If you choose to centralize distribution on one web server that is your own choice, but the better phrase is "digital distribution is free if you want it to be".

I doubt we will see a return to pay-to-listen models in music. Reality has taken too big of a bite around the copyright extortion ring surrounding sine waves. The future of music is in patronage, merchandising, and live performances - which really, it has always been. Only extremely rare unicorn performers ever have the stars align to be able to monetize their music itself (in the past it was making it big with a label, today last decade it was topping itunes) while we are seeing the rise of music as a viable profession without extraordinary fame as long as you can provide a niche and be good at it, you can attract enough whale fans to support you regardless of if the tracks themselves are free - your real audience is those that not only want what you already made, but want you to continue to make.

Remember, as in all things IP, it is not the actual music file that is scarce or expensive to produce, it is the idea behind the music that took an artist hours or days to hand craft into a digital creation. The first iteration was the expensive one - all other ones are effectively free. It is essential that going forward we culturally recognize the distinction and move to seek sustainable business models around the former rather than the later, which we only invented as an imperfect way to translate ideas into the physical goods market back when they were less distinct than they are now (ie, costs of distribution did exist for paper books, so pigeonholing writing into markets via copyright was a reasonable train of thought when per-unit costs still existed and thus people could not effortlessly propagate the information on an individual basis).

  If you used something like ipfs, syncthing, or generic 
  torrents you could easily distribute anything you want at 
  large scale at no cost, as long as people were interested 
  in having it.

The UX of peer-to-peer file sharing will always be more complex than "go to this WWW URL" if just to avoid the free-rider/spam problem.

There's a very good reason for that. The people that know about Freenet and could promote it won't because of the issues it has with CP. Due to the distributed nature of the platform, and the high volume of CP that is supposedly hosted there (I've never used it, but that's what I've heard) you basically can't use Freenet without hosting CP.

There are a collection of private trackers run by motivated volunteers and paid for with meager donations which have collections far superior to the best paid services or archives anywhere or at any time in history.

They do this by erecting and maintaining virtual economies where what you can get is limited by how much you've shared.

I haven't actually kept up to date recently on the project, but the ML is super active. I believe they now have a working localforage backend to store torrents - the implementation already works flawlessly, and there is a hybrid client in the same node package family that can seed the same files to both webtorrent cleints and traditional UDP clients.

But it is extensionless and seamless and just uses webrtc data channels and websockets.

[1]:https://github.com/feross/webtorrent

However, I really doubt infrastructure costs dominate SoundCloud's money problems. Significant, yes. But a major engineering overhaul developing an entirely different architecture for distribution which might either not work or alienate customers is probably not an appropriate move when in that situation.

Maybe it could be something to do as a clean shut-down to help things live on (an amazing thing when dying companies do things like this to end well) but not ... expected.

So, you have to be the person with the content. Not useful if you find a torrent with 0 seeds.

The problem is that ISP are actively trying to constrain torrents with deep packet inspection or ongoing surveillance of other centralized bodies. Torrents would see a much more widespread use if such barriers were removed.

> The UX of peer-to-peer file sharing will always be more complex than "go to this WWW URL" if just to avoid the free-rider/spam problem.

For the end user, clicking on a torrent has zero UX issues. That's why torrents took off so easily in the first place, and why they still exist nowadays.

I'd be interested in knowing why they switched away from it.

From the article it sounds like their main cost is paying a ton of people a lot of money.

Just in the past 3 or 4 months I've found half a dozen or more artists on Soundcloud, then headed over to Bandcamp or Amazon to buy and download their music. It would be awesome if I could buy it right there on Soundcloud. Every song could have a "Buy MP3" and "Buy Album" button right there by the Like, Share and other buttons.

Maybe it wouldn't solve all of their problems, but it's better than what they have now.

Plus, for the electronic/DJ side of things, many of the tracks posted are remixes which aren't ever for sale (it seems). But from a scale standpoint, you would think that there might be some sort of revenue opportunity there.

Isn't there a fair-use provision where you can remix/sample works as long as you don't sell the derivative work or something like that?

I think that's how a lot of the electronic music stuff works... people freely mix and remix stuff, give it away for free, and make their income doing live events and shows.

That's my sense... anyone know if I got these details right?

Post the single with a "Available to buy on <some date>" notice. When it's officially released, take down the notice and put up "Buy now" buttons. And there's no reason they have to make every song available for sale or every song that's for sale available for streaming.

The question is how this income is split between the services (which deservedly should be profitable) and the musicians.

Art has always had a shady connection to commerce in which the gatekeepers tend to profit more than the artists themselves.

Salaries dominate many or most business costs.

There might be a way to monetize sharing digital content using some micropayment system like you say. Though I think that will have to come about after the current players have left or been marginalized as they don't care so much about helping the artists make a living, instead wanting to maintain control so they can get the money.

I'm kind of baffled that SoundCloud isn't already raking in profits. Presumably their stakeholders simply haven't pushed for profitability yet.