No! I don't create for money, I create for the sake of creation! It is a sacred act to me! No sarcasm, no joke. I acquire money in order to create more effectively, I don't create in order to gather the most money of us all.

This attitude that we must all live like neat little economic machines is seriously depressing.

Well to be fair to your take on things, you probably create out of your own pocket and with passion. Soundcloud chose to be a business when they took millions in investor funding on board.

As is their right, and mine. If their way does not work out, then they are welcome to join me for a discussion on post-corporate philosophy. BYOB.

If you do have a platform for such discussion let me know, I would love to talk a bit more about the idea. It has been a burning concept in my mind.

Gah, now I wish I did. I've been meaning to start blogging for years. I had a lot of fun in a drink-n-chat site a while ago, but the environment isn't quite right for long conversations. An opportunity, I suppose...

SoundCloud could easily exist just by asking artists that want to host more than 5 songs a fee, or for some extra features on their profile. Just small stuff. If they would be dealing just with sound instead of sound-that-is-music.

Serving a service like SoundCloud isn't technically challenging or expensive. It's dealing with all of the legal stuff of people uploading music that's under license, people uploading songs that have uncleared samples in them and all that bullshit.

It's proabably ran by 5 engineers working on the service itself, 25 maintaining the DMCA platform and 270 lawyers.

They did that. It apparently wasn't enough. When I signed up a few years ago, I did a thing where I wrote and recorded a song a day for a month. A few days in, I had to start handing Soundcloud money for a Pro account so I could upload more songs. And when I forgot to renew in 2015, my stuff temporarily disappeared.

IDK what they do nowadays. I only release a new song every couple of months.

(shameless plug: soundcloud.com/bphogan)

That's what's Bandcamp did. And they're profitable.

> SoundCloud could easily exist just by asking artists that want to host more than 5 songs a fee.

They do that. If you want to hsot mroe than a few hours of music and additional stats you need to pay $10 month. I happily do that and it's a perfectly reasonable business model in my opinion. The problems, as you explained, started when Soundcloud tried to become a general and major label streaming service. A rather bad one compared to Spotify & Co. It's downright silly to go after such a crowded market when you have rather little to offer.

My guess is that there are more than enough artists, labels and users who actually want to pay and use the service to deliver music to their audience and that this was a profitable niche Soundcloud occupied, but the chase for growth made them lose focus.

What's a paid service that facilitates access to unknown artists? How could that even work? Netflix isn't remotely like something of that sort.

The creation of new music has always involved exposing penniless people to it and no current music subscription service comes remotely close to that.

One alternative might be integrating peer-to-peer with a music discovery system.

Edit: craigslist and meetup are closest thing to "mass culture websites" and they each get a small minority of users to pay for their operations.

> What's a paid service that facilitates access to unknown artists?

Other people have been mentioning Bandcamp. Seems like signing up as an artist is free, and they market themselves as a way to discover and support new music. Am I missing something, or isn't that the kind of service you're talking about?

Not the denigrate Bandcamp but I think the thing Soundcloud has that a Bandcamp-like-system doesn't have is the ability to create a "music scene" - sure, Bandcamp is helpful for artists, allowing them to sell stuff to people who are already familiar with them. The key of soundcloud afaik is being able to share a simple link to anything you've done.

But they won't. The people creating content on it did not have money and just wanted exposure. The consumers did not have money either.

I don't know if that's necessarily true. Youtube is to Netflix what Soundcloud is to Spotify. Netflix and Spotify are successful because they charge a small fee to allow users to consume high quality content. Youtube and Soundcloud are both free and allow users to consume community-generated content. This is a bit of a rhetorical question, but why is Youtube so successful when Soundcloud isn't?

YouTube seems successful because Google is paying for it. It's never made a profit.

No. It's successful as a profitable product otherwise you wouldn't have so many content creators get paid a lot of money for creating videos. It's ad revenue sustains itself, and those that create on it quite well.

Youtube not only is not profitable as far as anyone knows, but has vastly reorganized its funding model for creators and most now make pennies on the dollar from what they did before.

Youtubers themselves were screaming about this recently, and almost always with any algo/payout change, and that is pre-Youtube red renegotiations.

I could be wrong but as of last year, YouTube is still a loss leader for Google.

You have any numbers to support that profitability claim? YouTube wasn't profitable when Google acquired them, and it wouldn't surprise me if they still were not profitable now. I'm sure they make substantial ad revenue, and it's entirely possible they are profitable. But running servers and content creators getting paid are not proof of that - Google has more than enough money to subsidize the endeavor.

Google also seemingly hasn't been trying very hard to make Youtube profitable. Spotify has a free tier, but you only get the "standard" 160 kpbs bitrate, as well as ads. To get the "extreme" 320 kbps bitrate you need to subscribe. Youtube could have easily restricted 720p and 1080p to paying customers, but didn't. I think now it's too late for Youtube to reverse their decision on that without some backlash.

Spotify also has other restrictions on the free tier, though (for example, you have to have a premium account to run Spotify on a Fire TV Stick (or any other Amazon device AFAICT)). Google/Alphabet might be able to get away with imposing similar restrictions on certain YouTube integrations without too much backlash.

Actual YouTube-based advertising revenue is notoriously incredibly low. Most creators will ultimately make more money from Amazon affiliate links or sponsorships than Adsense. In terms of actual numbers, I've often hears that the Social Blade estimates are well above what actually ends up with creators.

Humans are a very visual-oriented animal would be my best guess. Videos vs. audio on the internet is a very different animal.

I've never really used SoundCloud because the ui is confusing and haphazard and it just doesn't feel like Spotify, which I pay for. Spotify makes sure and shows you the album art etc. My recollection of SoundCloud from when I tried it in the past was some sort of waveform you clicked on to listen and visualize the music.

Soundcloud is a very different platform to Spotify though. I wouldn't pay to subscribe to Soundcloud because not all of the artists I like would be on there.

Soundcloud was more of an independent artist platform, and I think Soundcloud might have been able to get artists to pay for some services like sponsored songs, pay to let users download their tracks, artist page perks.

But it's hard to know if that would have worked. Especially in retrospect.

I think it's probably as simple as two things:

(1) Video content engages a wider audience and commands more focus than audio content

(2) Video advertisements dropped into video content are more effective than audio advertisements.

But that's a guess with no empirical base.

Radio stations still exist and they survive primarily on audio advertisements. That's also without any of the internet fingerprinting which can be used to cater advertisements and potentially make Soundcloud's advertisements more lucrative.

People have money, especially $5-10 a month, I don't want to hear it. If you want to get your music out there, or you want to consume others music. Bands used to create demo tapes, and distribute them for FREE. I'm sure that costs more than $5 a month.

You can scrape together one hour of minimum wage. This is how the economy works. I'm tired of the freeloader generation ever since Napster. People need money to live, expecting everything free is nonsense.

That sounds like the perfect setup for a peer-to-peer system like the original file sharing programs. Bring back Napster / LimeWire etc. for user-generated content!

That's the line of thinking that began destroying Soundcloud's image. I used to be a heavy user and stopped when they started playing ads because I knew a subscription model must be in the works. Now they've completely backpedaled and it's usable again.

YouTube is free. Seems like SoundCloud was trying to be the audio version of YouTube.

YouTube is the audio version of YouTube, people listen to a TON of music on there. SoundCloud is minuscule in comparison.

YouTube is also making zero money, so if that is what they were trying to be, they've succeeded. Difference is, they don't have Google backing them.