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SoundCloud recently announced it struck a longawaited licensing deal with Universal Music, whose hit roster includes Kanye West, Adele and Taylor Swift. This latest deal provides SoundCloud with 50 percent coverage among the “Big Four” — Warner Brothers also has a deal with SoundCloud; Sony BMG and Sony/ATV are still holding out. The Universal deal, in addition to SoundCloud’s latest round of funding, is a strong indicator that the Berlinbased music-content platform is a serious competitive threat to Spotify.
While SoundCloud usually gets much less media buzz than Spotify, you wouldn’t know it based on their numbers. First, while both SoundCloud and Spotify have
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large user bases, Spotify has only 75 million active users compared to SoundCloud’s more than175 million monthly listeners. Why does SoundCloud have twice as many registered users? Spotify is more of a paid service for streaming music. The total number of users matters less to Spotify than how many of them are willing to pay. In contrast, SoundCloud is less focused on monetization (for now) and can afford to provide free content in the name of growth. Second, SoundCloud has much better unit economics than Spotify. Why? SoundCloud’s producers, the users uploading content, are there to build a following and are not as focused on monetization. revenue to content license holders.
175 MILLION MONTHLY LISTENERS
In contrast, Spotify is primarily a reseller of music inventory owned by record labels and publishers. It’s simply a distributor for the latest releases, sort of like a Walmart for music streaming. Most of the songs on Spotify you could find on Apple Music, Pandora or another streaming service. As a result, Spotify lacks the network effects that SoundCloud enjoys. Consider the difference between YouTube and Netflix. The distinction is the same here, but with music rather than video content. Given Netflix’s relative success, you might think this is a favorable comparison for Spotify, but it isn’t. YouTube is valued at $85 billion, or two times the value of Netflix. And you only need to understand one number to know why: Netflix will spend more on content in 2016 than any of
CBS, Viacom, Time Warner or Fox. Like Spotify, the vast majority of what Netflix earns goes to license owners.
If you dig deeper, this analogy makes a lot of sense. Just like Netflix, creatives don’t build their own following on Spotify. Instead, they get famous on SoundCloud, just as the best users do on YouTube. Fetty Wap started as a SoundCloud sensation before dominating the billboard charts. DJ titans Diplo and Skrillex each built their presence and notoriety by remixing already famous songs on SoundCloud and using their following as a jumping off point to produce original music.
60 MILLION MONTHLY LISTENERS
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SoundCloud recently announced it struck a longawaited licensing deal with Universal Music, whose hit roster includes Kanye West, Adele and Taylor Swift. This latest deal provides SoundCloud with 50 percent coverage among the “Big Four” — Warner Brothers also has a deal with SoundCloud; Sony BMG and Sony/ATV are still holding out. The Universal deal, in addition to SoundCloud’s latest round of funding, is a strong indicator that the Berlinbased music-content platform is a serious competitive threat to Spotify.
While SoundCloud usually gets much less media buzz than Spotify, you wouldn’t know it based on their numbers. First, while both SoundCloud and Spotify have
4
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large user bases, Spotify has only 75 million active users compared to SoundCloud’s more than175 million monthly listeners. Why does SoundCloud have twice as many registered users? Spotify is more of a paid service for streaming music. The total number of users matters less to Spotify than how many of them are willing to pay. In contrast, SoundCloud is less focused on monetization (for now) and can afford to provide free content in the name of growth. Second, SoundCloud has much better unit economics than Spotify. Why? SoundCloud’s producers, the users uploading content, are there to build a following and are not as focused on monetization. revenue to content license holders.
175 MILLION MONTHLY LISTENERS
In contrast, Spotify is primarily a reseller of music inventory owned by record labels and publishers. It’s simply a distributor for the latest releases, sort of like a Walmart for music streaming. Most of the songs on Spotify you could find on Apple Music, Pandora or another streaming service. As a result, Spotify lacks the network effects that SoundCloud enjoys. Consider the difference between YouTube and Netflix. The distinction is the same here, but with music rather than video content. Given Netflix’s relative success, you might think this is a favorable comparison for Spotify, but it isn’t. YouTube is valued at $85 billion, or two times the value of Netflix. And you only need to understand one number to know why: Netflix will spend more on content in 2016 than any of
CBS, Viacom, Time Warner or Fox. Like Spotify, the vast majority of what Netflix earns goes to license owners.
If you dig deeper, this analogy makes a lot of sense. Just like Netflix, creatives don’t build their own following on Spotify. Instead, they get famous on SoundCloud, just as the best users do on YouTube. Fetty Wap started as a SoundCloud sensation before dominating the billboard charts. DJ titans Diplo and Skrillex each built their presence and notoriety by remixing already famous songs on SoundCloud and using their following as a jumping off point to produce original music.
60 MILLION MONTHLY LISTENERS
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Los Angeles-based electronic live act The Glitch Mob have gradually rose from being outsiders in the LA DJ scene to some of the pioneers in glitchy, heavy bass music. Josh Mayer (Ooah), Justin Boreta (Boreta) and Edward Ma (ediT) were originally part of a DJ collective in the mid 2000s and after realizing they were the most serious about music, formed The Glitch Mob together. This has turned into an incredibly fruitful relationship, netting two full-length albums, including Drink The Sea in 2010 and Love Death Immortality last year, as well as several EPs. The group has brought their electric live show to festivals around the world like Coachella, Ultra Music Festival, Leeds Festival, Open Air and many more.
After giving away hundreds of dollars worth of Glitch Mob apparel last week, we had the chance to chat with Josh Mayer (Ooah) about the group’s beginnings, how they craft their live sets, songwriting, cooking and much more. Stream their recent EP Piece Of The Indestructible and get advise from Ooah on how to introduce your friends to The Glitch Mob later on in our chat.
MT: I saw in one interview that one member called you the Ryan Gosling of EDM, is there a reason why?
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Ooah: We always have had these funny nicknames for each other over the years. When we first started The Glitch Mob as a DJ collective back in 2005/6, there were like 10 people in The Glitch Mob it wasn’t like a band -- it was just like a DJ collective. We had all these funny names like we used to call edIT the Crop Master and Boreta was the Ice Man and there was like, like this guy Random Rob and Anesteer and RD and a bunch of other just kind of west coast producer/DJ’s that we were friends. We all just had these like ridiculous nicknames that kind of just carried over from that time. MT: I guess how did you guys whittle down to three from that large collective? Ooah: It just kind of naturally happened, like the collective thing was not very serious and was just kind of this fun thing that we had did at one point in time. Then once The Glitch Mob name started to get like a tiny bit of momentum really the people that carried the torch for it were me Eric and Justin and this guy that goes by Kraddy we were like the most serious about it and from there we actually started to write music together. We didn’t actually write music off the bat with them. We did a couple remixes and he actually wasn’t even really there for most of that part. She was kind of doing other stuff so he would kind of pop in and out but really when we started making music it ended up just being the three of us.
5/11/16 12:17 AM
Los Angeles-based electronic live act The Glitch Mob have gradually rose from being outsiders in the LA DJ scene to some of the pioneers in glitchy, heavy bass music. Josh Mayer (Ooah), Justin Boreta (Boreta) and Edward Ma (ediT) were originally part of a DJ collective in the mid 2000s and after realizing they were the most serious about music, formed The Glitch Mob together. This has turned into an incredibly fruitful relationship, netting two full-length albums, including Drink The Sea in 2010 and Love Death Immortality last year, as well as several EPs. The group has brought their electric live show to festivals around the world like Coachella, Ultra Music Festival, Leeds Festival, Open Air and many more.
After giving away hundreds of dollars worth of Glitch Mob apparel last week, we had the chance to chat with Josh Mayer (Ooah) about the group’s beginnings, how they craft their live sets, songwriting, cooking and much more. Stream their recent EP Piece Of The Indestructible and get advise from Ooah on how to introduce your friends to The Glitch Mob later on in our chat.
MT: I saw in one interview that one member called you the Ryan Gosling of EDM, is there a reason why?
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Ooah: We always have had these funny nicknames for each other over the years. When we first started The Glitch Mob as a DJ collective back in 2005/6, there were like 10 people in The Glitch Mob it wasn’t like a band -- it was just like a DJ collective. We had all these funny names like we used to call edIT the Crop Master and Boreta was the Ice Man and there was like, like this guy Random Rob and Anesteer and RD and a bunch of other just kind of west coast producer/DJ’s that we were friends. We all just had these like ridiculous nicknames that kind of just carried over from that time. MT: I guess how did you guys whittle down to three from that large collective? Ooah: It just kind of naturally happened, like the collective thing was not very serious and was just kind of this fun thing that we had did at one point in time. Then once The Glitch Mob name started to get like a tiny bit of momentum really the people that carried the torch for it were me Eric and Justin and this guy that goes by Kraddy we were like the most serious about it and from there we actually started to write music together. We didn’t actually write music off the bat with them. We did a couple remixes and he actually wasn’t even really there for most of that part. She was kind of doing other stuff so he would kind of pop in and out but really when we started making music it ended up just being the three of us.
5/11/16 12:17 AM
MT: Speaking of remixes, how did the Metallica remix happen? Ooah: That came about through, through the X-Games. They thought that would be kind of cool if they could get two of the artists working together. They just hit us up and they asked us if we would want to remix a Metallica song and it would be the theme song for the year. MT: I guess how did you guys whittle down to three from that large collective? Ooah: It just kind of naturally happened, like the collective thing was not very serious and was just kind of this fun thing that we had did at one point in time. Then once The Glitch Mob name started to get like a tiny bit of momentum really the people that carried the torch for it were me Eric and Justin and this guy that goes by Kraddy we were like the most serious about it and from there we actually started to write music together. We didn’t actually write music off the bat with them. We did a couple remixes and he actually wasn’t even really there for most of that part. She was kind of doing other stuff so he would kind of pop in and out but really when we started making music it ended up just being the three of us. Because our kind of collective vision was all on the same page and everyone else kind of went off and did their own thing. MT: Speaking of remixes, how did the Metallica remix happen? Ooah: That came about through, through the X-Games. They thought that would be kind
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We never actually got to work with Metallica or meet them, but it was kind of cool thing to get to do because a couple of us grew up definitely listening to a lot of Metallica.
of cool if they could get two of the artists working together. They just hit us up and they asked us if we would want to remix a Metallica song and it would be the theme song for the X-Games this year. We never actually got to work with Metallica or meet them, but it was kind of cool thing to get to do because a couple of us grew up definitely listening to a lot of Metallica. It was definitely an honor to get to remix a song of theirs. We wish it was one of their classic songs instead of a new song, but it was still really cool to get to do it.
5/11/16 12:29 AM
MT: Speaking of remixes, how did the Metallica remix happen? Ooah: That came about through, through the X-Games. They thought that would be kind of cool if they could get two of the artists working together. They just hit us up and they asked us if we would want to remix a Metallica song and it would be the theme song for the year. MT: I guess how did you guys whittle down to three from that large collective? Ooah: It just kind of naturally happened, like the collective thing was not very serious and was just kind of this fun thing that we had did at one point in time. Then once The Glitch Mob name started to get like a tiny bit of momentum really the people that carried the torch for it were me Eric and Justin and this guy that goes by Kraddy we were like the most serious about it and from there we actually started to write music together. We didn’t actually write music off the bat with them. We did a couple remixes and he actually wasn’t even really there for most of that part. She was kind of doing other stuff so he would kind of pop in and out but really when we started making music it ended up just being the three of us. Because our kind of collective vision was all on the same page and everyone else kind of went off and did their own thing. MT: Speaking of remixes, how did the Metallica remix happen? Ooah: That came about through, through the X-Games. They thought that would be kind
10-11 (final).indd 1
We never actually got to work with Metallica or meet them, but it was kind of cool thing to get to do because a couple of us grew up definitely listening to a lot of Metallica.
of cool if they could get two of the artists working together. They just hit us up and they asked us if we would want to remix a Metallica song and it would be the theme song for the X-Games this year. We never actually got to work with Metallica or meet them, but it was kind of cool thing to get to do because a couple of us grew up definitely listening to a lot of Metallica. It was definitely an honor to get to remix a song of theirs. We wish it was one of their classic songs instead of a new song, but it was still really cool to get to do it.
5/11/16 12:29 AM
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5/11/16 11:45 AM
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The Lab Los Angeles is Mixmag and Smirnoff Sound Collective’s weekly post-work unwind where we stream only the finest American and international DJs, live and direct from our Downtown LA office. Last Wednesday, we welcomed Pantyraid in to The Lab LA. Pantyraid descends upon The Lab LA at the end of a three year hiatus with a slew of exciting new ventures ahead of them. The duo - made up of Ooah of The Glitch Mob and solo artist MartyParty - are preparing to release their third album ‘After Glow’ which lands on April 29 as the follow up to their 2013 effort ‘Pillow Talk’.
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5/11/16 12:36 AM
The Lab Los Angeles is Mixmag and Smirnoff Sound Collective’s weekly post-work unwind where we stream only the finest American and international DJs, live and direct from our Downtown LA office. Last Wednesday, we welcomed Pantyraid in to The Lab LA. Pantyraid descends upon The Lab LA at the end of a three year hiatus with a slew of exciting new ventures ahead of them. The duo - made up of Ooah of The Glitch Mob and solo artist MartyParty - are preparing to release their third album ‘After Glow’ which lands on April 29 as the follow up to their 2013 effort ‘Pillow Talk’.
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DEADMAU5 TELLS IT HOW IT IS
over T aking the cover of
the recent edition of VIBE Magazine, the mostly hip-hop oriented magazine sat down with deadmau5 for an interview (like we don’t know how to do that by for the ages. One of my favorite aspects now) but also referring to him as “the pale about this article is the horrendous introduction that actually told people how skin 32-year-old“. to pronounce deadmau5’s name
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to a comment from Joel Zimmerman, was, “Or Cypress Hill’s inclusion on your new album?” Now this is a hip-hop focused magazine, but come on, there are other things that we can talk about. Thankfully, Now diving into the interview, you deadmau5 called them out on it. After a can tell right off the bat why VIBE lengthy discussion about what hip-hop Magazine set up this interview. The very first question they ask in response artist deadmau5 would work with, 17 this is when things get interesting.
5/11/16 5/11/16 11:49 12:42 AM AM
DEADMAU5 TELLS IT HOW IT IS
over T aking the cover of
the recent edition of VIBE Magazine, the mostly hip-hop oriented magazine sat down with deadmau5 for an interview (like we don’t know how to do that by for the ages. One of my favorite aspects now) but also referring to him as “the pale about this article is the horrendous introduction that actually told people how skin 32-year-old“. to pronounce deadmau5’s name
2-3 (final) copy.indd1 1 16-17 (final).indd
to a comment from Joel Zimmerman, was, “Or Cypress Hill’s inclusion on your new album?” Now this is a hip-hop focused magazine, but come on, there are other things that we can talk about. Thankfully, Now diving into the interview, you deadmau5 called them out on it. After a can tell right off the bat why VIBE lengthy discussion about what hip-hop Magazine set up this interview. The very first question they ask in response artist deadmau5 would work with, 17 this is when things get interesting.
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The first people called out in the article are the trio of Swedes currently on their One Last Tour, Swedish House Mafia. “It reminds me of Swedish House fucking Mafia. There’s three of you and one fucking CD with the track on it. It’s all show pony shit.” But he meant that in the most loving way possible. “They’re great people. I always feel bad, but I think they get it when I say shit like that. So I can hang with Steve [Angello], [Sebastian] Ingrosso and Axwell. They’re all really cool dudes, and we have good times. When I start gacking on about what they do or their stage thing, they understand.”
One of the greatest moments of the interview was when deadmau5 brings up Ultra Music Festival again. He recently complained on twitter about not knowing if his stage set-up for Ultra was going to be ready in time. He then went on to verbally abuse UMF, “Ultra’s weird. I mean every time I say something about fucking Ultra, that fucking dude calls us up, fucking bitches us out—“Argh, I’m going to sue you.” Whatever man. I’m tired of talking about Ultra, even if I had something good to say—Ultra is the same thing every fucking year.” Within the same rant, he compared it to Lollapalooza, saying that the two have not changed and just do the same thing every year. Other aspects of the article include his hatred for the word EDM (thankfully I am not the only one) and instead refers to it as “Event Driven Marketing“. He also goes on to tell VIBE that surprisingly he does have friends, and that they are DJs and producers.
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The first people called out in the article are the trio of Swedes currently on their One Last Tour, Swedish House Mafia. “It reminds me of Swedish House fucking Mafia. There’s three of you and one fucking CD with the track on it. It’s all show pony shit.” But he meant that in the most loving way possible. “They’re great people. I always feel bad, but I think they get it when I say shit like that. So I can hang with Steve [Angello], [Sebastian] Ingrosso and Axwell. They’re all really cool dudes, and we have good times. When I start gacking on about what they do or their stage thing, they understand.”
One of the greatest moments of the interview was when deadmau5 brings up Ultra Music Festival again. He recently complained on twitter about not knowing if his stage set-up for Ultra was going to be ready in time. He then went on to verbally abuse UMF, “Ultra’s weird. I mean every time I say something about fucking Ultra, that fucking dude calls us up, fucking bitches us out—“Argh, I’m going to sue you.” Whatever man. I’m tired of talking about Ultra, even if I had something good to say—Ultra is the same thing every fucking year.” Within the same rant, he compared it to Lollapalooza, saying that the two have not changed and just do the same thing every year. Other aspects of the article include his hatred for the word EDM (thankfully I am not the only one) and instead refers to it as “Event Driven Marketing“. He also goes on to tell VIBE that surprisingly he does have friends, and that they are DJs and producers.
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