In those companies you mention how do they organize their millions of workers that create, manage, and provide their services to us?
Through paying them.

How do they get the money to keep the lights on?
Through being a business. Free tiers get ads, Pay tiers give money.

 

A server is just a small fraction of the upkeep. 10 a year wont even cover it in the slightest.

Too many moving parts to list. But one big one no one thinks about is legal costs to keep a company. Most of the money goes to lawsuits.

Uber alone has an entire skyscraper in san fransisco that houses their legal department.

 

It means that you need contact them and tell them that you don't agree to your music being used to train AIs. Same thing as with Facebook/Meta a while back. People needed to contact them to say that they don't agree with Meta taking pictures from users Facebook and Insta accounts to train Meta AI.

 

AudiSexPro, our forum has 78,982 members. If everyone pays €10 per year, that's €789,820 per year. That could definitely pay for a server. But as you know, that's not going to happen, and so we don't need to think any further. The battle has long been lost.

Uber is a platform economy that doesn't manufacture anything itself, but rather offers services; they are massively attacking the taxi industry worldwide.

 

Sorry not sorry but saying these companies farm user data, dont fairly pay royalties or share advertising money with artists, train ai with user content and so on to "keep the lights on" is total bullshit. When the offices are in the most expensive high street high rises in major cities, average low level employee incomes are low to mid six figures and lets not forget multiple ceo/owners personally "earning" billions of dollars in cash money each, yeah, no. These a-holes have completely rigged the game and are in bed with the major labels and some of the performing rights organizations, basically across the entire board of the music industry. Pure greed for money at any and all costs under the disguise of running at a loss in the name of helping indie arts. Get tf outta here man

 

It's about participation and self-determination.
We only have one right when it comes to the big companies: to buy or not to buy, to use or not to use.

 

Big capital always wins; they have the money. SoundCloud has already gone bankrupt. First layoffs, then layoffs, then the investor...!

- SoundCloud fires 40 percent of employees - 2017 Music service in crisis - offices in London and San Francisco close

Streaming service - SoundCloud on the verge of bankruptcy - August 11, 2017
- Company urgently needs fresh capital – Investors want a new CEO

Investors demand €170 million. In 2015, the company reported a loss of €51 million on revenue of €21 million. According to Ljung, SoundCloud now needs $170 million in additional capital, as Axios reports. However, investors want a new CEO at the helm. Instead of Ljung, former Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor is set to take over.

The music platform SoundCloud could be sold by the end of the year. Shareholders Raine Group, a US investment firm, and Temasek Holdings, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, are talking about a "possible auction of the company," according to Sky News. Raine and Temasek hold the majority of SoundCloud's shares.

 

we are a community of a sister site that offers music tools at no cost. Im assuming the small number of the participating users here might not all throw that money at a platform that costs more development costs plus severs.

yes that is a part of what uber is. The legal side encompasses, drivers, riders, accidents, sexual assaults, uber eats damages… etc etc etc..

Just trying to get you to think broadly and apply it to a hypothetical music platform.
Record labels suing, samples, illegal uploads, defamation…… etc etc etc.

that’s just a factor of moving parts.

if you Google you will see how Spotify was sued by everyone in its years of inception. This also applies to SoundCloud.

 

I agree the labels are always forward facing they are here for the artists but actually aren’t.

even in the lawsuits against Suno & udio they keep throwing the word artist around. But in reality they don’t want to loose value in the catalog they are sitting on. Especially after the large purchase of all the masters that were made during the pandemic.

they need a return on investment and new tech is threatening their old rusty business model

 

Most of them aren't free, they're illegal!

No, you just won't be able to get them excited about setting up something of their own. You could open your own studio using membership or club dues. But you find that there are too few of them, because either they don't understand, are too stingy, or have been brought up to do what they are told.

Can you elaborate a little on the hypothetical music platform?

We still live in a constitutional state; you can be sued at any time, and then you hire a lawyer and have them defend you.

 

It's all just hot air; what they say isn't what they do. Follow the money.

 

Today, it's done this way because it's legally required; otherwise, the companies are committing a criminal offense. By accepting our terms of service or license agreement, they consent to us continuing to use your data. If you don't check the box at the bottom, you can't use their service.

 

Sure traffic costs money as does the cost of the blade server(s)/ Virtual server(s) for hosting and a decent Cisco or equivalent router and a hardware firewall, as does maintenance. That stated, it is still hosting what doesn't belong to the hoster unless the hoster owns the tunes as well. I have some friends that investigated this and the marketing involved to successfully compete with the major streamers outweighed the practicality.
The idea is good and a pure one of fair due to the composers who aren't A.I. but it will take a lot more than $10-$20 from even a thousand people. The hundreds of thousands possibly more and convincing people to change from their existing streamers means the marketing has no room for error to do something like it.

I'm not trying to rain on your parade, just saying that many are on the same page and in order to make money, you need a lot of money to start with.

 

Last edited: May 12, 2025 at 11:31 PM

Also the path of least resistance always wins. Spotify, Apple Music will win because most people want to be fed the media they consume. Spotify playlists, even netflix does this. The people that keep the lights for these companies are the passive music listeners.

The small minority of music diggers are on beatport, soundcloud, bandcamp etc. But their market share of the entire music industry is small. Its hard to keep the lights on in those places when most people want the newest Taylor swift adjacent tik tok hit type beat just given to them through the channel of maximum reward least amount of effort.

 

Not all - which was my point. Some companies don't do it; some countries don't allow it.

There are many other services besides Amazon, DropBox, Google, and Microsoft that do not use ai or machine learning to leverage hosting of your files as a revenue stream.

As concerns Apple, it uses ai only to identify underage corn (photos and videos) - as do most large corporations and universities on their own servers (as well they should).

Proton for instance, has a very strict privacy policy and guardrails, though the issue here is a cloud service using ai to analyze your music - not logging your IP address or not.

Dozens of companies offer free tiers of service - most in the US, some not. I will leave it to your sharp intellect to read the Terms of each one to verify which is not, in fact, "into ai already." Or stay uninformed: your choice.

 

Let's just agree that the companies which directly host your material have nothing to do with using the data for training, per their own TOS. Exceptions or not to that premise. On services like Soundcloud; your content is internet-facing, with no paywall or other similar mechanism to check users' credentials.

Isn't that just a discussion of picking what service gets to use your content, and which do not? Look at the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine; hoovering up all content available to it when it "Snapshots" sites with its crawlers? "robots.txt" is not even so much as a speed bump for them anymore. Cloud Storage is a different concern than Soundcloud, because that is meant to be data storage which is not internet-facing and for public content delivery.

 

The problem is, it seems to me, there is no mechanism of enforcement to ensure legal entities like companies and corporations are in fact in compliance with their own terms as well as the terms of the countries in which they engage in business, and with a world wide internet, isn't it quite likely they do engage in activities in most if not all countries either directly or indirectly.

So with such a huge widely dispersed network of activities, who or whom is capable and ethical enough to actually understand and investigate/audit their business practices for legal and ethical compliances?

That is the conundrum ... Who watches the watchers?

 

Here in the EU (European Union), Microsoft and Facebook sometimes end up in court. Microsoft then pays out €500 million, and Facebook gets a warning letter. Failure to comply with data protection regulations costs them 20% of their revenue!!

So there is no legal vacuum, and there is already the "AI Act: First Regulation on Artificial Intelligence in the European Union." www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20230601STO93804/eu-ai-act-first-regulation-on-artificial-intelligence