Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 455 posts

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#21

Post by amyjess »

jinder wrote: post #16

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.

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.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#22

Post by dustinmoris »

They also laid off the entire New York team and at least some individuals in Berlin:

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

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#23

Post by cmrdporcupine »

tyingq wrote: post #6

Other sources say total employees are 420, so it's roughly a 40% cut. Ouch.

420 still seems like a rather unreasonably large number (to me) for something that is basically a file hosting service with a couple barely maintained mobile apps and a web site.

Quite a few artists I follow are on Soundcloud primarily for new material. I would happily pay for Soundcloud if they'd bother to update their app for Android Auto and Android TV.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#24

Post by beckler »

phreeza wrote: post #15

Their Github org seems to have gone from 45 to 37 members. Not sure what that means, do they only have 37 devs? https://github.com/orgs/soundcloud/people https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Lo9slf... edit: now it's at 35... ouch

those are just the people who publically show they're part of that org.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#25

Post by avenoir »

pmoriarty wrote: post #9

For me as a music producer and consumer, one of the most frustrating changes recently made my Soundcloud has been their cancellation of groups, which used to be a decent means of discovering new music related to kinds of music you already like. Once groups were cancelled, the listens on the songs I post to Soundcloud plummeted to virtually nothing, and I really don't bother to upload my music there anymore, nor to go…

I'm not a SoundCloud user, but as someone who just started using groups on Flickr i noticed that the views on my uploaded photos went from barely anything to at least a thousand per image (and with just a handful of groups). I can definitely see how this can break your audience. Seems like an incredibly dumb move on SC's part.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#26

Post by kawsper »

conradfr wrote: post #12
mintplant wrote: post #4

> Some rough news today for SoundCloud, the audio streaming site whose content is largely based around uploads from its 175 million users in 190 countries. Does SoundCloud see itself as an audio streaming service now, as opposed to an audio hosting service? That seems like a focus shift away from where they started, and puts them up against behemoths like Spotify. Maybe that's related to why they're struggling. Tange…

Love using Bandcamp. Apparently great[1] and profitable since 2012[2]. [1] https://daily.bandcamp.com/2017/01/24/everything-is-terrific... [2] http://5chicago.com/technology/bandcamp-profitable/

I am so pleased with Bandcamp, every time I buy music it is such a joy to see a link to Bandcamp.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#27

Post by kayoone »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #23
tyingq wrote: post #6

Other sources say total employees are 420, so it's roughly a 40% cut. Ouch.

420 still seems like a rather unreasonably large number (to me) for something that is basically a file hosting service with a couple barely maintained mobile apps and a web site. Quite a few artists I follow are on Soundcloud primarily for new material. I would happily pay for Soundcloud if they'd bother to update their app for Android Auto and Android TV.

420 is total employee count, only a fraction of that (i believe substantially below 100) are devs, which for a site of that size is adequate i guess. They also have quite a few engineers working with the data instead of product development.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#28

Post by legohead »

doublerebel wrote: post #5

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 an…

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 :(

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#30

Post by saimiam »

aaronlevin wrote: post #19

SoundCloud employee here. If you are hiring, please reach out to people from SoundCloud. The decisions of who to let go were not based on performance. A lot of amazing people, both attitude and technically.

Kudos for posting under your full name (presumably.)
Post reply on HN