Posts from streaming audio

The advances in AI over the last year are mind-boggling. I attended a dinner this past week with USV portfolio founders and one who works in education told us that ChatGPT has effectively ended the essay as a way for teachers to assess student progress. It will be easier for a student to prompt ChatGPT to write the essay than to write it themselves.

It is not just language models that are making huge advances. AIs can produce incredible audio and video as well. I am certain that an AI can produce a podcast or video of me saying something I did not say and would not say. I haven’t seen it yet, but it is inevitable.

So what do we do about this world we are living in where content can be created by machines and ascribed to us?

I think we will need to sign everything to signify its validity. When I say sign, I am thinking cryptographically signed, like you sign a transaction in your web3 wallet.

I post my blogs at AVC.com and also at AVC.Mirror.xyz which is a web3 blogging platform that allows me to sign my posts and store them on-chain. This is an attestation at the end of last week’s blog post.

You can see that “author address” and click on it to see that it is one of the various web3 addresses I own/control. That signifies that it was me who posted the blog. It is also stored on-chain on the Arweave blockchain so that the content exists independently of the blogging platform. That is also important to me.

I think AI and Web3 are two sides of the same coin. As machines increasingly do the work that humans used to do, we will need tools to manage our identity and our humanity. Web3 is producing those tools and some of us are already using them to write, tweet/cast, make and collect art, and do a host of other things that machines can also do. Web3 will be the human place to do these things when machines start corrupting the traditional places we do/did these things.

Our portfolio company SoundCloud is introducing fan powered royalties to share revenues more equitably with musicians.

The streaming music business pools its revenues and pays out based on a mathematical formula. There is no direct connection between a fan and artist. This graphic explains the existing model:

What SoundCloud is offering is that direct connection, explained here.

If you are an artist and you want to get fan powered royalties you can monetize directly on SoundCloud or via SoundCloud’s Repost service which allows you to monetize on SoundCloud and all of the other streaming platforms:

Artists can participate automatically in fan-powered royalties in three ways:

SoundCloud Premier: Premier is our monetization program for Pro Unlimited subscribers. Artists will be notified and prompted to join once they become eligible to monetize. Click here for Premier eligibility requirements. 

Repost by SoundCloud: Repost by SoundCloud is for artists who want to reach fans everywhere by distributing their music to every major music service. There are no eligibility requirements to monetize with Repost by SoundCloud. You can subscribe to Repost by SoundCloud here.

Repost Select: While there are no eligibility requirements to monetize with Repost Select, it’s a program open to select Repost by SoundCloud subscribers via application or invitation only. Click here to apply or learn more.

While the pooling model has worked well to scale the streaming industry, it has not worked well for independent and emerging artists. This bit from SoundCloud’s Fan Powered Royalties page explains it well:

With fan-powered royalties, each listener’s subscription or advertising revenue is distributed among the artists they actually listen to, rather than being pooled. This new model benefits independent artists and empowers fans to play a larger role in the success of their favorite artists. It also encourages the growth of local scenes and the rise of new genres.

Fan-powered royalties benefit independent artists whose fanbases are dedicated to listening to their music frequently. So if a fan only listens to an early-stage rapper from Detroit or an emerging singer from France, most or all of their subscription or advertising revenue will go to those exact artists. 

SoundCloud has always been about the emerging artists and I am glad to see them leading the industry to a more equitable model for revenue sharing.

An interesting project came out of USV this year.

My partner Andy had a hunch about short form content, audio entertainment, and romantic comedy and he launched a company to explore these ideas called Meet Cute.

Meet Cute produces short (15 minute) romantic comedies that are consumed in five chapters of three minutes each and are available on your favorite audio/podcasting service.

You can check them out here:

Apple

Google

Spotify

Stitcher

SoundCloud

iHeart

Meet Cute is about delivering a little bit of heart warming entertainment in the middle of our busy lives via a medium we all have in our cars and phones. I listened to the most recent story last night on the LA Metro on my way downtown to a basketball game.

The Meet Cute team is very small but they are already producing content at a rapid pace. Three fifteen minute stories will drop this week and that pace will quicken in the new year.

The leader of the Meet Cute team is Naomi Shah who worked as an analyst at USV and helped Andy develop this idea and plan. And brand and marketing is led by my daughter Emily Wilson. These two women are very talented as is the Meet Cute entire team.

A great way to stay engaged with Meet Cute is to subscribe to the weekly Meet Cute newsletter to stay up-to-date on all things Meet Cute, including new story drops. It never fails to give me a smile when I need it the most.

Our portfolio company SoundCloud introduced a new subscription offering yesterday called SoundCloud Go which complements its existing subscription offering called Go+. Combined with the longstanding free service, SoundCloud now has an elegant set of offerings for its users:

SoundCloud is fundamentally different than other streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Tidal, Napster and Deezer because it has always allowed anyone to upload their music to its platform (UGC content). About this time last year, SoundCloud added all of the music that these other streaming services have and launched its premium offering (Go+).

You can see the numbers in the above chart. The premium content that Spotify, Apple Music, etc offer is about 30mm tracks. The UGC content that is only available on SoundCloud is another ~120mm tracks.

The UGC content on SoundCloud is not just your daughter’s high school friends making music in their bedroom (which is how many of the current top artists started out). It is DJ mixes, mixtapes, remixes, top artists like Kanye dropping music quickly and easily (which he did yesterday), emerging artists like Chance who are unsigned and have chosen to stay independent, podcasts, and a lot more. It is the most eclectic, interesting, and vibrant streaming music service in the world.

And so if you have always loved SoundCloud for the UGC content, but want it with no ads and offline sync, get SoundCloud Go. Its available here.

And here’s some “UGC” content to start your morning off with, courtesy of Lil Uzi Vert:

At the Grammy’s last night, Chance The Rapper, one of the night’s big winners, gave props to SoundCloud in his acceptance speech for Best Rap Album:

Chance talked about the importance of artists staying independent and his shoutout to SoundCloud was a well deserved acknowledgement of the power of platforms like SoundCloud in helping artists get discovered independently of the traditional music system and staying there.

Here’s the Best Rap Album of 2016, in case you missed it.

And if you didn’t know, SoundCloud is a USV portfolio company.

I saw the news today that Nielsen reported that Streaming Now Officially the Number One Way We Listen to Music in America and I thought to myself “didn’t that happen a decade ago?” The report goes on to say that “on-demand audio streams surpassed 251 billion in 2016–a 76 percent increase that accounts for 38 percent of the entire music consumption market.” I guess that 38% is a global number and that streaming is over 50% in the US. At least that’s how I interpret the article.

Back in 2007 and 2008, I wrote that streaming was preferable to file based media. I expected the market to flip quickly.

A decade later, the market is in the process of flipping.

I started listening to streaming audio when Listen.com launched its subscription music service (which became Rhapsody and then Napster) in the late 90s. I moved on from file based music almost twenty years ago.

Which is a reminder that something may be inevitable, but that doesn’t mean it will happen quickly.

I woke up to an awesome holiday gift today. Sitting in my inbox was an email from Greg Galant. Greg had read about the missing Positively 10th Street podcasts from 2005-2007 here on AVC a few weeks ago. So he dug up an old hard drive and found five episodes in his iTunes folder. And he sent them to me.

I just listened to the first episode of the bunch which we did with our kids right after they came back from eight weeks at summer camp in August 2005. It was like going back in time. USV had just gotten going, Twitter didn’t exist but that team was working on a podcasting service called Odeo.

Podcasting has come a long way since then and so has our family. But like pulling out an old family photo album, the ability to go back and hang out with our family as it was eleven years ago is pretty fantastic. So thanks Greg.

And if you happen to have any files in your iTunes folder with a name like this [8-21-05 Positively 10th Street.mp3], please send them my way. I have renewed hope that I may be able to collect all of them eventually.

Last month I wrote a post called “The New Entertainment Bundlers” in which I talked about the emerging group of companies that are bundling subscription entertainment (and other services) into an offering that makes it easier and less expensive for consumers to acquire streaming entertainment services.

But something has happened on the way to the forum. Amazon has decided to unbundle its streaming video service and sell it in the US for $8.99/month. Amazon’s Prime service remains a massive player and bundler of entertainment in the market but the decision to unbundle video suggests that bundlers like Amazon and YouTube will also unbundle and compete on multiple dimensions. That makes sense.

Of course, it remains to be seen if a bundler like Amazon will allow another bundler, like Verizon or AT&T, to bundle their unbundled services. From a consumer perspective, that would be best. The more options and the more competition in the market, the better for consumers. It’s nice to see the market evolving in that direction.

Living in LA this winter has been a boon to my podcast listening and discovery. I get in the car, fire up SoundCloud on my phone, and start listening. This past weekend I listened to three new podcasts that I thought I’d share with all of you.

Unlisted With Brad Inman

Brad Inman‘s Inman News has been covering the real estate industry for as long as I’ve been interested in the real estate industry. Brad’s relationships and insight into the world of real estate are unmatched. Unlisted With Brad Inman is Brad’s weekly podcast. In this episode he talks with an economist at StreetEasy about the NYC residential real estate market. If you own real estate in NYC or are thinking of buying or renting in NYC, you should listen to it. The “hot, medium, cold” thing at the end of this podcast is really great.

 

The VinePair Podcast

VinePair is a website about beer, wine, and spirits. Their podcast is about the business side of the industry and this episode is about the rise and fall and rise again of Irish Whiskey. It’s really well done.

 

Studio 1.0

Studio 1.0 is Emily Chang‘s podcast on Bloomberg Business. In this episode she talks with Showtime’s CEO David Nevins about the TV business and all the changes that are going on. If you watch a lot of Netflix, HBO, Showtime, Amazon, etc, you will enjoy this interview.

The amazing thing is the diversity and quality of podcasts you can listen to these days. If you want to get into podcasts, get the SoundCloud app and start following these podcasts and others and they will just show up in your feed each week and you can listen when you are behind the wheel, in the gym, on the subway, etc.