Let's see. This guy's thesis seems to partially be that "SoundCloud's paid user tier is a ripoff because the raw cost of the expanded storage you get is actually negligible".
What else might a paid user's funds be going to, that he's not thinking of?
* paying for the time of people who maintain and develop the site
* paying for the time of people who support the people who maintain and develop the site (receptionist, office manager, etc)
* paying for the time of people to deal with copyright issues - both in terms of having people whose job is to build and maintain the automated copyright infringement detection systems (and to liase with the recording industry people they need to), and in terms of maybe having some kind of batch of people whose sole job is to do it manually
* possibly paying for the time of other content monitoring humans, doing the equivalent of the poor bastards whose job it is to monitor facebook/youtube/flickr/whatever for child porn, snuff, and other horrible things, is there an audio equivalent to that?
* office rent (SoundCloud apparently has offices in Berlin, New York, London, San Francisco, Los Angeles & Sydney, none of these are exactly cheap places to rent - and that drives up the salaries of your workers as well)
* bandwidth to play the songs for the people who are getting a lot of views
* advertising SoundCloud
* perhaps some measure of profit-sharing with the users who generate popular content (I don't think SoundCloud has ads, though? Looks like it does, I guess I've never spent enough time using it as my music source to hear any.)
* maybe paying back the VC/founder money that's been put into getting the site to where it is
* who knows what kind of financial arrangements with the music industry, I can't even begin to speculate how complex those get
Sure, the carrot SoundCloud holds out in front of you of "more storage space" is negligible in value. But don't neglect all these other costs. Money for those doesn't just come out of thin air. Unless they've figured out a way to massively parallelize mining BTC with the spare CPU cycles of everyone listening to a song or something.
(Limiting the upload bandwidth of free users may also be a deliberate choice to keep the quality of SoundCloud's content slightly better on average. If you're not making enough money off your music to feel like $7/mo is worth it then it's probably not very good yet to be honest. But I'm getting off into total theorizing here and I'm not even stoned.)
What else might a paid user's funds be going to, that he's not thinking of?
* paying for the time of people who maintain and develop the site
* paying for the time of people who support the people who maintain and develop the site (receptionist, office manager, etc)
* paying for the time of people to deal with copyright issues - both in terms of having people whose job is to build and maintain the automated copyright infringement detection systems (and to liase with the recording industry people they need to), and in terms of maybe having some kind of batch of people whose sole job is to do it manually
* possibly paying for the time of other content monitoring humans, doing the equivalent of the poor bastards whose job it is to monitor facebook/youtube/flickr/whatever for child porn, snuff, and other horrible things, is there an audio equivalent to that?
* office rent (SoundCloud apparently has offices in Berlin, New York, London, San Francisco, Los Angeles & Sydney, none of these are exactly cheap places to rent - and that drives up the salaries of your workers as well)
* bandwidth to play the songs for the people who are getting a lot of views
* advertising SoundCloud
* perhaps some measure of profit-sharing with the users who generate popular content (I don't think SoundCloud has ads, though? Looks like it does, I guess I've never spent enough time using it as my music source to hear any.)
* maybe paying back the VC/founder money that's been put into getting the site to where it is
* who knows what kind of financial arrangements with the music industry, I can't even begin to speculate how complex those get
Sure, the carrot SoundCloud holds out in front of you of "more storage space" is negligible in value. But don't neglect all these other costs. Money for those doesn't just come out of thin air. Unless they've figured out a way to massively parallelize mining BTC with the spare CPU cycles of everyone listening to a song or something.
(Limiting the upload bandwidth of free users may also be a deliberate choice to keep the quality of SoundCloud's content slightly better on average. If you're not making enough money off your music to feel like $7/mo is worth it then it's probably not very good yet to be honest. But I'm getting off into total theorizing here and I'm not even stoned.)