Soundcloud is absolutely ubiquitous in the electronic music community. I was talking about this with a friend recently who is a programmer and a (relatively) well known composer, and she made the point that soundcloud actually represents a very important cultural document; there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it were to disappear. This is something I haven't heard a great deal about, and it's something that concerns me about other media platforms like Medium.
>it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it were to disappear. This is something I haven't heard a great deal about, and it's something that concerns me about other media platforms like Medium.
Of course, in all fairness (and modulo archiving by organizations like the Internet Archive), media and writing hosted on a personal web site is at least as likely to just disappear at some point. I agree with your basic point though. Any number of content sites have gone away in a manner where pretty much everything was lost.
>In a 2003 experiment, Fetterly et al. discovered that about one link out of every 200 disappeared each week from the Internet. McCown et al 2005 discovered that half of the URLs cited in D-Lib Magazine articles were no longer accessible 10 years after publication [the irony!], and other studies have shown link rot in academic literature to be even worse... Nelson and Allen... examined link rot in digital libraries and found that about 3% of the objects were no longer accessible after one year.
>Bruce Schneier remarks that one friend experienced 50% linkrot in one of his pages over less than 9 years (not that the situation was any better in 1998), and that his own blog posts link to news articles that go dead in days; Vitorio checks bookmarks from 1997, finding that hand-checking indicates a total link rot of 91% with only half of the dead available in sources like the Internet Archive; the Internet Archive itself has estimated the average lifespan of a Web page at 100 days. A Science study looked at articles in prestigious journals; they didn’t use many Internet links, but when they did, 2 years later ~13% were dead. The French company Linterweb studied external links on the French Wikipedia before setting up their cache of French external links, and found - back in 2008 - already 5% were dead. (The English Wikipedia has seen a 2010-2011 spike from a few thousand dead links to ~110,000 out of ~17.5m live links.) The dismal studies just go on and on and on (and on). Even in a highly stable, funded, curated environment, link rot happens anyway. For example, about 11% of Arab Spring-related tweets were gone within a year (even though Twitter is - currently - still around).
>My specific target date is 2070, 60 years from now... Even at the lowest estimate of 3% annual linkrot, few will survive to 2070. If each link has a 97% chance of surviving each year, then the chance a link will be alive in 2070 is... ≈0.16 (or to put it another way, an 84% chance any given link will die)... If we try to predict using a more reasonable estimate of 50% linkrot, then an average of 0 links will survive... It would be a good idea to simply assume that no link will survive.
But people have been preserving physical books for hundreds, even thousands of years. Physical archives have been a thing for a long time and try to preserve everything from music to letters to government records. Historians often use letters and notes written by people hundreds of years ago, because people often saved that stuff.
Same with web content most of this content is likely still somewhere. While you and I have no access too it someone does, whether they'll share it with us is another thing all together.
That's not necessarily true. Some of it is preserved by the internet archive, but a lot falls through the cracks.
Maybe you mean it's still on someone's home computer. But hard drives fail over time. So do CDs, floppy disks, and flash drives. Over time all this stuff will be lost unless someone makes an effort to preserve it.
I'm referring mainly to the authors of these works likely having something lying on a hard drive sitting on a shelf or backed up on 'C: Back up 2012-06-21 4 of 7'. These are much like those piles of old letters found in Grandma's attic, mostly unintelligible (I certainly can't read the cursive scrawls) but still ultimately not 'lost' if someone is prepared to spend the time recovering them.
Oh Come on. You have never heard of the Library of Alexandria? The day this was gone, we lost one of the largest chunk of older books and parchments. We are talking about a huge collection that went up in flames.
The documents we still have now are just a tiny fraction of what existed.
When Grooveshark shut down, I lost some fantastic artists. There was a low-distraction music station for programmers [writhem radio] I would listen to, which was gaining some popularity and would have music guests DJ their new stuff.
When Grooveshark died, that set of original music spun by the DJs was essentially lost- which sucked because that was my go-to for "work music". I've only started to find the tracks again, some on soundcloud, YouTube, etc.
Worst part is, the guys responsible for the music station, which was definitely growing, hasn't done much to start again. It's understandable, when you think of how difficult it is to grow a brand from nothing.
I had the same experience when Grooveshark shut down. It's weird. I didn't realize just how awesome their service was. On the face of it, the technology wasn't particularly novel.
It was the content that kept me coming back. Mostly the radio shows like WritheM and Electro Chill.
This is certainly not a replacement for what you've lost, and I don't know if it's even the kind of music you're referring to... but you might be interested in: http://musicforprogramming.net/
I haven't looked recently, but I was only specifically interested in their "BitMix's", where they'd bring in an up and coming artist to mix an hour long set together.
when people argue that "digital distribution is essentially free," then ask why Soundcloud is losing money, since distributing music is literally their only real cost of doing business.
we will continue to endure substantial cultural losses for so long as people continue to believe that content can & should be distributed and consumed for free.
ultimately some sort of micropayments + blockchain-like-cloudserving might replace Spotify, Soundcloud, and all other streaming services with a decentralized system in which listeners compensate artists directly.
until then the promise of disintermediation is just a fantasy. gatekeepers on the Internet control access to most content, particularly music.
If you used something like ipfs, syncthing, or generic torrents you could easily distribute anything you want at large scale at no cost, as long as people were interested in having it.
If you choose to centralize distribution on one web server that is your own choice, but the better phrase is "digital distribution is free if you want it to be".
I doubt we will see a return to pay-to-listen models in music. Reality has taken too big of a bite around the copyright extortion ring surrounding sine waves. The future of music is in patronage, merchandising, and live performances - which really, it has always been. Only extremely rare unicorn performers ever have the stars align to be able to monetize their music itself (in the past it was making it big with a label, today last decade it was topping itunes) while we are seeing the rise of music as a viable profession without extraordinary fame as long as you can provide a niche and be good at it, you can attract enough whale fans to support you regardless of if the tracks themselves are free - your real audience is those that not only want what you already made, but want you to continue to make.
Remember, as in all things IP, it is not the actual music file that is scarce or expensive to produce, it is the idea behind the music that took an artist hours or days to hand craft into a digital creation. The first iteration was the expensive one - all other ones are effectively free. It is essential that going forward we culturally recognize the distinction and move to seek sustainable business models around the former rather than the later, which we only invented as an imperfect way to translate ideas into the physical goods market back when they were less distinct than they are now (ie, costs of distribution did exist for paper books, so pigeonholing writing into markets via copyright was a reasonable train of thought when per-unit costs still existed and thus people could not effortlessly propagate the information on an individual basis).
If you used something like ipfs, syncthing, or generic
torrents you could easily distribute anything you want at
large scale at no cost, as long as people were interested
in having it.
The problem there of course is the "as long as people were interested in having it" part. You can publish stuff for free on Freenet, but to a first approximation, nobody actually uses Freenet. If a torrent/magnet URI runs out of seeds then it dies forever, unless you have a way to contact former seeds and beg them to give you a copy, etc etc. Bandwidth costs money, and always will. Distributing files costs money, and always will.
The UX of peer-to-peer file sharing will always be more complex than "go to this WWW URL" if just to avoid the free-rider/spam problem.
> "but to a first approximation, nobody actually uses Freenet"
There's a very good reason for that. The people that know about Freenet and could promote it won't because of the issues it has with CP. Due to the distributed nature of the platform, and the high volume of CP that is supposedly hosted there (I've never used it, but that's what I've heard) you basically can't use Freenet without hosting CP.
Regardless of content, my biggest technical problem with Freenet is that it's a cache, not storage. You don't know when something is going to disappear. Link rot is even more unpredictable on Freenet than the open internet, and if you upload something, you don't know if it's going to need re-uploading.
There are a collection of private trackers run by motivated volunteers and paid for with meager donations which have collections far superior to the best paid services or archives anywhere or at any time in history.
They do this by erecting and maintaining virtual economies where what you can get is limited by how much you've shared.
You don't really need 100% uptime trackers, DHT lets you do peer to peer file discovery. There are trackerless torrents, the only problem being how you get the torrents in the first place, but all that takes is a magnet URI from the original uploader / creator somewhere.
So, you're suggesting that SoundCloud seeds all the files instead of offering the download option. Perhaps this could work if "play-in-browser" vs "download" ratio is not too big.
I haven't actually kept up to date recently on the project, but the ML is super active. I believe they now have a working localforage backend to store torrents - the implementation already works flawlessly, and there is a hybrid client in the same node package family that can seed the same files to both webtorrent cleints and traditional UDP clients.
But it is extensionless and seamless and just uses webrtc data channels and websockets.
There are implementations which approximate bittorrent written entirely in javascript. It's possible.
However, I really doubt infrastructure costs dominate SoundCloud's money problems. Significant, yes. But a major engineering overhaul developing an entirely different architecture for distribution which might either not work or alienate customers is probably not an appropriate move when in that situation.
Maybe it could be something to do as a clean shut-down to help things live on (an amazing thing when dying companies do things like this to end well) but not ... expected.
Mathematically, as the download count for each file approaches 1.0 (or even lower), a privately-funded torrent seed server starts to look more and more like a traditional file host.
Soundcloud & co require the content provider to upload the content too. If you want to share the content, provide the seed. If you don't want to share the content, don't upload to soundcloud, don't provide the seed.
If the provider decides to shut down or no longer renews the licence for a piece of content then the content will disappear. Torrents on the other hand only require that at least one seeder has to actively seed the content. Soundcloud has to host the initial seeder anyway which means that they are in practice not worse for longevity than a central file server as long as soundcloud continues business.
> The problem there of course is the "as long as people were interested in having it" part.
The problem is that ISP are actively trying to constrain torrents with deep packet inspection or ongoing surveillance of other centralized bodies. Torrents would see a much more widespread use if such barriers were removed.
> The UX of peer-to-peer file sharing will always be more complex than "go to this WWW URL" if just to avoid the free-rider/spam problem.
For the end user, clicking on a torrent has zero UX issues. That's why torrents took off so easily in the first place, and why they still exist nowadays.
Honestly, I don't think the solution even requires that much creativity or innovation.
Just in the past 3 or 4 months I've found half a dozen or more artists on Soundcloud, then headed over to Bandcamp or Amazon to buy and download their music. It would be awesome if I could buy it right there on Soundcloud. Every song could have a "Buy MP3" and "Buy Album" button right there by the Like, Share and other buttons.
Maybe it wouldn't solve all of their problems, but it's better than what they have now.
A lot of the music posted is a single here, a single there - often before official release. Sometimes it isn't weeks until that single (or larger album) is available for purchase.
Plus, for the electronic/DJ side of things, many of the tracks posted are remixes which aren't ever for sale (it seems). But from a scale standpoint, you would think that there might be some sort of revenue opportunity there.
> many of the tracks posted are remixes which aren't ever for sale (it seems)
Isn't there a fair-use provision where you can remix/sample works as long as you don't sell the derivative work or something like that?
I think that's how a lot of the electronic music stuff works... people freely mix and remix stuff, give it away for free, and make their income doing live events and shows.
That's my sense... anyone know if I got these details right?
Post the single with a "Available to buy on <some date>" notice. When it's officially released, take down the notice and put up "Buy now" buttons. And there's no reason they have to make every song available for sale or every song that's for sale available for streaming.
This functionality actually already exists. Artists can add a purchase link to the store of their choosing, and it will appear right next to the "Share" button.
I wish I could buy everything from Bandcamp. I feel like I'm the only one who thinks FLAC is important. I may not be renewing Spotify, so I'm back to using my (very limited, where is my SD card Google?) local storage, therefore I'm going to be transcoding my collection to ~85 kilobit Opus which seems to be acceptable quality for listening to while out of the house.
I don't think we will ever overcome thousands of years of ingrained social sharing Norms, nor do I think we should.
And if distribution is the problem then there are good existing solutions to the problem of bandwidth cost, e.g. torrents.
There might be a way to monetize sharing digital content using some micropayment system like you say. Though I think that will have to come about after the current players have left or been marginalized as they don't care so much about helping the artists make a living, instead wanting to maintain control so they can get the money.
The difference between free and essentially free does become significant when you consolidate all of those essentiallies in one place. I couldn't find how much they spend on the distribution infrastructure itself, but if their 250 million monthly users were to bring in an average of 2-3 cents per month, they would net a profit, even after all the legal and administrative expenses on top of the actual cost of distribution.
I'm kind of baffled that SoundCloud isn't already raking in profits. Presumably their stakeholders simply haven't pushed for profitability yet.
HathiTrust.org, 13-14 million volumes has less than 20 FTEs and the vast majority of them are on new development projects. Put into maintenance it might take 2 FT sysadmins to keep going. Maybe double the cost for operations. Preservation and digital distribution is really really cheap. SoundCloud isn't losing $44 million on sysadmins, servers and network. It's all the other startup crap, sales, bizdev, legal that is doing them in.
> Soundcloud is absolutely ubiquitous in the electronic music community
You're not understating this. As a lifelong electronic music fan who has discovered some fantastic new remixes on SoundCloud over the years, the disappearance of SoundCloud would be a large cultural loss.
Even if one is not a fan of that sort of music, surely one could empathize.
Interesting, the above track is classified as house but doesn't sound like any house music I've heard. The cut up samples sound similar to Madeon - you might also like him.
As a counter-point though, the role of SoundCloud in a diversified music commerce portfolio is not ideal as a catch-all archive. A professional elsewhere mentioned it is a useful tool for sharing and A/B/C listening tests with tracks set to private, but that's not the end use-case scenario. In principle, SoundCloud should not be the sole - or even main - distribution channel for a music act.
To put it another way, SoundCloud at its core is a free streaming site, and it also allows free downloads if enabled by the music act. There is no way I know of to set up SoundCloud for paid downloads or streams. Thus, using Bandcamp, Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, Tidal, Google, Deezr (etc) are wise to capture a modest revenue stream and listener data in ways SoundCloud simply doesn't support.
SoundCloud a lot more like Facebook than it is iTunes: socially important, great for sharing, a way for something to go viral - all important angles in modern business, sure. Is it such a monolith that I'm worried about its future? Not really; it'd be sad to watch it crumble (further, in some respects) but that doesn't seem likely for at least a couple more years. Lots can change.
A significant role of the SoundCloud that I'm most familiar with is as a distribution platform for mixes and performances by musicians for whom the _sale_ of their music is not a significant revenue source; these performers (and I'm talking about dance music, in all its varieties) almost exclusively make their living performing live, and release mixes mostly as a sort of marketing.
This obviously isn't the _only_ type of artist on SoundCloud, but they're a huge part of what makes SoundCloud culturally significant.
I'll just go to my crib-sheet response: SoundCloud isn't for "mixes" as in DJ sets. That's what MixCloud is for. That's why DJ mixes get kicked off SoundCloud routinely, and I won't fault them for it. MixCloud is for mixes, SoundCloud is for creators, in my opinion.
Mixes get kicked off of SoundCloud because they have a higher chance of one of the X songs/samples in them being picked up in the copyright detector net. The fact that it doesn't happen, or that it happens less, on MixCloud only goes to show that MixCloud isn't playing ball with copyright holders, or hasn't been approached to do so. They don't have some magical blanket license to let anyone, anywhere, for free, upload a mix with copyrighted material.
Actually quite the opposite - from what I read, MixCloud did get into arrangements with numerous labels/rights holders and therefore the risk of having a mix taken down is greatly reduced - and it's why MixCloud doesn't approve of people uploading individual tracks.
DJs are in the derivative work business, no matter how much they claim to be innovative or 'making something new!' by mixing tracks together, and while I'm an advocate for Copyright Reform, for now the way laws and commercial rules are written, DJs making and uploading mixes don't have a leg to stand on in the SoundCloud model.
Well then, color me surprised. If I can somehow, without paying at all, upload a two-hour mix to Mixcloud, with all copyrighted material, and have it not taken down.... that's great.
Yeah it is, and the player seems to work fine as well. For DJ stuff on PC I tend to use Traktor Pro and I can even upload the track list file (.NML I think) and it adds tags to the tracks. 90% of what I've used was purchased from Beatport, with the other minor amount being rips from CD purchases over the years.
It really does seem to be the proper platform for DJ mixes.
> Mixcloud streams the mixes and radio shows of its registered users and pays performance royalties by way of its agreements with licensing collectives around the world.
I think both these points agree: SoundCloud is the one place where you can find lots of music, especially electronica. Also, that's not a very healthy thing if you're interested in preserving history.
A lot of queer music, IME, is primarily distributed through Soundcloud - and more generally, there's a lot of people making music for reasons other than making money off it. Obviously, it's a poor business choice to keep a service running primarily for these people, but it's certainly a cultural centre for certain types of music none-the-less. I'll be sad to see it go.
Oh for sure, I think it's absolutely an equalizer. Some random kid in a small town can follow somebody famous like Chance the Rapper and then upload their own content. I'm very glad it exists and still keep mine up to date (and leave some historical tracks too, why not). Digital equipment is getting cheaper and better year by year, it's awesome.
As an Ableton Live and Propellerhead Figure user, I've always been amused by the "Upload directly to SoundCloud!" plug-ins / capabilities, because on the one hand "Yay, convenient!" and the other hand "Wait, I've still got to master these and bounce them to mp3s for other uses."
We are living in the age of data impermanence. There is no mechanism to archive all of the content we are generating efficiently. Soundcloud represents but one of the many websites whose content will be lost forever to the digital dark ages.
> There is no mechanism to archive all of the content we are generating efficiently
While we can't archive all the content, the folk at the Internet Archives* are put heroic efforts in preserving the notable content. If Soundcloud doesn't make it, I hope they at least work with the Internet Archive to preserve the data.
When programming with immutability becomes ubiquitous, this problem will be solved. Immutable systems enable permanent & idealized caching at all layers. This is more of a research topic now but is where we are headed in 10 year timeframe i think.
Anyway, who cares. What about the last ten thousand years of content that nobody gives a shit about.
On the other hand, without them, much of the content wouldn't have been anywhere anyway. So the content is there because they are there. And if the go away, so might some of that content as well as future content which won't have a home.
Most things never made it to stone, paper and magnetic tape. We're recording more data now than ever before because it's so cheap to do so. Sure we lose some, but more information will be created and stored today than existed in the entire world not that long ago.
I'd like to offer a contrary perspective. I actually like the idea that some of our "stuff" ends up being ephemeral. By accident or design. I'm not really talking about burning the occasional Alexandrian Library, but the stuff that didn't seem important enough for anyone to really care about.
And if something I made only exists on Soundcloud, I either don't really care or I'm a bit stupid.
For most of our history nearly everything we thought, said and did was ephemeral. Not recorded and then gone. We've become pack-rats. We're at the beginning of technology civilization and already we have amassed so much that for any major genre of music there exists more content than a human being could consume in a lifetime.
And the vast majority of it is, at best, unremarkable.
I think we are wired for worrying about losing information because it used to be a disaster. We used to be terrible at recording information. We're not anymore. Oh boy are we not. We'll just make more. Or we'll repeat whatever process brought us there.
And if it can't be repeated you now have the rarest and most unique gift: a cultural experience that only exists in the memory of those present.
Imagine the storage space we as a civilization are going to use for storing worthless shit just in the next 100 years.
All of my weight behind it. SoundCloud was how Indie Music, the companion of the lonely programmer, took us all into the small bedroom corners of the struggling songwriter. The problem is obviously business model.
While not so straightforward, applying DJBooth.net's money-making viewpoint of non-intrusive angle ads or more creatively publishing short-span addictive games on the website Indie gamers can play while listening to Indie Music should start a path to a defining solution.
Soundcloud is so important for the programmer community that it is unthinkable that it will just disappear. All those background music I enjoy as I code, all those chip-tunes, livecoding musics etc. I hope they open some donation so that I can help.
I've never personally gotten into SoundCloud but I fill a similar void using Spotify. They have a constantly evolving set of background music playlist under "Browse" > "Genres & Moods" > "Focus".
Even if they do, people lose interest, stop paying hosting fees, or generally move on. I have a generally unmaintained personal site that was on Comcast Personal Web Pages--which were shut down last year. I do have backups (which many wouldn't have had) and I did rehost the site for now (as many also wouldn't have bothered doing).
I have a techno song on my computer that I downloaded at least 5 years ago, I think maybe 2009? I remember downloading the song when I was trying to pirate a copy of Fruity Loops Studio.
I recently came back upon it and couldn't find it on the internet, so I uploaded it to YouTube for posterity [0].
It's amazing that in something so massive like the internet, a single mp3 file can be almost lost forever. It really shows how important sites like archive.org are.
Their business model seems backwards. There are a lot more of us consumers than producers, so why not offer packages to us? That model does turn SC into a more traditional service, but because it has a more unique collection than the alternatives, it seems to have distinct value.
I want to pay them, but they didn't seem to have a music-listener-focused subscription level last time I looked. All of their paid features were designed for music producers, not listeners.
I pay for it and I'm not a pro. I really only paid because I wanted the spotlight feature and I also felt that I used the site so much it would be prudent to throw them some funds. Like most I have been thoroughly disappointed with the lack of upgrades to the site but so much good content is there that it's hard to walk away from it.
They can be better than 128kbps, it depends on the quality you upload. But that's the artists choice and obviously if you want the best quality you should buy it. Also if you don't care about the quality but really like the song you should buy it :)
Do you know under what conditions the stream is higher than 128kbps? I've only done a small amount of digging around on their APIs and have not found anything but that.
Your friend might want to look into Archive Team, then. See how well their current tools support a crawl of Soundcloud, that the documentation is up to date, plan out how a pre-closure crawl would go, and do a small test run to check that everything goes as it should.
> there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it were to disappear.
I don't know. We would obviously loose a fragment of history but if those tracks were so important culturally then they would have been distributed more widely. For instance, pressed on CD or vinyl or utilized in a movie or pirated in some way.
While I do like soundcloud I don't get what's so special about it. My hunch is that it is not so much the website but the fact that the internet is mainstream these days. There were websites where artists could share their music and have a profile before Soundcloud. Just to name a few: Besonic, mp3.com, myownmusic ...
I think you're taking a rather narrow view. soundcloud has become a storehouse not just for music, but for SOUND -- ambient environments, spoken word, audio diaries, etc. saying that anything of value is released on CD already would be like saying that the personal correspondence of Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, etc is worthless because we already have their published books.
In this way, I think it's also unique vs. other music sharing sites, in that people don't typically post their recording of a Chinese night market on their CDBaby or YouTube channel ...
I was merely responding to GP who just mentioned music. And I think that most of what is released on soundcloud has no substance but that is fine.
> saying that anything of value is released on CD already would be like saying that the personal correspondence of Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, etc is worthless because we already have their published books.
No, not at all. What I meant to imply is that if something is of worth culturally then at least some people would put some effort in keeping it alive. Like I said, it needn't be a CD. A pirated rip that is spread over bit torrent would be just as good.
The bible is still around because people painstakingly copied it not because some single entity kept one copy alive for good.
As far as general sounds are concerned, there are other places like freesound.org or archive.org. Thus I don't think soundlcoud has a monopoly on sound.
I get your point, and I think it's a reasonable point of view. I guess my belief is a little different -- I feel like people are fairly bad judges of what something is worth culturally. Sure, we get the high points right, but the Internet is chock full of stories of undiscovered genius that nearly ended up in the trash bin. See for example http://www.messynessychic.com/2013/02/18/found-at-auction-th...
Soundcloud contains an incredible collection of sound clips. If you take the virtual bulldozer to it, then you're just increasing the chance that something of value doesn't get copied over to archive.org or freesound.org, because the original owner isn't willing or able to do so.
That's quite true. Trusting a company to stay alive for ever is a problematic strategy, though.
I guess the best we can do is to encourage people not to upload their stuff to soundcloud or any other for-profit website in the first place if marketing their stuff is not what they aim for.
It's generally unfortunate when major batches of content--whether MP3s or an online magazine--end up inaccessible to the future. And I find it a bit worrisome that a relatively small non-profit plays such an outsized role in archiving the Internet.
That said, a huge number of works that people create have always ended up in the trash, thrown out, or archived only in a few obscure places. What makes it a bit frustrating with digital is that it's relatively practical to save so much more--if perhaps not necessarily everything that's even been posted to a public site--but few really good mechanisms (or funding) to do so.
I am slightly optimistic that we will find better ways to archive important media in the future. However, there is also the danger that people will get too obsessed with the past and hold onto highly problematic issues that otherwise would just fade away. In other words, archiving stuff promotes all kinds of fundamentalism.
The trouble is that cultural importance is an aggregation of the preferences and behavior of millions of people, but hosting and backing up digital content requires deliberate action (and money) from individuals. In other words, stuff doesn't just automatically get hosted and backed up because a bunch of people enjoy the stuff.
I think we have to accept that life is messy and there won't be a perfect solution but many different tools that enable us to keep more and more stuff alive.
Peer2peer technology could be part of the solution. Spreading stuff on bit torrent doesn't require too much work from an individual.
I can speak directly to this. I recently started making electronic music of my own, and have been building a small community of fans and listeners. I don't want to give the wrong impression here (it's still friends and family and only a few strangers), but if SoundCloud goes down, it will basically destroy the progress I've made so far. I am a bit freaked out right now with this news. I really hope the torch gets passed and I don't have my community pulled out from underneath me.
>there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it were to disappear.
Would it be really? Most of it wasn't even heard by more than 200 people in the first place.
For something to be a "tremendous cultural loss" it should not just a cultural artifact, it should also have had cultural impact (mass appreciation or influence) to begin with.
agree 100% on EDM and soundcloud, OTOH there also are a LOT of musicians that deal with film scoring, it seems very used for demo / mockup purposes so that would be difficult for them as well if it closed
I've been a daily soundcloud user for almost 6 years. At some point they gave up on trying to change or improve the user experience. Soundcloud has done nothing to facilitate the growth of users who focus on reposting/finding/sharing/curating content, vs. content creators who upload their own music. There is no way to gain a following or reputation as someone who reposts content on soundcloud -- and even if you have that following, there's no way to communicate to your audience.
In three years, it seems they've just made the UI elements bigger, and added background images for songs and profiles. I was really hoping to see the ability to post text messages into people's timelines. Something to communicate to your followers.
I absolutely love Soundcloud and also use it daily - I am listening to it right now - but it's an absolute disgrace how little they've done to improve the platform. It seems like such a total waste of potential.
The issues with the UI/UX are obvious and there are clear ways to improve on the situation. A number of people have done unsolicited Soundcloud redesigns, but there was an excellent one in December 2014 that is worth taking a look at:
In addition to showcasing a beautiful, thoughtful redesign, this post makes a series of criticisms that are both justified and still in urgent need of rectification. For example, in the stream:
* It’s hard to discern which song is playing.
* Only three to five songs are visible at once.
* The Stream doesn’t automatically scroll.
* The avatars [of commenters] on the waveform are virtually meaningless.
* Reloading the Stream is slow and clunky.
I would really hate to lose Soundcloud, as a long time fan of electronic music (going on 20 years now!) it's been a big part of my life for years now and I love it.
My biggest complaint about Soundcloud is their lack of pagination, sorting, or shuffling (real shuffling, not just shuffling the 20 tracks that come in with every infinite scroll page). I have well over a thousand likes on my profile and the only way to listen to some of my earlier likes is to sit there like an idiot and scroll through a hundred pages of infinite scroll.
Also, their iOS app doesn't cache songs. The lack of caching on its own has forced me to go back to Spotify for 99% of my music. I'm not about to pay $80/month for data just for Soundcloud.
Older versions of the Android app allowed for "Stream caching" which you could select up to 100%, allowing you to listen to songs entirely offline if they had been listened to once before and you had not cleared the cache.
Recent versions of the app have removed this setting entirely, and from the behaviour I've noticed indicates that no caching is taking place on the phone.
Which honestly is just really stupid from an operations stand point. Why is there any point to transferring hundreds of megabytes of songs on a playlist over and over? Bandwidth isn't free for users, or SoundCloud's CDN.
This is why I have started to download music from SoundCloud more, and consuming it offline with VLC. It's pretty easy to do, even if SoundCloud doesn't offer the download button.
re pagination/infinite scroll: I had the same problem, it was fucking unbearable to check out peoples' earlier stuff. Luckily, Soundcloud has a very decent public API, which you can use to roll your own narrow client, for whatever you're looking for with the features you want: https://developers.soundcloud.com/docs/api
----
Here, start from my own (extremely crude, for personal use, not for public consumption) "Soundcloud User Unpaginator":
I really love Soundcloud but the "Shuffle" is the only thing I don't like. I am actually planning to design a small single-page one-purpose site for exactly that: A real Shuffle for Soundcloud!
Reposts? They are currently my #1 annoyance on soundcloud.
I'm following 300+ artists and they increased my stream's size by at least 4x.
It's not about "finding, sharing and curating" but to spam your stream with duplicate tracks.
Imagine an artist reposting his own tracks. Then his network does. As does his label. And his friend. And then all of them repost a playlist with this track on it. Yay!
Agreed, and the solution is painfully obvious: Show the item once in the feed and just let me know that "DJ Joe Doe, Awesome Records, [guy who is in my network] and 27 other people reposted this."
Come to think about it, isn't that how most other social feeds handle this problem?
Facebook has been doing this for years and it works great. The duplicated content is shown once, and then the separate comment feeds from the different reposts (if there are any) are put below it. Soundcloud wouldn't even have to innovate here; they just need to copy what's already working elsewhere.
Not having duplication is better for revenue because having duplicate content fill up your feed because lots of your friends re-shared something is bad UI. I'm not really that much more likely to click on something after the first time I'm shown something, and I start to get actively pissed off at it after a few unnecessary repetitions (this was a big complaint about the spam coming from Facebook games in the early days). Spamming up the feed with duplicate content means that for the same time spent browsing, someone sees fewer pieces of original content, meaning their average click rate is less, and yes, that costs revenue.
But fundamentally duplication costs revenue because it's a bad UI and bad UIs piss off users, leading them to use your product less.
I follow 2,000 on soundcloud and wish I could follow more (there is a limit currently). I agree that the way reposts are shared on timelines is annoying in the sense that it is inadequate. Obviously the user needs the ability to filter reposts and just see tracks posted by artists (not currently possible). But I also follow people because I know they repost quality content from obscure artists. That's the main way to discover content on soundcloud right now, and it seems completely broken, both for the person doing the discovering, and the person being discovered.
Keep in mind I am primarily interested in DJ-oriented music, which is not music designed to be listened to beginning-to-end, but rather mixed and beat-matched with other music. You can often get the gist of a beat and rhythm in a matter of bars. I'll usually click around a track for 5-10s before I repost it, and move on to the next track. When I'm ready to actually listen, I go back to my profile and play back everything I've reposted for the day, and unpost the stuff that doesn't stand for the full length of the track.
Wouldn't it be better to 'like' tracks as a bookmarking mechanism, then repost when you go back to listen. That's how I do it and that way I'm not filling my followers feeds with stuff I haven't even listened to.
Exactly. And those creating content are the ones who fork out for a paid account. It wasn't designed for 'curators' because they add nothing but noise to the ecosystem.
In one regard, I think it's really cool to be able to follow artists and put together a public playlist for others to be interested in. That's neat. If it's more for recognition and trying to be a sort-of icon for 'picking out great tunes' then I don't think they add much - as in, established music review sites do a pretty good job still of curating and reviewing. SoundCloud isn't really a review platform per se.
Vine seems to have the same problem. Most regular people only occasionally post an original Vine, but if you want to see those, you have to scroll through tons of their reposts first.
I personally want it to go back to (or more likely at this point, find a new website dedicated to) being a community for people who make music. It's now more about listening to music together, or broadcasting to an audience, than sharing music creation.
I miss the Friday nights spent working on music in Ableton, rendering a clip and posting to soundcloud, then commenting/giving feedback to friends who had just done the same. I made several friends by searching genre tags I was interested in, and following people who I would also trade feedback with. Soundcloud (or at least the little bubble in which my friends and I used it) used to be much more about the "work in progress" than the finished results.
Now I only post polished mixes of arrangements or melodies I'm proud of. Nothing that I'd like criticism on, because I know some of my family and non-musician friends will see the tracks and say something. I've gone from posting 4 times a day, to once every 4 months. Maybe going back there isn't a good business decision for Soundcloud, but the "magic" is just gone for me with it's current experience.
Thanks for telling me about this, I'm going to give it a try! Now the tough part will be getting my other friends to try it out as well as the same time.
Yeah it's a pretty neat system though using Dropbox and if anything it can give you some tips about sharing just on your own (Save All, Uploading in proper folders). There are lots of remix contests and the like if you feel up for a challenge.
And the annoying bug on the native mobile app where it randomly stops playing, which has been a problem for so long and still hasn't been fixed despite the companies worth...
Thanks for the heads-up about the site - honestly I've found a lot of good, new, or developing channels through this site and comments like yours. I've taken a look and joined up, and will be definitely interested to play around with it! This fits perfectly in the discussion in my opinion. Looking forward to exploring more.
> I've been a daily soundcloud user for almost 6 years. At some point they gave up on trying to change or improve the user experience.
Yeah, probably at the point when they started hemorrhaging money. Why do people expect a company that is dying to focus on UI improvements? Like any other business in the world, their focus is on staying alive.
How do developers focus on "staying alive" if not by making the product better (or leaving)? I'd expect that the architecture issues of growing larger have mostly been solved by now.
They probably work on things that help bring in more paying customers. UI tweaks isn't among those things. I'm betting they have a whole analytics team, for example.
By tidying some licensing loose ends with that Big Label agreement they signed a couple of weeks ago it seems to me they're readying themselves to be acquired pretty soon.
The auditor has clearly stated that it has doubts about the company as a 'going concern'. This is a technical term in auditing that implies the auditor has doubts that the company will survive (i.e, will have to liquidate) another twelve months. It's not a willy nilly "growing company is losing money" type statement, it means there is a fundamental problem in how the company is financed and operated.
Auditors are required to issue such statements when there is no line of sight to the company being solvent (and no one can guarantee that the company can close a financing round.) I'd venture a guess that almost every startup at a similar stage to SoundCloud would have the same issue if they are audited.
Soundcloud is almost 10 years old. At what point a company stops being a startup? At what point it stops being feasible for a company to operate at a loss?
Are these meant to be rhetorical? You decide when you're going to stop calling it a startup. They are venture-backed and founded within the past decade. I'm going to call them a startup.
As for question number two, I'll let you count how many publicly-traded companies aren't profitable that have been around for decades.
I didn't register an opinion on whether SoundCloud should or shouldn't be profitable, I merely said what GAAS[0] requires an auditor to do.
There is operating at a loss because you are reinvesting (see: Amazon) and there is operating at a loss because your business isn't viable. Soundcloud is somewhere in between those two extremes.
Very true--Amazon would never have a going concern statement issued in its audit, because it voluntarily reinvests what would otherwise be operating profit. I was thinking more along the lines of a company like Sprint, where they are only solvent through issuance of debt and outside investment.
By reducing the statement to that, you're overstating what the auditor actually said:
KPMG said in the report that the need for more investment represented “a material uncertainty which may cast significant doubt on the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”
And again, this was in their 2014 report. So clearly they've last more than a year at this point.
I'm sure the same would have been said about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and a billion other startups that eventually made it. Aren't auditors supposed to be very conservative? It's unsurprising to me that KPM, PWC, or any other auditing firm would have a pessimistic out look of a startup that is relying on raising money to exist.
From your link: "This accounting principle assumes that, a company will continue to exist long enough to carry out its objectives and commitments and will not liquidate in the foreseeable future."
I'm not sure I'd agree there's no other facts. links from the article include excerpts from their financial accounts which don't look good (losing 39M on a 17M turnover is not healthy).
And the quote from the auditor is significant, auditors don't put that kind of thing in unless they have to as it annoys their customers to be reminded that there's significant concern over their ability to continue operations.
Do they have public accounts? I can't understand what SoundCloud could spend $60M USD on? Apparently they have over 300 employees, what do they do all day? Clearly I don't understand their operation.
According to the 2014 accounts the employees earn a little less than €100,000 each, on average. So there's a huge wage bill.
I have no idea what they do either. Legal compliance - DMCAs, and avoiding DMCAs - seems to be a big problem. But I don't understand why they need 300 people to work on that.
if they raised $77m last year that gives them another year or two of runway. But given the continuing losses the current business model doesn't seem to be working, and the burn rate is too high for long term survival without real income growth.
As a user, I love finding music on SC. But I worry they'll try to make the site yet another pay-to-play streaming service, which will kill most of the interest.
Becoming a sales site seems like a better move. IMO there's a big niche for a Bandcamp-but-better site just waiting to be filled.
I'd guess interfacing with music labels and copyright holders must be a special kind of tedious. Seems to be a recurring problem of music platforms who don't fit the industry's royalty model
one excerpt of their P&L does not equal "excerpts from their financial accounts" (plural). And again, it's from 2014.
For all we know Soundcloud was profitable last year. Maybe it's not likely.. but the article has no information at all on last year, yet they feel comfortable making this statement.
The auditor statement is standard boilerplate. It applies to every company that is losing money. That's right -- if the company is losing money, they may need to raise money in the future to continue. No kidding.
there are two excerpts from their financial accounts in there if that makes you any happier (and justifies my use of the plural :) one from the P&L and one from the staffing section
The article is working on what's publicly available (there's a surprise), as they can hardly work on what Soundcloud hasn't released! My guess would be that if Soundcloud had managed to get into profitability that quickly then soundcloud would've got a press release out to say that.
Agree. The article could just as well be written about any other successful high-growth company. Continued survival will require further capital investment...no sh@*t! Obviously the author is just trolling for views. If SC announces another round, and then turns a profit in 3 years, someone will write another article about their "amazing turnaround".
Twitter is a public company now, not a high-growth company. It's quite fair to criticize Twitter, or Zynga, for selling to the public at an inflated price based on hype -- after which their respective stock prices have languished. Keep in mind that there has been plenty of criticism of twitter from the very beginning, all while they went from being worth zero to $20 billion. The point is, criticizing a high-growth, privately-backed company like SoundCloud for losing money only makes sense if you want to criticize the entire model of venture-backed entrepreneurship.
If we listen to you, it would seem that SC is both blameless, and - in fact - not in trouble at all.
And that's all fine and well. It sounds plausible. But it seems like every company is "blameless, and things are actually going peachy... but we still need more funding". And at that point the whole thing starts to become unraveled.
Really, is that what I said? You are committing a logical fallacy concluding that "this article doesn't prove SC is in trouble" implies "SC is not in trouble". Also you are making a big assumption that I approve of the venture funding model as applied here.
The problem is that now investors are asking themselves more frequently, after a few years of sight-unseen venture investing, if it really makes sense for them to keep funneling money into companies that might never turn a profit, let alone have a profitable exit at the horizon.
The talk around here (let me say that again: "the talk") is that investors are getting tighter and tighter and money is not so easy to get anymore. If you follow the startup scene here you can certainly spot some worrying indicators that confirm that sentiment. Add to the mix that the traditionally conservative German/European investor is reading the same news we're all reading about the imminent burst of the Silicon Valley hyper-valuation bubble.
Where is the evidence that Soundcloud is or will have trouble raising money? Pandora just raised $300m in December. Deezer (france) raised €100m less than 2 weeks ago. And Spotify is looking for $500m (just 8 months after raising ~$500m) right now.
No evidence yet. I stated pretty clearly that it's "talk" I was writing about, and it was centered around the Berlin scene. Which is global, of course, but has its own peculiarities.
I hope this is just an alarmist headline. SoundCloud is pretty essential in its space, it's one of the few services that lets you natively get audio on to Twitter, the main place musicians share snapshots of their work and remixes, and a key part of numerous podcasts and ways to embed easily shared audio on the Web. This is one startup I absolutely don't want to see go down the pan.
I still don't think it will happen. Worst case scenario, someone's gonna make a very nice deal when buying them.
What alarms me is the amount of Teslas, Mercedes-AMG M models and other kind of extremely expensive cars parked in their parking lots and in the area surrounding their HQ here in Berlin. In the last one and a half year I've witnessed such a crescendo of the car show-off level that's I'm worried about their paychecks politics. An average salary of ~80k/y, as reported in the linked piece, explains a lot.
You can't even consider buying a car like that with 80k in Berlin, after tax and insurances it becomes ~40k and if you got an expat family and possibly kids that’s enough for owning a bicycle and an OK flat and feeding your family. The offices are rented from an incubator with ties to the gov that has space in the building (and come to have meetings there with their expensive cars).
I don't know where you have those numbers from, but they are very inaccurate. The average household income in Berlin in 2012 was 1650€ net per month [1], so that would be about 20k per year. According to what you wrote, Berlin streets should be essentially free from cars, but I can assure you that this is not the case.
Let me give you some real numbers. I am married and have a small child. I earn 55k gross, which is ~38k after taxes. My wife earns significantly less, providing another 7k per year. I don't know right now how much she earns before taxes, but our gross income combined is well below 80k. So we have about 45k per year and we easily get by. We have a nice flat, eat out several times a week, take ~3 vacations a year, are paying into a private pension plan, and are still saving money. Granted, we don't own a car, but we could if we wanted.
I have no idea if the reported 80k are accurate, but I would be very surprised, as it would be far above the average income for software developers in Berlin (and I think most of their employees are devs).
german here. a net income of 40k will put you somewhere in the top 20% of german households [1], . berlin is generally a really cheap city (see this [2] article from 2014.. cost of living/rents below german average), so saying "that's enough for owning a bicycle" is just not true.
Is that the actual paycheck, or the company expenses on salaries? I'm not an expert on German finances, but I would expect the actual paycheck to be only about 50% of total employer expenses.
And then the state takes about 40% of the actual paycheck in taxes and social payments. Teslas and Mercedeses are not the car of the file-and-rank employees if that ~80k was the full company expense per employee.
I'm absolutely certain those cars don't belong to the employees. Also do take in consideration the average would include salaries from execs and teams in SF and NYC.
Also, the amount you take home from 80k, while good for Berlin standards, is hardly enough to buy a 120k car (depending on your personal priorities, of course)
Of course not, I'm not talking about 200 Teslas parked outside. My reasoning was more or less this: devs, general low level employees, IT technician - they're not paid that much. They would probably be the low end of the pool of salaries. To rise the average so much it would take some good amount of overpayment for upper management and executives. All for a company that doesn't make money. Hence the observation about the cars.
AFAIK the two Teslas frequently seen around the Factory belong to the same guy (one of the founders of the Factory). There's not that many execs at the Soundcloud office as well, from what I reckon.
Also: there's multiple companies in the building complex (including a bunch of seats on the coworking space reserved for offsites from executives from Lufthansa and some other giants)
That would explain the high concentration of super cars, then, but It was at least 4 teslas, 2 blue ones, one in red, one in white.
Source: I lived in the area for 7 months last year
As a music producer I pay 79 EUR / year since 2011 because I enjoy having a practically unlimited storage space for my own productions, may it be a complete song or stems (individual instruments) that I share with musicians I collaborate with.
80% of the tracks on my account are private. I mostly use Soundcloud as a musical post-it system so I can easily listen to my productions in different settings (car, friend's hifi system, earphones etc.), share tracks with label in a "secure" fashion.
I was really saddened to see they introduced ads even for people who actually pay for their service, I felt literally betrayed and angry but fortunately it did not last long. However it leaves traces.
I still find it amazing that they did not introduce basic filters for the stream, like "just grab house mixes at least 45 minutes long"...
Anyway, I am still quite happy with the service even if I could do the same on my own dedicated server, minus the social network thing.
I just wish them good luck but I hope that their longevity will not be due to ads served even to subscribers...
Do you have backups of your tracks into case Soundcloud goes away?
EDIT: Its on my to do list to write a pipeline for Soundcloud for Archive Team this weekend. Just in case. That doesn't pickup private tracks though. Backup your stuff!!
At my company we have a bunch of content that's only archived on SoundCloud. The main barrier I've had to backing up original uploads (only available through the web interface) is the terrible reliability of all the AJAX calls. Even with browser automation, it requires a LOT of error-handling just to navigate between resources successfully.
It seems that all these microservices[1] are there for the sake of blogging about using microservices[2] as there haven't been any new significant new features delivered in years, and the whole application now seems to be delivered through AJAX calls.
Oh, I didn't know that. I ended up writing my own SoundcloudSync.py to keep a backup. Not very sophisticated but easy enough to run by hand whenever I upload something new.
Yes I have all the originals on my music computer, plus do regular backups of all my music projects to my dedicated server.
I'm not afraid to loose what I created. 8 years ago, I lost 200 tracks. When I realized it, I decided consciously to make it a good experience, no grief at all.
I found it to be a formidable opportunity to start fresh, change my process, change my habits and create more!
As a heavy user (but not uploader) I remain almost entirely unmonetised (for better and for worse). I'm fed almost no ads either on the web or app, and there is no premium plan for listening.
Not yet but nothing they charge for has been relevant to me yet as a consumer. I am launching a couple of podcasts in the next month though and want to embed audio on Twitter so will be doing so soon which is one reason I'm concerned at this news as nothing else is suitable IMHO. (I pay for lots of online services, but not if there's no product targeted at my use case.)
Am I missing something? This report is from 2014. Despite the fact that "SoundCloud was heavily reliant on further capital investment to continue operating in 2015."....it did indeed raise money, made it through 2015, and is still operating in 2016.
It seems that this "report" is coming out now because stories about startup implosions get more clicks these days. It shouldn't surprise anyone that they are and have been losing money. That's why these companies raise such large rounds.
All my production buddies hate it. They pay full price, your the world and yet Soundcloud take down the tracks that they OWN. With no recourse or apology. Their system has been broken for 5 years at least for the power users in the community.
Not being able to save tracks for offline use on mobile has been bothering me for a while. Maybe I'm an edge case, but I do a lot of listening while commuting, which means no Internet on the subway here in NYC. That means SoundCloud isn't even an option for me unless I'm at my desk.
Also, I can't save a collection of favorite tracks in any meaningful way. I can favorite them, but they quickly get lost in the mobile UI if I do too much of that. I end up relying on global search every time I want to revisit a song or artist.
Overall it seems like UX hasn't been a top priority for them.
I'd love to pay Soundcloud actual money for the ability to cache songs for offline listening in the mobile app! This would be a killer feature for a listener-focused subscription tier.
Yes. I observed case of two media houses making mobile news apps. They both have roughly similar market share in country, and both apps are well working and okay designed.
However, during commute, the ratio of mobile use I observe is roughly 95:5. Why? Because one of the apps automatically downloads all morning news for offline reading at 6am.
-Also, I can't save a collection of favorite tracks in any meaningful way. I can favorite them, but they quickly get lost in the mobile UI if I do too much of that. I end up relying on global search every time I want to revisit a song or artist.
You can use playlists to save collections of tracks
Sure, but that's a workaround not a feature. I personally don't consume music in playlist format (on Spotify or wherever else). It forces me to still remember "oh yeah, playlist A has those few tracks from XYZ artist".
I'd prefer to have a screen that can sort my saved tracks in a meaningful way.
They "broke" that in the mobile app. It used to be that it would cache the stuff you had listened to (very useful in London where there is no network signal in the tube), but now it seems you always have to be online to listen.
What do 200 people do in such a company? (serious question, I just wonder how the workforce is usually distributed for a single online product of that size)
The company accounts [1] break this down a bit, reporting the staff numbers as 123 "builders", 73 "operators" and 40 "pushers".
A slide deck about SoundCloud [2] explains that "builders" are the design, engineering and product teams, "operators" are finance, HR and legal, and "pushers" are the platform, community, content and marketing teams.
But that doesn't answer the question of what all these people do! I wouldn't have thought they'd be more than 20 people max. Surely they don't have many developers, or we wouldn't see all these remarks here about how they have not updated their site in years. So what's everyone in such a "bloated corporation-like structure" doing? Filling out TPS reports and sending them to each other to get stamped?
I've worked in a place that built and shipped 3 or 4 product lines: actual physical hardware with software, and did it with fewer than 50 people, most of them on the manufacturing line.
Well, they shouldn't gain the bloated-ness of a 40yo bureaucratic corporation that fast, though? At least, that's what all the theories about the way startups should operate are about...
Having run a music site for 7 years or so I am not surprised. We started before Soundcloud and created a very engaged community for musicians that many paid for.
However I never understood how Soundcloud could justify raising so much money given the revenue potential (from producers) in the space. By the way, the site I ran was http://www.muziboo.com
"Forced to close" is a really, really big stretch here.
They have a huge community, play an important role in online music, and have a seemingly excellent engineering team. I'm sure they would be acquired by a major media player long before they ever closed, but I don't see that happening any time more. I bet they'll just double-down and raise more money while trying to develop more subscription revenue offerings to music consumers.
The article refers to a report saying SoundCloud is heavily reliant on “further capital investment” to continue operating. Isn't that just another way of saying they're currently not turning a profit? Wouldn't that have been true of YouTube prior to acquisition?
I'm not familiar with FACT. Looks like it may be a legitimate music industry publication. Looking at the other SoundCloud articles, it seems about 50% of them are in some way negative. That suggests to me that they might have an agenda they're pushing.
Joke aside, it is a great place to find free music. I am not surprised that it is more popular in countries I would assume does not have the same availability of streaming services.
Since I'm from Sweden I've been living the life with Spotify and similar services for years but still I've found myself go to SoundCloud to find the music which I cannot find on Spotify.
Weird how Pakistan seems to be Soundcloud central! I suspect that the advertising sales team at Soundcloud only care about the Western markets, hence I posted the US 'trend'.
> While SoundCloud brought in €17.35m ($15.37m) in 2014, it lost a total of €39.14m ($44.19m). Employee wages during that period also increased 42.5% to €17.9m, meaning that the average wage per employee for that year totalled €79,980.
Wow, that is ridiculously high, especially so for Berlin.
Perhaps this was the total employee cost for the company, and not the actual pay check the employee herself sees? Then this would be about within expectations.
Why do you think that is ridiculously high? Isn't everyone complaining how impossible it is to hire people? As mentioned elsewhere, this number probably includes employee overhead. But even if it didn't, I'd consider that about the minimum for accepting a salaried job. Maybe that's why I'm still contracting...
How is that 'ridiculously high'? That's say e4000/month after taxes (if total tax pressure is 40%). These costs also include e.g. the director's salaries, which I presume are more than 80k/year for a 10 year old company with 200 employees.
Glassdoor says 50-65k before tax for run of the mill 'software dev' in Berlin, with soundcloud being on the upper end of that range; and it seems I underestimated tax pressure with 40%. Considering that 80k is the average (including directors, mgmt, legal, ...), I wouldn't say that those salaries are 'outrageous'.
I use Soundcloud for hours every day, and would GLADLY pay a Spotify type premium for it. As others have noted, it has an incredible amount of music that exists nowhere else (including a lot of non-EDM), but it is a great listening platform for many other reasons. The biggest, for me, is that SoundCloud has far and away the best discovery mechanisms. The 'play related tracks' feature is the most effective radio I've found (better than Pandora, light years better than Spotify) and my feed is always full of new songs that I enjoy.
But SoundCloud has one big problem holding it back, in my opinion:
Getting a great SoundCloud experience requires a lot of upfront work. To have a good feed, you need to find and follow a bunch of artists and/or 'like' a bunch of tracks (from when I first started: the default feed, or low-data feed, gets stale quickly, and had many songs that did not align with my preferences). This sounds simple, but it's not, as SoundCloud is designed for discovery rather than building/organizing your music library. For example, there is no library-like simple list view, and you can't filter/sort your 'likes' as you can in Spotify/iTunes. Also, the radio-like features are not immediately apparent, making it hard to bootstrap your SoundCloud preferences by passively listening/liking tracks as you go.
Looking to the alluded future monetization: The ads are infrequent, and not at all annoying. Unless they ramp up the ads, it will not be a big incentive to pay for premium.
There is really nothing like SoundCloud if you like EDM or EDM-influenced indie music (think Miike Snow).
you can pay a spotify-type premium for it, if you want to support them just upload to a pro account (even if you don't upload any music). I am going to do that myself as I just realized pretty much 90+% of the listening I do at work while coding is on soundcloud (I also have a subscription to google music, but don't use it as much for EDM)
They lost me as a paying customer when they decided to allow Universal Music Group to remove content directly. Overnight I just stopped caring about Soundcloud. They might have done more such things to piss off users since then, but I wouldn't know. I, at least, decided it would not be worth investing my time in the site after that.
Apart from that; yeah, it is the Flickr of music -- promising at first, but then a whole lot of non-evolution of the site.
This is why archive.org with your own netlabel is a better choice, theyre not for profit so the bar is lower fir their survival. The more we donate to them the better they get too!
Soundcloud seems like the only service that allows other sites to use the music data. By that I mean the ability to use actually use the track's sample data for creative coding audio reactive projects like http://vertexshaderart.com
On the negative side, as others have pointed out, they haven't done much to make the site better for various definitions of better. I've found searching fairly lacking. I'd love something that tried to find tracks I'd like (is that something deep learning could figure out?).
Also when searching for music I type in some keyword and then start listening to tracks. The browser gets more and more bogged down the more tracks I listen to. Something about their design is adding more parallel work with each new track clicked on. Maybe that's a browser bug? Eventually I have to refresh the page and then scroll back down to the last track I played and continue the process of listening to tracks.
As a music consumer I personally want to pay for soundcloud instead of getting ads, which could bring more revenue than ads and be more flexible in prizing, but when I asked soundcloud support for the option they said they had no immediate plans for one. In the end money is king and I don't understand why they haven't explored more revenue options.
I really hope this isn't true. I've hosted my own music there for years (and am a paying customers), and almost all of the interesting new music I find is from there.
One thing that might help them is to charge non-creators for some services. Right now there just doesn't appear to be any reason to if you're just a listener.
I don't say this about many start ups, but sound cloud has created an amazing experience and interface for publishing sound. I don't know how defendable it is, but they are one of those start ups that definitely needs more capital before they build out their revenue streams. And I think they are going to get it.
Unfortunately, none of this is surprising. Soundcloud has no real revenue model due to a seemingly inability to court rights-holders, and the product is mediocre at best. Soundcloud provided an outlet for the indie and electronic music communities to share and consume music early on, and that has more or less remained their bread and butter to this day. Even if they were charging end-users for access, the viability of it is as a competitor to Spotify and Apple music, at the prevailing market price-point ($10 / month) is slim. Ultimately Soundcloud is a niche product competing against broad market products with no real path to revenue other than somehow bringing mainstream music onboard. And it seems pretty clear that mainstream music isn't interested in collaborating with Soundcloud.
Reminds me of the danish site MyMusic.dk that was founded in 1998, and became the go-to site of danish underground artists. In 2010 it just disappeared from the web, and 12 years of music from 16.000 danish artists were just _gone_.
It reappeared as Bandbase.dk for a while, but then went bankrupt again.
That said, I think Soundcloud has missed a huge opportunity by being market leaders. They could have taken the best from Bandcamp, and earned royalties from each sale. It would make it so easy for indie artists to earn a little money from what they love, and also make Soundcloud money. Instead, artists are putting up 30 second previews on Soundcloud with a link to Bandcamp to buy/download for free.
I seriously don't understand how this is possible. I was the multimedia editor of a college newspaper in about 2008 and we needed a place to host podcasts. We were looking around for a solution that could serve as infrastructure for audio files, and soundcloud was the only game in town.
It still is, and now, eight years later, podcasts as a business are booming. How are they not making enough money selling their product as infrastructure? Their API is so unbelievably good that even a cash-strapped community college was prepared to pay for their service. Are they really not earning enough revenue to keep it going?
I think it would be a shame if SoundCloud disappeared considering how many of my music discoveries come from there. If it wasn't for SoundCloud I wouldn't have known Pilotpriest, Dance with the dead, Droid Bishop, and other synthwave artists even existed. Bandcamp is okay but I find it hard to find new synthwave and related genre artists on their search. If SoundCloud dies someone over at Bandcamp needs to beef up the search and tagging system over there (I buy much of my music now through BandCamp).
How many of these services will have to shut down before it's user's will start supporting them? Please give me the option of paying money, and making sure you will be in business for the next few years.
I used to produce tech/progressive trance back in the day as a hobby (you can checkout snippets from some of my tracks from SC link below) and remember when SoundCloud first came into the picture. It was a great platform to connect with others who dabble in music production and share tips. It has since become the breeding ground for up and coming EDM producers. A really cool place on the web and it'd be a shame if they closed down shop.
I would be happy to pay something to Soundcloud as long as it's not per-song. It's a good service. Really easy to use as a musician and great for finding new music as a consumer.
Hm, maybe they should be selling some "audiophile" subscriptions with ability to tag and hierarchically categorize songs you liked? I would buy that if the price is not astronomical.
But I also think it's really important that the basic usage stays free for people who randomly wonder in from other websites.
This appears to be the basis for the report. Startups tend to post losses. Amazon did for many years. That's because all the money that comes in gets spent to grow.
Youtube is not making any profit either, I suppose streaming based websites are very difficult to make profitable. Must be the constant growing expenses for servers.
All the sites that have predicted youtube as unprofitable assume google is paying standard bandwidth rates, with the peering arrangements they have with ISPs of virtually any size, they pay next to nothing to reach 95% of end users.
I am not sure of the exact details, but "free" video always had a long way to go. I remember one of my favorite sites pre-2000 was adcritic.com, they were essentially only showing ads, and failed.
While I understand the appeal for Soundcloud as a platform for people to get their music "out there" (especially with EDM), I personally don't like the UX at all. The big gripe I have is that the categories are often jacked up. I'm a big metal fan and almost half of the songs in the "Metal" category do not remotely meet that description.....as in, dubstep remixes of Taylor Swift songs and crap like that.
I remember few years ago there was something like forum (or groups) on Soundcloud. It was really nice way to collaborate with other musicians, but they decided to kill it. I lost interest in SoundCloud since... I still have an account, but I am not using it that often. Also how they present tracks is very annoying, so I stopped sharing soundcloud stuff with friends. It actually got me into creating my own service.
SoundCloud is a grassroots thing really necessary for creativity coming out of no where exposing music on an even playing field compared with other services. I love them.
They should not only charge for music uploading but have a premium plan for listeners like myself similar to Spotify. No ads the ability to archive songs outside of normal release windows, something like that.
Losing soundcloud would be terrible. Half of my music discovery is through soundcloud; Though I find myself listening 80% of the time on Spotify instead, moving over once I find an artist through soundcloud.
Soundcloud's mobile app is terrible though, randomly freezing and crashing. Wonder if poor engagement through the app contributed to the this loss posting.
80k average salary is crazy for a Berlin based company. They have a reputation of poaching engineers and granting them crazy salary increases. They then also let them do kind of whatever they feel like with whatever tech stack which may work if you have a money printing service but is questionable for the stage they are in.
The report makes it clear that while the company had “adequate resources to continue in operational existence for the forseeable future,” SoundCloud was heavily reliant on “further capital investment” to continue operating in 2015.
What's the difference between "operational existence" and "continue operating" here?
While SoundCloud brought in €17.35m ($15.37m) in 2014, it lost a total of €39.14m ($44.19m). Employee wages during that period also increased 42.5% to €17.9m, meaning that the average wage per employee for that year totalled €79,980
Seems like a pretty generous wage increase for a company in the red.
Especially given that good talent here in Berlin is much much cheaper. 80k/year scores you some superstar devs, while that's probably the peanuts some out-of-school pre-puberal intern would earn at a Valley startup.
What's really expensive here is management people and the way German hire the mid-level management is broken most of the time. I don't know if it's a German thing or a global corporate thing, but I've personally witnessed some pretty interesting hiring horror stories.
80k/year probably includes the 28-ish% "Lohnnebenkosten" (incidental wage costs)
So the actual paycheck would be around 60k. I think that's pretty ok for Berlin?
Having worked in both, Germany and Silicon Valley, I'd say that the middle management hiring is certainly a bigger problem in Germany than I've seen on either the east or west coast in the US.
Yes, but the Soundcloud devs are average and as such overpaid. I think it is a combination of non-merit in hiring and a culture that is toxic for good development (favoring coolness to getting things done i.e. effectivity/doing the things that earns money).
I didn't expected that, Soundcloud is such a nice plateforme. I thought that they were still growing, there is so much potential, with artists promotion and so on. I also wonder why they never became a selling platform. Is there any company that would buy the service ?
It looks nice. Good luck with it. As with all audio hosting services, after a moderate amount of success you will surely find yourself on the radar of the anti-piracy agencies. I hope you are well prepared and can overcome this challenge.
I do not upload any music on to sound cloud, but never the less, it is one of my primary ways of discovery. I would happily pay $2-4 a month to so called get rid of "ADs" and support them.
KPMG's statement is pretty standard in any GAAP financial statement. If your company is losing money, it pretty much has to be included. Not many startups wouldn't have it.
I will be very sad if they go, as I have my music (from another life) on that service. However, I doubt that will happen. At worst they will scale down their operations and cut costs.
What we need is something that isn't centralized. The problem that needs to be solved is how to pay for the things that you care about but, keep enough in a common pot to not only share the service but, to make systems for discovery.
Soundcloud is awesome. It's needed, it's culturally important but, it doesn't make money. We should stop thinking of things like Soundcloud like business but, more like museums with infinite square footage.
We can pay the artists as patrons directly, we can pay tour guides who show us interesting and amazing things. We have decent micropayments. What's left is the thing that hackers aren't great at, the cultural work of changing public perception.
Most artists just want to eat, pay rent and live well enough to create more art. I love that Soundcloud allowed people to experiment, get good enough to book gigs and then I could see them live.
What we need is a system that does that efficiently. We need a better managerial structure than VCs + Founders. Soundcloud is a pretty solved problem, both technology wise and UI wise. What isn't solved is funding and management.
There are so many services that would be wonderful to have but, will never be $1bn+ exits for anyone.
Twitter should be. IMHO I think it will be eventually.
Every social network gets abandoned once people put up ads. It's pretty crazy that we live in a world where conversation, speech both personal and public are strip-mined for profit.
People will eventually realize that freedom costs something. Thankfully, technology should make that cost in dollars very cheap.
A Facebook scale social network could charge $1/yr and pull in $1.5bn/yr. A decentralized FB-scale network isn't trivial both technically and socially but, it's something that we as hackers should figure out.
A decentralized social network would be a huge win for freedom of speech, thought and information. Facebook already filters everything that people see. It's a centralized, easily subpoena-able entity.
The larger, much harder problem is how do you convince teenage girls to join a service. They are both the heavy users and set the communication norms for the next generation.
The next problem is how do you build something that is wanted by society but, don't do it by setting up a relationship with a VC looking to exit for 100X what they put in.
Once we solve those two issues, social and funding then the world will very quickly become a place where we can build things that are self-sustaining, less link rot, less invasion of privacy, less filtering of thought and speech by centralized powers.
The worst part: we all knew this day was coming from many years back. Because we all know but don't want to accept that advertising is the only viable business model on the web.
