Sloane Stephens goes from agony of injury to ecstasy of US Open final Sloane Stephens reached her first Grand Slam final on Friday after beating Venus Williams. Week 2 in Bachelor in Paradise meant more drama for Dean and Kristina, and Chris Harrisons emotional interview with DeMario. The Agony And The Ecstasy Full Movie' title='The Agony And The Ecstasy Full Movie' />Why Is It So Hard For Streaming Services to Succeed When Sound. Cloud announced mass layoffs last month and that the music streaming service might not have enough cash to see out the year, panic rippled through the internet. If Sound. Cloud folded, where would all the music go And, even more worrying, did it signal the death knell of the democratic online music platform The Berlin based company beloved by DJs and electronic music producers had been struggling to monetize for years. Despite being venture backed, attracting 1. Spotify has 1. 40 million, and helping the careers of megastars like Chance the Rapper, it teetered on the brink of collapse a few weeks ago. Had it not been for the 1. Alexander Ljung step down as CEO, it most likely would have been forced to shutter. Sound. Clouds woes, however, are not an outlier. Spotify and Pandora are the two largest independent companies not backed by a tech giant and neither are turning profit. Smaller players like 8tracks and Hype Machine have seen their advertising revenues gobbled up by Facebook and Google. On the surface, it seems like online music is a losing game. Autopilot Full Movie In English. But the music industry is booming for the first time in nearly two decades, entirely because of streaming. In 2. 01. 6 the music industrys revenues hit 1. The internet has come full circle and is now the music industrys silver bullet. So why is it so damn hard to build a successful online music business The first hurdle to jump is licensing. The rights to recorded music are closely guarded by record labels that are not prepared to be burned again, having only just recovered from the digital piracy of the early 2. Funding is one of the main issues, Zach Fuller, an analyst at media and technology analysis company Midia Research, said. If you are a music service you have to convince a venture capital fund to part with money that will go straight back into the labels pocket. Streaming services typically have to pay hefty up front costs to the rights holders in the form of advanced payments. Its the record labels that make bank from this arrangement Warner Music is projected to make 1. Major labels have a de facto duopoly on streaming rights, Mark Mulligan of Midia Research said. Each major can dictate terms as they each have the effective power of veto, like at the U. N. security council. So they get to shape what the streaming market looks like. One way to legally get around paying these advances is to operate as an internet radio model, which is what Pandora, Mix. Cloud, and 8racks are all built on. By not offering an on demand service straight out of the gate, and imposing some restrictions on what users can do on the platforms such as not rewinding tracks these companies have avoided huge up front costs. Once the companies have built up a healthy user base, they then start working on licensing deals that allow them to offer an on demand option. We provide the platform for people who have great taste to craft online mixtapes, David Porter, 8tracks founder and CEO said. Its a legal way to license thats prescribed by U. S. law. 8tracks is licensed as a non interactive internet radio service. This type of licensing is available to companies that mimic radio broadcasting, and royalties are paid out by performance rights organizations like Sound. Exchange. When Porter founded 8tracks in 2. Users uploaded their self created playlists, and the result was a platform ripe for a passive, or lean back, music discovery experience historically associated with TV or radio. In the digital music landscape, Pandora is the best known example of lean back listening. Elizabeth Moody, Pandoras vice president of global content licensing, said that the reality is most people actually want to be told what to listen to. Regardless whether youre a Spotify or Pandora subscriber, were learning that roughly 7. Its only really when people are hanging out with friends or creating playlists for specific events that theyre actively seeking out specific music. Its no surprise, then, that Spotify, which has historically been a more lean forward service, cooked up the expertly curated Discover Weekly Playlist in 2. The Swedish companys move is symptomatic of the need for music services to find that sweet spot between offering a predominantly lean back experience, with the flexibility to dive in occasionally. Analyst Fuller echoed this, saying that as streaming continues to evolve, the music discovery issue will get better and better. The similarities between 8tracks and Pandora dont stop at the playlists. The two companies also both initially pursued an advertising model to support their business. Unfortunately for 8tracks however, this increasingly became less viable. Digital advertising revenues have been shrinking for a number of years now because of Facebook and Google. A significant shift in how advertising works was the move toward whats known as programmatic advertising using an algorithm to buy and sell ads rather rather a human sales team. Pandora and Spotify. Showtime Full Tru Loved Online Free. Its challenging to make the economics work unless you have sufficient scale, Porter said. For that reason, at the end of 2. Porter made the decision to implement a cap on the free listening available on the service. It was a conscious decision to reduce the size of our audience, our revenue base, and cost base, he said. But it was a gamble that we would reduce our costs by more than our revenues and essentially force profitability at the expense of growth. Growth is a tricky goal to get right in the online music business. Take VC funding and be forced to scale too quickly, or take a more modest approach and kiss advertising dollars good bye is the dilemma all companies face. As Sound. Clouds travails acutely demonstrated, the Silicon Valley playbook of scale first, revenue second doesnt quite work. Mulligan explained that this is because the main cost base for a streaming platform is the music rights, which scale in proportion to the companys user base. In other words, because a platforms costs scale linearly with its number of listeners, every listener must be monetized in order to turn a profit. For music streaming start ups, 7. Mulligan said. If the streaming service is acquiring users but not monetizing them yet because they have free users without a scaled ad business, then those costs still need to be paid even though there is no revenue. Nikhil Shah, co founder and commercial director of Mixcloud echoed this In other industries it might be easier to focus on driving scale without having to worry about a business model from the start, Shah said. But within digital music, because we believe in paying rights holders fairly and equally for their work, it means theres a cost in place from day one. As a platform that also primarily appeals to DJs and podcasters because its led by user generated content, Mixcloud and Sound. Cloud have long been direct competitors. But while Mixcloud and Sound. Cloud might look and feel similar, the former differentiated itself early on by figuring out how to to grow sustainably. We chose to go down a path of being a self funded, self sustained, lean, and organically grown business, Shah said. Mixcloud, which has 1. Red Bull and Adidas.