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…
Vendo Celta 2 portas, 2014/2015. - Direção, Vidros e Travas
SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
431–440 of 455 posts
Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
#432I 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…
Vendo Celta 2 portas, 2014/2015. - Direção, Vidros e Travas
Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
#433SoundCloud 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.
Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
#434Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah I'm aware of all the problems with publishing. Frankly I think it's all outdated, it was great back when there was only radio, film and TV, but imo the rules need updating to work with web. However, that's not our battle. We don't want to become a streaming service, we are OK leaving that to spotify/apple music etc. I guess we would like to be closer to bandcamp by still selling downloads, however, there are a l…
I think Beatport does a lot of what you're talking about - it's the go-to store for DJs and there are DJ charts that are pretty robust and well respected. https://www.beatport.com/charts Regarding the early "exclusive" access - I think services that provide value for superfans or early champions are a big area of potential growth for the music business. Pledge Music has a great business built around this idea. Coupli…
Pledge music and indeed Patreon are both doing good things for unsigned artists and I see potential for some crossover.
One of the major problems with beatport, is as they are the biggest and oldest store for electronic music, they take 50p on the £ and will only deal with "distributors" who generally take another 30% or so just for uploading your music. which leaves the label with roughly 35p in the pound to split with the artists. which is a terrible deal.
Also they don't offer any kind of promotion except for the charts. which are rubbish too. if an artist has a release, they will make a chart and put a few of their friends tracks in, it doesn't help with discoverability for most independents. the only thing which really helps sales on beatport are a banner. and that is curated by a person who works at beatport. which is flawed.
So yeah, in my opinion nobody out there has nailed it yet and there is still opportunities in this area. I'm confident that if you offer a service which is beneficial to independent labels and DJ's then they will use there social media influence to push fans to buy from you rather than beatport/itunes/etc. It's not a unicorn, but I believe it could easily be self sustainable (I'm hesitant to use the word profitable, as I'd rather it was profitable for the labels & artists than the platform, as long as the platform didn't lose money of course).
Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
> YouTube and Spotify have great algorithms for suggesting new songs Spotify recommendations are far from great. They crowd source based on popularity, Pandora's recommendation engine is far superior.
My anecdata indicates the opposite, as far as quality of recommendations is concerned. Curious how matters of taste might mean that you can't accurately make sweeping generalizations like this.
If your suggestions are based on crowd sourced data like play count, your recommendations will be further encouraged by recommendations and thus become obsolete over time.
Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Comments would be littered with things like "hey, great, check out my stuff!" > That type of shallow "like for like" culture is absolutely cancerous for what was previously a very maker-heavy audience. Man, I've been in there since day one practically and it was always like that, as has been every service of that kind I've ever used (hands up anyone who ever maintained an MP3.com playlist). Music runs on shameless…
Ideally, promoters would always be trusted experts. Question is: How do those experts, without engaging other promoters, discover potential tracks for promotion?
Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
#439I 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…
Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices
#440SoundCloud is my go-to for music while programming. I've spent countless hours curating my likes, playlists, follows, etc. I'd be quite upset if the service shuts down, 1) for the artists that have gained large followings through the service and 2) for all the personal time spent that will in the end mean nothing. I think I'm reiterating what has been said before, but the reposting is horrendous. It's made the listen…
If your playlists are public, please share :)