Let’s set out a few facts here. First: SoundCloud is experiencing massive growth, particularly since its “Next” iteration went live for all late last year. Second: with that growth and switch to a Twitter-like “follow” mechanism, artists are seeing huge growth in fan numbers on the platform – in some cases rivalling or exceeding Facebook. Third: SoundCloud pay nothing to rightsholders.
Among my peers, the same question keeps getting asked: “When are SoundCloud going to start paying?”. Make no mistake: people are starting to resent the fact that they’re seeing all these plays and getting no payment per-stream. There’s a Catch-22 here: as the platform grows and delivers more plays for artists, so will the annoyance among rightsholders who are seeing those big numbers with zero payouts.
Here’s some observations as I see it:
1. SoundCloud needs to introduce ads
Right now, SoundCloud is in the same place as the pre-monetisation YouTube. They’re growing rapidly, and need to satisfy rightsholders who at some point will make a put-up-or-shut-up demand on them. Additionally though, their costs must be spiralling on an epic level. An audio platform is not a cheap one to run, being fairly bandwidth-heavy, so logic would dictate that at some point Soundcloud’s investors are going to demand a stronger push to monetise and offset costs. Advertising is inevitable: its the only way the requisite revenues can be generated. Look to YouTube for the precedents on this one.
It seems inevitable these days that we’ll be changing our phones at least once every two years, if not every year. As a consequence then, most of us will no doubt have some spare handsets lying around. In my case, its a couple of old Android phones and an old iPod Touch. 
For a while now I’ve been trying to solve a particular issue with how I work. I use a Macbook Air, with a 128Gb hard drive. That’s not a lot of space, especially when you’re working with a lot of assets like video files and whatnot around an artist campaign. Across my campaigns a lot of assets wind up getting saved to my hard drive: photos, cover art, promo videos etc etc. Storing it all takes up more and more space – annoying when I may only need the files a few times across a campaign lifetime. 
On my last post I detailed a simple way in which you could use Twilio to be a central phone number directing on to wherever you happened to be (home, office, abroad etc). What I didn’t detail though was some of the extra stuff I’ve done with my number which underlines why I use Twilio and don’t just buy a Skype number, for example. 
