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SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

factmag.com

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

#281

Post by mc808 »

aback wrote: post #110
cmyr wrote: 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…

when people argue that "digital distribution is essentially free," then ask why Soundcloud is losing money, since distributing music is literally their only real cost of doing business. we will continue to endure substantial cultural losses for so long as people continue to believe that content can & should be distributed and consumed for free. ultimately some sort of micropayments + blockchain-like-cloudserving migh…

The difference between free and essentially free does become significant when you consolidate all of those essentiallies in one place. I couldn't find how much they spend on the distribution infrastructure itself, but if their 250 million monthly users were to bring in an average of 2-3 cents per month, they would net a profit, even after all the legal and administrative expenses on top of the actual cost of distribution.

I'm kind of baffled that SoundCloud isn't already raking in profits. Presumably their stakeholders simply haven't pushed for profitability yet.

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

#282

Post by jewbacca »

dntrkv wrote: post #180
adriand wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely love Soundcloud and also use it daily - I am listening to it right now - but it's an absolute disgrace how little they've done to improve the platform. It seems like such a total waste of potential. The issues with the UI/UX are obvious and there are clear ways to improve on the situation. A number of people have done unsolicited Soundcloud redesigns, but there was an excellent one in December 2014 that…

My biggest complaint about Soundcloud is their lack of pagination, sorting, or shuffling (real shuffling, not just shuffling the 20 tracks that come in with every infinite scroll page). I have well over a thousand likes on my profile and the only way to listen to some of my earlier likes is to sit there like an idiot and scroll through a hundred pages of infinite scroll. Also, their iOS app doesn't cache songs. The l…

re pagination/infinite scroll: I had the same problem, it was fucking unbearable to check out peoples' earlier stuff. Luckily, Soundcloud has a very decent public API, which you can use to roll your own narrow client, for whatever you're looking for with the features you want: https://developers.soundcloud.com/docs/api

----

Here, start from my own (extremely crude, for personal use, not for public consumption) "Soundcloud User Unpaginator":

Source: https://github.com/gadtfly/Soundcloud-User-Unpaginator/

Running: https://soundcloud-user-unpaginator.herokuapp.com/ (warning: heavy, totally synchronous, server-side blocking, on Heroku free tier)

Could be easily modified to download instead of list, if you want an archive.

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

#283

Post by pindropm »

There is a great cultural and emotional content that these services contains. Shutting these services will cause a big damage to this heritage.

We are trying to solve some of the biggest problems of music industry with PindropMusic

https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/pindropmusic/id1042553162?mt...

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

#284

Post by pindropm »

There is a great cultural and emotional content that these services contains. Shutting these services will cause a big damage to this heritage.

We are trying to solve some of the biggest problems of music industry with PindropMusic

https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/pindropmusic/id1042553162?mt...

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

#285

Post by 15charlimit »

duaneb wrote: post #264
dustingetz wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When programming with immutability becomes ubiquitous, this problem will be solved. Immutable systems enable permanent & idealized caching at all layers. This is more of a research topic now but is where we are headed in 10 year timeframe i think. Anyway, who cares. What about the last ten thousand years of content that nobody gives a shit about.

This is not a technological problem, it's a money problem.

>This is not a technological problem, it's a money problem.

It doesn't have to be, and in many cases it is not.

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

#287

Post by puranjay »

ghaff wrote: post #134
cmyr wrote: 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 poi…

This makes me think of the thousands of domain names that expire every day.

Most probably housed spam, but some probably housed at least some work of value.

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

#288

Post by kogepathic »

dntrkv wrote: post #180
adriand wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely love Soundcloud and also use it daily - I am listening to it right now - but it's an absolute disgrace how little they've done to improve the platform. It seems like such a total waste of potential. The issues with the UI/UX are obvious and there are clear ways to improve on the situation. A number of people have done unsolicited Soundcloud redesigns, but there was an excellent one in December 2014 that…

My biggest complaint about Soundcloud is their lack of pagination, sorting, or shuffling (real shuffling, not just shuffling the 20 tracks that come in with every infinite scroll page). I have well over a thousand likes on my profile and the only way to listen to some of my earlier likes is to sit there like an idiot and scroll through a hundred pages of infinite scroll. Also, their iOS app doesn't cache songs. The l…

Older versions of the Android app allowed for "Stream caching" which you could select up to 100%, allowing you to listen to songs entirely offline if they had been listened to once before and you had not cleared the cache.

Recent versions of the app have removed this setting entirely, and from the behaviour I've noticed indicates that no caching is taking place on the phone.

Which honestly is just really stupid from an operations stand point. Why is there any point to transferring hundreds of megabytes of songs on a playlist over and over? Bandwidth isn't free for users, or SoundCloud's CDN.

This is why I have started to download music from SoundCloud more, and consuming it offline with VLC. It's pretty easy to do, even if SoundCloud doesn't offer the download button.

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

#289

Post by zdkl »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #122
raesene4 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I'd agree there's no other facts. links from the article include excerpts from their financial accounts which don't look good (losing 39M on a 17M turnover is not healthy). And the quote from the auditor is significant, auditors don't put that kind of thing in unless they have to as it annoys their customers to be reminded that there's significant concern over their ability to continue operations.

Do they have public accounts? I can't understand what SoundCloud could spend $60M USD on? Apparently they have over 300 employees, what do they do all day? Clearly I don't understand their operation.

I'd guess interfacing with music labels and copyright holders must be a special kind of tedious. Seems to be a recurring problem of music platforms who don't fit the industry's royalty model

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

#290

Post by colechristensen »

mst wrote: post #269
babuskov wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you're suggesting that SoundCloud seeds all the files instead of offering the download option. Perhaps this could work if "play-in-browser" vs "download" ratio is not too big.

And play in browser could be handled by something like torrent time, no?

There are implementations which approximate bittorrent written entirely in javascript. It's possible.

However, I really doubt infrastructure costs dominate SoundCloud's money problems. Significant, yes. But a major engineering overhaul developing an entirely different architecture for distribution which might either not work or alienate customers is probably not an appropriate move when in that situation.

Maybe it could be something to do as a clean shut-down to help things live on (an amazing thing when dying companies do things like this to end well) but not ... expected.

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