"Soundcloud is fine and will be around for years, stop backing up all of the music".
Didn't the CEO say something along those lines ~2 weeks ago when they forced the archive.org folks to stop pulling down a backup copy of everything? Funny how quickly that was proven to be BS.
Not that anyone should be surprised by this outcome.
Reminds me of the financial crisis when banks that were losing billions would claim to be "Awash with liquidity." Once the CEOs admit weakness, the sharks circle tighter.
Probably unaware it exists like everyone else. SoundCloud Go has been so poorly marketed.
Up until a few weeks ago, I only ever saw it mentioned on tracks where I could only listen to a sample. On my feed right now, the only link to it is in the overflow menu on the top navigation. Meanwhile, SoundCloud Pro has a big advert which takes up about 1/6th of the page.
How can a website that lets people upload music files and comment on them, and play the music POSSIBLY need $170 MILLION to operate? I just don't get what they could possibly need that amount of money for.
* Business development teams for the Nth media company collaboration scheme
* App development teams for the Nth iOS app redesign
* Back-end and ops teams for the Nth overwrought storage architecture
* Front-end teams to explore rewrites in the Nth proposed in-house JS/CSS framework
* Operations people to keep the aforementioned people paid and fed
Licensing music. As to the reasoning behind considering licensing music, then giving it away for free to your customers to be a wise business decision, I don't quite follow their strategy.
Well, if the uploader remembered to enable that setting, you can download the mixes in a much better quality than the 128 kbps streaming quality that both services use. Sometimes even in WAV of FLAC format. This was not possible on Mixcloud the last time(s) I looked, but do speak up if you know it to be possible! Without this option, you (obviously) risk loosing your favorite mixes whenever the funding runs out of the service, so I believe this to be a differentiating factor. Apart from how it sounds when you play it back on a real stereo setup, of course.
As someone who uses both platforms and actually prefers Mixcloud as a product, the user base is simply not there. I see much more engagement on Soundcloud.
Maybe it's different for other creators, artists, DJs, but I'd guess that's a very common experience when comparing both services.
Mixcloud founder here, thanks its appreciated. Theres one big different on engagement, we tend to see lower play counts, but higher number of minutes listened per play. You'll start to see us surfacing this data more in the upcoming months, and I expect everyone to be pleasantly surprised.
Since you are here, can you also surface anything about potential plans for offering an improved (and possibly paid-for) streaming quality and/or offering the mixes available for download? I'm in it for the mixes and I want to love Mixcloud, but there is only so much fun to be had with discovering a mix that cannot be played on a quality stereo and/or in a place without internet connection (so at the party, in other words) and those will in any case go on my priority list if and when Soundcloud finally goes down.
Indeed–that image caption serves absolutely no purpose except to beat on someone who is at a low point anyway.
And it doesn't even make sense! Taking a vacation every now and then is likely to improve productivity, and for SoundCloud specifically, it seems almost necessary to go to Burning Man and mingle. The criticism is especially rich coming from a guy who looks at least twice as stoned in his official TechCrunch photo than the SC CEO at Burning Man.
Creating SoundCloud is more than 99.x% of people ever achieve, including me, the author, and the editor of this shameless excuse of an article. SoundCloud is obviously beloved by many. If they don't find a way to get those people to pay, they're in good company.
Bias actually makes for interesting reading and clickbait. That is what it's all about. It's not about being fair and balanced. And actually given that the truth does not matter to the vast majority of people reading Techcrunch (or honestly any publication) I am not sure it even would be a smart business strategy. People watch wrestling and they know it's fixed. People read fiction. This is another version of it.
Also full of dramatic, unsubstantiated claims such as:
> Now staff morale is in the toilet, the user experience is a mess, the subscription models are unappealing, competitors are growing rapidly and musicians are fleeing to other upload platform.
I really thought TechCrunch was getting better, but man this is bad journalism. It's like a hit piece in a high school newspaper.
To be fair, the UX is a mess. The mobile experience is horrible and always tries to drag you to the app (which is not great), and SC is constantly trying to push the "social" aspect. I can't filter out "shares" or whatever from my feed, which means instead of listening to the artists I like, I end up listening to a bunch of random crap they share.
> By August 2014, it was abundantly clear that the SoundCloud’s advertising program, which would allow artists and labels to collect royalties, would not launch as planned. Despite Toig’s promises, not a single major label had agreed to a deal. The project launched with a eleventh-hour pivot to focus on independent creators, with Toig later apologizing at an all-hands meeting for failing to sign the majors...Ljung assured everyone in attendance that the label arrangements would eventually get done. A few days later, he flew to California and went off the grid. It was time for Burning Man.
Further down in the article:
> ...The stalled deals also affected internal operations at SoundCloud headquarters in Berlin. Though the $150 million round never closed, managers had been instructed to double the size of the company’s 150-person engineering team.Meanwhile, Ljung continued to travel the world. In May 2015, he spoke at a Burning Man–esque festival outside of Las Vegas called Further Future. In June, he showed up in an ad campaign for Italian luxury company Salvatore Ferragamo. When SoundCloud employees from around the world flew to Berlin for an August retreat, he was nowhere to be found.
Yes. The article you are referring to has been to the top of HN. And I think the buzzfeed article did a good job by speculating on the reasons why Sound Cloud may be doing bad with CEO not being available. This TechCrunch article, however uses just the image with no context to explain something which is _completely_ out of context for what this article is trying to convey.
Not only am I not surprised that the CEO of a music-based company is at Burning Man, I fully expect him to show up at SXSW as well. Anything less would almost seem like a dereliction of duty.
These press prostitutes know exactly what they're doing. Thank God for services like archive.is because otherwise they just blackhole everything scummy they do.
I agree. I do not see how going to a festival is such a bad thing to do. It's actually a good thing to be able to still do something in your free time that you like..
The author has been kind of a joke on underground hockey twitter (long story) about being the stereotypical self-unaware tech evangelist for some time. Not really surprised to see that it came from him.
youtube-dl's name is unfortunate since it.grew.to support many other sites, such as SoundCloud. You can download flac or wav files often using it on SC content.
Bad. Lossy -> Lossy transcoding will always introduce artifacts. Unless the origin source is lossless. (Actually lossless, not a file someone transcoded to a lossless format from a lossy origin)
For all those looking to make a SoundCloud clone: What is HN's opinion on its failings (from a user perspective) — i.e. how would you make SoundCloud better right now?
Also interested to hear those who can balance with commercial viability.
Keep it focused on community facing artists, remixes, dj sets, etc.
From what I've seen they suffered most from lack of direction, weak leadership, and no real business plan from the beginning. It seems (correct me if I'm wrong) it started as a hobby project and got twisted into a SaaS model that didn't fit it's purpose or audience.
As far as monetization - why not have a Patreon-esque system of support specific content producers/artists? I don't think a blanket monthly subscription is really a good fit but personally I would pay 1-5$ / month for specific artists/content providers and follow only them.
See Bandcamp. The main thing that it doesn't have that SC does is a feed, but otherwise, they do have a Patreon-esque system - you can listen to the music on the website for free, but you can either buy the albums you like (and download them) or subscribe to users you like (and get subscriber-exclusive releases, which may include earlier versions of songs, stems etc)
It is also not particularly Patreon-esque. You don't pay the artist a recurring fee. You can listen to the music for free only a handful of times, then you need to buy it, in a one-time transaction.
Bandcamp is really a place to discover music, buy it and download it. It's not similar to Soundcloud, or Spotify, which focus on streaming. A more apt comparison would be Beatport.
The target audience of Bandcamp are DJs and music connoisseurs, who want to own the music they like, in high-quality formats.
Bandcamp does a really good job of staying focused on these core user groups, and apparently is also doing rather well, financially:
You can't, because people don't pay and don't want to pay, unless they are forced to, as in there's actual scarcity (i.e. no way to easily get that content from anywhere else).
Clearly it can work, because it works for Patreon. It also works for twitch, who allow people to "subscribe" to streamers they like. This entails paying $5 a month (half to the streamer, half to twitch) to receive exclusive chatting rights, special "emotes", and other non-essential features. People do it not because they want access to the special features, but because they want to support the streamer. It seems that people are adverse to paying only when it is on an-item-by-item basis, but are not adverse to it in general.
Why do you think "you can't", despite Patreon (for now) looking like it can work? (Although they of course don't have to finance an entire music sharing service with this)
Music fans seem comparatively loyal and willing-to-spend to me, so I'm curious about your reasoning.
People will pay for indie music, it's been happening for a long time. It still happens today. Particularly if, as we've been talking about here, it's focused on electronica/hip-hop people will pay so they can perform the track in public. There's a real stigma against playing stolen music like that. Plus you can pay for higher quality versions. Lower quality versions don't sound as good when timestretched so they dont work as well for mixing.
Maybe a limit on how many streams/month that could be lifted for a certain fee?
Regardless - point is I think there are ways to monetize this enough to keep it running. I doubt any streaming service will ever be a cash cow but I'm sure there are ways to keep them running.
Scarcity is part of Patreon. I'm guess/assume that much (most?) of the support comes from backers wanting exclusive content that is sometimes offered as a reward.
There's no real evidence that there is a profitable business model for streaming music except insofar as subsidies from other parts of the business make sense overall. Just because a lot of people like something doesn't mean that there is a path to making money with it.
I don't have strong feelings about what's good and bad about their UI, etc. Their main failing is that they're probably not going to exist much longer unless Apple, Google, or someone along those lines snaps them up at fire sale prices and is OK with losing money on them.
I second this, the mixes are my favorite part as well as DIY producers.
I would say focus on sets over tracks, and develop partnerships to stream exclusive live concert sets- would be really easy to scale if they focused on electronic first as those sets are easy to record/stream.
I’ve commented extensively on this before if you check my comment history but basically they need to go back to their roots. No commercial music. No copyrighted music. It should be a great place and community for indie and unsigned artists to post content and they can monetise it using paid artist accounts as they originally did (pay for more storage, better listener stats, etc). Commercial music means licensing and lawyers and paying money you can’t afford. Stay away from it. You can’t compete with Spotify et al. Maybe try to implement the tech Moxcloud used to allow DJ mixes but I wouldn’t go further than that commercially.
They need to find a much better way to let their listeners discover new music. SoundCloud groups used to be an alright way to do that, and when SC ditched them they really crippled themselves, and now I as a small, independent music producer don't even bother to upload my music to SC because it gets zero listens since there's virtually no way for anyone who might appreciate it to discover it.
Back when SC had groups, I didn't have a lot of listens, but it wasn't zero, and some people actually liked my music. Now SC is a ghost town for me, so why even bother?
Very much this. Some simple search tools would go a long way - multiple tags, sort by upload date, "not including" negative search, filter by like/download count, downloadable only etc
> Give me a non-browser client.
> Make the browser client not leak memory.
> Don't interleave Soundcloud Go previews with free music.
> Give me reasonable discovery of similar music.
Until Go happened, Soundcloud was my everyday work listening. Now I only use it for long mixes that I can't find (or am too lazy to find) elsewhere.
The challenge for any clone isn't going to be features, it's going to be content.
Don't make a business out of it, at least not directly. Make an open source, federated clone, ideally with something like GNUSocial driving it - something that doesn't go down under the pressure of endless bullshit DMCA claims or investor pressure. Sell your services as a consultant maintaining it for artists who can't get the technical bits down.
We have got to quit trusting commercial entities with our culture. They are not good stewards of it.
+ merge the same shared track
> bob shared "sounds01"
> randy shared "sounds01" {at a later time}
>>merge names if the same track is shared
> Bob & Randy shared "sounds01"
>>ui animations if in real time change of merge, otherwise don't animate
+ make an artist collaboration area
> see Reestablishing Groups/Clubs
+ different subscription models
> free artist account
> paid artist account
[removes ads + more upload space]
~
> free listener account
> paid listener account
[removes ads + more playlists]
~
> advertiser account
[design fill-form ads that link directly to soundcloud track/album (all ads are in the same style, text and links.)]
+ less hassle create playlists - ui
> see old soundcloud, pre-redesign
+ no hidden ui buttons [download, buy etc]
+ having another subcategory called 'reposted/shared' along side tracks, etc.
> toggle reposts on paid accounts
+ groups/clubs readded
> Reestablishing Groups/Clubs to make soundcloud more open to collaboration and like minded playlists.
> Group playlists
I'm probably not the typical user, since I like to listen to music off-line. One thing that annoyed me about SoundCloud is that I often come across music on YouTube that has "download at SoundCloud" links. However, the SoundCloud "download" button always seemed to be a kind of a lottery. Sometimes it was there, sometimes you needed to log-in, more often than not it was nowhere to be found.
I understand that it's not in SoundCloud's interest to offer downloads and these days I just use youtube-dl. But apparently (at least at some point in time) it gave musicians the impression that it will allow their music to be downloaded.
I would pay a premium price to stream in better quality and I cannot for my life figure out why no one has ever suggested this in any of the many recent SoundCloud threads or why SoundCloud hasn't thought of this themselves. But I guess that the two are connected – and that I really am the only person who would pay for this.
SoundCloud uses an encoding algorithm that is extremely bad even for the lousy 128 Kbps they are streaming in. Why should a dedicated music service feature worse audio quality than YouTube? Of course I would pay to improve this during the six hours I spend on SoundCloud each and every working day.
Speaking as a music creator, I like using Soundcloud (for example) to share a new mix with colleagues / clients, who can easily comment at specific times on the recording. Or to share A/B comparisons between different settings. And all of this can be on private URLs shared with only the intended parties.
I don't use it to find new music to "just" listen to, and I never have. But I would happily pay to use it for what I do get out of it. I haven't paid for it yet, because their free tier has so far covered everything I needed...
Is there any business being the middleman among artists? Could have a musicians-only option, similar to IMDBpro, be monetized in SoundClound platform?
A lyricist auction their lyrics among some artists, musicians sell their music to advertisers who are producing a commercial. Musicians selling to filmmakers. Dj buying the rights to remix some songs. I know there are already several businesses doing this, many separate. But SoundClound could dominate this market by having a worldwide scale. And for being the first choice of niche artists.
I am taking this event as reminder to go back to my own self-hosted website with an RSS feed. It doesn't have the complete social factor offered by Soundcloud, but hey, it's my own!
Isn't this already true? You are allowed to flaunt copyright under certain conditions, including if the portion copied is sufficiently small, or if the new work is considered transformative. I would imagine that many instances of sampling would be protected because of this.
SoundCloud's responsibility should be to defend the rights of their users. If a DMCA claim is filed in a way that SoundCloud deems to be unfair, then they might offer to litigate on behalf of their user. As it stands, the majority of artists will capitulate to studio even in cases where the law is on their side, because they haven't the means to defend themselves.
Yes and no. The limit is something like 4 bars I believe. That may be a sensible limit for the traditional 3:20 minute song on the radio, where such a snippet can often capture the central motif of the song.
But most of what makes SoundCloud different are the 3-hour DJ sets that can draw on hundreds of different sources, including other songs, or movie dialog, or noises recorded in nature.
There's no absolute truth how to value each and every contribution to something like that, and it may well be fair to keep some royalties flowing to many of these sources. But as far as I understand it, the current regime is somewhat lopsided in the original creators' favour.
I have been using SoundCloud almost exclusively for the better part of 7 years. I have playlists (eg., Personal Favourites for <Month> `<Year>) dating all the way back to early 2011. It's the /only/ online music service I subscribe to. Zero interest in Spotify, don't care for Apple Music, and even other services (eg., Mixcloud, Bandcamp, Audiomack, etc) miss the point of being driven by a community.
It's a service where, at this point, I cannot part ways with, simply because there are zero alternatives that either emulate its flow (twitter like feed), or house the same blossoming artists that go on to become big (eg., Post Malone, Don Monique, Bryon Tiller, Chance the Rapper, Joe Kay, etc) names.
But, SoundCloud has its issues, and its Go+ service (subscriber since day 1) is a missed opportunity. On its service, there are a many issues with SC.
1. SoundCloud (not a developer, but assuming) seems to have chosen poor engineering choices from the top. SoundCloud just chose to not solve it once it became too hard on their database, including when they famously had issues with being early adopters of Mongo. Their most recent frontend HTML5 rewrite chews up CPU usage, and it just hasn't changed in recent years.
2. SoundCloud Go and Go+ were blatant cash grabs. I purchased it purely to bypass ads, but also because I believe in the /concept/ of the service, but have lost faith in the company some time ago. Content Producers would have paid more if only discovery hadn't gone downhill, which may have heightened
3. Despite the iOS app being updated every other week, it seems as though it /actually/ hasn't been updated in years. You cant click "Like" and then "Repost" within 1-2 seconds of each other before the app just decides to crash. The app even lacks basic controls and makes it impossible to queue up songs /unless/ it's put into a playlist, but then you have to discovery > listen > add to playlist > flip to playlist... it's asinine
4. Artist Engagement is a /joke/. Just to "buy" or "download" a track means you're walking into a wall of questionable sites, and a plethora of social media logins. "LOGIN TO DOWNLOAD! NOW RETWEET! NOW LIKE! ALMOST THERE! NOW SNAP AT US". This isn't SoundCloud per se, but they implicitly allow this to happen. They could have easily required you to follow the artist before downloading directly to solve at least part of the problem. Especially considering you can just use a Chrome Extension to download the song...
5. Music discovery is pathetically trash. The further you drive down the rabbit hole of discovery, the slower the experience becomes. Discovery is the /core concept/ of SoundCloud since there is so much underground talent just waiting to be discovered. This was the entire point of SC, and they failed at it.
6. Copyright issues plague people to the point of marring them from becoming 'djs' or potential artists. It also seems like their ability to work with artists in general is just utter garbage.
7. The UI is /garbage/. It needs to be updated. It's almost like 10 teams at SC worked on it after a night of drinking and throwing up. The simplicity of discovery should be the focal point, but it seems like it's a bug when you want to find new music.
8. The power of SC is the community. It's a feed of new music, even music people you follow are reposting. While "The Upload" is a great idea, it's buried deep behind a sluggish UI.
9. Queueing took far too long to release. It's especially stupid considering that if you dive into an artists page, while having an album queued, playing their song will wipe the playlist in favour of the artists. Come on.
I can go on for /hours/. But, I hope SC stays around, a new CEO comes in, and the product is not only rebuilt, but redesigned from the ground up.
> SoundCloud just chose to not solve it once it became too hard on their database, including when they famously had issues with being early adopters of Mongo
Do you have more info on the Mongo angle? I worked in SoundCloud engineering for a while (long ago) so I'm curious how that happened :D
I have been wanting something like Youtube Red for Soundcloud, where my listens directly correspond to payments for the creators. I had hoped that Soundcloud Go would be like this but I believe most of my money goes to record labels.
> If it can’t find funding or a buyer, SoundCloud could vaporize, destroying its massive archive of user-uploaded music, podcasts and other sounds.
Wrong. If Soundcloud goes bankrupt then the state tries to find a buyer for a new SoundCloud with a virgin cap table. So Soundcloud won't disappear whatever happens.
Are you sure that is what happens, given that SoundCloud is a German company? Afaik a kind of administrator gets appointed by the Court who can take over administration of the company, not sure about the cap table though.
Of course we are all thinking (hmm should we do a clone) and believe me I am not going to deny it's tempting, hell I might even be pushing for something like that.
But the reality is most likely that someone is going to buy them for no money and then continue the platform trying to beat the dead horse alive.
The reality is that you don't make any money on streaming services if you don't hold the rights. Netflix and Spotify should be a good inspiration for how to do it and they aren't even doing as well as one might think.
But there is a very simple way to make a good (non funded) business out of soundcloud and that is to turn it into a paid platform for artists who want to push things up there.
"Employees told us the company is “a shitshow,” with a lack of product direction, talent leaving and employees secretly using Spotify."
Weird. I never really thought about SoundCloud and Spotify being actual competitors. I've always felt that SoundCloud did a lot better with indie/obscure artists, remixes, and the whole "soundclown" meme genre, whereas Spotify did a lot better with commercial/mainstream artists and albums. I use both frequently.
That's part of the problem. They focused all their attention on making a Spotify competitor, when the core principle of what SC unique is the community and a vast underground culture of unknown artists hoping to make it big.
The two are similar in that they're online streaming services, but insofar as everything else, not even close.
If you haven't seen it checkout Soundcloud GO. Essentially they pivoted to a Spotify competitor a couple of years ago but they still have the old, non-subscription version of Soundcloud available too.
The reason I stopped using soundcloud as soon as I could was the fact that soundcloud uses 128kbps mp3 for most of the songs. If that would be at least 160k or 128k opus that would've been fine. But 128k mp3 is noticeably worse.
Being in the music industry, I always had a negative experience using SoundCloud - It's not surprising that by neglecting their user's needs they are systematically imploding.
Could you elaborate? I was under the impression that SoundCloud is one of the few platforms that treats musicians well, and lets fans discover really small bands/djs.
I feel like they had the opposite problem. They only focused on fan-service, at the expense of profitability. The reason the music industry hates it is because it removes them as gatekeepers. Soundcloud gave a platform to musicians that allowed them to gain exposure to audiences without having to bend the knee to LA or NY.
i really like soundcloud for drum and bass mixes that would otherwise be pretty difficult / impossible to find otherwise. I will miss it if it goes under :(
Not the user you replied to, but for me, Youtube's "automatic mixes" loop pretty quickly. Also, YT is a bit more of a pain to use on mobile (either leave a video running, uses up battery and data, or use a modded version of Youtube which pretends it's Youtube Red and has background playback enabled).
Soundcloud "just worked". It even caches your feed after you listen to it, so I was able to use it without it using my mobile data for a while.
well youtube has a video associated with it, i usually plug my phone into the car and listen there. Plus the youtube "mixes" thing isn't remotely the same thing as a good set from a real dj.
The dnb subreddit focuses mainly on new releases of individual tracks and discussion about artists, not so much for people to post mixes.
I dunno, soundcloud was just better. I could sit in the car and search for an artist and find a mix (bootlegged or otherwise) and listen to it within a few seconds and be on my way. Other things are just clunky and requires a lot more planning in advance.
I pretty much saw this coming. Posted to a IPFS group last year about using IPFS to make a decentralized soundcloud clone. I was lucky enough to get a response from Juan, the creator of IPFS.
I honestly don't understand the hate. If you're going to DV me at least take a sec to read the thread or let me know what your issue is. The thread has some good responses from Juan; that's really the only reason I posted it here. I thought of going decentralized because (at the time) I loved soundcloud. I used it as an artist and also as a listener. I've been around long enough to know that their model was not sustainable and eventually all the great content would disappear. Decentralized makes sense for something like SC. Let the people who find it valuable share in the costs of serving it a la bit torrent.
lol, just wondering why there is no soundcloud ico yet, as it seems so easy to set it up https://icobox.io/
- would it be too much data for a blockchain based system?
- does anyone need a distributed soundcloud?
Didn't the CEO say something along those lines ~2 weeks ago when they forced the archive.org folks to stop pulling down a backup copy of everything? Funny how quickly that was proven to be BS.
Not that anyone should be surprised by this outcome.