I'm not sure if this is appropriate here (which is why I made a new account) but some friends and I have started developing a site which we hope captures the main benefits Soundcloud used to have for independent labels, DJs and artists.
We can see many ways we think it could be sustainable as a business that benefits the creators and owners of the music as well as the listeners.
So if anyone out there is interested in fixing this space and has the time and the inclination it would be great if you would make contact via DM.
We've so far been developing in our spare time. We are getting close to Beta. No thought or plan as yet to raise investment.
Delivering music online is hard. Not technically hard but legally hard. The reason for that is that there are two copyrights in a recorded song: the recording itself and then the song which is contained within that recording - the actual written words and melody.
You may well know all of this already, but a lot of people don't - or haven't fully appreciated the complexity, so I apologise if I'm telling you something you already know!
Butnwhat this means is that even if you have the agreement of the person who owns the recording to be allowed to use that recording in a stream, as soon as you make that recording available to stream you need the agreement of whoever wrote the music.
The complicated bit here is this - even if the artist owns the rights to the recording AND they wrote the song they may not actually be able to assign you the rights because quite often they have assigned the representation of their rights in the songwriting copyright to an organisation like PRS/MCPS (in the U.K. for example) - who are then required to pursue for a royalty payment anyone using the songwriting element (which is contained within the recording). The reason they assign these rights is that it makes certain things around songwriting royalty collection easier. Songwriters are paid for the use of their copyright - for example if their song is played by a DJ in a club - but the payments are often small and they cannot possibly grant a license to every single DJ who wants to play their song and they also can't admin the collection of that payment.
This causes a headache for people who want to provide streams of songs - because they need to negotiate a licence and associated payment with the organisations to which songwriters have assigned this element of their copyright.
And it means that - in essence - unless you've done that deal, at some point when you get big enough, one of those organisations is going to come knocking with a back dated request for payment.
yeah I'm aware of all the problems with publishing. Frankly I think it's all outdated, it was great back when there was only radio, film and TV, but imo the rules need updating to work with web. However, that's not our battle. We don't want to become a streaming service, we are OK leaving that to spotify/apple music etc.
I guess we would like to be closer to bandcamp by still selling downloads, however, there are a lot of other ways to add value to a service like that (speaking as someone who has run an independent digital record label).
For example, an electronic label will either directly or via a promotions company, send out a bunch of exclusive pre-release "promos" to well known DJ's and taste makers. They use this to gather feedback on how well the release will do. This was important when printing vinyl as it could tell you if you have a potential hit, or a flop before choosing how many copies of the vinyl to get printed, or gave you the chance to cancel it if the feedback was all bad. That feedback loop is still in affect, however, it's lost it's value, it gathers mostly useless feedback like "downloaded for R.Hawtin" and it goes no further than the label, or the labels facebook page. What if I wanted to follow my favourite DJ and actually be able to see what he is rating pre-release, so I could pre-order and or pay the label directly, via our service, a premium so that I could also get early "exclusive" access.
The DJ audience is a big one, and DJ's still have to download the file to actually DJ out at a club or whatever. I don't think that will change for a long time if ever. Just the security of being able to carry on performing if the internet goes down.
I also think a lot of DJ's would like to have their virtual record box, backed up at least, online. Imagine taking a flight half way across the world to DJ and having your laptop/USB keys stolen. you want to be able to buy a new USB and reset it from any internet terminal ideally and carry on the show.
So yeah, without carrying on and writing a novel, I think there are lots of areas to add value without becoming a Streaming service. I also think Soundcloud went wrong when they decided to become a streaming service.
I think Beatport does a lot of what you're talking about - it's the go-to store for DJs and there are DJ charts that are pretty robust and well respected.
Regarding the early "exclusive" access - I think services that provide value for superfans or early champions are a big area of potential growth for the music business. Pledge Music has a great business built around this idea. Coupling that with the taste maker endorsement of DJ feedback etc is a great idee. The challenge - like all music services - is how you find an audience big enough to make it a viable business.
yeah beatport tried and failed to get into streaming a while back too.
Pledge music and indeed Patreon are both doing good things for unsigned artists and I see potential for some crossover.
One of the major problems with beatport, is as they are the biggest and oldest store for electronic music, they take 50p on the £ and will only deal with "distributors" who generally take another 30% or so just for uploading your music. which leaves the label with roughly 35p in the pound to split with the artists. which is a terrible deal.
Also they don't offer any kind of promotion except for the charts. which are rubbish too. if an artist has a release, they will make a chart and put a few of their friends tracks in, it doesn't help with discoverability for most independents. the only thing which really helps sales on beatport are a banner. and that is curated by a person who works at beatport. which is flawed.
So yeah, in my opinion nobody out there has nailed it yet and there is still opportunities in this area. I'm confident that if you offer a service which is beneficial to independent labels and DJ's then they will use there social media influence to push fans to buy from you rather than beatport/itunes/etc. It's not a unicorn, but I believe it could easily be self sustainable (I'm hesitant to use the word profitable, as I'd rather it was profitable for the labels & artists than the platform, as long as the platform didn't lose money of course).
