Art has, for thousands of years, flourished under a system of patronage. Sometimes patrons really wanted art, sometimes they it was just a selfish indulgence, but unless they were commissioning something specific the art was generally left to its own devices. I could see Soundcloud thriving under such a system.
And how much of this money lost was due to technological vs. human costs? How is it that a streaming site needs nearly 200 employees anyway?
Soundcloud could be thriving, but then they seem to have put people at the helm who prioritize spending money above all else.
Your comment is besides the point. My point is, at no point did SoundCloud have "humble beginnings". At no point would SoundCloud have considered a business relationship that would have allowed its customers to block investment. The SoundCloud you are dreaming of never existed.
Now if you believe that you can run a SoundCloud competitor that:
1) supports over 250M monthly listens and 12 hours of upload every minute with fewer than 200 employees and lower overall costs
2) be cash flow positive the entire time, or secure investment for someone who doesn't care about a return (you should really join the rest of us in 2016, the art-funding model of the renaissance is long over, just ask Kanye West[1])
Then you should do it, or at least think about doing it. However, I feel as if you are really underestimating what it takes to build a service like SoundCloud.
I still fail to see how you need 200 people to run a CRUD app that streams audio. Or, at least, I fail to see how you would need that many people if you had a small team of computer nerds that knew how things work. Given the job market seems to be skewing more towards bootcamp grads, and given the general paucity of practical intelligence that I seem to encounter from businesspeople, maybe you're right on that one.
And of course Soundcloud wouldn't consider a business relationship that lets customers block acquisitions! Nobody would! That's why there needs to be a way for people to block it anyway.
That said, my earliest uploads are 6+ years old, and I had an account prior, so I think I have been around for at least part of what could be considered "humble beginnings".
And for the record I have never had an issue over their need to charge for premium accounts. That's fine. It was a bit bullshit when they switched to their "casette tape" model, as it fucks over the DJs in the crowd who use SC for hosting hourlong+ sets. I am not advocating for Soundcloud being completely free and 100% available to all -- you are right, it wouldn't survive.
The problem is that once SC was acquired, their tone shifted. SC slowly grew to be this place that was about more than indie artists posting their work -- SC started targeting big fish (like everyone else, sigh), and attracting large volumes of new users. The larger user pool has been slowly diluting what was once a relatively tightly packed (and very communal feeling) community of artists. You could write an artist and actually expect an answer from them! All this has gone away in the years SC has grown considerably.
SC should follow the model of DeviantArt, or Craigslist. Pick you niche, and dominate the shit out of it. Charge money only where absolutely necessary, from the subset of your customers most likely to pay, and do it in a way that supports the rest of the business.
I'm reminded of Roshi, their distributed/crdt Redis solution, they open sourced (https://github.com/soundcloud/roshi) a while back just to deal with problems of their scale. CRDTs and Distrubuted programming is not something they teach at coding bootcamps. You should really take a look at some of their developer talks and get a sense of their scaling pains before you assume that SoundCloud is built by 200 fresh-out-of bootcampers (Also, those 200 aren't exclusively engineers, you need a sizable marketing/community team to manage all that global talent on your platform).
Even a feed, where one user can publish to millions others, is non-trivial at scale. I think you are seriously underestimating the amount of work that goes into building something like SoundCloud.
Ignoring this - it doesn't seem SC has ever been in the green so comparing to relatively simple models of DeviantArt or Craigslist doesn't make sense. DeviantArt doesn't have the target of the MPAA on its back. SoundCloud will never be as cheap as Craigslist to run.
Also, SoundCloud hasn't been acquired - I'm not sure where you are getting this info. The same guys who ran the ship in its "humble beginnings" are running it now.
Yes, because many believe art to be a higher calling than some stupid new gadget or cloud service.
While I don't really want patrons or VCs ruling the scene, and would much rather let the artists reign, artists generally don't have jobs (VCs took 'em) and so they don't have much money, so they can only do so much to support themselves. Enter the patron.
Cool why don't you go ahead and do that instead of expecting someone else to do it?
It's easy to say "someone else should pay for this without expecting anything in return but the glory of art". People would rather make more money from their money than not. If you feel that strongly, go and break the cycle. If your personal wealth is not enough to make a difference* by doing so then I don't see how you can go giving out your "solution" which is just getting someone else to pay and them not have any say in how their money is being spent.
And how much of this money lost was due to technological vs. human costs? How is it that a streaming site needs nearly 200 employees anyway?
Soundcloud could be thriving, but then they seem to have put people at the helm who prioritize spending money above all else.