Mr Porter says 8tracks has music from all over the world being packaged by users who feel those tunes are underrepresented elsewhere. Why does 8tracks keep at it? Pandora has never turned a profit since going public in 2011-last week an investor encouraged the company to sell itself. It is also crowdfunding, raising money by selling equity to its loyal users in surveys they have already pledged $30m, according to its founder, David Porter. About two-thirds of its (heavily electronic) music is from independent artists and providers like INgrooves, CD baby and TuneCore. Each month, approximately 5m people-mostly university students-use the crowd-curated radio service, whose biggest competitors are Pandora and iHeartRadio. But the company has been sued for not paying royalties, leaving critics asking how SoundCloud will move from upstart to a proper contract-bound streaming service without losing the community spirit that attracted users in the first place.Ĩtracks, with its pleasingly-retro name, is either the biggest of the smalls, or the smallest of the medium-sized.
#8tracks radio rediscovered Offline#
In a bid to get more competitive with the likes of Spotify and Pandora, SoundCloud launched a subscription service that features downloads for offline listening, and a bigger music catalogue made possible through label licensing deals that took several years to finalise. It has built a solid reputation for allowing for remixes, mash-ups and commenting features that proved popular for artists as well as fans. SoundCloud, launched in 2007 by two musicians, now has roughly 175m users. Chandler Coyle, a music industry consultant and online educator for the Berklee College of Music, says, "They took the money, so they have to try. Analysts say Spotify is probably planning an acquisition of its own, and aiming to go public. To the small fry, Spotify is huge: earlier this year, the streaming and subscription service-with its 30m subscribers -raised $1 billion in debt financing, on top of the previous $1 billion raised in several rounds of equity investment. Spotify is positioned in the middle, between the mammoths and the remaining few independents.
So what does the future hold for music services whose parent companies don't make market-leading music hardware or market-leading search and video-streaming services? MySpace, after its decline as a social network, lingered on as a place for artists and fans to meet Time, Inc bought its parent company earlier this year.Īs long as people keep buying iPhones, Apple will have the cash to experiment, and to buy up rivals, as long as it likes. A year later, Apple bought Beats Music (along with Beats’ electronic-gadget business), and then discontinued the streaming service when it launched Apple Music. In 2014, Beats Music, a subscription-based streaming service, bought Topspin Media, another innovative platform that helped artists sell merchandise and albums directly to fans. In February, YouTube spent $8m to acquire BandPage, a San Francisco start-up that helps artists sell merchandise, concert tickets and fan experiences. Google has owned YouTube-named the number one music-streaming platform since 2006. Independent providers that once served a broad range of artists and fans have been snapped up by big companies with deep pockets and ties to major labels. Digital music services are like 24-hour all-you-can-eat (and whatever-you-want) restaurants of sound.Īnd yet the digital music landscape continues to narrow. They see what other fans listen to, and consume a seemingly endless supply of tunes. Music fans can simply select artists and genres, and then press play. FOR those with insatiable appetites for music, digital streaming seems like a dream come true.
0 kommentar(er)
