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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

#401

Post by kogepathic »

rorykoehler wrote: post #380
hobo_mark wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a heavy SC user, listen to my "manually curated" (for lack of better words) timeline in background for hours a day (using global shortcuts in chrome to skip what I don't like), but what if I want to buy a song I like? I have to give my money to Bandcamp! Also, 10 bucks to remove ads is ridiculous, their catalogue is tiny and with overwhelmingly obscure/indie music (at least for me), AND I have no idea if the arti…

Why would you buy a song you like if you can listen to it for free?

> Why would you buy a song you like if you can listen to it for free?

Because you want to support the indie artist/label so they keep making music you like?

> Also, 10 bucks to remove ads is ridiculous, their catalogue is tiny and with overwhelmingly obscure/indie music (at least for me), AND I have no idea if the artists will actually get any of it! Cut it in half, have some sort of revenue share and I'm in.

100% this. I'm not going to pay that much just to remove ads and especially if that money is going toward big record labels instead of the indie artists/labels I actually listen to.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#402

Post by knes »

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.

we (Pusher.com) will be happy to welcome engineers from Soundcloud to our London Office. we have some job listing on https://pusher.com/jobs but please still do reach out even if any job description fits your profile, we are always looking for talented people in every area.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#403

Post by neak »

bm1362 wrote: post #384
dustinmoris wrote: post #22

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…

I just quit the payments team with Pje a month ago and I can say no one saw this coming. The entire payments and subscriptions infrastructure is now unmanned. Pje was a veteran but most of the team was The silver lining here is that recruiters are in a blood frenzy; I've had ~30 messages come in today.

How was it going with the Go launch? I've been dealing with it on the b2b end and it has been pretty painful.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#404

Post by chiefalchemist »

hasbroslasher wrote: post #351
chiefalchemist wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like BandCamp is leaving a lot of opportunity on the table.

That's exactly what's going on. It could be, however, that the cost of that opportunity outweighs what they're working with right now. Building a social network is a ton of work and could be a lot of risk. Allowing users to upload homemade music and post it to other social media is apparently tried and true, as they've been doing it for 10 years. While Soundcloud went "full social media" and then ended up with losses…

Yes. But discovery and repeat visits are key. Bandcamp != #HookedBook :)

They don't have to go crazy. But something less than the current clinical experience would be a step in the right direction.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#405

Post by chiefalchemist »

lcnmrn wrote: post #358
chiefalchemist wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One out of how many? I'm just curious about the signal to noise ratio. I could use a new discovery tool, with not too much noise.

Between 1/10 and 5/20 or sometimes more from http://hypem.com/popular/noremix

Sounds tryable. Thank you.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#406

Post by elbartus »

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.

CeleraOne is hiring in Berlin, actually around the corner of Soundcloud's HQ in Berlin Mitte. We 're looking for engineers in Python, C++, JavaScript as well as Operations and Machine Learning. See http://www.celeraone.com/en/careers for a complete list or contact us directly career@celeraone.com.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#407

Post by zimpenfish »

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.

That's a good point, actually - I've been wondering what I can do with my music that's hosted on SC and putting them on YouTube (with some generated visuals, I guess) might work.

Ta!

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#408

Post by klangberater »

thowaway999 wrote: post #185

I was a director of an engineering department for SoundCloud for a time and left several years ago. Frankly none of this should be surprising: nobody there could figure out a product definition nor a monetization plan. What is more: the engineering organization at SoundCloud at large was completely fractured and suffered from in-fighting. Nobody trusted anyone across organizations. There was no shortage of bullying e…

Hi, former SoundCloud VP here. First I think it is highly inappropriate to use this sad event to blame certain nationalities/groups. I hope everybody agrees that SoundCloud is a much needed product and we all hope for its success. Some general points: Was there a lot of chaos at SC and were some people treated unfairly during that chaos? Yes, most certainly... I am not happy about it. But we were growing like crazy in headcount and every day we were afraid that the site was going down. Everybody tried to do their best to cope with it, but it was a huge challenge... People had different opinions how to deal with it, and that led to heated discussions and some fights. Then to come in from a established organisation and complain about it, is at the very least naive.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#409

Post by someoneinberlin »

mickey_maus wrote: post #399
thowaway999 wrote: post #185

I was a director of an engineering department for SoundCloud for a time and left several years ago. Frankly none of this should be surprising: nobody there could figure out a product definition nor a monetization plan. What is more: the engineering organization at SoundCloud at large was completely fractured and suffered from in-fighting. Nobody trusted anyone across organizations. There was no shortage of bullying e…

This all hits really close to home for me. I'm wondering if anyone else shares your opinion on the Berlin scene being "Mickey Mouse" and why?

I don't thing the Berlin scene per se is "Mickey Mouse" but there are a lot of companies that grew to fast with a insane amount of money. A lot of times the founders were installed as CEO and had little to none experience regarding leading a business. The were just happy to "make it" but had no clear vision what happens after the big money came in. Same for SC: They got a lot of money for a good idea (democratising music I would call it) but there was no clear vision or business model for the future just like OP calls it out. Some goes for a lot of other companies we've seen come and go. In the end Berlin is just not as mature as the valley but this is changing lately at least from what I see

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#410

Post by someoneinberlin »

agilildo wrote: post #357
thowaway999 wrote: post #185

I was a director of an engineering department for SoundCloud for a time and left several years ago. Frankly none of this should be surprising: nobody there could figure out a product definition nor a monetization plan. What is more: the engineering organization at SoundCloud at large was completely fractured and suffered from in-fighting. Nobody trusted anyone across organizations. There was no shortage of bullying e…

Digital Ocean was smart to cut this short (the flock of brazilians from SoundCloud migrated there). Not all brazilians are like this tho - only the agilists.

Agilists? What has this to do with a preferred way of working?
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