For example, Grooveshark was a direct competitor for Spotify with similar apps and features around the same time[0]. It got sued out of existence by the music industry, and back then quite a lot of music on both had that bootleg audio quality that sure points to piracy.
I remember going to Europe from the USA around 2012, and everyone was already using Spotify. Their music experience was vastly superior to ours. IIRC, they were based/avail in countries with really loose music copyright laws. Was that what made the difference? They grew huge where they could, before the hammer came down? Then too big to fail?
Again, IIRC, when the US music labels wanted to shut them down, they instead said: "hey, why don't you just buy a big piece of Spotify. We are already your distro. F the artists." I remember thinking that this was a gangster move. (btw, I still refuse to subscribe to Spotify.)
Between 2006 and 2016, no one in the Nordics and Eastern Europe cared about piracy. By the time Spotify became prominent enough in the West to compete with music sales, it had already mainly been legalized.
Grooveshark was in the US, which has a very litigious business climate and is world-leading in copyright enforcement.
I can't think of a more plausible explanation. But I will say that breaking laws to later legalize is still only a successful strategy if one doesn't get caught. If anyone thinks this is a good strategy, I'd say there's survivorship bias going on.
> I'd say there's survivorship bias going on.
I agree that there is definitely survivorship bias happening here. However, what exactly is the punishment for failure? Is it worth the risk?
I also agree with your assessment, by the way.
Which cultures are we talking about? I assume not the US.
Look at Sean Parker - Napster got sued to oblivion, he became first president of Facebook and made literal billions.
His cofounder (Shawn Fanning) didn’t make it quite as big, but still sold a company to Blizzard for $30m. Plus whatever he made out of HNT.
Neither seemed to suffer any kind of stigma for their involvement in arguably the highest profile piracy startup.
As a personal philosophy, please, someone help me avoid nihilism!
imo the difference is that spotify at least tried to hide it
when you searched for songs on grooveshark you'd get names back like "Tame Impala - The Slow Rush (2020) Mp3 (320kbps) [Hunter]"
also IIRC grooveshark never even tried to set up revenue share with labels/artists
Spotify cheated behind the scenes and a veneer of following the rules, which eventually transitioned into actually following the rules and paying out artists
> Speaking of industry incestuousness, I suggest you read more about Tencent’s 9.1 percent stakeholding in Spotify, which is awe-inspiring in its spider’s web of vested interests. The short version: Tencent Holdings is about to own 10 percent of Universal, which in turns owns around 3.5 percent in Spotify, which in turn owns around nine percent in Tencent Music Entertainment, which in turn is part-owned by Universal’s two main rivals (Warner and Sony), but remains majority owned by Tencent Holdings, which in turn owns 9.1 percent of Spotify. (And, yes, no kidding, that’s the short version.)
Sorry for the tangent, but I've always wondered: does Tencent's partial ownership of Reddit give them any access to Reddit's internal data? Is that how that generally works, or am I making uninformed assumptions?
The answer is probably a bit more nuanced, but broadly, you're making uninformed assumptions. Blackrock own about 5% of Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, and we don't see people throwing around accusations that they're fiddling with their runnings.
I used to work for a company that Tencent had a minority (but significantly larger than 9%) share in, and they approximately 0 influence in our operations. Some places will be different, but if you've ever worked anywhere with a parent company you'll be familiar with just how untrusting the subisidiaries are. Honestly, I think the best way of thinking about it is the Larry Ellison Lawnmower joke - they're not out to get you, they don't care.
Whether or not that remains to be true going forwards who knows, but that's the same of any organisation anywhere in the world, and as someone who lives in Europe I'm far more concerned about what the US is doing right now.
Tencent, despite being a for-profit company, may still have political motives pushed onto them from the very top. This is true for all chinese companies (because if they don't "comply", the very public example of jack ma is the answer).
Now, of course, it doesn't mean this power is utilized all the time or everywhere. It simply means that the opportunity exists for such power to be weld if the state calls for it. Just because it hasn't happened so far doesn't mean it can't. It's different from Ellison Lawnmower, because the political differences between the countries.
Thats not true, at all.
They have donated millions in the 2024 election alone to a number of politicians[0]. They definitely have political motives
[0]: https://dallasexpress.com/uncategorized/blackrock-giving-big...
How do you figure?
Please paste this above all future comments you post to save HN readers’ time.
Seriously? You can say that with a straight face?
> Tencent, despite being a for-profit company, may still have political motives pushed onto them from the very top. This is true for all chinese companies
And that definitely won't happen in the US [0].
The fact that the US is now voting in the UN with Russia, Iran, NK, which mindlessly pushes the EU towards China is mind-blowing, and entirely understandable.
source: EU born, lived most of my life in the USA, then back in the EU for the last 10 years. I will truly miss the century of Pax Americana, and I hope for the coming century of Pax Europa.
The name "Tencent" is based on its Chinese name Tengxun (Chinese: 腾讯), which incorporates part of Pony Ma's Chinese name (Ma Huateng; 马化「腾」) and literally means "galloping fast information".
So maybe it's just concidence? Their first product was also a messenger software so I don't see why they would name themselves "ten percent". The investing thing came later.
A different context for the proverb "I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun YOU!"
If Spotify was really the wolf they wouldn't have to pay Universal billions. Not that much has changed really.
They were already the teacher's pet. Grooveshark was the one that was always getting suspended, before ultimately being expelled.
Survivorship bias is when two cases face the same selection process, not when one fails for taking an opposite approach.
But the other company that Uber reacted to was Wingz, Inc, not Lyft.
I would argue it was not even so much that they were doing "things the right way", they were optimizing black car service and pivoted because it was not as lucrative.
Cryptocurrency is another horrific example, where the value-add is avoiding KYC = tax and sanctions evasion! I knew this over a decade ago, and decided to sit it out for moral reasons. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
edit: to be honest, not just moral reasons. I just could not imagine that in a just world, this illegality would be allowed to continue. So little did I know.
The sounds in Windows XP were created in a pirated version of Sony SoundForge, and were only detected because of the metadata in the .wav files.
I guess companies can get "too big to sue".
Theranos was also a fraud. I am not talking about outright fraud.
I am just some shmoe, so I would love someone else to put this more clearly. Is what I originally posted intellectual property/regulatory arbitrage, vs. fraud?
Is there a better way to state this difference?
What a time to be alive!
This is generative AI music, aka the future of music?
Theranos was completely fraudulent and there was no way to tell.
Unless you live in a country where copyright or other regulations can lead to actual jail time.
IMHO, companies intentionally breaking the law should be held accountable by going after executives - even if they left the company.
Regulatory does not matter if your product does not matter. Megaupload did matter, and did not solve the regulatory problem or change the business model.
Maybe it came too early for the solution or alternative business models to become apparent.
What was the difference? Did not have the correct investors? Did not have a unique enough product?
I would assume the latter. However, this is an interesting topic for discussion.
The file lockers that pirates use today operate under the radar. The owners don't do interviews and they use crypto.
I like to think that early exposure helped immunize me against some other self aggrandizing grifters over the decades.
https://www.theregister.com/2002/01/22/kimble_schmitz_deport...
Are you recommending to break the law or are you being sarcastic? I sincerely do not know anymore.
In the ~ 2005-2008 time frame, many monthly services sprang up to offer play any song from their catalog on demand, along with limited downloading, based on Microsoft's PlaysForSure DRM program. Services included Yahoo Music Unlimited, Napster to Go (lol), (Real) Rhapsody, MSN Music and a bunch more. Afaik, this was all legal, but Microsoft shut down the DRM program with, I think, very little discussion as to why (but probably had to do with lack of market share in portable players)
I do recall some issues with the catalog on Yahoo Music Unlimited where the non-interactive catalog was bigger than the interactive catalog, because non-interactive has mechanical licensing and interactive play requires an intetactive licensing exercise between the rightsholders and the service provider.
1. You do all government certifications like FCC, recycling, pollution, security, backed with scientific research that your chip is ok. This will cost a lot of money and time and might prevent you from reaching the market quickly.
2. You start selling asap as a Prototype. You make money and you can start the whole certification process. (or not).
The concept of Prototype is legal in many countries, there's often an official threshold of product sold at which your product is not a prototype anymore.
Does it have to be either of those?
They're just summarizing the lesson they see.
Same with LLMs and copyright, I suppose.
There's a list of cases here [1]. The case against Github Copilot was already mostly dismissed despite it producing identical samples to license-restricted code. The cat is so far out of the bag now anyways with many open models and datasets containing the stolen data - there is nothing anyone can do about it now.
[1]https://www.bakerlaw.com/services/artificial-intelligence-ai...
Spotify only got away with it after the fact because they pivoted to a model that gives money to the people who wanted to put them in prison before. And Facebook got away with it becau it's big.
Well this is the interesting thing. Have there been any, aside from the Mega example?
When rights holders use a pirated version of their work it may be embarrassing, but it certainly doesn't violate copyright law. (Assuming the pirates didn't transform the work in a substantive way)
I'm more offended by the idea that we should sit quiet and not do anything just because the status quo set up the rules in their favor.
The immoral part here is not using pirated content to build the initial catalog. The immoral part is that their success came by aligning with the exploiters (the labels) and not the exploited artists.
Tidal pays them more.
Bandcamp pays them even more and lets them run their own storefront.
Not Spotify's fault that artists sign bad deals.
Let's do something then. You lead the way and I'll follow.
[0] : https://blog.communick.com/communick-collective-a-zero-commi...
If anyone else could share any other radio stations who still have living human disc jockeys, I would love to check them out. DJs are an amazing resource which should be cherished.
I mean come on, this is all amazing. Forget the music recommendation machine algos:
https://www.kcrw.com/music/articles/pachyman-samia-steel-woo...
The next logical step is for one of us to make a Spotify clone which leverages these human DJs, and gives credit with links to station and artist Bandcamp.
https://claude.ai/share/7c277bf6-eb65-4148-979d-f76ee6027fb0
Let's build it and get a bunch of people using it and show the world that the pirates are willing to pay the artists more than Spotify is. At such a point, why wouldn't everyone avast payments to Spotify and hoist the jolly roger in the name of paying artists more?
If someone lead in that direction, would you follow? Would you use the player that made the payments happen? Would you seed the torrents that made the player work?
We can make this super simple: we can still keep the subscription model, we just need to change the revenue sharing system. Let's just charge a base monthly fee for the streaming service itself (say $1/month) and let's add a monthly "pay what you want" amount where 100% of the value goes specifically to the artists you choose.
So, let's say that I pledge to give $10/month, and I spread that around some 10-15 artists, This means that 90% of the money I am putting into the system is going to the artists. Someone wants to give $20/month, it would mean 95% of the money going to the "right" hands. We wouldn't have to argue about what the "right" hands are because that is defined directly by the people voting with their wallets.
I'm just saying that paying the artist and handling the bits are totally separate things and if we want to challenge the existing model we should use something that decouples them in a way that demonstrates that the bad deal that artists are getting from Spotify is not the only option.
I have setup this system where people can set up how much they want to pay each artist per month (out of a fixed budget), and anyone that signs up to my service [0] gets an account on our Funkwhale server [1] where they can upload and promote their work. I take zero commission from these payouts, the only thing I need is to have content creators who prefer to pay a flat $29/year to have this instead of giving out 8%-12% of their earnings to Patreon.
bruh...
Having been in industry for over a decade now, the opposite is true. Big mega corp has a huge legal team and is always looking to stop any law breaking. They don't need to break the law and doing so will only incur huge fines and huge negative public outcray. They pay compliance people to walk around and breath down managers necks.
Small corps on the other hand...it's basically a free for all of "do whatever it takes to get this over the line and keep it alive, and if it fails just walk away and let the public deal with it".
Unfortunately, there are many many more people that don't care and/or don't know about the decisions made by company leadership, so voting with my wallet makes no difference to the company. I just keep adding to my soapbox collection. Starry eyed world would have more people making similar decisions so that asshat companies do not succeed so that regulations would not be necessary. To bad that world doesn't exist
Don't worry about "regulatory." If your product matters, then you will be able to afford to solve the problem. If your product doesn't matter, then "regulatory" will not be an issue. Just ignore it.
I personally find this concept pretty darn offensive, but it is exactly how the world works. It's a really important lesson that I really wish I had learned earlier.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42677087 (see top reply)