It's hard out there.
It's virtually impossible to keep track of what companies are engaging in extractive business practices, either as ad-tech surveillance to auction your info to the highest bidder, and/or feeding your content into the juicy maw of a proprietary LLM. Thus- we thought it might make sense to collect and share our ongoing competitive intel with the community at large. We'll simplify it and put the exciting bits right up front, but feel free to dig into the footnotes and citations for all the ugly details.
If you want to dig into the hellscape for yourself, the fastest way to get radicalized is to look up who funded and/or who owns a given company. Nine out of ten times it's a VC Firm with it's sticky little fingers in every terrible industry or profit scheme you can imagine. ANYWAY. On with the show.
Companies and services will be rated on a simple system, and as we research more, we'll add them.
🟢 | Good
👀 | Watch
🤨 | Sus
❌ | Avoid
| Service |
Rating |
Reason |
| WeTransfer |
🤨
|
Their addition and subsequent removal of AI training from their ToS was a red flag. Keep watching closely. Owned by Bending Spoons, an Italian tech group valued at $11 Billion.1 |
| Dropbox |
👀
|
Oddly, perhaps surprisingly, they've been on the right side of IP and the sale of personal data for a while. I just wish audio playback was better, and they hadn't taken money from equity's worst offenders (like BlackRock). "When you use our Services, you provide us with things like your files, content, messages, contacts, connected services, and so on (“Your Stuff”). Your Stuff is yours. These Terms don’t give us any rights to Your Stuff except for the limited rights that enable us to offer the Services."2 |
|
Soundcloud
|
🤨 |
Much like WeTransfer, the addition and subsequent clarification they made about AI training in ToS after community backlash is cause for concern. Soundcloud owns and operates Musiio, an AI tagging and search tool, which leaves a bad taste in my mouth. 3
Musiio uses data to fuel their search and tagging product (which they sell for profit), which is used by companies like Epidemic Sound. Are users compensate for their contributions to this data pool? What do you think?
|
| Google Drive |
❌ |
It would be nice to avoid, but at this point in history, it seems virtually impossible. Google products and tech are absolutely ubiquitous . Google ToS and Agreements are startlingly vague, but written as well-intentioned4. They are clear on IP, but everything provided is part of the data pool that powers their Ad Networks. |
| Boombox |
❌ |
This company has accepted a bunch of private money, ("Company builders. AI native, of course") and deploys a set of AI tools inside the product, including lyric generation, chord progression and AI mastering. They don't say where "Boombot" got it's data set, but a quick look at their privacy policy under "HOW WE USE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION" gives us a clue: "To process data with machine learning algorithms, which helps us build, personalize, and improve the Services." Yuck.5 |
| Bandcamp |
👀 |
First Floor did a great job breaking down BC's journey over the past few years from indie darling to labor- haters. We should all be wary of a company centering indie music being owned by a B2B platform, but their ToS remains clear on IP rights. Watching closely. |
| Ampwall |
🟢 |
A great Bandcamp alternative with it's heart in the right place. "Ampwall's priority is preventing human artists from being forced to appear alongside or compete with low-effort AI-generated works." Hell yeah.6 |
Wrap up (for now)
I fully expect there to be a sea of class-action lawsuits once the AI fervor dies down. Major tech players will (maybe) pay out a pittance to IP rights holder to say sorry for devouring your data to power our water chugging machines, and very few (if anyone) will be punished meaningfully. Like all things in life, it's not necessarily where you end up but how you get there. For that reason, I take pride in our little worker-owned audio platform that does a straightforward job.
At Tape Trade we think you shouldn't have to settle. It's possible to use the conveniences of the internet without compromising your data or personal values in the process. If you want a simple and honest way of storing, sharing, and listening to your works in progress, we might just be what you're looking for.
Appendix
WeTransfer & Bending Spoons. Bending Spoons is in the business of acquiring companies that capture a lot of customer data, like Evernote and more recently Vimeo. It's not exactly clear if there's an end goal or anything linking their acquisitions (just yet).
