As a heavy EDM listener, Soundcloud is an amazing resource. Unfortunately, I see a variety of problems with the platform.
* The company was founded eight years ago but only added subscriptions to the artist side two years ago (I think?) and to the listener side in the last three months. Ads were added to the listener side a year ago, with no option to subscribe to remove them until the last few months. I basically stopped listening to Monstercat given how pervasive the ads were (every two tracks when skipping after a few seconds? Come on...)
* No way to buy music from them directly. Here's a recent release from Pegboard Nerds: https://soundcloud.com/monstercat/sets/pegboard-nerds-heartb... . First five lines on the description: buy on iTunes, Bandcamp, Beatport, watch on Youtube, listen on Spotify. Not being able to sell music and have an online library of purchases seems like a lost opportunity.
* Speaking of libraries, you can like or repost songs. Beware though - if an artist removes a song or makes it private, it'll be gone from your lists. And I mean GONE - there's no record it existed, no track name, no artist, nothing. I only found out because I'm familiar enough with my likes that I noticed songs weren't playing in the right sequence. This is extraordinarily frustrating - at least if I bookmark music on Youtube, the artist and track name are in the bookmark, even if the video gets removed, making it possible to find/purchase elsewhere. Until a day arrives where I don't have to add the title of every track I like to a local text file, there's no way I'd sign up for their listener side subscription.
I've felt like Soundcloud could become a tremendous force in the music scene if they did things right - a one-stop shop for everything; uploading, sharing, listening, purchasing, collecting. Doesn't seem like they're pulling it off though.
Serial reposters have killed my soundcloud stream. Even artists I like, I offen do not like their taste. Discoverability is also a major problem. Lack of search filters, and arbitrary sorting of results in particular. Hashtag spamming and fake playlist naming to try and pump up play counts are rife.
Don't get me started on the mobile app..
I'd love to see some kind of subreddit like channels built into the platform which could encourage discussion and interaction - between artists especially .. There's so much good random music out there on the platform, but it just feels lost to the ether sometimes. To be honest, the platform which did this best while it lasted was MySpace artist pages.
Edit:
There's so much more they could be doing to become a place for artists. Special curated playlists - pay trendsetters / djs / weirdos to create awesome playlists out of the current content. Something I can set and listen to, look forward to updates on. The fact that Youtube is a better radio than Soundcloud is depressing to me.
Also, something like the RBMA[1] could easily boost the sense of community and respect for the platform. At the moment it just feels like.. plumbing. No love whatsoever. The official soundcloud blog[2] is so sterile and detached from the music they host. If I was them I'd be going insane over Desiigner's Panda[3] becoming No. 1 on Billboard [4] after having such a meteoric rise within the platform - feels like Solja Boy - Crank Dat moment for Soundcloud, yet there's pretty much nothing officially acknowledging it.
Many friends/other people online have all expressed the same frustration. I've reached out to Soundcloud but have had no response. If any SC engineers are lurking here, can you shed any info on why there's no built in toggle or navigation pane to only show original content and not reposts?
1. Tracks only shows on an artists page, not your stream of all artists you are following.
2. Tracks wasn't there originally when this extension was made. It was only added somewhat recently.
3. Often artists will use the repost feature to share their own tracks that have been posted to their label's or another artists account. This is especially true when it comes to remixes. This extension will still consider these to not be a repost :)
I'm so sick of all these businesses starting out humble and bespoke and then suddenly chasing growth and trying to take over the world.
Soundcloud is a tool for artists to host their music with a minimum amount of hassle. It's also a tool for fans to discover said artists. But it should be nothing more than this. There are other competitors that have already taken over other aspects of the music space, and own it completely -- but nobody owns artists'-hosting-their-music like Soundcloud.
It was the beginning of the end when they were bought by ABC or whoever-it-is. I wish there was some way for a business' customers to block acquisitions, maybe we'd fewer entrepreneurs with reckless exit strategies messing with the good things in life.
Soundcloud was launched in 2007, and raised €2.5M in VC cash in 2009. Soundcloud charged nothing and had no real business model.
Seems like to me they were chasing growth for the beginning. The "tool for artists to host their music with a minimum amount of hassle." was subsidized by VC money.
Art has, for thousands of years, flourished under a system of patronage. Sometimes patrons really wanted art, sometimes they it was just a selfish indulgence, but unless they were commissioning something specific the art was generally left to its own devices. I could see Soundcloud thriving under such a system.
And how much of this money lost was due to technological vs. human costs? How is it that a streaming site needs nearly 200 employees anyway?
Soundcloud could be thriving, but then they seem to have put people at the helm who prioritize spending money above all else.
Your comment is besides the point. My point is, at no point did SoundCloud have "humble beginnings". At no point would SoundCloud have considered a business relationship that would have allowed its customers to block investment. The SoundCloud you are dreaming of never existed.
Now if you believe that you can run a SoundCloud competitor that:
1) supports over 250M monthly listens and 12 hours of upload every minute with fewer than 200 employees and lower overall costs
2) be cash flow positive the entire time, or secure investment for someone who doesn't care about a return (you should really join the rest of us in 2016, the art-funding model of the renaissance is long over, just ask Kanye West[1])
Then you should do it, or at least think about doing it. However, I feel as if you are really underestimating what it takes to build a service like SoundCloud.
I still fail to see how you need 200 people to run a CRUD app that streams audio. Or, at least, I fail to see how you would need that many people if you had a small team of computer nerds that knew how things work. Given the job market seems to be skewing more towards bootcamp grads, and given the general paucity of practical intelligence that I seem to encounter from businesspeople, maybe you're right on that one.
And of course Soundcloud wouldn't consider a business relationship that lets customers block acquisitions! Nobody would! That's why there needs to be a way for people to block it anyway.
That said, my earliest uploads are 6+ years old, and I had an account prior, so I think I have been around for at least part of what could be considered "humble beginnings".
And for the record I have never had an issue over their need to charge for premium accounts. That's fine. It was a bit bullshit when they switched to their "casette tape" model, as it fucks over the DJs in the crowd who use SC for hosting hourlong+ sets. I am not advocating for Soundcloud being completely free and 100% available to all -- you are right, it wouldn't survive.
The problem is that once SC was acquired, their tone shifted. SC slowly grew to be this place that was about more than indie artists posting their work -- SC started targeting big fish (like everyone else, sigh), and attracting large volumes of new users. The larger user pool has been slowly diluting what was once a relatively tightly packed (and very communal feeling) community of artists. You could write an artist and actually expect an answer from them! All this has gone away in the years SC has grown considerably.
SC should follow the model of DeviantArt, or Craigslist. Pick you niche, and dominate the shit out of it. Charge money only where absolutely necessary, from the subset of your customers most likely to pay, and do it in a way that supports the rest of the business.
I'm reminded of Roshi, their distributed/crdt Redis solution, they open sourced (https://github.com/soundcloud/roshi) a while back just to deal with problems of their scale. CRDTs and Distrubuted programming is not something they teach at coding bootcamps. You should really take a look at some of their developer talks and get a sense of their scaling pains before you assume that SoundCloud is built by 200 fresh-out-of bootcampers (Also, those 200 aren't exclusively engineers, you need a sizable marketing/community team to manage all that global talent on your platform).
Even a feed, where one user can publish to millions others, is non-trivial at scale. I think you are seriously underestimating the amount of work that goes into building something like SoundCloud.
Ignoring this - it doesn't seem SC has ever been in the green so comparing to relatively simple models of DeviantArt or Craigslist doesn't make sense. DeviantArt doesn't have the target of the MPAA on its back. SoundCloud will never be as cheap as Craigslist to run.
Also, SoundCloud hasn't been acquired - I'm not sure where you are getting this info. The same guys who ran the ship in its "humble beginnings" are running it now.
Yes, because many believe art to be a higher calling than some stupid new gadget or cloud service.
While I don't really want patrons or VCs ruling the scene, and would much rather let the artists reign, artists generally don't have jobs (VCs took 'em) and so they don't have much money, so they can only do so much to support themselves. Enter the patron.
Cool why don't you go ahead and do that instead of expecting someone else to do it?
It's easy to say "someone else should pay for this without expecting anything in return but the glory of art". People would rather make more money from their money than not. If you feel that strongly, go and break the cycle. If your personal wealth is not enough to make a difference* by doing so then I don't see how you can go giving out your "solution" which is just getting someone else to pay and them not have any say in how their money is being spent.
Gosh how reckless of them to want to pay back their VCs (streaming enough music to satisfy millions of people costs $$) and also become a profitable business!
Soundcloud is a terrible mobile app and a slightly better website. I love that I can access vast troves of undiscovered house music - but you couldn't design a worse UI if you tried.
Soundcloud is lame now that the ads have come. Listening to a taco bell ad come on in the middle of my favorite playlist really kils the vibe.
It's interesting for me as a long-term Soundcloud user to hear a predominance of listeners here, when my experience of the site is that it focusses on producers and performers.
Sure, once in a while someone with a YouTube mindset uploads an album that they clearly didn't write, or an indie label learning about PR reposts their own back catalogue, but not that often. Mostly, artists upload tracks they wrote or are working on, and people repost a curated taste of what they are inspired by.
That's what I found about six years ago and my community on there have helped to keep me publishing music occasionally - not just writing bits and pieces but actually finishing music and hitting upload.
I think I'm fairly central for Soundcloud's target audience. You'll find download links on my tracks (full quality) and no Beatport, iTunes or Bandcamp links, because it's something I do for fun, not profit. I've never reached my upload limit because I'm not exactly prolific - or because the limit is generous.
The service has value to me, but I simply don't need anything that going pro offers.
People are very particular about their music. Doesn't it make sense that a service built for niche genres doesn't have broad appeal? I fucking love soundcloud and they nailed their product years ago, so I'm really excited to see what deals they've been cooking up the past year or so.
There is nothing inherent in the structure of SoundCloud that limits its usefulness to only niche genres. Mainstream genres simply have access to more established avenues of promotion, like radio and YouTube.
I used to love Soundcloud, but with growth and licensing concerns, mixes and remixes/edits started going missing. Then they deleted the Balearic Social account.
A lot of the better balearic types are posting at hearthis.at now, but the website is pretty rough, and their android app is terrible. Mixcloud seems a better choice.
How dose one enable it? I only get the "something went wrong" page when visiting the site and all the help docs only reference an HTML5 embedded player.
* The company was founded eight years ago but only added subscriptions to the artist side two years ago (I think?) and to the listener side in the last three months. Ads were added to the listener side a year ago, with no option to subscribe to remove them until the last few months. I basically stopped listening to Monstercat given how pervasive the ads were (every two tracks when skipping after a few seconds? Come on...)
* No way to buy music from them directly. Here's a recent release from Pegboard Nerds: https://soundcloud.com/monstercat/sets/pegboard-nerds-heartb... . First five lines on the description: buy on iTunes, Bandcamp, Beatport, watch on Youtube, listen on Spotify. Not being able to sell music and have an online library of purchases seems like a lost opportunity.
* Speaking of libraries, you can like or repost songs. Beware though - if an artist removes a song or makes it private, it'll be gone from your lists. And I mean GONE - there's no record it existed, no track name, no artist, nothing. I only found out because I'm familiar enough with my likes that I noticed songs weren't playing in the right sequence. This is extraordinarily frustrating - at least if I bookmark music on Youtube, the artist and track name are in the bookmark, even if the video gets removed, making it possible to find/purchase elsewhere. Until a day arrives where I don't have to add the title of every track I like to a local text file, there's no way I'd sign up for their listener side subscription.
I've felt like Soundcloud could become a tremendous force in the music scene if they did things right - a one-stop shop for everything; uploading, sharing, listening, purchasing, collecting. Doesn't seem like they're pulling it off though.