Realizing you're no longer as edgy SoundCloud, but also not as mainstream as Spotify
Hey Snackers,
"Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn." Sounds more bad Cards Against Humanity game than DC Comics movie. So Warner Bros. changed the title of the Margot Robbie superhero flick after it flopped at the box office.
All 3 major US market indexes closed at record highs Wednesday as coronavirus fears eased. That could reverse today on overnight news of a spike in the death toll.
Before Spotify and Apple Music... You turned to Pandora for "stations" that matched your mood, fiercely skipping to find that one song. But when you tired of Michael Bublé-ish, you'd turn to edgier SoundCloud — your go-to for mashups and 50-minute tropical house mixes. The Berlin-based startup has been out of the limelight for years, but it just got a $75M investment from Sirius XM (which, coincidentally, owns Pandora):
Still around... SoundCloud made $127M revenue in 2018. But it's moved further from the DIY roots that made it popular, while still lagging on the mainstream/money-making front. FYI, both Twitter and Spotify tried to acquire SoundCloud — and both deals fell apart.
SoundCloud was late to the 'License Game'... Its early biz was more like users uploading songs to YouTube without copyright licenses. Now, record labels insist on licenses to use their artists' music (they can get paid on streams). Spotify was quick to strike these license deals, letting it to offer many more songs/artists (and draw more subscribers). By the time SoundCloud made its 1st label deal in 2014, Spotify and Apple Music were already leaders.
What's a Deepfake, again?... Facebook, with its 2.5B users sharing billions of posts, just made a new addition to its fact-checking army: a whopping 4 journalists. The 4 Reuters journalists will join a US fact-checking team that includes the Associated Press, PolitiFact, Factcheck.org, and thousands of FB-employed contractors. Oh, and don't forget machine-taught AI bots that spot potentially false news and flag ALL-CAPS!!! posts.
It would really take an army... to actually fact-check and verify every single Facebook post for misinformation, since most is user-generated content. Even with its F.A.I.L. army, Facebook has become nearly too big to moderate. And Zuck still insists that it's a social network — not an editorial operation like The Wall Street Journal. Since Facebook is failing to keep up, you'll need to stay vigilent.
Sign up for Robinhood, our commission-free investing app, and get a free stock. Already on Robinhood? You'll still get a free stock for getting a friend to sign up (they'll get one too).