I'm not sure if this is appropriate here (which is why I made a new account) but some friends and I have started developing a site which we hope captures the main benefits Soundcloud used to have for independent labels, DJs and artists.
We can see many ways we think it could be sustainable as a business that benefits the creators and owners of the music as well as the listeners.
So if anyone out there is interested in fixing this space and has the time and the inclination it would be great if you would make contact via DM.
We've so far been developing in our spare time. We are getting close to Beta. No thought or plan as yet to raise investment.
SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
121–130 of 455 posts
Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
#122I use SoundCloud daily for music I can't find anywhere else. I'm amazed they haven't tried harder to make people like me pay for the service. I would pay if I hit a paywall at some point of usage.
I feel like SoundCloud (and similar indie music services) could really benefit from a microtransaction-based model. I don't want to pay SoundCloud $10/month for what they offer, because a competitor is fulfilling an aspect of that offering for me already and doing a better job of it, but I'd be keen on paying them something for what their competitor doesn't offer.
Essentially I want to pay them something to be able to listen to SoundCloud's uploaded tracks on my phone offline. That's it! Until they can compete with Spotify on a technical front and make me switch, I can't justify the $10/month, but I can certainly justify paying less for a sliver of that offering.
Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
#123Soundcloud 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.
Wasn't the reason for the shift to try and make enough money to support themselves? Free Independent music is not really sustainable
Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
#124SoundCloud 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.
Looking for a platform engineer to own our web product (Django/React app) at The Infatuation in NYC -
https://theinfatuation.com
Here's the job posting: https://theinfatuation.com/careers/38/software-engineer-plat...
Feel free to PM me or reach out at buck@theinfatuation.com
Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
#125SoundCloud 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.
We're hiring in SF for a few roles: ruby/elixir, js, machine learning. Team of peers with collaborative process. If you are a frontend dev and hate speculative hiring phone calls, you can jump straight to coding excecise: https://github.com/Tout/tout_fe_interview http://corp.tout.com/careers Ping me at tom@tout.com if interested.
Why do engineers in good standing at SoundCloud have to do coding exercises? Our industry is annoying.
Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe to limit the damage notified (and thus possibly upset) employees can cause.
That must've been an interesting calculation. Now they're paying dozens of employees that literally aren't able to work three months worth of salary.
Severance is pretty common, and some companies will just keep you technically employed (and thus paid, and even given health insurance) with no expectation of you doing work or coming into the office. Three months is definitely on the generous side, but not that unusual from what I've seen and heard.
Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
#127On a tangent, I now hope that A16Z podcast will be available on google play et al. That was the only reason for me to use Soundcloud and it frustrated me when I used it because it severely lacked features something as trivial as sorting by podcast date.
Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
#128SoundCloud 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.
I am sorry to hear what you guys are going through, and kudos for posting this here.
We are hiring for several positions at Amazon in our Seattle office working on some really cool stuff. Please send resumes to sarthomp at amazon.com and say you found out on Hacker News. We'd love to make this work for you.
Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
#129SoundCloud 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.
Can you create a list of folks and positions that are now looking? Perhaps by location?
Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
#130Soundcloud 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.
I've worked at a few places that died this way. CEO: "We're #1 in $NICHE. But growth is the only way, so we need to compete in $BIG_MARKET." [months of de-focus later] CEO: "We're only #10 in $BIG_MARKET and now we totally lost $NICHE!!" Resume writing ensues...
Expanding to $BIG_MARKET is not a bad thing, in fact this is the textbook example of "crossing the chasm", where you start with a niche and expand--if you try to go mainstream from the beginning you will always fail.
The problem when you're expanding is you need to have a clear idea of what you are. Because knowing what you are means you can scale by taking advantage of your strengths instead of dumbing it down. Amazon is a great example.
But if you just expand without knowing what you are, you'll end up like Soundcloud.
Also another thing is this idea of "what you are" (aka vision) shouldn't come from some media coverage or VCs or pundits. You should have already had the vision before these people started talking about you. See Snapchat for example, media pundits started calling them "a camera company", and Snapchat itself started believing the hype, and even renamed themselves "Snap". Snapchat is not a camera company. It's a social network that revolutionized private sharing. But they don't seem to think so anymore because they have to match the stratospheric expectation set by their IPO. Instead of expanding their own playing field they jumped into other giants' playground (competing with Apple in AR, competing with Instagram in public photo sharing, etc.), this pattern never ends well historically.
Soundcloud fell into the same trap. Their investor called them "The Youtube of Audio", instead of seeing it for what it is. If they had realized they were popular because they were a great service for indie musicians and focused on that aspect it is possible that by now they are more influential than any existing music tech companies. Instead they tried to become "the youtube of audio", which is the most uninteresting thing I've ever heard, it's the definition of "dumbing down" in order to expand.