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SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

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Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#131
I remember few years ago there was something like forum (or groups) on Soundcloud. It was really nice way to collaborate with other musicians, but they decided to kill it. I lost interest in SoundCloud since... I still have an account, but I am not using it that often. Also how they present tracks is very annoying, so I stopped sharing soundcloud stuff with friends. It actually got me into creating my own service.

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have backups of your tracks into case Soundcloud goes away? EDIT: Its on my to do list to write a pipeline for Soundcloud for Archive Team this weekend. Just in case. That doesn't pickup private tracks though. Backup your stuff!!

At my company we have a bunch of content that's only archived on SoundCloud. The main barrier I've had to backing up original uploads (only available through the web interface) is the terrible reliability of all the AJAX calls. Even with browser automation, it requires a LOT of error-handling just to navigate between resources successfully. It seems that all these microservices[1] are there for the sake of blogging a…

Have you tried using youtube-dl? It extracts the relevant data from Soundcloud's JSON API to perform the download:

https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

I know you mentioned originals are only accessible through the web interface, but I was not sure if you were aware of the JSON API.

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#133

Not being able to save tracks for offline use on mobile has been bothering me for a while. Maybe I'm an edge case, but I do a lot of listening while commuting, which means no Internet on the subway here in NYC. That means SoundCloud isn't even an option for me unless I'm at my desk. Also, I can't save a collection of favorite tracks in any meaningful way. I can favorite them, but they quickly get lost in the mobile U…

Not having download capability in iOS is almost entirely at the whim of the iTunes reviewers.

Source: I work at competitor, and iTunes blocked the Download functionality from our app - until we made a few changes.

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#134
post #103

Soundcloud is absolutely ubiquitous in the electronic music community. I was talking about this with a friend recently who is a programmer and a (relatively) well known composer, and she made the point that soundcloud actually represents a very important cultural document; there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it…

See also the original MP3.com.

>it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it were to disappear. This is something I haven't heard a great deal about, and it's something that concerns me about other media platforms like Medium.

Of course, in all fairness (and modulo archiving by organizations like the Internet Archive), media and writing hosted on a personal web site is at least as likely to just disappear at some point. I agree with your basic point though. Any number of content sites have gone away in a manner where pretty much everything was lost.

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#135
post #118
post #103

Soundcloud is absolutely ubiquitous in the electronic music community. I was talking about this with a friend recently who is a programmer and a (relatively) well known composer, and she made the point that soundcloud actually represents a very important cultural document; there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it…

We are living in the age of data impermanence. There is no mechanism to archive all of the content we are generating efficiently. Soundcloud represents but one of the many websites whose content will be lost forever to the digital dark ages.

Data has never been more permanent than it is now, but we're also generating much more data than ever.

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#136
post #118
post #103

Soundcloud is absolutely ubiquitous in the electronic music community. I was talking about this with a friend recently who is a programmer and a (relatively) well known composer, and she made the point that soundcloud actually represents a very important cultural document; there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it…

We are living in the age of data impermanence. There is no mechanism to archive all of the content we are generating efficiently. Soundcloud represents but one of the many websites whose content will be lost forever to the digital dark ages.

On the other hand, without them, much of the content wouldn't have been anywhere anyway. So the content is there because they are there. And if the go away, so might some of that content as well as future content which won't have a home.

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#137
post #103

Soundcloud is absolutely ubiquitous in the electronic music community. I was talking about this with a friend recently who is a programmer and a (relatively) well known composer, and she made the point that soundcloud actually represents a very important cultural document; there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it…

Are any of your friends paying for SoundCloud?

I use sound cloud for finding new artists and I don't even know what I could pay for...

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#138
I didn't expected that, Soundcloud is such a nice plateforme. I thought that they were still growing, there is so much potential, with artists promotion and so on. I also wonder why they never became a selling platform. Is there any company that would buy the service ?

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#139
post #103

Soundcloud is absolutely ubiquitous in the electronic music community. I was talking about this with a friend recently who is a programmer and a (relatively) well known composer, and she made the point that soundcloud actually represents a very important cultural document; there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it…

As a counter-point though, the role of SoundCloud in a diversified music commerce portfolio is not ideal as a catch-all archive. A professional elsewhere mentioned it is a useful tool for sharing and A/B/C listening tests with tracks set to private, but that's not the end use-case scenario. In principle, SoundCloud should not be the sole - or even main - distribution channel for a music act. To put it another way, So…

A significant role of the SoundCloud that I'm most familiar with is as a distribution platform for mixes and performances by musicians for whom the _sale_ of their music is not a significant revenue source; these performers (and I'm talking about dance music, in all its varieties) almost exclusively make their living performing live, and release mixes mostly as a sort of marketing.

This obviously isn't the _only_ type of artist on SoundCloud, but they're a huge part of what makes SoundCloud culturally significant.

Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

#140
post #41

While SoundCloud brought in €17.35m ($15.37m) in 2014, it lost a total of €39.14m ($44.19m). Employee wages during that period also increased 42.5% to €17.9m, meaning that the average wage per employee for that year totalled €79,980 Seems like a pretty generous wage increase for a company in the red.

Especially given that good talent here in Berlin is much much cheaper. 80k/year scores you some superstar devs, while that's probably the peanuts some out-of-school pre-puberal intern would earn at a Valley startup. What's really expensive here is management people and the way German hire the mid-level management is broken most of the time. I don't know if it's a German thing or a global corporate thing, but I've per…

Yes, but the Soundcloud devs are average and as such overpaid. I think it is a combination of non-merit in hiring and a culture that is toxic for good development (favoring coolness to getting things done i.e. effectivity/doing the things that earns money).
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