Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> There is no mechanism to archive all of the content we are generating efficiently While we can't archive all the content, the folk at the Internet Archives* are put heroic efforts in preserving the notable content. If Soundcloud doesn't make it, I hope they at least work with the Internet Archive to preserve the data. 1. https://archive.org/
SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
311–320 of 348 posts
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
See also physical books, letters, LPs, etc.' Until relatively recently it wasn't expected that everything would stand the test of time.
Indeed. I, for one, am very grateful that most of my high school papers have since faded into the abyss ;-) ... or so I hope.
hs.archive.org/beta/
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. Torrents are a terrible solution for the long tail of content.
This is false. There are a collection of private trackers run by motivated volunteers and paid for with meager donations which have collections far superior to the best paid services or archives anywhere or at any time in history. They do this by erecting and maintaining virtual economies where what you can get is limited by how much you've shared.
Mathematically, as the download count for each file approaches 1.0 (or even lower), a privately-funded torrent seed server starts to look more and more like a traditional file host.
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Interesting, the above track is classified as house but doesn't sound like any house music I've heard. The cut up samples sound similar to Madeon - you might also like him.
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#315Soundcloud 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 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…
If you have Spotify, try https://play.spotify.com/user/wayspurrchen/playlist/5b5SO6ic...
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Honestly, I don't think the solution even requires that much creativity or innovation. Just in the past 3 or 4 months I've found half a dozen or more artists on Soundcloud, then headed over to Bandcamp or Amazon to buy and download their music. It would be awesome if I could buy it right there on Soundcloud. Every song could have a "Buy MP3" and "Buy Album" button right there by the Like, Share and other buttons. May…
I wish I could buy everything from Bandcamp. I feel like I'm the only one who thinks FLAC is important. I may not be renewing Spotify, so I'm back to using my (very limited, where is my SD card Google?) local storage, therefore I'm going to be transcoding my collection to ~85 kilobit Opus which seems to be acceptable quality for listening to while out of the house.
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#317Soundcloud 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…
IPFS proposes a distributed solution to link-rot and long-term storage solution
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNhFJjGcMPqpuYfxL62VVB9528NXqDNMFXiqN5...
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook has been doing this for years and it works great. The duplicated content is shown once, and then the separate comment feeds from the different reposts (if there are any) are put below it. Soundcloud wouldn't even have to innovate here; they just need to copy what's already working elsewhere.
Perhaps they found the duplication better for revenue?
Not having duplication is better for revenue because having duplicate content fill up your feed because lots of your friends re-shared something is bad UI. I'm not really that much more likely to click on something after the first time I'm shown something, and I start to get actively pissed off at it after a few unnecessary repetitions (this was a big complaint about the spam coming from Facebook games in the early days). Spamming up the feed with duplicate content means that for the same time spent browsing, someone sees fewer pieces of original content, meaning their average click rate is less, and yes, that costs revenue.
But fundamentally duplication costs revenue because it's a bad UI and bad UIs piss off users, leading them to use your product less.
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Same with web content most of this content is likely still somewhere. While you and I have no access too it someone does, whether they'll share it with us is another thing all together.
Re: SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Same with web content most of this content is likely still somewhere . While you and I have no access too it someone does, whether they'll share it with us is another thing all together.
That's not necessarily true. Some of it is preserved by the internet archive, but a lot falls through the cracks.
Maybe you mean it's still on someone's home computer. But hard drives fail over time. So do CDs, floppy disks, and flash drives. Over time all this stuff will be lost unless someone makes an effort to preserve it.