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>> You think all those mixes come for free? They have to be licensed as well once the embedded song snippets exceed 30sec which most of them do (also depending on the local jurisdiction).

Again you're not understanding what I'm saying. You seem to think of music (or SoundCloud) as only EDM. When SoundCloud started it was largely amateur and indie 'analog' musicians and songwriters (i.e. people playing instruments and writing their own music). None of that needs licensed. Those people, despite not making any money, were paying SoundCloud £9.99 per month to increase their storage space and see listener stats. Obviously I don't know how many but there were badges on the profiles to indicate a paying user and there were a significantly high percentage. There was quite a large community of this type of music around a lot of genres. None of it needed licensed. If you stick to indie artists you don't need to deal with licensing. People doing mixes can use MixCloud which automatically licenses uploads some how.

So, my point is, SoundCloud did not start off with DJ mixes or copyrighted material. It started off very legitimately and had a decent business model. They could have made a nice business out of it but like most SV businesses preferred to sink a load of VC money and 'grow' with no ultimate business model.

Edit:

>> If they can succeed with this music selection and find listeners like you and who pay, great for them, but obviously they can't.

My comment was nothing to do with listeners paying - it was about artists paying. Artists have always been able and willing to pay for spotlight/storage/stats.

> Again you're not understanding what I'm saying.

How many times do you want to repeat this?

> SoundCloud did not start off with DJ mixes or copyrighted material.

The CEO and CTO were themselves very much into EDM. SC positioned itself repetoire-wise as a DJ platform from very early on, most tracks, traffic, the first surge were EDM-based the first years. And 99% was copyrighted material stitched together. I don't know where you have your information from but it's just blatantly wrong.

Anyways, I think that our current discussion does not contribute to the initial points in any way and doesn't make us both feeling better, so I stop here. Have a nice day!

It was a platform for producers, not DJs.

But the underlying issue is that those DJ tracks many times technically did need permission from copyright holders to be posted. Unfortunately dealing with this w/o a ton of money is just a failing exercise.

Soundcloud is still good to get DJ mixes from DJ's I like, but I can seeing it go away just due to all of the costs that would accompany trying to ensure they have the right to share everything that is posted by users.

>> But the underlying issue is that those DJ tracks many times technically did need permission from copyright holders to be posted.

What the parent and I are saying though is that DJ mixes were a small part of the content in the early days. It wasn't created to host DJ mixes or marketed as that initially. Producers/songwriters/amateurs were the bulk of the content. SoundCloud could have built a decent business by banning copyrighted material and only dealing with original works. There was never any need to get into the messy licensing business.

> If they can succeed with this music selection and find listeners like you and who pay, great for them, but obviously they can't.

For the longest time they didn't offer a way to pay, and the now-existing payment model doesn't really do anything for someone listening to the small guys, so the only obvious about them not being able to find paying listeners is that without an offer to pay for there is no paying.

> 99% of the mixes on SoundCloud are crap.

Spoken like a person who didn't understand all that was on the platform. You do realize that SoundCloud had basically spawned a different genre of hip hop and rap, right? It's not just dance mixes, there's a lot of stuff that's super unique on there and it's not just hip hop, rap, or edm.

I'm far from a SoundCloud user or a hip hop or rap aficionado, but I'd like to learn more about this. Can you elaborate? Or do you know of a source where I can read about this?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/arts/music/soundcloud-rap...

You should have put the quote into its context, I wrote if it's a matter of taste then I implied that (in my opinion) 99% is crap. You might have a different opinion because you have a different taste.