SoundCloud presses Go on its subscription streaming service
Summary:
The new feature, SoundCloud Go, is being launched on Tuesday, and the company hopes a mammoth catalogue of more than 125m tracks – quadruple those of its rivals Spotify and Apple Music – will persuade a chunk of its 175 million subscribers who listen for free to start paying. SoundCloud has been talking about its plans to launch a subscription service for the past two years, during drawn-out licensing negotiations with music rights holders. The company has agreed deals with all three major labels, the indie-label licensing agency Merlin, and various music publishers. These are SoundCloud’s first licensing deals, as its free service has relied on “safe harbour” legislation under which it promised to remove copyrighted tracks if notified by their rightsholders. Although SoundCloud Go is only launching in the US, Wahlforss said the company’s label deals were global in nature, meaning that it only needs to strike publishing-rights agreements with collecting societies elsewhere in the world before expanding. SoundCloud has plenty of catching up to do with its rivals.
Key Data:
- The music and audio streaming firm SoundCloud is launching its long-planned subscription service, but for now the $9.99-a-month service will only be available in the US.
- The company and its investors will be hoping that SoundCloud Go can boost its financial performance. In its last public set of financial resultsfor 2014, SoundCloud’s revenues grew by 54% to €17.4m, but its losses increased by 69% to €39.1m. SoundCloud has raised £111m in funding since 2009, including a £24.5m round of debt financing in early 2016.
- Spotify recently reached 30 million paying subscribers, while Apple Music reached 11 million in February.
Children as young as seven caught sexting at school, study reveals
Summary:
According to a study by one teaching union, More than half of teachers are aware of incidents of children sexting at their school, including primary-school pupils as young as seven. In one typical incident, a girl pretended to fancy a boy and persuaded him to take a picture of his genitals, which she then shared with others. In another, a year 9 pupil, aged 13 or 14, took explicit selfies of herself for a boy at another school, but classmates got hold of the photo and shared it, thereby distributing child sexual images. A spokesman for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children(NSPCC) said it was worrying that so many children were sharing explicit images. “Many young people see this activity as part of everyday life, despite the severe risks involved.
The NSPCC said: “Children and young people need to understand the risks of sending these images and know what to do to get the support. If a child has lost control of a sexual image, they can get in touch with ChildLine who will work with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to get the image removed. The charity is calling for sexting to be included in age-appropriate sex and relationships education which the charity says “should be on every curriculum as [schools] are at the frontline of child protection”.
Key Data:
- The counselling service ChildLine dealt with more than 1,200 cases last year of young people worried about indecent images they had shared, or who felt pressured into sexting.
- Teachers were also targets for pupils and parents on social media. The study, which received responses from 1,300 teachers, found that half had seen adverse comments posted about themselves on social media sites by pupils and parents.
- In one typical post a parent threatened to come in and “sort that bitch out”; one pupil threatened to rape a teacher; another teacher was branded a paedophile on social media, while another was condemned as a “wife beater”.
- “Online abuse has a devastating impact on teachers and pupils’ lives and yet no serious action is taken by government to ensure that schools are responding appropriately to this abuse.
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