Our experience is the opposite, we have a pretty large flow typed code base, and can do a full check in <100ms. When we converted to TS (decided not to merged) we saw typescript was in the multiple minute mark. It’s worth checking out LTI and how the typing on boundaries, enables flow to parallelize and give very precise error messages compared to TS. The third party lib support is however basically dead, except the latest versions of flow are starting to enable ingestion of TS types, so that’s interesting.
That’s primarily via the PROs - ASCAP, BMI, SESAC.
E.g. ASCAP says
“Fortunately, most popular live-streaming platforms, such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram Live, Soundcloud and Twitch are licensed by ASCAP”
I’m assuming because DJ performances via twitch are considered non-interactive streaming they - like Pandora’s free tier - don’t need a mechanical licence, at least in the US.
How that then translates to other territories though I’m not entirely sure. In Europe I’m pretty sure they’d need to have a mechanical licence in place whether or not they are interactive.
Co-founder of Mixcloud here. We've been doing live streaming and licensed for years at this point (https://www.mixcloud.com/pro/live) Surprised it took twitch so long to make these deals happen, but it shows how complex these deals are to navigate, and congrats on them for doing so! Interested to see how this pans out and glad to see others in the field figuring out the licensing and not just ignoring it.
I wonder how long until Twitch also gets forced to some rather arbitrary rules set by the record companies, like how you can't do "best of Daft Punk" on Mixcloud (too many songs by one artist).
Jokes aside, kudos to you for coming up with what's been the only available legal option for the past decade or so! Judging by this, your platform will still have some advantages:
> No Vods, Clips, or Highlights
> DJs opted into the program will not be able to save VODs, Clips, or Highlights to Twitch. VODs, Clips and Highlights involve different rights than live streams. We are creating additional promotional and discovery opportunities to extend the reach and impact of DJ content.
It'll depend a lot on the deals being struck, I can only speculate on the structure. The weird rules stem from the US copyright laws, and are therefore are impossible for a company like ours to get changed. We benefit from lower rates because of this and can make a service which will survive long term, so its a tradeoff we believe is worth it. I would stipulate that by going outside of those rules, they will have to pay a larger chunk of revenue to the labels, and it'll increase the ad load and cut the revenue passed to DJ's. Ultimately we decided that wasn't the approach we wanted to take, and the trade off was a good one, we'll find out with time which way they went.
The structure smells very much like the YouTube deal major labels made when they’d had enough of PROs not negotiating high enough license rates for them.
Which, as an ex-PRO employee, makes me a bit sad to see.
“Performing Rights Organization” - so in the USA, ASCAP, BMI, SESAC. They offer what’s known as “collective licensing” for music rights - essentially an aggregation of a bunch of copyright owners, so that someone who wants to use music can negotiate with the PRO and get access to all its members rights rather than having to go and negotiate with thousands of individual music publishers, songwriters, etc.
Switched over to you for events that I run years ago after dealing with the nightmare of twitch and couldn't be happier. Y'all have a good product. Much prefer working with you to the likes of Twitch, anyway.
What is the maximum bit rate for mixcloud mixes? The audio quality of anything I upload sounds terribly degraded especially when I share it with someone who is not signed in
Depends on if you are on free or Pro account as the uploader, if you are on Pro we up the bitrate substantially. Beyond this, it also depends on the device the user is listening on, we'll switch over to Opus when possible, which makes a big difference. If you want to max out the quality I would recommend you get Pro and ensure you listen on Chrome (or mobile apps). We'll do up to 320k on aac and 192k on opus. On Live we do something similar and last time I checked we did substantially higher rates than twitch on audio, but lower bitrates on the video.
I'm curious if Twitch explored a partnership with you all at Mixcloud, given you had the deals and infra all built out. In hindsight that would've been a much more efficient process For Twitch, but as a former employee I also understand Twitch is averse to integrations with third-party companies that create dependencies on their ability to control their own destiny.
We've talked to twitch on and off over the years, but nothing specific to this. Music licensing data pipelines are a massively complex topic and very hard to get right. Its one of those areas you can only appreciate having done it. It looks trivial from the outside, my guess is they will be starting that work now, and in about 6-12 months time the complex reality of it will start to set in. Ironically the hardest part isn't even figuring out the track, its figuring out which major label owns the rights for it, in the territory it was streamed, on the day it was streamed. This is even more complex on the publishing side, where you can have multiple writers.
Hey Mat, I've been working on a music platform called dns.xyz. would love to know if we could partner to let people upload and sell dj sets, and rev share with you for being in the clear wrt rights. I'm @dnsceo
100% its way less than 1% of their streams, the CEO said as much recently. However that doesn't mean that the music labels are ok with copyright infringement being on the platform. I guess this is the real question, they clearly had to do a deal or shut it DJ's on the service. They chose to do the deals, so will they now lean into it as its an active area for investment, or was it a necessity to avoid a lawsuit etc. Time will tell, and its great to see them addressing this problem and the playing field being levelled for everyone else we was already paying for rights.
Interesting! Never heard of Mixcloud before. Thank you. Personally I like the model where the you pay an X amount per month for your licensing versus the “we take whatever we feel like after the fact” that seems to be Twitch model. I stream relatively small music producers and why should I pay for licensing something from a big artist?
I know this is a complicated subject but thats how it feels on my end.
That serial number sends shivers down my spine. I also used to work on this system, and still do! At one point seagate admitted that the firmware was faulty. It would periodically stop responding under load, and cause the raid controller to think the drive had failed, causing it to remove it from the array.
I’ve never seen this posted publicly by them, but I’m fairly sure a revised firmware was offered. We deemed it too risky to upgrade the drives one at a time, so built a new cluster on Western Digital drives.
What’s frustrating about this change is that Apple keeps changing the terms on it. Until last week the T&C’s included the phrase “exclusively”. This allowed you to provide the user with your own sign in system and avoid forcing the google/facebook lock-in, however removing this crucial word means for those of us with apps in the market with social logins, we have to add yet another one.
This is going to lock more users to iOS, and doesn’t allow users on popular apps to migrate to Android and maintain their login. (Note no Android SDK is provided)
It might technically not be antitrust, but as an app developer we’re now forced to include Apple sign-in.
Isn't it? It should be. You're forcing developers to add your sign-in method everywhere... they can't add it on Android. You're essentially forcing sub-par android support.
Mixcloud founder here, thanks its appreciated. Theres one big different on engagement, we tend to see lower play counts, but higher number of minutes listened per play. You'll start to see us surfacing this data more in the upcoming months, and I expect everyone to be pleasantly surprised.
Since you are here, can you also surface anything about potential plans for offering an improved (and possibly paid-for) streaming quality and/or offering the mixes available for download? I'm in it for the mixes and I want to love Mixcloud, but there is only so much fun to be had with discovering a mix that cannot be played on a quality stereo and/or in a place without internet connection (so at the party, in other words) and those will in any case go on my priority list if and when Soundcloud finally goes down.
Mixcloud Founder here, thanks for the support and if you ever have issues reach out. We're working hard on the app, but we're a super small team, so bear with us!
> Mixcloud Founder here, thanks for the support and if you ever have issues reach out.
Wow, awesome! Never thought anyone from either SoundCloud or MixCloud would read this.
Short list of improvements I would love to see:
1. If an artist uploads a tracklist for their mix, support seeking directly to a track within the mix (similar to a cue file) via the app or website.
2. Introduce a better way to seek in the app. When the mix is 1-2 hours long and all I have is a seek bar the width of my phone screen and a fat thumb, it's very difficult to seek to somewhere specific in the podcast. Something like 10 sec forward and 30 sec back buttons would already be a huge win.
3. Sometimes the mobile app plays the mix but all you get is silence. This seems to happen most frequently in the middle of a mix when there are connectivity issues. Closing the app and opening it again when you have better connectivity still results in blank sections of the mix. Super weird and very annoying!
But otherwise, yeah, please keep it up! Mixcloud has basically replaced the other music discovery services for me because it's got the content I want and it just works.
Mixcloud founder here, thanks for the vote of confidence. One key difference is we internally measure success or engagement in terms of minutes listened not play counts, and actively optimise for this. So often the visible play metrics don't actually respresent true human engagement. It's something we're thinking about a lot internally right now, and we might start exposing it shortly. I suspect most people will be very surprised for the better when we do.
Don’t get me wrong - I agree that minutes played is a much better metric than play count - in fact I always wondered why Soundcloud wouldn‘t go a few steps further and not only show minutes listened, but also where those minutes were spent within your mix, like a heatmap over your upload‘s waveform to see which sections were most popular or where listeners stopped listening.
However, regardless of the fact that you use different metrics, for me it feels much harder to find an audience at Mixcloud. It‘s not that I‘m very popular at Soundcloud, but the small circle of like-minded followers I found there doesn‘t seem to translate very well to Mixcloud. Again, that may change with Soundcloud‘s demise.
That is the same internal goal that SoundCloud has. Play counts is just what users want to see. All of SoundCloud's internal optimization is around listening time.
