SoundCloud needs to make its move – and soon

800x500_white-on-orangeLet’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.

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Old smartphone + Skype = simple access-anywhere home security camera

Skype_std_use_logo_pos_col_rgbIt 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.

I’m one of those people who hates to see old tech go to waste, mainly because I’m of the view that they’re still eminently capable of doing some useful things. You only have to see how much the Raspberry Pi has taken off to know that low-powered tech can still perform a lot of useful tasks. So, with that in mind I thought I’d see what could be done with my old handsets – and found rather a nifty solution. By simply installing Skype on them, then setting Skype to automatically answer with a video call, I can use the handsets as globally-accessible video cameras, letting me check on home when I’m away etc.

If you want to give this a go, its dead simple. Just do the following:

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Affiliate links

Just a quick one to say that from now on I’ll be using affiliate links when linking out to products. Initially it will only apply to stuff on Amazon, but we’ll see. Personally I don’t have an ethical problem with affiliate revenue, and am quite glad that cool sites like Wirecutter get some money back for recommending me decent tech equipment etc. So, I’ll be doing the same here. I hardly think it will bring in insane levels of income, but figured it was still worth trialling purely to see what’s possible.

If for any reason you’re not in favour of that, just don’t click the links to products and go search them directly on the service. I’m fine with that too ;-)

Rolling your own easily accessible cloud network drive with OwnCloud and Transmit

owncloud-logoFor 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.

With that in mind, I was looking for a cloud storage solution with the following criteria:

1) Must be accessible as a network drive on my Mac so I can simply copy files to/from it
2) Must also be accessible from mobile/tablet so I can get to files on the move
3) Must be private by default (ie content not accessible via public URL)
4) Must also have means to share links privately to other people

On paper at least, this appear to be a relatively simple request. However, as it transpired it was actually a really tricky one to sort out. The likes of Dropbox, SugarSync, Box and others all rely on more of a sync method, whereby your files remain on your hard drive but also sync up to the cloud in order to access them from anywhere. The failing of that for me was that I didn’t want these files on my hard drive; I just wanted them in the cloud. Those services also cost a lot when you’re only using them to store a large volume of files that you access intermittently.

FTP therefore seemed like the next best option – and as a friend advised, Transmit on the Mac lets you now mount webservers as network drives for seamless access. However regular FTP meant files would be public (unless some .htaccess wrangling was done – not my forte), and would also fail on point 4 above, because there’s no easy means to share a private file.

With all that in mind, I decided to look into OwnCloud; an open source, roll-your-own-Dropbox cloud storage service. OwnCloud is free and can install on any webserver, and so its #1 USP is that you aren’t paying per gigabyte to store your data, as is the case with all commercial providers. Usefully though, you can also mount OwnCloud as a drive over WebDAV. And, if that fails, you can simply use Transmit to map a drive to your OwnCloud file storage area. Crucially for me though, OwnCloud also passed on points 2, 3 and 4 above: files are kept private, but can be shared easily via their web interface or dedicated iOS and Android apps.

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Further fun with Twilio: two easy, clever things you can do

logos_downloadable_roundOn 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.

First up: Twilio and Zapier. Zapier is very similar to IFTTT; it allows you to feed one API into another to make something happen. A large number of services are supported and you connect them up to do things like tweet when a new Mailchimp campaign has been sent, for example. In this instance though, what I’ve done is set up a “zap” where if I text an email address to my own number, it adds that address to the Daily Digest mailing list. I often have people ask about signing up when I’m at events or meetings, so this is a perfect way to take action on that; I can just text their email to my Twilio number, and it then adds that address to the Daily Digest list, then sends a confirmation email to the subscriber. Simple, but hugely effective. In time I’ll probably buy a separate number so I can publicise the feature – ie “text your email to [number] to subscribe”.

If you do have a Twilio number, Zapier is really a must-have service as it just opens up the possibilites no end – particularly to non-developer types like myself. For example, you could have Twilio call you when one of your artists updates their Facebook page. Or you can have it text you when someone adds a new file to your Dropbox. The possibilities are endless, so do check it out.

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