Interesting how Bandcamp and Soundcloud are kind of the same thing in terms of letting people upload audio into playlists, but one seems to be doing fine while the other's likely shutting down. Like, was it hard to let people sell albums through Soundcloud? What's the logic there?
@sanspoint @wxcafe Yes, gosh, I know their business models! I'm saying one works, and one doesn't, but the tech is SO CLOSE it's baffling why Soundcloud couldn't have pivoted literally one degree
@sanspoint @wxcafe @Gargron I think bandcamp's business model has always been "make it easy for people to buy music". Soundcloud never had a business model that I know of - they always felt something like old Flickr for music... Lots of people interested in creating things and discussing the results with others, but with little aspirations to monetize their work.
@Gargron yes, soundcloud e-commerce play came too late and too shitty to compete with bandcamp.
@Gargron from my perspective, soundcloud tried to be a better competitor to another site nobody cares about: reverbnation. bandcamp was always about e-commerce from day 1. neither soundcloud or reverbnation were about e-commerce initially, but instead giving fans access to additional content. but it turns out that those fans would mostly rather consume it via youtube...
@Gargron Bandcamp's model is "we take every 10th piece of money" while SoundCloud relies on paid subs from artists and paid subs from users (and these ones are p. much useless), and I presume Bandcamp stores way less data than SoundCloud, especially since it's not trying to be a discovery platform, or even a listening platform, just a really good store.
@Gargron after some years in small-to-midscale selling-stuff-on-the-web, i've come to realize that it's actually pretty hard to do well, but also (and maybe more importantly) that it's not a mindset that a lot of the tech money / leadership / whatever really understands very well.
like unless you _start out_ doing that, and scale it up over time, there's a pretty good chance you don't know how to do it.
@Gargron Bandcamp had better management TBH
@plsburydoughboy @Gargron Their management were at least smart enough to take less VC money.
@Gargron When I first was into soundcloud, it was mostly used for uploading work in progress music, so that you could get comments on it. The whole point was the time-based commenting thing. Bandcamp (in my experience) is about publishing and selling your finished music (and collecting other people's).
Soundcloud tried to pivot to being a place where people listen to stuff that's finished in order to make money to survive, bandcamp was already doing that.
I think.
@masklayer @gargron being former DJ, rave organiser and radio producer I always saw Soundcloud as (slightly) biased towards EDM genres, another factor(perhaps consequence of commercial boom in EDM a few yrs ago) was copyright/licensing aspect became a minefield for DJ mixes, remixes, mashups etc which is what EDM is built on. a lot of creators stopped uploading for fear of getting copyright-related bother over the years..
@Gargron no, soundcloud started doing podcast crap.
@gargron I think SoundCloud had an attractive no-ads-free-content-only subscription. They made it too expensive though : 5 bucks/month. And failed to promote it: I found out about it in an article about them letting go their staff, while using SoundCloud several times a week.
@koos Never seen any ads on SC (well, adblock 😂) their subscription never appeared like a value proposition to me.
@gargron a couple of months ago they did audio ads, but now that you mention it: haven't heard any in the last month or so.
@gargron what I'm saying is they have a way to monetize what they're good at: streaming free, less well known music. They were too busy promoting the go subscription. But maybe a few bucks a month per user still wouldn't cover their costs.
@Gargron even in 500 chars it's hard to list the problems of SC. They wanted to be a Youtube of sound but were hounded by GEMA/RIAA. By the time they figured that out, they wanted to be Spotify but were far too late.
@sixohsix @gargron although their management made mistakes, more problems came from the pressure of big labels. Universal can remove any content from SC they wish on copyright grounds. They and other majors had *already* successfully targeted the smaller DJ/rave mixtape independent sites/online radio for copyright enforcement before SC even started.
A lot of oldskool rave tracks started out on indie labels but got sold to majors in 90s ☹
SC was always about streaming single tracks (true, also playlists) and social interaction = people hanging online watching following feed listening while commenting and liking...
BC was always about releases, albums, downloads and support of creators = artists getting paid (as they call it: fair trade music)...
also SC is VC-funded, BC is not (afaik)
@Gargron Bandcamp lets you sell through them, and they get a cut. Soundcloud's business model is subscriptions for uploaders.