (because they were still using postgres on the back end), I remember searching for Balkan Swing Electro, and there was a ton of it. There is no way for me to discover new things like that any more because groups are gone, search sucks, tags aren't freeform, and SoundCloud wants to be Spotify. SoundCloud owned the long tail of music, you could find everything that didn't sound like Justin Bieber making a remix with Diplo and Wiz Khalifa, and very little that did. I'm eagerly awaiting the next company that wants to own the long tail of music.
The simple fact is that copyright protections are far too strong. The copyright cartel doesn't need a shady network of 400 pound men to enforce their schemes; they just use the U.S. Attorney's office instead.
How many bright technical entrepreneurs have been crushed by rent-seekers milking the royalties out of a 40-year-old track? Copyright has completely lost the plot. We need to rein it in, with the awareness that this will be no small task, as it amounts to taking away a license to print money from some of the largest companies in the world.
Well the copyright of the of recording is there to protect the record label's investment. They aren't going to finance a record and it's promotion if someone else can come along and also release the same recording and collect money for it. That was always the plot.
That being said artists don't have to sign contracts with record labels if they don't want. With technology and the internet it is possible today more than at any point in history to successfully release and promote your music without a record label. I thought this was the great promise of platforms like Soundcloud. If an artist decides they need the marketing muscle of a record label they can license their recordings to a record label and retain the recording copyright. I really believe this is the future: See:
Huh? There's two copyrights - the copyright for the physical recording which is now 35 years and there is the songwriter copyright which is country by country but generally 50 to 70 years. The latter favor the artists so that they can receive royalties for their lifetime. Without that the songs would fall into the public domain while they artists was likely still alive. See:
>"That was the case for centuries. Why is that such a bad thing?"
For centuries? Given that commercial recordings weren't widely available until the end of the 18th century I am not sure where you are getting this from.
You are mixing different things - there is a songwriter copyright and the recording copy right.
A song being in the public domain(the expire of the songwriters copyright) doesn't mean you get to use the recording however you see fit. It means you can use the song as in record the song yourself and not pay royalties to Elvis's estate or whoever actually authored the song.
The terms of the recording copyright determine who owns the physical recording. Often after a number of years these can revert back to the original performer. This is known as a "reversion." Upon a reversion the original performer can then license the original recording as they please - as reissues, for inclusion on compilations etc. This is why you can't upload an Elvis song to youtube - because Elvis Presley Enterprises own the recording.
I actually didn't know about recapture rights, so thanks for sharing that. It is nice that such a compromise was thrown in there, though it's not clear to me that the copyright cartels would take such attempts lying down. The legislation's requirements for recapture are not only fairly involved, but there seem to be several provisions that could become the center of a protracted legal case.
It's one thing to have legal rights; it's another to get people to actually comply with them, and the odds in court of a One-Hit Wonder from 1982 against a big record conglomerate don't seem too favorable, especially when the alternative is to continue collecting a royalty check.
There are a lot of points of inflection for a copyright broker like a label to jump in and attempt to run down the other party's legal war chest (a technique commonly practiced by large companies).
>Well the copyright of the of recording is there to protect the record label's investment. They aren't going to finance a record and it's promotion if someone else can come along and also release the same recording and collect money for it. That was always the plot.
The plot is as defined in the U.S. Constitution:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
Today, the copyright regime stifles the progress of science and useful arts by cloistering our cultural, scientific, and creative heritage into the pockets of a few big corporations for a virtually unlimited period of time (the effective goal being "forever minus one day", as Jack Valenti put it).
Science and the useful arts are promoted by allowing rightsholders the opportunity to make a decent living out of their work for a while. They're not promoted by allowing rightsholders to make one popular thing in their 20s, live off royalties for the next 60 years, and then enable their posterity to be three or four generations of moochers for the remaining 60+ years left in the copyright.
We want to reward work, but not so much that creative people, let alone entire generations of their offspring, are deprived of the ongoing incentive to contribute. "Necessity is the mother of invention", after all.
Progress is not promoted by locking up cultural icons in impenetrable boxes. We're more concerned about a company's brand image than we are about free discourse or historical records.
Progress is not promoted by raining the force of the American government down on hackers and engineers who build communication systems that make copyright difficult to enforce, or by using arcane legal mechanisms like the CFAA and the RAM Copy doctrine to prevent developers from spidering the web.
I am all for allowing companies to profit, I'm a capitalist. But we need not take that narrative to its extreme and assume that we must allow corporations whatever is best for their bottom line without consideration to the larger social, cultural, and economic concerns at hand. People are creative and will find plenty of ways to cope with revised copyright laws. Remember, the primary goal of copyright is NOT to be a dollar-printing machine in the rock star's basement, but rather to promote the progress of science and useful arts, and we should structure things to ensure that is happening.
Copyright as it exists now primarily functions to serve corporate profiteers. The public only accepts it because it doesn't understand how draconian it gets, since most of the time their in-the-course-of-daily-life-infringements don't result in a lawsuit. We need to fix that.
Nobody is forcing artists to sign bad deals with record companies though. I am no way defending record companies here but it seems kind of silly to make a deal with the devil and then complain about the terms afterwards. Anyone is free to try to negotiate for things like reversions and there is no such thing as a standard record deal. Artists such as REM, Metallica and Prince have all famously done negotiated reversions way before the 35 years.
The US is actually unique in that reversion is non-assignable, so an artist can't give up the right to receiving their music back even if they wanted to give it up.
The UK isn't nearly as kind in this regard. Duran Duran were recently prohibited by an English court from claiming their reversions in the US. See:
Can you actually tell me about a bright technical entrepreneur who has been crushed? Why did they form a business distributing somebody else's product if they couldn't pay for it?
Something is old so now you can’t own it? Does a 40 year old house suddenly become public domain just because people like to visit? If you made something, you and your heirs have a right to that, it doesn’t just get confiscated because it’s popular. Some of Bob Dylan’s songs are over 50 years old; does that mean he shouldn’t own the stuff he created? That is just theft. Nobody has a “right” to anything I create unless I say so.
Songs aren't physical things; they are ideas. And you cannot own ideas. Allowing people to own it in the first place was a compromise by the commons so people could make some money from creating things by owning it for a short time. The copyright extensions have stolen these ideas from the commons.
>"Songs aren't physical things; they are ideas. And you cannot own ideas."
No a song is not an "idea", it is piece of work that someone produced. And a recording of that is very much a physical thing. Why shouldn't the creator of that be allowed to own it?
A song in this context is not an "idea". They are a recording made by skilled technicians of a performance by skilled musicians. Creating a recording of a song that people want to listen to requires a lot of professionals who deserve compensation.
Thankfully society gave the world a legal system. Now when a business distributes music belonging to another business, compensation through the courts can be pursued in cases of piracy.
Please be more specific of their need and I'll do my best to twist an answer around. In the mean time, I'll continue to feed my family using the modest wage I make mastering records that so many people think are just magic ideas that float in the air with no value.
That is not how intellectual goods work. They require their own class of property laws called "intellectual property" precisely because they are different from real property.
Real property provides the basic needs of human life, and any single parcel or space can only be occupied or used by a single entity at a time. It exists in time and space as a physical good. Persons and families are entitled to protect this property, with force if necessary, because they depend on it for their ongoing maintenance and habitation.
Real property laws provide structure to our approach to real property so that we can live in a neighborly civilization instead of a smattering of independent militarized tribes.
Intellectual property, on the other hand, exists in an abstract, non-physical space. The same intellectual content can exist with perfect fidelity in an unlimited number of minds, and because intellectual goods are not subject to physical laws of space and time, they can be shared and utilized fully and simultaneously by everyone capable of processing and storing them.
This free-flowing nature makes intellectual goods extremely powerful, but it also gives them limited economic utility, because the supply is very hard to constrain. This was true in the past, and it's 1000x truer with the advent of the internet, which allows us to transfer intellectual goods practically anywhere in the world perfectly, exactly, and instantaneously. Now you don't even need to stay on good terms with the neighborhood sage for access to the treasure trove of intellectual goods!
Disembodied intellectual goods are useful, but they are not necessary for survival, and thus it is rarely if ever justified to use force in the "defense" of them. This is very different from real property, which must be reserved and defended to ensure survival.
To the extent that we do decide to use force to "defend" such goods, we should tread lightly. The analog to real property is very weak indeed.
Copyright essentially injects the government as a middleman into a voluntary and free market transaction, and says "I know you THINK you want that, but we aren't going to allow you to buy it from him, because we say someone else deserves the money more than him". Such interjections are another area where we should tread very lightly, and in recent decades, we have done anything but.
Our current iteration of copyright-gone-amok constrains our speech and does a great deal of damage that no one with an audience is willing to talk about, because they're all too busy enjoying the money stream from it to comment on its destructive consequences.
Language like "perfect fidelity in an unlimited number of minds" just doesn't add up in my head. Nobody can reproduce the sound of a recording in their mind without listening to a tape/record/cd/file of it.
How is your speech being constrained by a record label anyways? A recording of a performance belongs to the creators of that recording. You don't have the right to reproduce it without paying them. That's that. It has nothing to do with your speech and everything to do with people in the entertainment industry getting paid for their work.
SoundCloud could have been a nice business if they hadn't got greedy. From the beginning (or close to it) there have been various paid accounts for artists which a lot of people used. SoundCloud was the best place to discover new music from unsigned artists. There were unsigned artists with tracks on it that blew up and eventually got picked up by major labels.
But:
- SoundCloud neglected the platform.
- Then they did one of the worst redesigns of any site I've seen (try reordering a track in your spotlight [paid feature] in Chrome. Crashes the tab and has done for years. I need to open another browser to do that.).
- Then it became overrun with major label artists.
- Then they started offering features just to the big artists - various UI/branding options - (forgetting about the artists that got them to where they were).
- Then they did the whole paid streaming mess which they were never going to succeed in. Anybody could have told them that, I really don't believe anyone in that company thought 'Go' would work. I think they just needed to do something.
I'm not sure if they've taken so much money now that this isn't possible anymore but if I were CEO I would take it back to it's roots. Focus on the unsigned artists. Fix the site. Offer a distribution system (like CDBaby/TuneCore) so that SoundCloud can be a one-stop show for unsigned artists. Now you've got paid accounts (for stats/spotlight/unlimited upload space) and a small cut of distribution on all paid platforms.
I don't understand how in a world where more artists are getting big without label help nobody is offering a great platform for them. SoundCloud got very close in the past. BandCamp has gotten close too (although it lacks the social/sharing/viral aspect of SoundCloud). If SoundCloud does end up shutting down it's due to greed and poor management. Instead of focusing on what they do well and what people use them for they've tried to go after the money and they were much too late making that move to get any of it.
It is funny you mention Bandcamp as your flagship example considering how much 1993 duct tape is holding it together. You cannot compare the UI and tech of the two; Bandcamp has neglected the same Courier New interface since they were a startup. SoundCloud engineering is worlds ahead. They were one of the biggest proponents and pioneers of containerized microservice architecture. They took a lot of beatings so that we wouldn't have to, and that's worth something to me. Frankly I've never read an inspiring development article from Bandcamp a engineering team.
I have no idea how Bandcamp is built behind the scenes, but from a user-facing perspective, their UI and UX seem way better than Soundcloud's.
>Frankly I've never read an inspiring development article from Bandcamp a engineering team.
I don't know the actual user numbers, but I'm guessing this is because Soundcloud has had to scale a lot more than Bandcamp has and not necessarily because Bandcamp's engineering team is worse.
But, hey, maybe Soundcloud did have a top-class engineering team. Doesn't really change my opinion of it, since I've always considered it the worst and least user-friendly out of all the streaming platforms (mid-song user comments I can't disable; next song autoplay that I can barely find the playlist for, with seemingly no relation to what I was just listening to; horrible sound quality; hideous and distracting color scheme that distracts from the music, much unlike BC).
That may be entirely the fault of the management and not the engineers, but still.
>> "It is funny you mention Bandcamp as your flagship example"
I didn't. I said they had gotten as far as SoundCloud which was close to the right product but not close enough.
>> SoundCloud engineering is worlds ahead. They were one of the biggest proponents and pioneers of containerized microservice architecture.
As a user, why should I care? After the redesign the product became abysmal to use. There are major bugs (like reordering spotlight in Chrome) which have been around for years with no fix. That's a paid feature, broken in a major browser for years. There are also still (or at least there were recently) some pages using the old interface. They wasted time building Go instead of fixing the almost great product they already had.
The age and the architecture of their backend have absolutely nothing to do with Soundclouds usability, which got worse and worse after every iteration, following the typical pattern.
The UI and the tech are not the focus. The focus is on providing a platform for artists to sell music. In that regard, it's been a great success. As an artist, I'd much rather distribute music on a platform that's proven to be run by those that put the needs of artists first rather than one that blows their load over how advanced their tech stack is.
Bandcamp's aesthetic has always been pretty minimal. I remember an obscure interview podcast I wish I could find now where one of the founders talked about their philosophy of not trying to splash a "brand" all over everything, so the artists felt more like they owned the look of their pages.
> It is funny you mention Bandcamp as your flagship example considering how much 1993 duct tape is holding it together. You cannot compare the UI and tech of the two; Bandcamp has neglected the same Courier New interface since they were a startup.
I really don't agree with that. While there's room for performance improvements at Bandcamp (the site can be slow on fridays, which is release day for most albums), their user experience and design is just fine and very functional.
Discovering an album via recommendations in your activity feed and actually purchasing and downloading said album is a matter of seconds.
It takes me longer to remove 5 items from a Soundcloud playlist, which is a process that involves opening and closing a modal window 5 separate times.
If one of those platforms feels neglected and dated it's Soundcloud.
Bandcamp, with its "Courier New" interface, has delivered hundreds of millions of dollars in value to its users and artists. And it's still growing.
That's cute that soundcloud made a bunch of blog posts about their super elite containerized microserviced architecture. How's their business doing? Who's making money on there besides industry plants?
Something must be terribly wrong at SoundCloud engineering besides the money crunch. They have done nothing to improve the core user experience for years. They've only made it worse on iOS. Try scrolling down the feed a bit on Chrome - it heats your computer up and starts gobbling CPU. None of their paid plans get me higher quality audio, which is sorely needed because by default their audio quality is shit. As an app or paid service, it's trash.
Yet it's the sole music app I use: all of my favorite artists and music are on SoundCloud. The only thing it has going for it is the community.
> Then it became overrun with major label artists.
So what. There also many excellent major label artist and it's good to have them. Many new album releases are missing on SoundCloud but available on Spotify from day one.
Probably I am the only one but I find most 'DJ mixes' on SoundCloud lack in quality/creativity (I am into electronic music though). Maybe some like them I think 95% of them are subpar and sound like my nephew created a song with Magix Music Maker. These mixes and 'the extended repetoire' are no competitive advantage over Spotify and Co.
>> So what. There also many excellent major label artist and it's good to have them.
You're missing the point. I've no problem with major label artists but when you start dealing with them you start dealing with licensing. Then you waste time, don't develop the platform, and abandon the indie artists that got you to where you are. You need to take the point in context of the rest of my argument. When Spotify/Apple Music/Pandora exist why would you enter that market when it's not the market that you started in and you have no chance of beating them? Focus on indie music and you have a business where people actually pay money for the service and you become profitable.
>> Maybe some like them I think 95% of them are subpar and sound like my nephew created a song with Magix Music Maker.
Well that's how music discovery works. You have to go through rubbish to find the gems. If you want pro level stuff every time you should use Spotify/Beatport etc. I've been on SoundCloud since the beginning (since before it even became the go-to place for electronic music) and it was a great way to discover really good songwriters. You have to do some work to find them but that's part of the fun. SoundCloud tried to evolve into something completely different than it began as. Your expectations are a perfect example of how that skewed the public perception of it to the point where you and I believe it is completely different things - in reality it tries to be both but doesn't excel at either.
> You're missing the point. I've no problem with major label artists but when you start dealing with them you start dealing with licensing.
You think all those mixes come for free? They have to be licensed as well once the embedded song snippets exceed 30sec which most of them do (also depending on the local jurisdiction).
Soundcloud had to find agreements with the labels sooner or later anyway because of the mixes and just included the major label artists in the deal because why not. Otherwise they would have been sued (and they were sued by some)—again—because of the mixes.
> Well that's how music discovery works.
Ok, then let's agree on it's a matter of taste. But I'd like to revise my comment: 99% of the mixes on SoundCloud are cr*p. Maybe it's just my taste but I am also SoundCloud user from day one and somebody who spent tons of money on Beatport. If they can succeed with this music selection and find listeners like you and who pay, great for them, but obviously they can't. Btw, you find the 1% good mixes also on Spotify or Apple Music.
>> You think all those mixes come for free? They have to be licensed as well once the embedded song snippets exceed 30sec which most of them do (also depending on the local jurisdiction).
Again you're not understanding what I'm saying. You seem to think of music (or SoundCloud) as only EDM. When SoundCloud started it was largely amateur and indie 'analog' musicians and songwriters (i.e. people playing instruments and writing their own music). None of that needs licensed. Those people, despite not making any money, were paying SoundCloud £9.99 per month to increase their storage space and see listener stats. Obviously I don't know how many but there were badges on the profiles to indicate a paying user and there were a significantly high percentage. There was quite a large community of this type of music around a lot of genres. None of it needed licensed. If you stick to indie artists you don't need to deal with licensing. People doing mixes can use MixCloud which automatically licenses uploads some how.
So, my point is, SoundCloud did not start off with DJ mixes or copyrighted material. It started off very legitimately and had a decent business model. They could have made a nice business out of it but like most SV businesses preferred to sink a load of VC money and 'grow' with no ultimate business model.
Edit:
>> If they can succeed with this music selection and find listeners like you and who pay, great for them, but obviously they can't.
My comment was nothing to do with listeners paying - it was about artists paying. Artists have always been able and willing to pay for spotlight/storage/stats.
> SoundCloud did not start off with DJ mixes or copyrighted material.
The CEO and CTO were themselves very much into EDM. SC positioned itself repetoire-wise as a DJ platform from very early on, most tracks, traffic, the first surge were EDM-based the first years. And 99% was copyrighted material stitched together. I don't know where you have your information from but it's just blatantly wrong.
Anyways, I think that our current discussion does not contribute to the initial points in any way and doesn't make us both feeling better, so I stop here. Have a nice day!
But the underlying issue is that those DJ tracks many times technically did need permission from copyright holders to be posted. Unfortunately dealing with this w/o a ton of money is just a failing exercise.
Soundcloud is still good to get DJ mixes from DJ's I like, but I can seeing it go away just due to all of the costs that would accompany trying to ensure they have the right to share everything that is posted by users.
>> But the underlying issue is that those DJ tracks many times technically did need permission from copyright holders to be posted.
What the parent and I are saying though is that DJ mixes were a small part of the content in the early days. It wasn't created to host DJ mixes or marketed as that initially. Producers/songwriters/amateurs were the bulk of the content. SoundCloud could have built a decent business by banning copyrighted material and only dealing with original works. There was never any need to get into the messy licensing business.
> If they can succeed with this music selection and find listeners like you and who pay, great for them, but obviously they can't.
For the longest time they didn't offer a way to pay, and the now-existing payment model doesn't really do anything for someone listening to the small guys, so the only obvious about them not being able to find paying listeners is that without an offer to pay for there is no paying.
Spoken like a person who didn't understand all that was on the platform. You do realize that SoundCloud had basically spawned a different genre of hip hop and rap, right? It's not just dance mixes, there's a lot of stuff that's super unique on there and it's not just hip hop, rap, or edm.
I'm far from a SoundCloud user or a hip hop or rap aficionado, but I'd like to learn more about this. Can you elaborate? Or do you know of a source where I can read about this?
You should have put the quote into its context, I wrote if it's a matter of taste then I implied that (in my opinion) 99% is crap. You might have a different opinion because you have a different taste.
> DJ mixes' on SoundCloud lack in quality/creativity
By definition they are about selection. Creative live mixes are performed in live events.
I use Soundcloud to discover new music in mixes. There’s something exciting trying to ID track using Shazam (cancer) or writing the time down and coming back every few months to find if someone else ID’d it.
I’d really like if they defaulted mixes to 320kbps tho. And streams stop randomly on Safari, while Chrome crashes after few hours of playback. Filtering options could be improved too, and Discover option is almost always suggesting me individual tracks - something I never listen to. Oh and there’s buffering problem between tracks that prevents to be used as continous stream.
This shows us, that company valuations are ridiculous and actually mean nothing.
Is SoundCloud worth a billion dollars? Well, it might be on paper or in the imaginations of the founders, but what does it really mean? To me, it's worth nothing.
The real problem is: these companies start to operate from the perspective of "having" those millions of dollars. This is why they hire too many people for too much money. They spent hundreds of thousands on marketing.
But in the end, you know what? They need to beg for money to pay their debts. They need to lay off dozens of employees because they don't have the money to pay them.
What if SoundCloud would have kept a small, yet highly skilled engineering team of maybe ~20 people, some marketing and sales, and try to not outgrow themselves? Probably they'd be having a huge surplus each year because their costs would be small and sustained.
When I read stories like these, I actually feel good about my bootstrapped, down-to-earth startup. We don't make millions, we don't "disrupt" the industry, yet we solve our customers' problems and delight them. We won't ever run out of money, as we carefully check each and every expenditure, and have growing savings in the bank.
Once you have investors, they want their money to grow, and this is not possible by staying small. We have invested in a startup we work with, and given the high risk of failure, I would not be happy with a meager growth rate of <10% per year. At that rate, my money is safer in the bank or some kind of low risk portfolio. If you have an 80% chance of losing the money, then you better expect at least a x5 return rate when selling your shares.
I'm a big fan of bootstrapping myself, and it's the best model IFF you can get by without investors. If you, like SoundCloud, have a product that does not break-even, then you will need investors, period. Of course you could say - well, just don't make a product that nobody pays for; but obviously there is a market for such products, on the investor side.
Staying small != don't grow business. I would never hire crazy so people in the startup can imagine spinning up new projects new microservice new crazy revolutionary database/big data/ new KV store/new cache layer out of curiosity.
Till one point, when the business is so big, growing engineering team to over 100 is inevitable. But plently of really successful tech companies did not overgrow their team size for a number of years. E.g Facebook.
Human captial spent is actually the most expensive even comparing space rental if you add up salary, bonus, and benefits. I also will not recommend startups in their early stage (or even until they can break-even for a long time) to flu candidates over. There is really no reason to fly people over until you want to hire that person. Flying and hotel adds up big time too. Google can offer this because spending a couple millions doesn't matter to them.
Yes, but you could argue that WhatsUp is even more impressive because it can be considered much latter stage and aquisition value also reflects that being 19x more than Instagram.
I guess they mean WhatsApp (http://whatsapp.com/). Not sure you're going to get a lot of fun with it if it is not widely used around you but it is a behemoth in many countries.
The issue is that the investment market seems to be partially built on selling the idea that you're doing something so new and different that you need all these fancy architectures and hundreds of developers. If you don't sell that idea, you're just another CRUD company so why should anyone invest?
Look at all of the really successful tech companies out there, they startrd with tools already available. I see this too often. Everyone has nice ideas and wanted to write something better because they don't like the interface or they had to hack around (look at you Jenkins). We are all guilty of that. But if you hire people and they begin to create new fancy architecture that doesn't pay off, trust me, that money went to waste. This is not even a math problem.
Again, find a company out there did not create their infratructure with common solutions and only begin to develop custom solution when they afford and they really needed it. Several years later.
The x5 return takes partial responsibility for the 80% failure. These foolish business pivots trashes the brand. If there's only one high-return idea in the room and it's clearly hazardous and unlikely to work - there should be no obligation to take it; an investor didn't drop millions to be squandered foolishly.
At those insane risk rates (at least for early rounds), it better be as exciting as going to a casino. Nobody in their right mind would provide seed funding with anything but gambling in mind. [Except for those who want to change the world by supporting an idea, of course.]
This reminds me of the current ICOs and the token economy. Early adopters try to push new currencies like crazy to cash out once popularity peaks.
SoundCloud was never thought as a real business. Everybody involved in the music industry should have known that it's not possible to build a solid business based on the oligopoly of three music labels and with Spotify having a headstart of 50m users and being still not profitable.
But still all these VCs with USV leading the way told us it's the next billion dollar unicorn. Old-school pump and dump.
Traditionally pump and dump meant taking advantage of unsophisticated retail investors. I don't think this qualifies as pump and dump unless you mean the earlier stage VCs somehow managed to cash out at the expense of some later naive shareholders? In this case sounds like everyone (except maybe Ljung) lost out..
Still it's a long-term pump and dump game. VCs praise their investments to the utmost (which is their job and because their believe in their investments) but mainly to attract more investors (pump) and at some point to find potential buyers (dump) where you can exchange retail investors with dumb corporations.
Intent matters. If they promote it, and honestly believe in it, and want to cash out at an IPO, then it's just good old investing.
You don't have to think it's the best thing ever. Or that it'll surely work. But you can still think that it's a pretty decent investment, high risk, high expected payout.
not really. they will have to prove they could see a profitable exit. which in this case is dubious since there were other companies doing what they promoted years ahead of them and all had the same outcome.
I could try to sell you a magic goose and I can really believe it will lay golden eggs any time now. interested? I even have ten of them myself!
> other companies doing what they promoted years ahead of them and all had the same outcome.
of course not exactly the same thing, not in the same environment. sure, comparisons are important, but it's not beyond reasonable to doubt that for some stated reason soundcloud will be different.
and they're not dead [yet]. (I'm not affiliated with them anyhow, and I too think that their UI is pretty shit.)
I mostly agree with the grandiose self-delusion of modern valuations, but I guess it also depends on what kind of service you're providing. If there's a social element, i.e. you share things with others, "community", you might lose to faster moving companies who take your audience; and if there's an ecosystem involved, you might not reach the critical mass to sustain it.
Perhaps you're not in a critical mass sort of industry?
How does this compare to Spotify which has 3000+ employees, debt financing of over a billion dollars, and an insane valuation? What does the future hold for that company whether it IPOs or not?
Definitely NOT making a mobile app with decent UI.
Jokes aside, having to negotiate with tons of artists and their labels/managers, I imagine their legal/business department is significantly bigger than that of most tech startups.
They negotiate with very few artists and their managers directly. The reason is that there are very few artists who have that kind of control of their content.
AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles and Taylor Swift come to mind, but there are very few artists who have a say in whether or not their catalog can or can not be streamed. Those artists made wise business decisions at some point and/or were able to throw their weight around. Here are some notable hold outs as of 2016 anyway:
Last time I checked, Spotify had 70 million users. That's one employee per 23333 users. Is that too much? How many thousands users should you have per employee?
Because if they want to have support at all (unlike, say, Google), they need quite a few employees.
The per-user costs here are web servers and customer support. The bulk of the servers are only doing one thing, so even though there are a lot of them, you could mange them with a hundred people. So that leaves customer service as a per-user cost. It's possible that the customer support department has 2000+ people, and that would be a satisfactory answer. But if that's not the case, then "employees per user" is pretty irrelevant, and the question stands.
not much. when I interviewed with them the PM director told me the radio listeners were near break even, if they gave people free trials then it was 100% a loss that was costing them money.
You need sales people to sell ads, designers to build out the creatives (assuming the company you sold ads for doesn't have media that fits with your platform). Then you need account executives to manage the account. Then you need a billing department that collects the money. Then you need engineering to build out your ad serving abilities.
For IT you have the core that builds what some here have called a "shitty" UI. Then you have people working on all kinds of invisible things like developer tools to support releases. People working on recommendation engines. People working on instrumenting data and metrics for business analysts.
Then you have people who hand-curate music for each of the markets and local tastes that Spotify operates in. Then you need people to manage these people... Etc.
personally I think if they had focus on monetizing the artists side of the business and keep it small as you say they could have a great business not at the scale of Spotify but sustainable.
I feel it is also a culture thing: Some artistic subcommunities seem to revel in the image of the 'starving artist' and making a lot of money is often regarded as 'selling out'. Certainly anything liked by the mainstream immediately loses its appeal for the groups that like to think the have exquisite tastes. (almost by definition)
So, websites like soundcloud find themselves in a bind: on one hand they can't start making lots of money because they would lose their artistic street cred, on the other hand their servers and bandwidth cost money. Blaming this lack of money for artistic on the economy seems a little bit off, this has basically been the case since Roman days.
I feel sites like github have a nice middle ground, charging a little bit to professional users while offering the service for free to open source users. It doesn't lead to billion dollar valuations quite as fast as an advertising model though...
I agree, GitHub is a nice comparison, and has been transformative in promoting a hobbyist's ecosystem while also being a viable commercial entity. However, I think you are being a bit unfair and leaning towards characterizing the artists as valuing obscurity and non-mainstreamness per se. The point about SoundCloud is that it provided access to the people making music from their bedrooms, the hobbyists of github. Arty music types were attracted to the platform not (only) out of a pretentious desire to avoid the mainstream but because many, most even, of our culture's musical gems are surely to be found in the long tail of not-(yet) commercial music.
I think you are right about the musical value in the long tail, but what I was driving at was that the monetary value is concentrated in the 'top', in a power law fashion. Since soundcloud has to pay for its employees and servers it needs money, but most of the ways of actually getting that money will chase away users.
I think a self-hosted soundcloud where people host their own music but use the network for discoverability might be one of the few use cases where decentralization actually makes a lot of sense, because since the users are not (mainly) in it for the money the economies of scale from centralization don't matter as much.
The music industry takes $18bn / year revenue, and movies $62bn. Perhaps I'm missing your point, because that seems like a whole lot of "valuable" to me?
I was referring to the non-mainstream music that is what people originally loved soundcloud for. The figures you refer to are entirely dominated by sales for music and movies of mainstream genres.
> By definition, there will be less money for non-mainstream anything
Consider a market with genre A with 1 million listeners, and 10 million other genres with 1 listener each. We can agree that the definition of the word "mainstream" will be such that genre A is "mainstream", and yet there is much more money in the sum of the non-mainstream genres.
> I guess I'm failing to understand what your vision of a better music market would look like. Can you describe it?
When I said "valuable ecosystem" I meant culturally valuable, not necessarily revenue/year valuable. I am simply saying that it would be nice if our world satisfied the following:
IF:
Some sound engineers who are into electronic music create a website which allows lots of people to share underground electronic music with each other, and start employing people to work on the website
THEN:
The website can continue to play the role which people have come to love it for, without having to change much, and the employees will be reasonably and stably compensated for working on the website, indefinitely.
> The website can continue to play the role which people have come to love it for, without having to change much, and the employees will be reasonably and stably compensated for working on the website, indefinitely.
The issue is that such websites come to be abused and people upload copyrighted material (like youtube). Then the record company sues and the website cannot stay alive any longer.
Shouldn't we be able to come up with technical solutions to that problem? For example, I know there are various sorts of "fingerprinting" technologies developed for identifying music fragments -- perhaps it would be possible to automatically identify copyrighted material using these sorts of technologies? Presumably Google does this already for YouTube, so someone make the technology available to indy websites providing upload functionality?
> Shouldn't we be able to come up with technical solutions to that problem?
The issue is that the companies do not have the originals to fingerprint since they are held hostage by media companies... :/ Maybe there is a way to fingerprint using pirated music or youtube audio?
As for youtube, it was filled with pirated content and was getting sued to oblivion until Google saved them.
In a perfect world I guess the media companies would work with technology companies and distribute some sort of fingerprint database such that if smaller fish obey the fingerprint database then they can be fairly sure of not being sued. One might even naively think that it would be in the interests of the large media companies to distribute such a thing because it would help avoid piracy.
When I read stories like these, I actually feel good about my bootstrapped, down-to-earth startup. We don't make millions, we don't "disrupt" the industry, yet we solve our customers' problems and delight them. We won't ever run out of money, as we carefully check each and every expenditure, and have growing savings in the bank.
When I read stories like these, I actually feel good about my bootstrapped, down-to-earth startup. We don't make millions, we don't "disrupt" the industry, yet we solve our customers' problems and delight them. We won't ever run out of money, as we carefully check each and every expenditure, and have growing savings in the bank.
Then it's not a startup. A startup is designed to grow quickly. Everything we associate with startups stems from the fact that the successful ones do make millions within a decade.
For it to be a startup, you have to have a large target market. That means any competitor that chooses to grow quickly will trounce one that moves slowly.
That definition of "startup" is very valley-centric. Most of the rest of the world still means it the way the grandparent meant. A small, fairly young company that is building a new product/service.
I disagree, here in CT of all places the distinction between business and startup is the same, focused on growth. I've heard multiple in the area VCs on multiple occasions confirm their worst nightmare is a "lifestyle business", not growing fast enough for 10x growth but not dying so they can write off their losses
They are all "business" in the end after all, I'll stick with the tiny nuance that "startup funding" became a more PR friendly replacement for "unicorn hunt". Not that there is anything wrong with it, but "could have been easily avoided" stuff like these happen more often.
A startup is a business with a high growth potential, otherwise it's just a business
as already pointed out by @sillysaurus3.
If tomorrow 250 people are queuing to get a drink from your bar, you won't be able to cater to their needs, nor the next day, opening a new brick-and-mortar business takes a lot of time.
A startup would be able to scale (after a couple of days / week) and fulfill the customers' needs.
PG invented that definition when he started YC. It's a good definition, and useful in the VC world. But it's not the original definition, and most of the non-VC/Valley world still uses the original one: a business that is trying to build something new, whether it's aiming for big growth or just a steady new market.
>"Then it's not a startup. A startup is designed to grow quickly. Everything we associate with startups stems from the fact that the successful ones do make millions within a decade. For it to be a startup, you have to have a large target market."
I am sorry but where is that criteria codified? This is nonsense. Here is an article with 14 founders being asked what defines a "startup" and only one of them mentions market size:
>"Everything we associate with startups stems from the fact that the successful ones do make millions within a decade."
No, that's the sensational media coverage that associates that. Further what is meant by "make millions"? Millions in revenue when you are losing millions is not really an indicator of success is it? Also Uber, Spotify at 8 and 11 years old respectively both have millions in revenue but lose money. Are they "successful"?
You might want to look up the meaning of ad hominem. There is nothing in my comment that is even remotely attacking either you personally or your character.
An ad hominem doesn't need to be an attack to be an ad hominem. It's just an argument against the person instead of an argument against their argument.
That's like calling a newly established barber shop a startup. It's not.
The GP is working on a podcast hosting company. The market for people who want to host podcasts is miniscule. Large enough to sustain a company, sure. But that's not a startup.
While I personally buy into that definition too, it IS very much a valley centric definition that much of the rest of the world doesn't follow. At least, not to the letter. So be aware that you may be speaking to people outside of your bubble when throwing around black or white definitions like this, because they may have their own differing definitions.
Besides, there have been multiple "podcast startups" (by the valley-definition of startup) in the past.
If podcast hosting is used as a stepping stone into a more general market, that could work. But the GP indicated they were small and moved slowly, so they can't really leverage that.
It doesn't matter whether it originated in the valley. It's not like calling an elevator a lift. A startup is a technical term with a precise meaning. You can call your bar a startup if you want, but that doesn't make it true.
> A startup is a technical term with a precise meaning.
My point is that it's really not. The term existed before the valley-definition and it exists outside of the valley-definition. Yes, Paul Graham and others popularised that definition (and I personally think it's a good definition and usually use t as that), but it has existed and continues to exist with other meanings, so it's far from a "precise technical term".
If a rose by any other name smells just as sweet, then a business by any other name stays just as small.
If a business is small and stays small, then at best it's a failed startup. If it's designed to stay small, then it's not a startup at all.
You can argue any other point, but you can't avoid the growth criteria. And if you have that, either you grow quickly or your competitor will put you out of business.
My point is that a podcast hosting company has no growth potential. The target market is too small. A startup could use podcast hosting as a stepping stone toward a bigger market, but in absence of that, it's a business like any other. And there's no shame in admitting that.
But it's really strange to insist it's a startup when it's not. Imagine insisting that a desktop computer is a chair just because you can sit on it.
That "precise meaning" is not universally accepted (or even really all that popular). Paul Graham proposed it once, some people subscribe to that, but it's not universal, and I'd say YC and the greater VC community have a vested interest in ensuring companies like the one this comment chain is about are not viewed as startups.
It's not just quibbling. If you don't use that definition, then the word "startup" loses all meaning. It doesn't matter what other people call themselves.
I think companies that don't follow that definition have an agenda: startups are now prestigious, so they call themselves a startup in order to seem impressive.
You're just not going to get anywhere trying to argue word definition on the Internet, even (especially) where it matters the most, like where if you're wrong you've done wasted a decade of your life. You're just going to get drowned out by people with way more invested in their failure than you have in your success.
If we all accept a definition that becomes the new meaning. It depends on the group listening. Language changes because its based on society at large defining the rules.
Google search defines a startup as "a newly established business".
Dictionary.com says "a new business venture, or a new commercial or industrial project".
Merriam-Webster says "a fledgling business enterprise".
I don't mean to be difficult but it's annoying that some folks on HN insist that PG's definition of "startup" is the only possible one. It's a useful definition, but people who use it the non-PG way are not wrong either.
So by that logic, a startup which which provides barber to your doorstep to trim your hair is not a startup ? Also, what about start-ups selling fruits/vegetables ?
Actually, it's central to the conversation. This isn't some semantic quibbling. They were arguing the startup model is broken and then giving an example of an alternative (themselves) without meeting any of the criteria of actually being a startup.
I'm convinced that the startup scene is now filled with posers who call themselves startups for prestige. This probably isn't a new phenomenon, but it's relatively new on HN.
What difference does it make whether he can call himself a startup? Saying "the startup model is broken, I'm happier running my business, which is small and bootstrapped but profitable" doesn't change anything just because he can't use the word "startup".
It's the distinction of outsider vs insider. Someone who actually runs a startup is better positioned to criticize the model. More than that, if everyone who started a startup were to follow his model, no one would care about startups because they wouldn't matter. But they do matter, and the reason why they matter is that they grow quickly.
>Is SoundCloud worth a billion dollars? Well, it might be on paper or in the imaginations of the founders, but what does it really mean? To me, it's worth nothing.
I was curious if this was true, so I asked a genie to see if you (as a bootstrapped founder) would trade $20 to own SoundCloud. Well it turns out the genie ran the experiment and concluded that not only is it worth $20 to you, but way more - in the genie's experiment you'd actually trade both $20k and even $200k for SoundCloud!
So I looked at your comment in which you say SoundCloud is worth "nothing" to you, like a bad black and white photocopy of a hundred dollar bill, and the truth is you value it at hundreds of thousands of dollars more.
Logarithmically, your valuation (10^5.3, which is all the genie tested up to but for sure you accept) is closer to a billion (10^9) than your stated valuation (10^0 - 1).
So after reading your analysis the billion dollar valuation seems more reasonable than the analysis you offered. (Of course, that does not make it reasonable.)
/s
On a serious note: what I mean is that the next time you make an argument about valuations being "ridiculous", don't be "ridiculous."
EDIT: received several downvotes but I am keeping this.
Yes, I thought that was amusing, the idea that Mr Toig's main complaint about his portrayal in the article was the mis-statement of his preferences for presentations gives you some idea of what it must have been like in the section of the business that he was responsible for (we don't know who provided the correction of course).
A previous manager of mine insisted on all documents using 12pt Arial with 18pt line spacing...
The correction might not have come directly from him. It was other employees who alleged that he got mad about that typeface not being used, and maybe the reporter got the detail wrong when publishing the story.
> According to one former SoundCloud Berlin employee, a lack of direction from Wahlforss, who served as chief technology officer, made things worse, with some engineers going rogue and rebuilding their colleagues’ work in their preferred programming language.
Great quote and I had to smirk when reading this. It happens all the time.
I remember a time when hiring RoR guys. Even the codebase was already in RoR, every new RoR dev said 'OMG we have to rewrite the entire app, the codebase is a mess'.
It's true, and I had to smile at that too, although nowadays I tend to take the "it's all terrible, we have to rewrite everything" attitude as either venting frustration (which is fine unless it becomes disruptive to forward progress) or a sign of professional immaturity (which may or may not be a problem, depending on context).
In corp I've seen engineers go behind their manager's back to write something in their favourite language knowing it would've been rejected if discussion had happen beforehand.
And then they go and write a blog entry about how much productive they are now, instead of what was the actual business impact if any, to the company customers or revenue.
And too often little consideration is given to impact further down the line. E.g., does this tie up your development teams in future doing non-value-adding work to fix breaking changes? What effect does this have on ongoing support costs? How easy is this skillset to hire for? How does this fit in with our roadmap?
But it doesn't matter because I've bolstered my CV and by the time those things become really painful I'll be long gone.
I don't follow. If they are coding the right things, then a real increase in productivity means better business impact. If they are coding the wrong things, then language doesn't matter.
How can a programming language choice hurt the business through some mechanism other than productivity? You could say that such a behavior is "indicative of poor choices" but that's begging the question.
No it doesn't mean a business impact at all, unless it is proven by accounting.
Programmer hourly rate * amount spent on doing such tasks = project money spent
Now how has the project money spent impacted the overall project costs, compared with the solution that everyone else is using, including the training costs for the rest of team, setting up a new build infrastructure, possible extra tooling support, salary rates for new hires?
Somehow I feel many coders would profit to learn a bit more about business and project management.
> No it doesn't mean a business impact at all, unless it is proven by accounting.
You're not understanding me. I'm saying that if the work would have this good business impact with the original language, then doing the same thing with better productivity (with the same worker) is better.
I'm not saying that improved productivity is guaranteed to mean business impact. Just that it either makes a good thing better, or it takes a bad thing and doesn't make it worse. If someone is doing the wrong work, their rate of production is not to blame.
> Now how has the project money spent impacted the overall project costs, compared with the solution that everyone else is using, including the training costs for the rest of team, setting up a new build infrastructure, possible extra tooling support, salary rates for new hires?
Other than 'salary rate', all of that falls under productivity. If all those costs are going up enough to drop productivity, then the entire premise goes out the window! The premise was secretly using a different language to increase productivity. Secretly using a different language to decrease productivity is so obviously a bad idea that it's not worth discussing.
I was about to say the same, but it’s not exactly the same. You are free to build anything, but using existing stack. Not pickup new stack and rewrite something that’s not even broken.
That said, probably more often than not, there’s an actual value in it.
I heard in a lecture of Blitzscaling with Eric Schmidt that google founders got the Google Chrome and Android projects running inside google without him knowing the real breath and intentions of the projects.
The main difference could be that google has loads of cash to burn trying things out. I don't know their history 100% but suspect they were pretty strict with standards when they were a small start up.
Google had a successful ads business before the doubleclick acquisition.
They are still more or less separate software stacks.
(Disclaimer: This knowledge is outdated by about 2 years, but a significant change is unlikely. )
but it was far from supporting the whole company alone as it is now. it mostly was successful because of their search monopoly alone. they could have banners and it would have been the same before the acquisition
Wikipedia says: "Google Maps began as a C++ desktop program designed by Lars and Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen at Where 2 Technologies. In October 2004, the company was acquired by Google, which converted it into a web application."
It depends on the outcome of the discussion - which depends on your capability as a manager. Sometimes this behavior is because the manager is an arse who can't run a reasonable process of team decision making, and the covert development is a reasonable appeal from someone who is disenfranchised in the decision making process and is making a very valuable point. The employee so doing is highly engaged and valuable and firing them is an act of self harm. In other cases this is an act of aggression by an unreasonable and arrogant individual who doesn't care about the team or the company and is simply doing what they want. You have to judge - call it wrong (either way) and you have a problem that will cost you dearly.
But be aware there are two sides to this coin and you might be the one that needs to learn. My questions are always : is this part of a pattern (conflict, poor performance, bad behaviour?); why don't I want to sit with this person for 2 hours with a coffee and understand whats going on?; why didn't the coffee heart to heart work out?
That depends on how well it works. If it blows up and costs the company a million bucks you get fired, if it works extremely well then you are a maverick genius. "Ask for forgiveness, not permission", etc.
Not saying that the extent to which it was apparently done at soundcloud should be acceptable though.
The extent indicates anarchy which indicates poor leadership. The issue must have been with the management culture - flat hierarchies don't mean free for alls!
Probably common, but they seem to have asked for it. 3 years ago, they published a presentation on slideshare [1] where they explained they were migrating from a monolith to microservices. That could make sense for them, given their size, but they explained as well that "rails is for pet blogs" (in the content of the presentation) and that they will take the opportunity to use many different languages. As I mentioned in comments back then, this was due to cause problems (although, I did not imagine it would go as far as people rewriting others apps).
I think it is more of a management issue; had management stayed on top of the productivity of their workers this wouldn't have happened. A good project manager would have grilled someone over why they felt the need to rewrite someone else's code on the company dime.
I've literally experienced this exact gut reaction two times in the last couple of months at two different companies. Code that is working fine, might need a bug fix here and there, is deemed worthless and should be rewritten. These we're tiny dev team: 3, 4 people max, so it happens everywhere I guess.
It does not happen everywhere. It happens in companies lacking sufficient years of experience building software, without good management. It's so common as to be almost universal in engineers with less than 5 years of experience to encounter some important piece of software that they think is ugly and poorly written and embark on a massive rewrite that they think will fix all the problems.
I read this article few hours earlier when crawling through the new section. It's a surprisingly interesting piece from Buzzfeed but there's a lot of bashing of the CEO, the CTO and one recently hired senior for label relations (who seem to be really odd).
This is typical: SoundCloud was an iconic company, its founders worshiped and idealized. Once money runs out, people but especially former employees start to backstab, blaspheme and blame loud and clearly. Why not before? Now when everybody is hitting SoundCloud it's easy and risk-free to join the hate. All the NDAs they once signed seem to be gone? To be fired also means fire and forget for them.
I never believed in SoundCloud. The founders did a great job building a huge brand and DNA out of nothing but the business model is by design broken or to put it simply, you just can't do business with music labels.
Btw, where is Fred Wilson? The biggest proponent and investor of SoundCloud who didn't miss an opportunity to tell us that sound is the future stays silent and hasn't commented this tragedy once. A VC just for good times?
- Presumably the people inside the company has tried for years to pressure for a change. When that doesn't work, and especially once a big layoff happens, it's understandable that employees vent their frustration in public. And that might be what it takes for outside people (investors etc) to make necessary changes at the top. It's not about backstabbing.
If these employees didn't care at all about the fate of the company, they would just take the severance package and move to other jobs without saying much. The complaining you hear is most likely from people that _care_ about SoundCloud.
- You're saying that the business model is broken, because you "can't do business with music labels". YouTube is evidence that it _is_ possible, it's just tremendously difficult.
You need advanced algorithms to detect copyright ownership, you need a system to do revenue sharing, you need people to handle complain cases etc etc.
The reason why they failed has to do with poor strategy and execution, and less to do with the business model.
(This reminds be of all the people that said Apple could never get into the cell phone business because dealing with the operators would be impossible. Or that web search was a broken business model back then Yahoo-like portals were all the rage and web search truly sucked.)
Does the fact that it's not their core contradict what I'm saying? Youtube is still hugely popular for people to share their own recordings and remixes.
I know that it took a long time for YouTube to figure out the licensing stuff. As I said, tremendously difficult, yes, but not impossible.
> Does the fact that it's not their core contradict what I'm saying?
Yes it does. Youtube is not about music, their focus lies somewhere else, music complements their product but they are not dependent on it and besides, it's a just one rev stream compared to their main rev channels. Another example: Apple has Apple Music to strengthen the network effect of their products, not because they want to enter the music business. So, both used labels to complement their core products. Both would survive without deals to the labels. SoundCloud would not survive without those deals because then SoundCloud wouldn't have any product.
> As I said, tremendously difficult, yes, but not impossible.
I disagree, 10 years negotiations sounds like something impossible for a company which core solely relies on music, who wants to fund a company for 10 years with an unclear outcome?? For Youtube it was a different story: In this ten years Youtube severely damaged GEMA's reputation by displaying billion times that it's GEMA's fault that user can't listen to music. So, it's questionable if any other company with less power would have been able to strike a deal with the GEMA. Anyways, Youtube could have negotiated 100 years, they still would make revs through other channels.
Youtube is about user uploaded content, and without a content recognition system in place for video and audio and licensing in place with both the movie and music industry they would have been dead in the water, just like SoundCloud. What other revenue streams would they have that would have worked without that?
As the article mentions, SoundCloud eventually did reach an agreement with the music companies, showing that it didn't have to take 10 years, but took longer still than they expected.
So my theory is that the business model is not broken by design as you claim, but that SoundCloud got into the trouble it is now in by poor strategy and decision making.
So my theory is that the business model is not broken by design as you claim
If the solution is that they just charge $80/mo, then "well duh," but there are other, non-licensing, forces involved at that point. The labels would love their slice of that model, but good luck selling it.
Does the fact that it's not their core contradict what I'm saying?
I'd say "yes." The PROs don't have as much leverage over YouTube as they do over music sites. YT can tell the industry, "fine, we'll just continue the way we've been going and you'll get nothing." Google has scads more money and lawyers than the record industry; Google makes the entire record industry's annual revenue every two months. UMG ain't shutting them down.
You'll notice that Google Play Music is not the same situation as YT, and is more like Spotify et al. The issue with pure audio streaming is that the music is a primary use of the service, so it's easier for the PROs to beat them down, legally. GPM could be prevented from operating just as other subscription streamers have been (threatened).
Put another way, YT still has a bazillion unlicensed items and the licensed streaming services have none. UGC audio sites are somewhere in the middle, but my contention is that they would have to let the PROs crawl up their buttholes just to unlock the doors every morning in order to settle the business model.
I cannot follow you. By no means you can openly criticize the managers of your own company. Even nowadays this could be handled as mutiny. On top of that, management is usually only half transparent at best. Causing doubt if the decisions are just bad or nobody got the whole picture.
What I mean: Since they all signed NDAs they are not allowed to openly criticize their company—ever. Not when being hired and not after being fired. Since 173 were fired it's easy to ignore NDAs because they won't get caught. But it's not right, they break a significant agreement and this is so typical for employees (just head to Glassdoor and how much internal stuff is disclosed).
We don't know what kind of NDAs SC employees had to sign/how valid they are. At least some of the issues are listed as only appearing after a while. Journalists likely are a lot more receptive to/asking around for employees with complaints when there is a general air of failure (or total overblown hype) surrounding a company.
> We don't know what kind of NDAs SC employees had to sign/how valid they are.
Every employment contract has by nature a NDA embedded. And those are much stricter than dedicated NDAs since employment contracts get rarely negotiated line by line, most employees just accept and sign employment contracts.
No offense and I am no lawyer. But I think you get something wrong about NDAs. It is useful to handle confidentiality of company information. I.e. during the process of signing contracts with music giants or even the strategy decision to do that, can apply to an NDA. But at some time this information will go public. An NDA could only apply if you later leak confidential details about contracts for example.
There is also a lot of complaint about the management and it's behaviour, NDAs won't stop individuals to reveal someone has bad manners, but there is always a possibility to accuse them of slander.
I think it's right to speak publically when called for (for instance with whisteblowers). Without people doing that, we'd actually have much less transparency in our democracy.
Companies where employees actually keep secrets do so by earning the trust and respect of their employees, not by writing ironclad employee agreements.
In this particular case, for these employees, I think it boils down to whether they honor their loyalty to the company vision more than their employee agreement.
In my experience, it's likely that the founders' problematic behavior has existed from the beginning, but employees feared retaliation and thus didn't speak up until now, when they are safe from being fired.
> but there's a lot of bashing of the CEO, the CTO
That's because it's the leadership's fault for the failure.
> business model is by design broken or to put it simply, you just can't do business with music labels.
If the business model is broken, they should pick something else. Again a leadership problem. Becoming yet another streaming service was a major error and completely preventable.
Soundcloud is an incredibly valuable property. They have obviously had a few managerial cock-ups, but in reality they have massive user buyin, huge network effect, and anyone who can get some equity in them during this current time of massive negative sentiment is going to do VERY WELL. I wish I had a way to buy in at this point.
SoundCloud is still the only place, as far as I know of, where underground and loft electronic music is shared and recognized. It's a pretty big scene and I genuinely don't understand all of the huge negative words surrounding SoundCloud right now, but I guess as someone who uses it every day I don't really pay attention to their business decisions.
MixCloud seems to be doing pretty well on the electronic music front. I don't know exactly what qualifies as underground anymore, but there are tons of great electronic mixes on there and a pretty active community.
Sure, it's great for that - but that doesn't make money and what they tried to do to make money was copy spotify, but with a worse product that had nothing to do with why people went to soundcloud.
would happily become a premium++ subscriber if money went to artists, something like humble bundle... but the paid plan is brain dead and offers no value ┐(￣ヘ￣;)┌
hope it survives or morphs into a decentralised platform that artists can thrive on.
I have somewhat mixed feelings about Soundcloud. On the one hand I've discovered a load of cool stuff through them, as well as uploaded a few tracks of my own.
On the other I received a takedown notice from them after a complaint from Sony about one of my remixes - my most popular track by miles and, at the time, the third most popular remix of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up (long story) - which left something of a bitter taste in my mouth. To add insult to injury the notice arrived on my birthday last year. Haven't really touched Soundcloud much since.
Soundcloud is one the rare service I would be happy to pay for. However, their current subscription does not bring me anything interesting. One idea would be to have a monthly limit, and propose an unlimited subscription at around $1 to $3.
And how come I have to pay for the artist album through Bandcamp after listening on Soundcloud? Is there no way to implement a payment straight from Soundcloud?
Also, there is an obvious return of the podcast scene: here again, plenty of ways to make money from that.
I agree their pricing decisions were not in line with their users. Soundcloud Go was poorly positioned, and their original premium tiers did not provide enough benefit for what they cost.
SoundCloud is far from 'failed' the service is still the go-to website for new music and I do not see a replacement at this time.
Not showing up to company retreats, circulating pictures of yourself taking private jets and hanging out with celebrities in Ibiza, doing a Ferragamo ad - CEO Alexander Ljung sounds like Erlich Bachman.
It's easy to write those things off as petty gripes but I think they are important in that illustrate a CEO who doesn't understand that those are bad "optics" for employees who are seeing layoffs and lack of funds available to higher talent. And a CEO who doesn't understand the nuances of this might also not see the nuances of lots of other important areas of their business. Why does the board not remove him?
We aren't doing "optics" anymore; that was more of a mid-election phenomenon. CEOs are largely just figureheads these days- one could argue that in this music industry it is important to have somewhat of a splashy rockstar image to exude legitimacy.
What does that even mean? Optics as in internal and external perception and politics is fundamentally important to a company. Leadership only works with trust and respect.
> CEOs are largely just figureheads these days
Looks like that's the case at soundcloud but in normal healthy corporations, CEOs do actually make decisions and drive the company. They can and do become the face of the company but that's just part of the role but not the only thing they are.
Except that this usage of the word "optics" in popular lexicon predates the U.S. election by at least 4 years. See this "word detective" entry from 2012:
It does not seem prudent to debate 2017 popular social vernacular with a publication from 2012. (Although your article goes on to support my argument of Optics being a term reserved for political discussion) Optics is a term largely reserved for the stage of political theatre, that is not my assertion, that is the zeitgeist of popular opinion.
Firstly I am not debating anything, your assertion is that this usage is a phenomenon bounded by the US election season and I pointed you to a resource demonstrating that it has been increasing in usage for at least the last 4 years. It is not "passé" now simply because the U.S. election is over.
>"Optics is a term largely reserved for the stage of political theatre"
Yes and much of what a CEO has to deal with is internal politics. You realize that "politics" in the general sense has a meaning and usage outside of just government right?
>"that is not my assertion, that is the zeitgeist of popular opinion."
It's quite amusing that you want to take someone to task for their usage of word simply because you have decided it is no longer "fashionable" and then you go on to use the word "zeitgeist" incorrectly. See:
> Optics is a term largely reserved for the stage of political theatre, that is not my assertion
It's in both Merriam-Webster [1] and UrbanDictionary [2] as simply relating to public perception, whether it's politics or business.
Weird that you think it's necessary to tell someone what words to use. Do you have a citation for this word suddenly vanishing from English in the past 6 months?
After 4 1/2 years at Square colleague of mine and I, left Square to start our own portfolio of small productivity tools some we are building ourselves and other we will probably be acquiring.
Our first rule was that we will not get funding for anything than scaling a business once it hit some sort of product market fit.
Until then there is only bootstrapping. This is to avoid something like SoundCloud where you become numb to the die hard reality of needing to build a business before you build an organization, get fuzzball tables and promote your altruistic business principles.
Is there a collapse? They used their VC money to pay employees to build stuff. Now the money is spent. Employees get layed off.
It could very well been worth it. What has been built might bring in return on invest for a long time.
Isn't that normal? Isn't VC money intended to be used that way? Are VCs demanding to build jobs for eternity? Or is there some moral reason to not grow and shrink the work force while building a company?
I haven't used SoundCloud that much, but the last time I seriously used it was in late 2015 for finding solid trap music. Finding unsigned material was a lot easier in 2014 than in 2015; everything in the first few pages was from huge signed artists.
I also gave Go a chance so I could download stuff I liked onto my iPhone. It was such a confusing service. I paid $9.99/mo to download tracks. There was no way to download albums. It was also difficult to find things that I wanted to hear. I cancelled after a month or so.
Well, there were several attempts from different groups, companies and people to build on their API that failed for no good reason. They simply decline the API access request without any reasoning. They could have made money from 3rd parties, or even through selling music directly on their site. I usually go to Soundcloud to discover music and than to Bandcamp to buy it. I am not sure why this was never a focus to them.
Open source remains an important force of continuity for technology professionals,
as even though SoundCloud is failing, they brought us a very important piece of infrastructure that will carry on: http://Prometheus.io
It has been catching on like wildfire everywhere I look, even big conservative companies. It feels like the new Nagios (in a good way).
It seems Discord is in the early stages of something like this. They have dozens of employees and a pre-money valuation of 725 million US dollars. However, very few users are buying their premium service, with most saying it isn't worth it, with this paid version only coming out a year after the release of Discord.
SoundCloud used to be /the/ place for indie musicians to post their work - now I think websites like Bandcamp have more or less taken over. This article explains why - they basically stopped focusing on the artists - but I'm surprised they didn't mention competitors.
As one of the engineers in those 40% fired, I asked myself if I should try to start a startup: use this [0] money, plus try to raise more in the current situation. Say, to implement a good old vision of SoundCloud - a cozy creator-driven music catalog, with communities, and features like real time streaming. But I guess, even if we succeed initially, the company will be eventually killed by the major labels, copyright infringement cases, etc. It's a rough territory.
This seemed to me a very sad story. The time during which SoundCloud as it was known and loved really existed was the era before they were really worrying about their "business model". As soon as they contemplated how they could exist long term, they started copying mainstream music services in a way that no-one loved. The real question is: given how much amazing free content there is, how are we going to nurture valuable cultural ecosystems like soundcloud, and create a meaningful and stable niche for them and their employees in our economies?
The problem with the music business is the problem with the art business in general. There are way too many people producing art and music these days and not enough consumers.
The price of music is negative in that people have so much music available that you'd have to pay people something or massively promote to get people to spend time listening to a new band. Companies like distrokid seem to do ok because they charge artists to distribute music. Fans really can't be bothered to pay anymore.
I never said to myself, at least in the last ten years: "damn, I wish I had more music". For me, music is "done". I have plenty, I don't need anymore and it is of much better quality than what it used to be back in the 80s and 90s when I used to spend a lot of money on it.
It's always sad when a company has issues for months and nobody either sees them or acts during that time. Though 'Desde la barrera todo el mundo es torero'.
I think the reason is that music subscription services took off in last 2-3 years massively, and globally. Apple Music expanded to a good number of nations, so did Spotify and others. And so it has also become very easy for creators to put their music on those services. There are SaaS apps that put unlimited music on all platforms for artists for as little as $20 a year.
You don't need to partner with record label any more to be on iTunes, Apple Music, Pandora, Google Play, Spotify, etc. You need $20 a year. The goliath that SoundCloud was fighting killed itself.
As a creator, I know there are 10x more people listening on Apple and Spotify. There is simply very less reason to upload on SoundCloud except for community. And it is the community that they managed to piss off by partnering with the labels.
SoundCloud problem was that it tried to chase and copy competitors instead of being unique--but it has truly unique user experience which it completely ignores (probably need to write about it a blogpost). By following competition you don't win. You don't get a leadership position. You just lose slower.
As a result, SoundCloud faced a notorious problem of wholesale transfer pricing [1] power. And it didn't have enough money to win or even participate in that battle.
[1] Wholesale transfer pricing = the bargaining power of company A that supplies a unique product XYZ to Company B which may enable company A to take the profits of company B by increasing the wholesale price of XYZ.
I would be interested in how BandCamp is doing. They seem to have a product that both sides of the deal actually like - both buyers and sellers - and they have a business model from the start.
I have no idea how big BandCamp is, in terms of both users and developers.
I would hate to see SoundCloud disappear or get dismantled in an effort to migrate its user base into a different social network. The core idea, to provide a way for amateur creators to share their music, and connect with an audience, is sound. I also think there is/was a gap in the market for podcast creators that SoundCloud authoring tools could have filled. Can some combination of charging creators for advanced authoring or analytics, and placing ads in a free listening tier, not provide sufficient income to keep something like this going?
Bringing up the bieber situation is entirely unfair. SoundCloud did the best any company could have done in that situation. His own label was also confused by the move.
> “Deals with the labels would have allowed us to have monetization,” said one former executive, who explained that no ads could be run across label-owned content without a revenue-sharing agreement.“We needed to make sure that we could grow unencumbered without a lawsuit.”
This sounds like a serious mistake. All the ones that succeeded asked for forgiveness afterwards rather than wait until they had permission.
While I feel sorry for their employees I am quite happy that this happened. The censorship that they applied to the content that they hosted was quite disgusting.
I am paying for music storage, but playback should use source quality at all times. Exceptions are when the track is uploaded in a lossless codec like WAV or FLAC. Then it should be OGG compressed. If you use MP3, at least use 192 kbps or better 320 kbps.
Example: https://clyp.it/ allows 320 kbps streaming and it costs 0$.
The tech industry keeps repeating the same business mistakes. This period strikes me more and more of the 1998-99 era when there was so much euphoria that there was no way but up. Then March 2000 came, the first Internet high flyers started to fail, and very quickly the whole thing unraveled. We're on the same road again...
Is it not possible to make a browser extension or app to "wrap" youtube and turn it into a soundcloud like service? Seems to me they could transition a lot of their users over to it and possibly save money.
Should music creators who want a place to upload and get feedback on their work move to a different platform now or is SoundCloud going to be around for that for the foreseeable future?
If anybody else is also put off by the writing style: There is some actual content there. One just needs to get through the first third which basically just repeats the headline.
TL;DR (without my opinion added): Top Management started too late to think about making actual money. They also hired an asshole for their US offices. When they got an opportunity to be bought by Twitter they asked for way too much money. And the CEO is bascially on a constant holidays trip since 2014, while not failing to rub it in everybody's face via Instagram photos.
Personal opinion: I don't understand these CEOs who start cashing out before either selling their business or making it a viable paid service, while being so close to a lifetime solution to the problem of money. I mean he already went 80% of the way, much further than most.
Maybe he already cashed out? We increasingly hear of founders taking money off the table by selling a part of their share when it comes time to raise a series-B or later round. SoundCloud was likely well past the series-B stage, and i wouldn't be surprised if the founder already has a few million in the bank.
They have. But still, every founder wants to avoid such situations. The founding team's reputation went from sky to hell within few weeks. Not nice and nobody wants to loose their face like this.
Yes he already cashed out, but apparently too early. For a normal life with a house and a little travel here and there his money is enough, but for this from-burning-man-to-private-jet lifestyle he will be broke in 5 years. A Twitter buyout would have made his lifestyle probably viable though.
Now it will produce shaming news for 1-2 years before someone buys it for a few million, drops 80% of the staff and then turns it into a low-level cash cow to fund his own private jet.
Are you being purposefully obtuse? He's saying that one could make the argument that meeting new people at the epicenter of your prospective user's culture would help growth ultimately. This is also referred to as "boots on the ground" marketing.
Late response, but I simply mean the collection of content on the site. Burning man is a major center for electronic music. You probably wouldn't be surprised by the head of Netflix going to Cannes, by contrast.
I really like this argument. And if judge the CEOs personality correctly he will have told 500 people that he's the boss of SoundCloud BEFORE even telling his name once.
I agree. I think SoundCloud's troubles came primarily from poor management. Throughout the monetization process, top management seemed to be hoping that the "business guys" would figure it out while they stayed in their comfort zones.
That's the second time this week I see Buzzfeed coming out with something that resembles decent journalism. Coincidence, or have they turned their ship around?
I think it's more that they have a few good contributors in with the nonsense. For example, their Australian political coverage has consistently been surprisingly good.
Indeed. I discovered this after a friend mentioned to me that Buzzfeed News was decent and, well, basically I didn't believe her so I went to check it out.
The first story I saw was breaking news of the Tianjin explosions and of course the story was so out there that, because it was Buzzfeed, I didn't believe it until I'd watched some of the footage and seen it reported elsewhere.
They'll bleed you to death with licensing fees, deputise you into their copyright enforcement police, upload their songs to your platform on one hand while suing you with the other, and all the while cry about how extracting monopoly profits is so much harder than in the old days.
Just go disrupt something safer, like organised crime or the international diamond trade. At least with those the law probably won't change out from under you.