
SoundCloud Will Be Worth More Than Spotify - Garbage
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/24/why-soundcloud-will-be-worth-more-than-spotify/
======
dplgk
Article states that users generating content aren't interested in money.
Wrong. Users have to sell through bandcamp because for some reason, SC hasn't
provided a market place.

Article states how artists like Skrillex made a name for themselves but
posting remixes of famous songs on SC. SC now removed remixes, citing
copyright infringement, even on legal, commissioned remixes. SC flags your
song if the title contains a famous artist's name or song title even if your
song didn't actually sample the famous song. After 3 strikes, your account is
banned, all fans and followers lost.

Smart artists are leaving SC in droves.

SC is hosting music from major labels. Users pay nothing to listen. How are
they making money? The only users that pay are the artists uploading their own
work. Yet those artists have no way to make money on SC. SC has sponsored
tracks inserted into listeners feed. That doesn't pay the bills. Also, the
promoted track is not based on the user's taste so they mostly hear songs they
hate.

~~~
ypeterholmes
Exactly. Between solid tech and a massive userbase, Soundcloud once had the
monumental opportunity suggested in the article. But they have played their
cards quite poorly which means this article is ridiculous.

~~~
aikah
I've been on Soundcloud for a looong time and unlike Spotify , it never was a
radio but some paid cloud hosting for mp3 with social features. So sound cloud
relied on paid customers who uploaded their music on the platform for
promotion purposes. I don't think they ever had any opportunity to turn into a
Spotify competitor. That's not how people use Soundcloud.

I think however Beatport is trying to be the Spotify for IDM. not sure how it
is working for them.

Beatport was "the shit" back then and made a LOT of money. The problem with
Beatport is that it works as long as djs are compelled to renew their
catalogue.

it became big thanks to "Electro", then Minimal techno , then it made Deadmau5
big, after Deadmau5 nothing really happened in the IDM world, so Beatport
success kinda went down.

Neither Dubstep nor HipHop ever were best selling genres on Beatport. And
today, MP3 sells don't bring much revenue even for big names. I'd be surprised
if TOP 10 beatport artists sell more than a 1000 units per best selling track
today.

It used to be different.

~~~
wavefunction
what does IDM stand for? The genres and artists you've mentioned are what I
consider fads or the mainstream trends of electronic music for the past ~15ish
years.

There is plenty of interesting things going on in electronic music, depending
on your tastes. Trap sort of replaced dubstep as far as accessible popular and
mainstream EDM. Deep house seems to be popular these days. Drum n bass is
having a weird spate of popularity and soul-searching at the same time. Future
bass seems to be a defined genre now.

*none of this post is offered in arrogance, merely stating my honest opinions which are devoid of value judgements.

~~~
joshjkim
IDM could also stand for "intelligent dance music"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_dance_music](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_dance_music)

lame term i think, but it exists!

~~~
Symbiote
Not quite so lame as "electronic body music", which is one of my preferred
genres.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_body_music](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_body_music)

------
dano
User generated content in the music business has been tried over and over
again. MP3.com, MySpace, Garageband, and many others. The problem is that the
consumer wants the hits, the names, the current hot artists. They don't want
the long tail of unknown artists.

Sure there are those who like to check out the new stuff and occasionally
something pops.

Soundcloud will eventually end up paying the same royalty rates as Spotify,
Pandora, Rhapsody, Slacker, and all the rest thus eliminating this "SoundCloud
has much better unit economics than Spotify."

What is to stop Spotify from adding an artist upload feature?

The macroeconomic factors on why all of the music delivery services are
eventually going to fall in value has to do with Apple, Google, Microsoft, and
Amazon treating music as a valueless commodity.

No one can charge more than iTunes for a song or streaming service. Apple sets
the market price and operates their business at low margins due to ancillary
revenue from hardware. If you're a music service and have no ancillary revenue
to increase overall margins, you've got a classic business problem. The
comparison to Youtube is also flawed because it doesn't mention that AdSense
is the ancillary revenue that has kept YouTube afloat these many years.

Furthermore, the content owners (copyright holders) will continue to raise
prices and cut exclusive deals with different providers in order to maintain
their cut of the pie. You see this with the content patchwork across Netflix,
Hulu, Amazon Prime, and even Youtube Red. No player has all the licenses all
the time.

Music is a wonderful thing, but delivery is a commodity service where the
players are competing on style and features. Content is ephemeral and a
marketing illusion for the most part. If you want people to come, you have to
have the stars.

~~~
twelve40
Totally agree that delivery is a commodity. However, as a user, I ditched all
services in favor of Soundcloud because of the discovery part. For example,
Diplo and Tiesto post and repost almost weekly, combined with the rest of
people I follow you get a stream of the very latest music of your taste,
manually curated (reposted) by the top DJ's themselves. It's not just an
"upload feature", its like Facebook for music: you hit play and get a tailored
endless stream of awesomeness, 0 effort on your part. No need to hunt for and
buy tracks one by one. No need to suffer through some unknown Pandora voodoo
that turns up the same tracks of unknown recency, over and over. Just follow
the people you like, and it will play the latest music you like, simple as
that.

I don't know if Soundcloud can manage to build a viable business, sometimes
they make changes that piss off users and uploaders, and the current model
doesn't look too lucrative. But for me as a user, the experience is night and
day compared to the true commodity services (iTunes, Amazon, Google, Pandora,
Spotify, etc etc), who I think will soon start to crack under margin pressure
like Rdio, Mog and others.

~~~
volaski
I feel like you're overly being dramatic about "ditching all services". Do you
literally only listen to music through soundcloud? If that is indeed the case,
you're missing out on a lot of great music. Also as a listener of both
Soundcloud and Spotify, I think Spotify's discovery has improved immensely to
the point where it's much better than the filter bubble of a feed you create
on soundcloud

~~~
recursive
I use soundbutt for at least 90% of music I listen to. I use spotify never.
The fact is _everyone_ is missing out on a lot of great music because there is
more great music than any one person can listen to.

~~~
gohrt
Disable cloudtobutt on HN

~~~
jitl
I would think this is the premier venue for cloudtobutt usage.

------
mrxd
This articles has some basic misunderstandings about what artists and DJs use
Soundcloud for, and how money is made in the underground music world.

Consumers buy tickets to a DJ's show, DJ pays indie label, label pays artist.
So three things should be clear: first, DJs aren't on Soundcloud to get signed
to a major label, they are trying to drive ticket sales; second, unknown DJs
don't use Soundcloud to promote themselves because ticket buyers must be
local.

Finally, amateur artists don't care about developing a following like YouTube
stars because their music is sold to DJs, not to listeners. Part of the appeal
of a DJ is that you hear great tracks at their events that you never heard
before, so they aren't going to want to buy viral Soundcloud hits that the
audience has already heard.

In short, the mainstream music economy is driven by MP3 sales/streams directly
to listeners. The underground music economy is mostly about event ticket
sales, and Soundcloud is valuable to artists if it can drive ticket sales.
That's why its current monetization strategy is mostly about telling artists
which cities their fans are in. Frankly, if I were Soundcloud, my next step
would be to build a ticketing platform.

~~~
collyw
I see quite a lot of friends of friends and other unknown artists promoting
their work on Soundcloud, using it as somewhere to host the music. I don't use
Soundcloud a lot, but I got the impression that was one of its main uses.

------
brianstorms
If hope that SoundCloud can survive the transition from a brilliant service
with innovative features (especially the user-annotated waveforms), to a
"competitor" to the likes of Spotify or Pandora.

I fear that the VC/investor zeal for monetizing the hell out of SoundCloud
will ruin what has made SoundCloud so special, and that sure, it may some day
be worth more than Spotify, but if so I suspect it'll devolve into something
less than its present goodness, and an inevitable drop in valuation will
follow, leaving VCs scratching their heads.

So it goes with every good online music service. They come, they go. Investors
cash out, users get screwed, same as it ever was.

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rfrank
No it wont. The last year or so of policy updates has pretty seriously
alienated a lot of the original user base, who have since started using
Bandcamp and other outlets a lot more seriously. Move involvement from major
labels just means that copyright enforcement will keep getting increasingly
strict, and the content creators will keep moving to Bandcamp.

------
rshaban
Unfortunately, Soundcloud doesn't seem to have the technical staff to keep up
– the new app remains a disappointment after months of adding-back features
and streaming remains shoddy at best, with random interruptions that require
manual intervention.

I hope that in the coming months they catch up to Spotify's performance.

~~~
Jordrok
I had only been using Soundcloud for around a month or two when they decided
to push out the new version of their app so I had relatively little attachment
to the old version, but even then it was blatantly obvious to me that they had
butchered functionality in pursuit of a pretty UI.

There are plenty of examples to pick from, but the one change I never
understood was the comment system. Timestamped user comments set directly on
the waveform of the song was the one truly unique feature they had and they
stripped it out completely. Months passed before it was even possible to view
or create comments from the app, and even now they're locked away behind an
obscure menu and only display in a useless list, entirely removed from their
original context.

They've tried to backpedal slightly by bolting on some of the missing
features, but the new app was clearly not designed with them in mind in the
first place. I would be honestly surprised if they manage to catch up.

------
kluck
I am not active on either platform. My guess is that both platforms have
something missing.

When I am shopping for music, which is what Spotify is supposedly for, then I
think it is not enough to supply the music in digital form. The physical form
that is independent of any current DRM annoiance and/or online website service
is missing. For the music industry though, Spotify seems to be a pretty good
model, where they can sell their stuff.

Soundcloud seemingly is a place to get recommendations on artists that I might
like or a place to listen to music from independent artists. While there seems
to be a lot music on Soundcloud, it may be a little too much. You might get
lost in the noise and the community and algorithmic recommendation filters
might not be enough. For the ones actually creating original music, Soundcloud
seems to be a "free beer" approach. People get to listen to your music, but
all you get in return is limited publicity. That might not be an enduring
model for music creators, just during their initial phase of getting known.

Thus maybe another platform will emerge.

------
phatfish
Based on SoundCloud's Android app I would say this is unlikely. The
information density has dropped to JUST fitting in 2 songs per screen on my
phone!

This makes it almost unusable for discovery on mobile, since I have to
scroll... and scroll... and scroll... while trying to glance at track names in
between flashy pictures. And the runtime in the stream disappeared quite a
while ago for no reason I can think of.

Ripping off Facebook really doesn't work for a music app. Spotify at least has
something pretty usable (though that too has gotten worse).

~~~
ajmalasver
My experience has been that this is less of an issue with their UX and more of
an issue with the stream itself. Once you start following a lot of artist and
especially if you download tracks through the download gates, you end up with
a lot of noise in your stream. I'm a DJ and I recently had my 3 year old
Soundcloud account with lots of my published music and mixes removed because I
had some copyright content in a mix. It was a major bummer but having a new
account with a fresh stream without as much junk was a silver lining.

------
shmerl
Out of such services I prefer Bandcamp. DRM-free music with FLAC option is a
major plus.

------
owenwil
My problem with Soundcloud is that they don't seem to be shipping anything.
The website's discovery features don't update more than once a month, the page
often cripples the latest version of Chrome by going to 100% CPU and overall
it's just not a great experience. The company's mobile app is even worse --
it's often confusing to use, and feels like a design exercise rather than
something useful.

I would love to see an official Soundcloud app, so I can use it on my desktop
24x7, but it doesn't seem like that's happening either. I just don't
understand what they're actually up to, other than being the place the random
average person will plop their latest track.

~~~
boredatnight12
I'd love to see some kind of Web visualization for their music and data set.
:\

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mark242
Blatant Show HN plug: [https://octave.is](https://octave.is) is a paid version
of SoundCloud without the ads, Youtube-esque comments, and other garbage that
clutters up individual artists' pages. Consider it the Vimeo to SC's Youtube.

------
exolymph
User-generated content is a fantastic business for the companies that win each
category (e.g. music).

