It's been a downhill trend ever since trending likes were replaced by reposts. Trending likes actually showed which tunes my friends found most interesting. Reposts allowed a single user to spam a feed with their personal taste. Then repost bots were allowed to require repost to unlock a free download and now discovery on SoundCloud is almost dead. My friends who are successful producers but refuse to play the bot and pay-for-repost game are completely drowned in the noise.
My bet is that since trending likes are a Graph DB problem, SoundCloud just chose not to solve it once it became too hard on their database. They famously had issues with early Mongo adoption so this would fit right in. Their most recent frontend HTML5 rewrite always winds up my CPU and hasn't changed in a couple years.
SoundCloud to me has always been a great idea with some great design that got ruined by some poor engineering choices from the top. And at the end by a desperate grab for stats and cash. I think producers would have paid more, better subsidizing free plans, if discovery hadn't gone downhill. I ran the numbers once on how CDbaby and Bandcamp became successful (based on stats trickled out over the years) while SoundCloud could never turn a profit. There's still plenty of room for someone to do this right.
I used to go to SC every day. When reposts started becoming a thing I loved it, since the people I followed would repost stuff I would have never found. But I guess I quit in time, as I never saw bots or what you are describing. That's too bad :(
I only started using sc once reposts were already out and never had an issue with them, but there's this new trend I've started noticing on SC, where artists add their new songs to a playlist and then repost the playlist every day. If a playlist has 20 songs it can be impossible to listen to anything else on your stream because the whole playlist gets added to the queue. I find it extremely selfish since it just makes it that much harder for other artists on the stream to get their fair share of air time.
That’s the reason I’m using Hype Machine to listen to those "trending likes" tracks on SoundCloud. I almost find a nice new song to listen every single day.
Yeah me too, Hype Machine is fantastic for that. Such an undervalued service nowadays. If you haven't subscribed as a supporter I'd recommend it http://hypem.com/supporters
I wasn't a fan of the UI refresh for the same reason, so I made my own alternate homepage which sorts the feed by artist and de-emphasizes reposts (http://gurlitz.org/soundcloud-digest/). Unfortunately like you said, content also dried up around the same time.
I haven't been using it long enough to have an opinion, but I did notice that the hosts of podcasts I enjoy would repost when they guested on another podcast, which I otherwise would not have noticed, and did appreciate.
Trending likes solved this, because even an upvote brigade required the user to have multiple friends in the brigade. All I had to do was follow a few key influencers on a topic and the post would show in my feed.
I signed up years ago, but only became a user in the past year or so. It's never really appealed to me for music discovery but it's been great for checking out new podcasts.
For anyone confused by this: SoundCloud can't play podcasts, but a small percentage of podcasters host their show on SoundCloud, and the app can (naturally) play those.
However, SoundCloud has probably seen the peak of its podcast-driven business. Podcasters have been wary of SoundCloud's fortunes for some time, and most have a Plan B in place. Today's news has likely expedited plans to find alternatives among at least some podcasters.
Iterface not changing in years makes me think it's ripe for an acquisition from Barry Diller's IAC. They specialize in sites that don't update their interfaces for years at a time.
(Apologies to those that work for one of those companies.)
I originally went to SC to find new music. If that's even possible, I haven't been able to crack that code. I've given up, and typically only end up from a link. Rarely by choice.
I was a director of an engineering department for SoundCloud for a time and left several years ago. Frankly none of this should be surprising: nobody there could figure out a product definition nor a monetization plan. What is more: the engineering organization at SoundCloud at large was completely fractured and suffered from in-fighting. Nobody trusted anyone across organizations. There was no shortage of bullying even. Taking that in mind, SoundCloud's downfall was to be expected. Because of caustic environment even before the financial crunch, they couldn't execute. Blame the incestuous Brazilian boys club there for it (I'm male, by the way); they bullied just about everyone.
As for Berlin, I am sorry to say: I had high-hopes for the tech culture there, but to call it Mickey Mouse would be a charitable statement. It was laden with confused hipsters who couldn't differentiate between language du jour and its monads and delivering a product.
When I applied, the warning signs were strong. Nevertheless I ignored them — to my own peril. Needless to say, I won't make those mistakes again!
Right before I resigned, it was revealed in a private leads meeting that 18 percent of the engineering force had resigned in that given quarter. Was I surprised? Not in the slightest. That knowledge gave me resolve to get out, which I hadn't yet announced.
I was a long-time SC engineer and can confirm, the influx of Brazilians and especially former ThoughtWorks folks was the inflection point in the destruction of the engineering organization. Conniving and intensely political, they absolutely ruined what was a compassionate, innovative, and productive culture.
Could you go into a bit more detail ? What did the Brazilians do / change ? As for ThoughtWorks, I've been at an interview with them and got a strong cultish vibe from the whole thing. Especially when they made it clear that their 'social responsibility pillar' is cool and all, but "we're still a commercial company that needs to make a profit so don't imagine you'll be doing charity here"...
I'm curious how the people from that environment affected SC's culture.
I'm sure the company had a much nicer culture when they started, given that their product attracted so much original content.. So what went wrong ?
I've met many decent people who work at ThoughtWorks, so it pains me to say this, but based off the interactions I've had with the organization professionally I've started to ask in interviews if the company does any work with TW (and a couple other firms, Pivotal has a poor track record as well). If so, the conversation usually ends there unless it's followed by a qualifier where the interviewer understands my reticence. I've been at two companies where TW involvement torpedoed projects, the culture, and even a sound business model. Not again.
I know the type. It's unfortunate that you have got a taste of the worst we have to offer. There are entire companies that are composed of nothing but these types. Most do not survive abroad and self select so you tend not to get the bad bunch – unless you reach a critical mass, then it becomes self-sustaining.
I joined after the re-organisations that Phil mentions in the linked post here were well underway. From all I could tell, no one regrets it. At the position I head, I only heard rumours about the struggle that he went through trying to improve the engineering problems there.
Everyone (with perhaps a couple of exceptions) I know personally there (Brazilians or otherwise) was trying very hard to improve things. Their efforts could have been misdirected. Their strategy could have been even counter-productive. The intentions were good, though. And I did see some ill-intentioned people in other places.
I even think that thowaway999 was probably well-intentioned. However, an anonymous director calling people that he disagrees with "conniving and intensely political" and claiming a moral high ground is almost comical.
Hi, former SoundCloud VP here. First I think it is highly inappropriate to use this sad event to blame certain nationalities/groups. I hope everybody agrees that SoundCloud is a much needed product and we all hope for its success.
Some general points: Was there a lot of chaos at SC and were some people treated unfairly during that chaos? Yes, most certainly... I am not happy about it.
But we were growing like crazy in headcount and every day we were afraid that the site was going down. Everybody tried to do their best to cope with it, but it was a huge challenge... People had different opinions how to deal with it, and that led to heated discussions and some fights.
Then to come in from a established organisation and complain about it, is at the very least naive.
Growing engineering organizations is simply not a reproducible science. Successful companies are so rare and the conditions which led to their success so exclusive that it's much easier to point fingers at the people you disagree with. I think the parent captures this.
The backlash which is emerging now are really a products of pent up frustration. SoundCloud was never able to develop a culture which resolved differences. Lots of acquiescence, lots of political assassinations but no mechanism for reconciliation. That's where I point my finger at least.
As they say in the German, der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf her (a fish rots from the head down). This man bears a tremendous amount of responsibility for everything described above.
I'm surprised that anyone architect or manager would blog that they're leaving a senior role after just 20 months. However when I've seen architects leaving a trail of destruction that looks familiar.
Everything mentioned in the linked article and his soundcloud post seems quite good. They greatly reduced new feature cycle time by bringing the right people together and having them work collaboratively rather than sequentially.
Hi, my name is Jano González, I work for SoundCloud and I'm from Chile, so it hits me when I see latino americans been stereotyped. I don't know if we ever met, but blaming things on people with a specific nationality it's super fucked up dude, please don't do that.
i apologize if i offended you or anyone else. the mention of "brazilian" is a relevant as a secondary detail. there was a group of problem engineers who were ring led. that group was brazilian. that they were latin american or brazilian is unimportant but a significant identifier of the social group. if they were there when you were you would know exactly who. otherwise it may have been confusing. prejudice is not at play. i was pointing out an organic association.
as i said they don't bear sole responsibility but rather signified the problem for the impunity of being able to break the no asshole rule. other immature apples spoiled the basket as well. plenty of innocent people suffered. none deserved that. burnout is evil. i hope we have all learned our lessons and become better people.
I worked for SoundCloud for about a year, I can attest that SoundCloud was a huge mess, mostly because the two founders (both Swedish) had no clue how to manage the business.
I think every nationality represented in the company gave a good contribution to make the place both good and bad.
I can't say the Brazilians there were an issue, but I can see how some folks, especially in the infrastructure team, wouldn't like them.
I personally had a lot more issues with German people, both in the company and outside of it, to be honest.
I hope you understand that you sound fairly angry and biased (no pun intended).
By being a director and having this sort of blaming outlook on other people, you most likely have a good share of responsibility for the downfall of the company.
I did my best to behave professionally every day of the job and help those around me. This is to say act better than the fray. Doing so for so long led to cognitive dissonance and personal burnout. My resignation was promptly tendered when I realized the burnout became so severe that I couldn't hold back from dispensing the most restrained of zinger, which was nothing compared to what was happening around me.
If I sound angry, it was because I sacrificed a lot of time, energy, and giving up a good life I had in other city for taking the job. Worse was realizing how much of a lost opportunity all of it was. We could have achieved more had we more trust and decency.
If you're looking for examples, consider scouring the annals of the web for "shit Soundclouders say" - a Tumblr feed of leaked statements from our colleagues. I don't know who put that together, but it certainly didn't help the trust or maturity aspects of day to day work. To give an example of the shit posted on their, English was a second language for the majority of us at the company. There was a fair bit of mockery for peculiarities about how people wrote in their second tongue - among memorable immature tantrums recorded on the Tumblr. Do you see where I am going?
I bear responsibility for not being more persuasive. I tried to get this damn Tumblr deleted but couldn't. Nobody cared - especially because it predated me and them. Everybody accepted that immaturity as a given.
Digital Ocean was smart to cut this short (the flock of brazilians from SoundCloud migrated there). Not all brazilians are like this tho - only the agilists.
I don't thing the Berlin scene per se is "Mickey Mouse" but there are a lot of companies that grew to fast with a insane amount of money. A lot of times the founders were installed as CEO and had little to none experience regarding leading a business. The were just happy to "make it" but had no clear vision what happens after the big money came in.
Same for SC: They got a lot of money for a good idea (democratising music I would call it) but there was no clear vision or business model for the future just like OP calls it out. Some goes for a lot of other companies we've seen come and go.
In the end Berlin is just not as mature as the valley but this is changing lately at least from what I see
Being a former Director at SC (Mobile), I highly doubt this a former director at SoundCloud (unless they joined after me). The Directors at SC were at least decent people that did not speak of the company or people like this. Please do not take this post seriously unless the person reveals themselves.
Yes but operational reasons such as we can't afford to pay them falls under a fair reason. Only issue could be they would have to a certain amount of notice, so it could be more costly.
I just quit the payments team with Pje a month ago and I can say no one saw this coming. The entire payments and subscriptions infrastructure is now unmanned. Pje was a veteran but most of the team was <6 months and we just moved into a new space. The numbers seemed good to me.
The silver lining here is that recruiters are in a blood frenzy; I've had ~30 messages come in today.
I did the back of the napkin math, and saw this coming a year ago. The numbers just didn't work out.
When the whole finance team quit late last year, I knew it wasn't good.
I got out of there earlier this year. I feel bad for the new hires that were just coming in. I heard that a atleast one was just moving from the US to Germany, their things are still in transit in a shipping container and they just got laid off.
I'm also hiring in New York for Time Out.
I would like to think that engineers from Sound Cloud may be excited by the music, theater, film, and event domain.
Drop me a line at [hn_username]@timeout.com
1. They haven't updated their iOS app seemingly in years. It lacks basic controls and makes it impossible to listen to more than a single song at a time.
2. The really shitty "artist engagement" sites that force you to follow 20 other social media accounts in order to get a download. I know this isn't Soundcloud directly, but they're the ones letting artists link off to these basically spam services through a button that promises a direct download. They could have easily required you to follow the artist before downloading directly to solve at least part of this problem.
3. Music discovery is absolute trash. Discovery on a platform like SC is even more important than a place like Spotify because there is so much underground talent that should be listened to. This was the entire point of SC and they largely failed at that.
4. I have seen countless artists on twitter calling out SC for taking down their own songs from their own accounts for copyright strikes. It also seems like their ability to work with artists in general is just utter garbage.
I'll add (5) - They haven't fixed a bug in their 'Spotlight' editing widget. Trying to drag and drop to re-sort your 5 highlighted Spotlight tracks in your profile always crashes Chrome, and has done so for years, despite me (and many others) filing multiple bug reports.
I actually liked SoundCloud a lot, before they introduced SoundCloud Go. It wasn't perfect, but since it was free I didn't have an issue to live with the flaws.
But they really burned all the goodwill they had with me and others when they introduced SoundCloud Go. Here's a list of the "features" of SoundCloud Go [0] and why it's difficult to accept them as a user:
1. Access the world’s largest music streaming catalog, a constantly expanding mix from established and emerging artists
It's not clear to me that any of this monthly subscription is going to the artists I like (e.g. like Patreon). So, I'm paying 10 Euros per month for you to run some servers while having a much smaller library than other streaming services?
I do not work in the legal or music industry, but it's my understanding that since most content on SoundCloud is indie remixes, they shouldn't have to pay royalties to the record labels because the content is not copyrighted by the record labels (legally remixes would fall under fair use). So unless I'm very wrong in this impression, SoundCloud bent over to the record labels because they didn't want to be sued out of existence like Grooveshark?
2. Full access to all 150M+ tracks
Versus 120M on a free account. I highly doubt this number, since after introducing SoundCloud Go, a lot of tracks from artists I listened to became "Previews" of 20-30 seconds long and you had to subscribe to SoundCloud Go to listen to the full song. It was pitched as a subscription to access additional/premium content, but this is not what it felt like as a user, seeing songs go from free to pay walled.
3. Offline listening
You updated the Android app to remove the caching option, where previously you could select 100% and have the app entirely cache the song offline, assuming you had listened to it at least once before. I used this feature to cache gigabytes of music on my phone so that once it was listened to on WiFi, I could go out and not consume my 3G data while listening to the playlist. That was a huge "fuck you" to users.
4. No ads
Install an ad blocker in your browser and never hear ads anyway.
5. Millions of premium SoundCloud Go+ tracks
Here's how Engadget covered the announcement:
"the subscription plan costs $10 a month and includes a library of additional content as well as the usual remixes, emerging artists and podcasts." [1]
Given what I've said in #2, this was not the user experience.
---
I'm sorry to the talented people who lost their jobs today, but I don't feel any sadness for SoundCloud. This hurt is entirely self inflicted. For any PM's reading, here's how to burn your reputation with users in 3 easy steps:
1. Introduce an expensive subscription service at the same price as your competitors, but don't offer as much content, and don't publicize that any of the money is going toward your content creators
2. Hobble your existing free product to force people to the paid service
3. Don't push any meaningful new features or notable bugfixes to your website or app in years (e.g. needing Flash to play a song, HTML5 which eats up 100% CPU so you can display... something)
Now I use Mixcloud. Not better for individual songs, but great for music discovery given all the podcasts/shows available. Their app is a bit meh, but there aren't any ads, and their website doesn't require Flash and doesn't use lots of CPU. Best of all: they've yet to screw over users by introducing a paid option.
Mixcloud Founder here, thanks for the support and if you ever have issues reach out. We're working hard on the app, but we're a super small team, so bear with us!
No. Remixes are a derivative work. They are a copyright violation without permission from the owner. Fair use would be satire or an excerpt for the purpose of commentary. Remixing is just more involved sampling and Vanilla Ice can tell you how well that works out without paying the piper.
Your points are understandable. But what would your plan be to keep the doors open? They need to make money somehow. Not being sarcastic, am genuinely interested.
This is a perfect example of how strong software engineering from competitors can result in you getting completely left in the dust. YouTube and Spotify have great algorithms for suggesting new songs - I feel like when my current song is done, I have a really high chance of hearing another song that I've never heard, but will enjoy.
This is not the case on SoundCloud, where I'm almost always jolted back to reality when the next song comes on.
I cannot comment on Spotify, but I pretty much dislike all Youtube recommendations.
I get sometimes different version of the same song again followed by some other song that is also popular but has nothing to do with what I'm listening to followed by something else I "liked before" but obviously don't want to listen to since I already heard it many times. That is followed by a different version of the same song again finally eventually converging on pop music that I generally dislike.
SoundCloud on the other hand sometimes recommends interesting things that I like but have never heard of. Other times, it recommends things that are completely unrelated and that I don't particularly like. However, they're still new/interesting.
My biggest gripe with YT recommendations is that songs I hit dislike on and always browse away from are constantly placed in my autoplay queue. There are some songs out there that I just hate and there's just no way for me to avoid them.
I've never had this issue with Spotify - mostly because of how differently its recommendations work - and it's probably one of the biggest reasons I've abandoned YT for Spotify.
They do a lot more than that. I just looked at my Discover Weekly playlist and the second track is from someone with 5,500 monthly plays. That's not showing up anywhere based on popularity. I'd say about half the playlist is similarly sized artists.
My anecdata indicates the opposite, as far as quality of recommendations is concerned. Curious how matters of taste might mean that you can't accurately make sweeping generalizations like this.
Neither Youtube or Spotify make any real money. Recommendation algorithms are the least of Soundcloud's worries as the platform just doesn't have any real business plan and just can't play the "growth game" anymore.
There is just no real money in selling access to or hosting digital music.
Soundcloud used to be a place for DJs. They died when they tried to go mainstream instead of focusing on DJs and selling them services.
Spotify looses money because they have to pay massive royalties to the music industry. Hosting content that is not part of that oligopoly should in theory be feasible, but of course it doesn't attract the same amount of attention. I wouldn't say it is a foregone conclusion though.
I hope you mean specifically on music, because that comment is laughable.
> Recommendation algorithms are the least of Soundcloud's worries as the platform just doesn't have any real business plan and just can't play the "growth game" anymore.
Exactly this point came up in a conversation with non-technical friends recently, everyone agreed. The nice thing soundcloud has is the ability to host mixes, which can last hours.
And that‘s exactly what they should have focused on. I never saw them as a service for listening to tracks and albums or storing my collection. It‘s not a Spotify or Apple Music competitor.
It’s a great place for DJ mixes, sets and live recording, though I think Mixcloud is the better product - unfortunately I see way less engagement over there. That might change when Soundcloud goes down.
How do you get that to work? I'm not on Spotify, but I use YouTube (Red subscriber in fact) and I find the suggestions to be pretty bad. It just seems to suggest random songs in the same genre mixed with stuff I've listened to before.
I generally don't subscribe to channels or upvote/downvote songs. Is that critical to getting good suggestions? I would have thought just listening history would be enough.
Soundcloud started dying when they decided to be more like Spotify and less like the independent music discovery service they started out as. Now they have an app and experience that is not particularly good at either.
I've worked at a few places that died this way. CEO: "We're #1 in $NICHE. But growth is the only way, so we need to compete in $BIG_MARKET." [months of de-focus later] CEO: "We're only #10 in $BIG_MARKET and now we totally lost $NICHE!!" Resume writing ensues...
Expanding to $BIG_MARKET is not a bad thing, in fact this is the textbook example of "crossing the chasm", where you start with a niche and expand--if you try to go mainstream from the beginning you will always fail.
The problem when you're expanding is you need to have a clear idea of what you are. Because knowing what you are means you can scale by taking advantage of your strengths instead of dumbing it down. Amazon is a great example.
But if you just expand without knowing what you are, you'll end up like Soundcloud.
Also another thing is this idea of "what you are" (aka vision) shouldn't come from some media coverage or VCs or pundits. You should have already had the vision before these people started talking about you. See Snapchat for example, media pundits started calling them "a camera company", and Snapchat itself started believing the hype, and even renamed themselves "Snap". Snapchat is not a camera company. It's a social network that revolutionized private sharing. But they don't seem to think so anymore because they have to match the stratospheric expectation set by their IPO. Instead of expanding their own playing field they jumped into other giants' playground (competing with Apple in AR, competing with Instagram in public photo sharing, etc.), this pattern never ends well historically.
Soundcloud fell into the same trap. Their investor called them "The Youtube of Audio", instead of seeing it for what it is. If they had realized they were popular because they were a great service for indie musicians and focused on that aspect it is possible that by now they are more influential than any existing music tech companies. Instead they tried to become "the youtube of audio", which is the most uninteresting thing I've ever heard, it's the definition of "dumbing down" in order to expand.
Exactly - I'm a hobbyist musician and have all my music there. But, the last year or so they've been focusing on podcasting, etc. and, as you say, it's not good at any of that. For people like me, they haven't offered any new features in a long time.
Oddly enough, when I first heard of SoundCloud, it was in a completely different context from either. I first saw it used as a pastebin for voice recordings.
Specifically, members of some online transgender communities use it to solicit community feedback on their voices. They'll record themselves talking, post it to SoundCloud, and ask the community for input on what they could do better.
I don't think there's enough of a market for "pastebin for voice recordings" to be a successful business though.
Pastebin for voice recordings is basically what vocaroo.com is, and I discovered that in the same context you discovered SoundCloud. And also because popular use by 4chan.
When I first heard of SoundCloud it was mostly used by self-releasing EDM artists as a place to upload their music, before YouTube was a popular alternative. Nowadays I see a lot of artists buying visualizer templates and uploading their music with that - or sending it to an aggregator on YouTube who displays a certain style of music (many of these aggregators don't seek artist permission and just upload popular songs and such, but many of the ones I follow get things sent to them by indie artists because a channel with 60,000+ subs will beat their own personal channel for recognition).
ITT no one admitting that the problem with the recorded music industry is now the fans who expect bits that make sound to be free while other bits are paid.
Spotify, Pandora, and Soundcloud fixed just about everything that people said was wrong with the industry from the consumer point of view. And don't give me that line about the labels screwing artists because thanks to fans who won't even pay for a premium subscription, Spotify literally can't afford to pay artists more without going under entirely.
TL;DR - music doesn't want to be free. Selfish people want it to be free.
It's not the artists who are struggling, it's the platform. By your logic, I'm oppressing Youtube creators because I didn't buy Youtube Red.
In terms of artists posting on Soundcloud, the fact that there's any demand for Soundcloud at all pretty much torpedoes this entire worldview you're espousing.
It is extremely common for artists to simply give away mixtapes on Soundcloud. When/if Soundcloud is gone, those same artists will continue to release on p2p networks. It is bizarre and delusional to believe that some valley person has to be making money off of it for me to listen to the music I like.
People sell things to make money. People make things for all kinds of reasons. Music is fundamentally an artistic venture, and everyone who tries to turn it into this other thing can frankly get completely bent imho.
It doesn't seem like a controversial position for those of us who enjoy music to wish there were some professionals making it.
If we are going to have professionals they must make money some how & the current status quo requires them to be constantly touring.
Talk to them and this is taking its toll both in longevity & album quality. I listen to albums a lot more than live concerts so I find this concerning.
You are right, people are cheap. However, some of the blame lies with these companies. They have taken a growth at all costs > figure out monetization later path to their own doom. You can't go from free unlimited streaming to paid limited streaming once you realize your costs are killing you. The recording industry does keep raising the prices (rightfully so?) making it harder to stay afloat. There is still a win here for the person with the right vision.
I have no idea how you got that notion, but as a previous paying spotify customer I quit because they consistently screwed up their UI, made pointless changes and kept forcing "social" into something that shouldn't be social in the first place.
I now use google music. It is still no way near as good as groveshark was (especially when it comes to having all the music and a simple interface) but it works pretty okay.
And of course they can afford to pay the artists: I get to pay way more to the music industry now, than I ever did before.
I love google music because their "Radio" feature is incredibly useful. So if I like a song, there is a "radio" option that plays similar songs, which has worked surprisingly well (imo). Maybe their AI is just better or something, but I'm a very happy customer so far.
The only thing I fear is that they will shut the service one day for no good reason (because they have done this before). But since its a core part of their android offering I'm hoping it won't happen.
Also any Google iOS devs reading this: PLEASE ADD WATCH INTEGRATION. I love to listen to music while running, but currently there is no watch integration, so all I can do is play the next/previous song through my watch. Definitely more control would help :).
I use Google Music to listen to music, and when I find an album I like I buy it on Vinyl, and also attend concerts when they are nearby. More than I have spent on music than ever before.
I keep thinking about this problem, and music isn't the only industry affected.
I wonder if this is us hitting some of the limits of capitalism? It's not that I mind paying, in fact, I want to support artists I like. But the entire ecosystem of media is set up in a way that it is just more efficient for everyone to get stuff for free.
I feel like financial transactions get in the way more than they help, but this is obviously from the consumer point of view.
I get it. You feel like maybe we're hitting some fundamental limitation of capitalism, whereby deserving artists aren't properly supported by the economic ecosystem around them.
You're right in the media ecosystem is weird here. Music is relatively unique in that it is something that's easy to consume more or less piecemeal. Nobody reads only 1/12th of a book or watches 3/10ths of a movie, but these are common in how people relate to music.
But what if there's another possibility?
I think we're expecting the future and present of music to not look like the past of music. Music, like pretty much all forms of art, has a small number of professionals and a large number of very talented non-professionals.
What's changed is how professionals attain that status. Once upon a time it was impress something really rich enough to be hired on permanently. Then this complex system involving record labels came into being. Now we have a couple of different viable models at hand, and we have yet to settle on one as the dominant new model.
Couple this with a lowered barrier to entry and generally increased competition for entertainment dollars (which compete with mobile games, ebooks, etc.), and users have good reason to favor subscription models. Artists have yet to puzzle out how best to interact with this, but I have faith people will get there.
I wouldn't call it a limit of capitalism. I would call it a limit of the old music business model.
Readit News
My bet is that since trending likes are a Graph DB problem, SoundCloud just chose not to solve it once it became too hard on their database. They famously had issues with early Mongo adoption so this would fit right in. Their most recent frontend HTML5 rewrite always winds up my CPU and hasn't changed in a couple years.
SoundCloud to me has always been a great idea with some great design that got ruined by some poor engineering choices from the top. And at the end by a desperate grab for stats and cash. I think producers would have paid more, better subsidizing free plans, if discovery hadn't gone downhill. I ran the numbers once on how CDbaby and Bandcamp became successful (based on stats trickled out over the years) while SoundCloud could never turn a profit. There's still plenty of room for someone to do this right.
I made this if it helps anyone: https://github.com/kyranb/SoundCloud-Feed-Cleaner
I only use it for podcasts though, never music.
MATCH (u:User {Id:123})-[:FRIENDS]->(f)-[:LIKED_ON_2017_07_08]->(t:Track) RETURN t, COUNT(f) ORDER BY COUNT(f) DESC LIMIT 25
For anyone confused by this: SoundCloud can't play podcasts, but a small percentage of podcasters host their show on SoundCloud, and the app can (naturally) play those.
However, SoundCloud has probably seen the peak of its podcast-driven business. Podcasters have been wary of SoundCloud's fortunes for some time, and most have a Plan B in place. Today's news has likely expedited plans to find alternatives among at least some podcasters.
The music industry is a shade of what it once was, and both CDBaby and Bandcamp are tiny slithers off of that.
(Apologies to those that work for one of those companies.)
Unfortunately for SC, IAC tends to price acquisitions based on historical revenues...
As for Berlin, I am sorry to say: I had high-hopes for the tech culture there, but to call it Mickey Mouse would be a charitable statement. It was laden with confused hipsters who couldn't differentiate between language du jour and its monads and delivering a product.
When I applied, the warning signs were strong. Nevertheless I ignored them — to my own peril. Needless to say, I won't make those mistakes again!
Right before I resigned, it was revealed in a private leads meeting that 18 percent of the engineering force had resigned in that given quarter. Was I surprised? Not in the slightest. That knowledge gave me resolve to get out, which I hadn't yet announced.
I'm sure the company had a much nicer culture when they started, given that their product attracted so much original content.. So what went wrong ?
I joined after the re-organisations that Phil mentions in the linked post here were well underway. From all I could tell, no one regrets it. At the position I head, I only heard rumours about the struggle that he went through trying to improve the engineering problems there.
Everyone (with perhaps a couple of exceptions) I know personally there (Brazilians or otherwise) was trying very hard to improve things. Their efforts could have been misdirected. Their strategy could have been even counter-productive. The intentions were good, though. And I did see some ill-intentioned people in other places.
I even think that thowaway999 was probably well-intentioned. However, an anonymous director calling people that he disagrees with "conniving and intensely political" and claiming a moral high ground is almost comical.
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The backlash which is emerging now are really a products of pent up frustration. SoundCloud was never able to develop a culture which resolved differences. Lots of acquiescence, lots of political assassinations but no mechanism for reconciliation. That's where I point my finger at least.
What were the unintended negative side-effects?
as i said they don't bear sole responsibility but rather signified the problem for the impunity of being able to break the no asshole rule. other immature apples spoiled the basket as well. plenty of innocent people suffered. none deserved that. burnout is evil. i hope we have all learned our lessons and become better people.
I think every nationality represented in the company gave a good contribution to make the place both good and bad.
I can't say the Brazilians there were an issue, but I can see how some folks, especially in the infrastructure team, wouldn't like them.
I personally had a lot more issues with German people, both in the company and outside of it, to be honest.
By being a director and having this sort of blaming outlook on other people, you most likely have a good share of responsibility for the downfall of the company.
If I sound angry, it was because I sacrificed a lot of time, energy, and giving up a good life I had in other city for taking the job. Worse was realizing how much of a lost opportunity all of it was. We could have achieved more had we more trust and decency.
If you're looking for examples, consider scouring the annals of the web for "shit Soundclouders say" - a Tumblr feed of leaked statements from our colleagues. I don't know who put that together, but it certainly didn't help the trust or maturity aspects of day to day work. To give an example of the shit posted on their, English was a second language for the majority of us at the company. There was a fair bit of mockery for peculiarities about how people wrote in their second tongue - among memorable immature tantrums recorded on the Tumblr. Do you see where I am going?
I bear responsibility for not being more persuasive. I tried to get this damn Tumblr deleted but couldn't. Nobody cared - especially because it predated me and them. Everybody accepted that immaturity as a given.
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https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882977097232338947
https://twitter.com/katalunia_/status/882992899893460993
> Well, SoundCloud just laid off all of its New York engineering
> Literally the entire payments and subscriptions team, ads-eng, monetization engineering, everybody
> Not really clear to me how the execs think this company will be able to make money from now on
The silver lining here is that recruiters are in a blood frenzy; I've had ~30 messages come in today.
When the whole finance team quit late last year, I knew it wasn't good.
I got out of there earlier this year. I feel bad for the new hires that were just coming in. I heard that a atleast one was just moving from the US to Germany, their things are still in transit in a shipping container and they just got laid off.
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Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14653564
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14653741
Other indicators: delayed salary reviews
1. They haven't updated their iOS app seemingly in years. It lacks basic controls and makes it impossible to listen to more than a single song at a time.
2. The really shitty "artist engagement" sites that force you to follow 20 other social media accounts in order to get a download. I know this isn't Soundcloud directly, but they're the ones letting artists link off to these basically spam services through a button that promises a direct download. They could have easily required you to follow the artist before downloading directly to solve at least part of this problem.
3. Music discovery is absolute trash. Discovery on a platform like SC is even more important than a place like Spotify because there is so much underground talent that should be listened to. This was the entire point of SC and they largely failed at that.
4. I have seen countless artists on twitter calling out SC for taking down their own songs from their own accounts for copyright strikes. It also seems like their ability to work with artists in general is just utter garbage.
I actually liked SoundCloud a lot, before they introduced SoundCloud Go. It wasn't perfect, but since it was free I didn't have an issue to live with the flaws.
But they really burned all the goodwill they had with me and others when they introduced SoundCloud Go. Here's a list of the "features" of SoundCloud Go [0] and why it's difficult to accept them as a user:
1. Access the world’s largest music streaming catalog, a constantly expanding mix from established and emerging artists
It's not clear to me that any of this monthly subscription is going to the artists I like (e.g. like Patreon). So, I'm paying 10 Euros per month for you to run some servers while having a much smaller library than other streaming services?
I do not work in the legal or music industry, but it's my understanding that since most content on SoundCloud is indie remixes, they shouldn't have to pay royalties to the record labels because the content is not copyrighted by the record labels (legally remixes would fall under fair use). So unless I'm very wrong in this impression, SoundCloud bent over to the record labels because they didn't want to be sued out of existence like Grooveshark?
2. Full access to all 150M+ tracks
Versus 120M on a free account. I highly doubt this number, since after introducing SoundCloud Go, a lot of tracks from artists I listened to became "Previews" of 20-30 seconds long and you had to subscribe to SoundCloud Go to listen to the full song. It was pitched as a subscription to access additional/premium content, but this is not what it felt like as a user, seeing songs go from free to pay walled.
3. Offline listening
You updated the Android app to remove the caching option, where previously you could select 100% and have the app entirely cache the song offline, assuming you had listened to it at least once before. I used this feature to cache gigabytes of music on my phone so that once it was listened to on WiFi, I could go out and not consume my 3G data while listening to the playlist. That was a huge "fuck you" to users.
4. No ads
Install an ad blocker in your browser and never hear ads anyway.
5. Millions of premium SoundCloud Go+ tracks
Here's how Engadget covered the announcement:
"the subscription plan costs $10 a month and includes a library of additional content as well as the usual remixes, emerging artists and podcasts." [1]
Given what I've said in #2, this was not the user experience.
---
I'm sorry to the talented people who lost their jobs today, but I don't feel any sadness for SoundCloud. This hurt is entirely self inflicted. For any PM's reading, here's how to burn your reputation with users in 3 easy steps:
1. Introduce an expensive subscription service at the same price as your competitors, but don't offer as much content, and don't publicize that any of the money is going toward your content creators
2. Hobble your existing free product to force people to the paid service
3. Don't push any meaningful new features or notable bugfixes to your website or app in years (e.g. needing Flash to play a song, HTML5 which eats up 100% CPU so you can display... something)
Now I use Mixcloud. Not better for individual songs, but great for music discovery given all the podcasts/shows available. Their app is a bit meh, but there aren't any ads, and their website doesn't require Flash and doesn't use lots of CPU. Best of all: they've yet to screw over users by introducing a paid option.
---
[0] https://soundcloud.com/go
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2016/03/29/soundcloud-go-hands-on/
No. Remixes are a derivative work. They are a copyright violation without permission from the owner. Fair use would be satire or an excerpt for the purpose of commentary. Remixing is just more involved sampling and Vanilla Ice can tell you how well that works out without paying the piper.
This is not the case on SoundCloud, where I'm almost always jolted back to reality when the next song comes on.
I get sometimes different version of the same song again followed by some other song that is also popular but has nothing to do with what I'm listening to followed by something else I "liked before" but obviously don't want to listen to since I already heard it many times. That is followed by a different version of the same song again finally eventually converging on pop music that I generally dislike.
SoundCloud on the other hand sometimes recommends interesting things that I like but have never heard of. Other times, it recommends things that are completely unrelated and that I don't particularly like. However, they're still new/interesting.
I've never had this issue with Spotify - mostly because of how differently its recommendations work - and it's probably one of the biggest reasons I've abandoned YT for Spotify.
Spotify recommendations are far from great. They crowd source based on popularity, Pandora's recommendation engine is far superior.
There is just no real money in selling access to or hosting digital music.
Soundcloud used to be a place for DJs. They died when they tried to go mainstream instead of focusing on DJs and selling them services.
I hope you mean specifically on music, because that comment is laughable.
> Recommendation algorithms are the least of Soundcloud's worries as the platform just doesn't have any real business plan and just can't play the "growth game" anymore.
This 1000%
I generally don't subscribe to channels or upvote/downvote songs. Is that critical to getting good suggestions? I would have thought just listening history would be enough.
The problem when you're expanding is you need to have a clear idea of what you are. Because knowing what you are means you can scale by taking advantage of your strengths instead of dumbing it down. Amazon is a great example.
But if you just expand without knowing what you are, you'll end up like Soundcloud.
Also another thing is this idea of "what you are" (aka vision) shouldn't come from some media coverage or VCs or pundits. You should have already had the vision before these people started talking about you. See Snapchat for example, media pundits started calling them "a camera company", and Snapchat itself started believing the hype, and even renamed themselves "Snap". Snapchat is not a camera company. It's a social network that revolutionized private sharing. But they don't seem to think so anymore because they have to match the stratospheric expectation set by their IPO. Instead of expanding their own playing field they jumped into other giants' playground (competing with Apple in AR, competing with Instagram in public photo sharing, etc.), this pattern never ends well historically.
Soundcloud fell into the same trap. Their investor called them "The Youtube of Audio", instead of seeing it for what it is. If they had realized they were popular because they were a great service for indie musicians and focused on that aspect it is possible that by now they are more influential than any existing music tech companies. Instead they tried to become "the youtube of audio", which is the most uninteresting thing I've ever heard, it's the definition of "dumbing down" in order to expand.
Specifically, members of some online transgender communities use it to solicit community feedback on their voices. They'll record themselves talking, post it to SoundCloud, and ask the community for input on what they could do better.
I don't think there's enough of a market for "pastebin for voice recordings" to be a successful business though.
When I first heard of SoundCloud it was mostly used by self-releasing EDM artists as a place to upload their music, before YouTube was a popular alternative. Nowadays I see a lot of artists buying visualizer templates and uploading their music with that - or sending it to an aggregator on YouTube who displays a certain style of music (many of these aggregators don't seek artist permission and just upload popular songs and such, but many of the ones I follow get things sent to them by indie artists because a channel with 60,000+ subs will beat their own personal channel for recognition).
Spotify, Pandora, and Soundcloud fixed just about everything that people said was wrong with the industry from the consumer point of view. And don't give me that line about the labels screwing artists because thanks to fans who won't even pay for a premium subscription, Spotify literally can't afford to pay artists more without going under entirely.
TL;DR - music doesn't want to be free. Selfish people want it to be free.
In terms of artists posting on Soundcloud, the fact that there's any demand for Soundcloud at all pretty much torpedoes this entire worldview you're espousing.
It is extremely common for artists to simply give away mixtapes on Soundcloud. When/if Soundcloud is gone, those same artists will continue to release on p2p networks. It is bizarre and delusional to believe that some valley person has to be making money off of it for me to listen to the music I like.
People sell things to make money. People make things for all kinds of reasons. Music is fundamentally an artistic venture, and everyone who tries to turn it into this other thing can frankly get completely bent imho.
https://twitter.com/forexposure_txt
If we are going to have professionals they must make money some how & the current status quo requires them to be constantly touring.
Talk to them and this is taking its toll both in longevity & album quality. I listen to albums a lot more than live concerts so I find this concerning.
I now use google music. It is still no way near as good as groveshark was (especially when it comes to having all the music and a simple interface) but it works pretty okay.
And of course they can afford to pay the artists: I get to pay way more to the music industry now, than I ever did before.
The only thing I fear is that they will shut the service one day for no good reason (because they have done this before). But since its a core part of their android offering I'm hoping it won't happen.
Also any Google iOS devs reading this: PLEASE ADD WATCH INTEGRATION. I love to listen to music while running, but currently there is no watch integration, so all I can do is play the next/previous song through my watch. Definitely more control would help :).
I wonder if this is us hitting some of the limits of capitalism? It's not that I mind paying, in fact, I want to support artists I like. But the entire ecosystem of media is set up in a way that it is just more efficient for everyone to get stuff for free.
I feel like financial transactions get in the way more than they help, but this is obviously from the consumer point of view.
But what if there's another possibility?
I think we're expecting the future and present of music to not look like the past of music. Music, like pretty much all forms of art, has a small number of professionals and a large number of very talented non-professionals.
What's changed is how professionals attain that status. Once upon a time it was impress something really rich enough to be hired on permanently. Then this complex system involving record labels came into being. Now we have a couple of different viable models at hand, and we have yet to settle on one as the dominant new model.
Couple this with a lowered barrier to entry and generally increased competition for entertainment dollars (which compete with mobile games, ebooks, etc.), and users have good reason to favor subscription models. Artists have yet to puzzle out how best to interact with this, but I have faith people will get there.
I wouldn't call it a limit of capitalism. I would call it a limit of the old music business model.