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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

#301

Post by Houshalter »

weisser wrote: post #258
ghaff wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

See also physical books, letters, LPs, etc.' Until relatively recently it wasn't expected that everything would stand the test of time.

But people have been preserving physical books for hundreds, even thousands of years. Physical archives have been a thing for a long time and try to preserve everything from music to letters to government records. Historians often use letters and notes written by people hundreds of years ago, because people often saved that stuff.

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

#302

Post by jjn2009 »

exhilaration wrote: post #265
tripzilch wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I really like a track I hear on Soundcloud, I download it with youtube-dl.

Thanks, I had no idea this was possible.

All the files they host are just mp3 hosted in s3 with no encryption or authentication required.

Its 128kbps which is disappointing but its no different from how it would sound streaming on the site.

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

#304

Post by robotresearcher »

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…

> since distributing music is literally their only real cost of doing business.

Salaries dominate many or most business costs.

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

#305

Post by Mick-Jogger »

jewbacca wrote: post #282
dntrkv wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) "Sound…

I really love Soundcloud but the "Shuffle" is the only thing I don't like. I am actually planning to design a small single-page one-purpose site for exactly that: A real Shuffle for Soundcloud!

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

#306

Post by badloginagain »

johnny_and1 wrote: post #299
badloginagain wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Grooveshark shut down, I lost some fantastic artists. There was a low-distraction music station for programmers [writhem radio] I would listen to, which was gaining some popularity and would have music guests DJ their new stuff. When Grooveshark died, that set of original music spun by the DJs was essentially lost- which sucked because that was my go-to for "work music". I've only started to find the tracks agai…

Search for WritheM on Spotify. I was in the same boat until I got the playlist from their wiki and loaded it into Spotify.

I haven't looked recently, but I was only specifically interested in their "BitMix's", where they'd bring in an up and coming artist to mix an hour long set together.

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

#307

Post by lavezzi »

distantsounds wrote: post #99
nbzklr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reposts? They are currently my #1 annoyance on soundcloud. I'm following 300+ artists and they increased my stream's size by at least 4x. It's not about "finding, sharing and curating" but to spam your stream with duplicate tracks. Imagine an artist reposting his own tracks. Then his network does. As does his label. And his friend. And then all of them repost a playlist with this track on it. Yay! Please give us an o…

there's an extension for that: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/soundshroud/iiobjl...

Thank you so much!

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

#308

Post by jacquesm »

markplindsay wrote: post #303
jacquesm wrote: post #167

Does anybody remember the name of the indie music website that was very popular around 2000 or so? For the life of me I can't remember it.

Insound?

Another blast from the past, but no, that wasn't it either :(

grrr. Now I really have to figure this out.

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

#309

Post by logikblok »

pmarreck wrote: post #226
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…

> Soundcloud is absolutely ubiquitous in the electronic music community You're not understating this. As a lifelong electronic music fan who has discovered some fantastic new remixes on SoundCloud over the years, the disappearance of SoundCloud would be a large cultural loss. Even if one is not a fan of that sort of music, surely one could empathize. EXAMPLE: https://soundcloud.com/moonchild/04-love-birds-vengeance-r…

Could you recommend more music? That track made my day.

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

#310

Post by eikenberry »

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…

I don't think we will ever overcome thousands of years of ingrained social sharing Norms, nor do I think we should. And if distribution is the problem then there are good existing solutions to the problem of bandwidth cost, e.g. torrents.

There might be a way to monetize sharing digital content using some micropayment system like you say. Though I think that will have to come about after the current players have left or been marginalized as they don't care so much about helping the artists make a living, instead wanting to maintain control so they can get the money.

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