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SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

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Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#271

Post by jtmcmc »

hasbroslasher wrote: post #249
coldtea wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insignificant in the grand scheme of things. The music industry is a shade of what it once was, and both CDBaby and Bandcamp are tiny slithers off of that.

Bandcamp is fine, but it's not on the level that Soundcloud was for browsing music (or for hosting your own). It's still really limited on the social side - the only way you get "likes" is when people download your stuff, the discovery tools are limited to "what's popular in this tag today" and random curated content. There's no "feed" like Soundcloud had. Also, possibly the most irritating part of the site is that f…

I think bandcamp didn't take money - so they can operate as they want. I totally agree with you with respect to bandcamp being where cutting edge music lives.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#272

Post by cerved »

phreeza wrote: post #76
skylark wrote: post #50

This is a perfect example of how strong software engineering from competitors can result in you getting completely left in the dust. YouTube and Spotify have great algorithms for suggesting new songs - I feel like when my current song is done, I have a really high chance of hearing another song that I've never heard, but will enjoy. This is not the case on SoundCloud, where I'm almost always jolted back to reality wh…

Exactly this point came up in a conversation with non-technical friends recently, everyone agreed. The nice thing soundcloud has is the ability to host mixes, which can last hours.

The nice thing SoundCloud has is white-label releases

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#273

Post by rhizome »

skore wrote: post #191
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Amaz…

> Their investor called them "The Youtube of Audio" And now, of course, (and for quite a while) YouTube is the YouTube of audio. It should have been apparent that it was foolish to try and beat google on that turf. Google beat them easily with a simpler interface and raw performance. The biggest difference, though: The audio quality on YouTube is actually better . Nail after nail in the coffin.

Ain't no way I'm listening to mixes on YT when they put brickwall-compressed ads cutting in on un-normalized audio every 10 minutes. It's a non-starter; when I see those little yellow dots I hit the back button.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#274

Post by awkward »

_kyran wrote: post #236
awkward wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I signed up years ago, but only became a user in the past year or so. It's never really appealed to me for music discovery but it's been great for checking out new podcasts.

Any reason you don't make use of iTunes or the charts in other podcasting applications?

I use pocket casts on mobile and soundcloud on the desktop. Soundcloud's better for discovery and it lets me listen without going through a subscription workflow.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#275

Post by michaelChall »

herval wrote: post #268
michaelChall wrote: post #247

Herval, cala-te

heh didn't expect to see my name on a post about a company I left aeons ago, but there you are - someone proving OP's point perfectly (ps I wasn't a director and I'm not OP, but obviously still one of many in the aforementioned mafia's hitlist)

Coitadinho

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#276

Post by kogepathic »

cerved wrote: post #255
kogepathic wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Things I hate about Soundcloud I actually liked SoundCloud a lot, before they introduced SoundCloud Go. It wasn't perfect, but since it was free I didn't have an issue to live with the flaws. But they really burned all the goodwill they had with me and others when they introduced SoundCloud Go. Here's a list of the "features" of SoundCloud Go [0] and why it's difficult to accept them as a user: 1. Access the world’…

Remixing is not covered by fair use :/

> Remixing is not covered by fair use :/

Well, that's good to know and also super shitty. I guess like many other services, once they got the attention of the recording industry it was only a matter of time until they were forced into a licensing agreement.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#277

Post by nsp »

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.

Teachable (online course platform) is hiring across the stack in NYC - well funded, we control the board, have 10 years of burn left, come have a great time building awesome software with us. Teachable.com/careers or email me directly at noah@teachable.com if you're interested, would love to chat

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#278

Post by praneshp »

lukashed wrote: post #100
tqkxzugoaupvwqr wrote: post #72

Earlier 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.

They're going to place work second anyway (to finding a new job). It's usually to give them a severance, not screw folks on a visa, etc.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#279

Post by throwaway999_0 »

tyingq wrote: post #6

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

That sounds about right. When I left there 1-2 years ago what I heard was, that SC would be profitable if they were running on 1/3 of the engineers they had at the time.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#280

Post by telendt »

flgr wrote: post #214

To the many able people who worked for SoundCloud in Berlin: Twitch Berlin is hiring. We're looking for data scientists and distributed systems engineers working on one of the largest live video CDNs in the world at a huge scale that makes things interesting: * Data Scientist, Fraud/Video: https://jobs.lever.co/twitch/17b5882c-6be0-41cd-a6ac-45b948e... * Distributed Systems Engineer - Live Video CDN: https://jobs.lev…

> The latter two positions say "San Francisco", but we have a growing engineering office in Berlin with people working on the live video CDN and fraud detection. These positions can be filled in Berlin and we'd be very happy to do so (helps us grow the Berlin office).

Ex-SoundClouder and Berliner here. I'm sad you haven't mentioned that in your previous comments in "Who is hiring?" threads. I once found a dead link in your comment and when I looked at job ads on your site I couldn't find any openings for Berlin.

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