zcrar70

Qobuz have the highest per stream payout rate for artists [0], and have the best audio quality of all streaming platforms (better even that Tidal imho). They have desktop, mobile and android auto (and presumably carplay) clients, and an equivalent to Spotify Connect whereby streaming can be switched to a different client.

Downsides are no native client (same webview approach as Spotify), not as strong recommendations (though slowly improving), good but slightly quirkier UI (also slowly improving). For me the trade offs are worthwhile.

[0] eg. https://resources.onestowatch.com/ethical-music-streaming-pl...

At 15 people, you can rely on 'tribal knowledge', where there is enough interaction between individuals that everyone is on the same page on most key points (company mission, coding standards, release processes, etc.)

As you grow, that stops being the case; to echo what @Peroni and @sloaken said - a good first step is good documentation and clear, repeatable and where possible automated processes. A second, related challenge is company culture - as you grow and interactions between each & every individual become less & less possible, getting everyone aligned on what it means to work at your company (and how to achieve company goals) is harder. You'll need to make a conscious effort to maintain that (see below).

The core team will need to start delegating more, which can be a hard if you're not used to it (some may also want to remain ICs), and will change the shape of your organisation. This is particularly hard to do gradually, as you'll need to work out the right point at which to transition different areas of the business. This comes with the risk of silos developing - a good way to work around that at mid-size is to continue arranging teams by project, but make sure that there are both opportunities to gather across functions (e.g. dev, qa, project management etc.) and more widely (e.g. company events, social events etc.). The main thing here is making sure people talk to each other, exchange information, getting good at collaborating with each other and know who to reach out to in case of issue. Again, you are going to have to dedicate time to this which will seem strange coming from 15 people (but will pay off handsomely in increased efficiency).

There are many good other points in this thread (on hiring experienced people even though they cost more, the importance of good hiring, clear ownership, us vs them), but a last one is the need more generally for the leadership team to adapt. They will have less visibility and control; the company will become less efficient which might be frustrating (it will still be able to do more overall); changes of direction will become harder and slower. This applies to all 15 people working there now, but particularly for the founders/leaders. Having some thoughts on how to handle this ahead of time (established reporting structures, clear goals and reporting metrics) will help minimise growing pains. It's always easier to say this than to do of course.

Source: did something similar a couple of times (4->25 people, 600->1000 people).

Some counter-arguments:

- TikTok revenues were estimated at $9.4 billion in 2022, at a $75bn valuation. Add revenue is projected to rise to $22bn in 2024. ByteDance (parent company) profit estimated at $6bn in 2023. They seem to have enough money to pay for the content which enables this growth (this may not just apply to the music element).

- The fact that they don't generate as much revenue per stream as YouTube is of no use to the artists whose works they are using to generate that revenue. Their work is still being used; and they should be paid for that usage. If TikTok's business model doesn't support payments to the artists, then that is TikTok's problem to solve - not the artists'.

I think a good argument is the point above that as only a fragment of a song is typically used, the amount should perhaps not be as much as a full song stream e.g. on Spotify or YT Music. Though that does open the question as to whether a stream of a Pink Floyd song should be paid as much as a stream of a Ramones song - given the difference in length!

You are right, they are not comparable; I have removed the comparison to the Spotify rate from the parent comment to avoid distracting from the precedent (which was the aspect I found most interesting).

You are quite right, the structure for radio is different than for streaming. Also, at the time, records / CD / cassette sales were significantly higher than they are now, so artist revenue from radio then was a much smaller proportion of the total than streaming is today.

What I found interesting was the precedent; the argument that radio was a means to promote artists, and therefore shouldn't pay royalties, was discounted even in those (to artists) much more favourable circumstances.

My understanding of what is happening:

* Universal want TikTok to pay similar fees for use of music as other online platforms such as YouTube ($0.004 per stream) or Spotify ($0.0039 per stream for US listeners)

* TikTok views its platform as a means for artists to promote their music, and therefore doesn't think it should be paying anywhere near as much

Interestingly:

- there was a similar argument for the value of radio plays (pre-internet). Radio stations viewed themselves as a way to promote the artists' work, and argued that they therefore shouldn't pay any royalties.

- this has since been settled resolved in favour of the music makers; from what I can see, in the UK, BBC Radio 1 pays around £40/minute in royalties

- the amount of royalties an artist receives from the record company varies significantly, but is usually in the order of 10-20% (Taylor Swift will have a better deal than a small indie band); plus any publishing revenue. Some artists also have different percentages for different types of revenue (e.g. streaming vs CD sales)

- this article has a good overview of how royalties get split for streaming in the US: https://www.billboard.com/pro/music-streaming-royalty-paymen...

My view:

* TikTok should pay royalties for the music it uses (music is an integral part of the package that makes them so hugely profitable)

* UMG should pay artists a higher proportion of streaming (and other) revenues

* streaming companies should be paying more per stream (may imply a price increase for streaming services)

Apologies - the correct link is https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67485561; I can't see how to edit, so will resubmit.

High level summary on the BBC website: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66890649

How have you been finding it? Do you use it as your main monitor? (Or only at specific times / alongside a traditional monitor?)

Founders usually give up their family lives, social lives, leisure time, and sometimes their reputation, sanity, initial investment in the startup and self-esteem on top of what you list, depending on the outcome. The stress level for a founder is usually quite high, and the success rate is quite low.

This comes across as a somewhat hysterical response to a fairly measured comment ("Yes, hello, reality calling").

That doesn't feel like the HN ethos. People working for any company should feel comfortable posting here, without feeling like they are the subject of a witch hunt imho.

rplan | Software Engineer | London, UK | Onsite

We are a fintech company building what we hope is the UK's best investor portal, allowing UK investors to access and manage their investments through a straightforward, intuitive and modern interface - both through our own online offering (rplan.co.uk), and for our corporate clients.

We're looking for smart, focused, full-stack senior software engineers to help us deliver.

Our stack:

  * C#, ASP.Net MVC/Web API, SQL Server
  * Angular 1&2, Typescript
  * Ionic 2
  * AWS

Our hiring process consists of a technical phone interview and 2 face to face interviews (one technical, the other non-technical).

Please email [email protected] if you are interested in finding out more.

He explains this here: http://www.crockford.com/javascript/encyclopedia/preface.htm...

(In summary, it's a started work but not finished, and he's hoping people will step in to help him finish it).

I do wonder how useful this going to prove, given Mozilla's already excellent reference material (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...).

The easiest form of investment to get started with are investment funds (aka mutual funds in the US). They are a form of collective investment (i.e. you invest along with other people in a basket of goods, rather than a single share). The advantage of this is lower cost (buying and selling shares has a cost, with a fund there are economies of scale so it's usually cheaper to invest via a fund than directly in a similar basket of shares), and generally lower risk (if a company that the fund invested in goes bust, you usually lose less money than if you invest in the company directly, because the fund invests in many different companies whereas you'd usually invest in a smaller number of stocks).

ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds) and Investment Trusts are similar to investment funds in that they are also collectives, relatively low cost. The current fashion in investing is to buy 'passive', 'tracker' or 'index' funds (or ETFs), which all follow an index such as the FTSE or S&P. These tend to be lower cost than 'actively managed' funds (where the fund manager tries to beat the index). Vanguard is a popular 'passive' fund manager.

Other types of investments include property (you generally need quite a lot of capital), and more risky types of investment such as forex trading, spread betting, etc. Even experienced investors tend to consider these risky.

Investments have done reasonably well over the past year in some areas (some UK income funds are up 8% in the past 12 months), not so well in others (a FTSE All Share tracker is only up 0.6% over the year). Investing is not risk-free, and generally speaking there is no guarantee to make a profit. You could also consider saving in cash, but with interest rates as they are now, you'd probably be worse off in real terms by the end of the year than you were at the beginning (because interest rates are generally lower than inflation)

Some investment brokers in the UK include: rplan (disclosure: I work for rplan), Hargreaves Lansdown (the largest), Fidelity, Nutmeg (another startup).

As others have mentioned, it's definitely worth doing a bit of research to find out more about how things work. If you don't mind the shameless plug, we have a 'guide to investing' available on our site which we think is quite a good overview of what's available (it's fairly UK-specific though): https://www.rplan.co.uk/investment-guide (note: registration required, let me know if you'd rather not register and I can send you a copy).

rplan - London, UK (http://www.rplan.co.uk)

====

We are changing how investing in mutual funds works for UK retail investors by creating easy-to-use yet powerful online services. We have been going 4 years, we're bootstrapped and have been profitable from year 1.

We are looking for a Software Developer with experience in both the .Net stack (C#, ASP.Net MVC, SQL Server) and ideally also client-side technologies (Angular.js, JS, Typescript).

You'd be joining a small and experienced dev team who like to get stuff done without compromising on quality. On-location only currently (London, UK - I'm afraid we aren't able to help with relocations).

Email [email protected] or myself ([email protected]) if you're interested or if you'd like to find out more.

> but hey, my Amazon or Spotify experience rocks and delivers great value.

They won't if there are no more good books to read/music to listen to, because the gains aren't worth the effort that goes into producing them.

I don't think danger is books or music disappearing, but that the quality goes down, as the incentives for authors/musicians/composers to invest significant time and effort producing high quality work are reduced.

This particularly applies to the 'avant-guarde' works which push the envelope creatively/intellectually, but typically don't correlate with high volumes.