Re:What is going on with SoundCloud?
by deng on Monday August 17, 2015 @08:45AM
(#10072574)
Self-hosting is a huge PITA, especially if you don't want to give away your music for free: setting up and maintaining a streaming server and payment system is not trivial at all. Also, if you're not already a big name, self-hosting will make it unlikely for people to discover your music. This was the big thing about SoundCloud: you followed people you like and saw what they liked.
The solution is what Bandcamp does: only host stuff where the copyright situation is clear. Which means: people selling the music they themselves created. This of course excludes mixes/remixes of copyrighted music.
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So you're saying there's space for a "DIY self-hosting" product which integrates with a promotion network?
No, I don't think self hosting is the solution. I still remember the times when every label had its own little online shop for mp3s. Those were dark times: not only did you have to register at every shop separately, most of those shops where just plain unusable: no pre-listening, broken id3 tags, downloading each song from an album separately, charging extra for higher quality, no accompanying artwork, etc.
As I've already written: I think Bandcamp does it very well, and IMHO it is currently the best shop for indie musicians to sell their music online.
If you're promoting music which is deemed to be copyright infringing you will have the same legal problems as if you were hosting it yourself.
Sounds like this is something Gumroad could do if they added a marketplace to list the items for sale on their platform. Difficult to categorize all those items but worth it. I'd browse.
Re:What is going on with SoundCloud?
by wishinghand on Monday August 17, 2015 @12:14PM
(#10074021)
I emailed them ages ago about being able to browse, but them and vhx.tv are not really into doing that now. Maybe later but for whatever reason they want people to reach their site and buy through the content creator's reach instead of having a searchable archive.
Building out that promotion network is the hard part.
Re:What is going on with SoundCloud?
by iphoneseventeen on Monday August 17, 2015 @09:34AM
(#10072816)
A thousand times YES!!!