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SoundCloud's Collapse

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Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#31

Post by thinbeige »

erikb wrote: post #12

If anybody else is also put off by the writing style: There is some actual content there. One just needs to get through the first third which basically just repeats the headline. TL;DR (without my opinion added): Top Management started too late to think about making actual money. They also hired an asshole for their US offices. When they got an opportunity to be bought by Twitter they asked for way too much money. An…

> If anybody else is also put off by the writing style:

The writing style is just fine, it's surprisingly high quality considering this is coming from Buzzfeed (even if it's the new serious branch).

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#32

Post by thinbeige »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #29
thinbeige wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then it became overrun with major label artists. So what. There also many excellent major label artist and it's good to have them. Many new album releases are missing on SoundCloud but available on Spotify from day one. Probably I am the only one but I find most 'DJ mixes' on SoundCloud lack in quality/creativity (I am into electronic music though). Maybe some like them I think 95% of them are subpar and sound like…

>> So what. There also many excellent major label artist and it's good to have them. You're missing the point. I've no problem with major label artists but when you start dealing with them you start dealing with licensing. Then you waste time, don't develop the platform, and abandon the indie artists that got you to where you are. You need to take the point in context of the rest of my argument. When Spotify/Apple Mu…

> You're missing the point. I've no problem with major label artists but when you start dealing with them you start dealing with licensing.

You think all those mixes come for free? They have to be licensed as well once the embedded song snippets exceed 30sec which most of them do (also depending on the local jurisdiction).

Soundcloud had to find agreements with the labels sooner or later anyway because of the mixes and just included the major label artists in the deal because why not. Otherwise they would have been sued (and they were sued by some)—again—because of the mixes.

> Well that's how music discovery works.

Ok, then let's agree on it's a matter of taste. But I'd like to revise my comment: 99% of the mixes on SoundCloud are cr*p. Maybe it's just my taste but I am also SoundCloud user from day one and somebody who spent tons of money on Beatport. If they can succeed with this music selection and find listeners like you and who pay, great for them, but obviously they can't. Btw, you find the 1% good mixes also on Spotify or Apple Music.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#33

Post by elmar »

Mikushi wrote: post #20
xfer wrote: post #10

> According to one former SoundCloud Berlin employee, a lack of direction from Wahlforss, who served as chief technology officer, made things worse, with some engineers going rogue and rebuilding their colleagues’ work in their preferred programming language. Does this happen at other startups?

Happens everywhere. In corp I've seen engineers go behind their manager's back to write something in their favourite language knowing it would've been rejected if discussion had happen beforehand.

I think most of google sucesses outside search were done like that without the CEO having knowledge.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#34

Post by pjmlp »

Mikushi wrote: post #20
xfer wrote: post #10

> According to one former SoundCloud Berlin employee, a lack of direction from Wahlforss, who served as chief technology officer, made things worse, with some engineers going rogue and rebuilding their colleagues’ work in their preferred programming language. Does this happen at other startups?

Happens everywhere. In corp I've seen engineers go behind their manager's back to write something in their favourite language knowing it would've been rejected if discussion had happen beforehand.

And then they go and write a blog entry about how much productive they are now, instead of what was the actual business impact if any, to the company customers or revenue.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#35

Post by dzhiurgis »

thinbeige wrote: post #21
k-mcgrady wrote: post #17

SoundCloud could have been a nice business if they hadn't got greedy. From the beginning (or close to it) there have been various paid accounts for artists which a lot of people used. SoundCloud was the best place to discover new music from unsigned artists. There were unsigned artists with tracks on it that blew up and eventually got picked up by major labels. But: - SoundCloud neglected the platform. - Then they di…

> Then it became overrun with major label artists. So what. There also many excellent major label artist and it's good to have them. Many new album releases are missing on SoundCloud but available on Spotify from day one. Probably I am the only one but I find most 'DJ mixes' on SoundCloud lack in quality/creativity (I am into electronic music though). Maybe some like them I think 95% of them are subpar and sound like…

> DJ mixes' on SoundCloud lack in quality/creativity

By definition they are about selection. Creative live mixes are performed in live events.

I use Soundcloud to discover new music in mixes. There’s something exciting trying to ID track using Shazam (cancer) or writing the time down and coming back every few months to find if someone else ID’d it.

I’d really like if they defaulted mixes to 320kbps tho. And streams stop randomly on Safari, while Chrome crashes after few hours of playback. Filtering options could be improved too, and Discover option is almost always suggesting me individual tracks - something I never listen to. Oh and there’s buffering problem between tracks that prevents to be used as continous stream.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#36

Post by thinbeige »

xfer wrote: post #10

> According to one former SoundCloud Berlin employee, a lack of direction from Wahlforss, who served as chief technology officer, made things worse, with some engineers going rogue and rebuilding their colleagues’ work in their preferred programming language. Does this happen at other startups?

Great quote and I had to smirk when reading this. It happens all the time.

I remember a time when hiring RoR guys. Even the codebase was already in RoR, every new RoR dev said 'OMG we have to rewrite the entire app, the codebase is a mess'.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#37

Post by detaro »

thinbeige wrote: post #32
k-mcgrady wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> So what. There also many excellent major label artist and it's good to have them. You're missing the point. I've no problem with major label artists but when you start dealing with them you start dealing with licensing. Then you waste time, don't develop the platform, and abandon the indie artists that got you to where you are. You need to take the point in context of the rest of my argument. When Spotify/Apple Mu…

> You're missing the point. I've no problem with major label artists but when you start dealing with them you start dealing with licensing. You think all those mixes come for free? They have to be licensed as well once the embedded song snippets exceed 30sec which most of them do (also depending on the local jurisdiction). Soundcloud had to find agreements with the labels sooner or later anyway because of the mixes a…

> If they can succeed with this music selection and find listeners like you and who pay, great for them, but obviously they can't.

For the longest time they didn't offer a way to pay, and the now-existing payment model doesn't really do anything for someone listening to the small guys, so the only obvious about them not being able to find paying listeners is that without an offer to pay for there is no paying.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#38

Post by elmar »

yeukhon wrote: post #30
manmal wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you have investors, they want their money to grow, and this is not possible by staying small. We have invested in a startup we work with, and given the high risk of failure, I would not be happy with a meager growth rate of I'm a big fan of bootstrapping myself, and it's the best model IFF you can get by without investors. If you, like SoundCloud, have a product that does not break-even, then you will need inves…

Staying small != don't grow business. I would never hire crazy so people in the startup can imagine spinning up new projects new microservice new crazy revolutionary database/big data/ new KV store/new cache layer out of curiosity. Till one point, when the business is so big, growing engineering team to over 100 is inevitable. But plently of really successful tech companies did not overgrow their team size for a numb…

> But plently of really successful tech companies did not overgrow their team size for a number of years. E.g Facebook.

A much better example is WhatsUp with 55 employees at the time of aquisition.

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#39

Post by vertex-four »

yeukhon wrote: post #30
manmal wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you have investors, they want their money to grow, and this is not possible by staying small. We have invested in a startup we work with, and given the high risk of failure, I would not be happy with a meager growth rate of I'm a big fan of bootstrapping myself, and it's the best model IFF you can get by without investors. If you, like SoundCloud, have a product that does not break-even, then you will need inves…

Staying small != don't grow business. I would never hire crazy so people in the startup can imagine spinning up new projects new microservice new crazy revolutionary database/big data/ new KV store/new cache layer out of curiosity. Till one point, when the business is so big, growing engineering team to over 100 is inevitable. But plently of really successful tech companies did not overgrow their team size for a numb…

The issue is that the investment market seems to be partially built on selling the idea that you're doing something so new and different that you need all these fancy architectures and hundreds of developers. If you don't sell that idea, you're just another CRUD company so why should anyone invest?

Re: SoundCloud's Collapse

#40

Post by WJW »

reustle wrote: post #26
Mikushi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happens everywhere. In corp I've seen engineers go behind their manager's back to write something in their favourite language knowing it would've been rejected if discussion had happen beforehand.

That sounds like a reasonable reason to fire someone

That depends on how well it works. If it blows up and costs the company a million bucks you get fired, if it works extremely well then you are a maverick genius. "Ask for forgiveness, not permission", etc.

Not saying that the extent to which it was apparently done at soundcloud should be acceptable though.

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