171–180 of 331 posts
From a consumer perspective, SoundCloud lost my interest when I heard it's 128 kbps transcoded mp3 you're getting when streaming songs. No thanks.
So until you heard its 128 kbps you had no idea? If that's the case then there's no problem with it streaming @128
You can hear the bad quality by comparing it to a high quality version of the same song on good speakers.
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…
From a consumer perspective, SoundCloud lost my interest when I heard it's 128 kbps transcoded mp3 you're getting when streaming songs. No thanks.
> 128 kbps transcoded mp3 How much are you looking for ? and how much are you willing to pay for that ?
I am paying for music storage, but playback should use source quality at all times. Exceptions are when the track is uploaded in a lossless codec like WAV or FLAC. Then it should be OGG compressed. If you use MP3, at least use 192 kbps or better 320 kbps.
Example: https://clyp.it/ allows 320 kbps streaming and it costs 0$.
"Jeff Toig's preferred PowerPoint style is size 10 Arial font with a black background. An earlier version of this story misstated the color." This is the funniest correction I've ever read :)
A previous manager of mine insisted on all documents using 12pt Arial with 18pt line spacing...
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That "precise meaning" is not universally accepted (or even really all that popular). Paul Graham proposed it once, some people subscribe to that, but it's not universal, and I'd say YC and the greater VC community have a vested interest in ensuring companies like the one this comment chain is about are not viewed as startups.
It's not just quibbling. If you don't use that definition, then the word "startup" loses all meaning. It doesn't matter what other people call themselves. I think companies that don't follow that definition have an agenda: startups are now prestigious, so they call themselves a startup in order to seem impressive.
> 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?
Probably common, but they seem to have asked for it. 3 years ago, they published a presentation on slideshare [1] where they explained they were migrating from a monolith to microservices. That could make sense for them, given their size, but they explained as well that "rails is for pet blogs" (in the content of the presentation) and that they will take the opportunity to use many different languages. As I mentioned…
Contrarian here: Soundcloud is an incredibly valuable property. They have obviously had a few managerial cock-ups, but in reality they have massive user buyin, huge network effect, and anyone who can get some equity in them during this current time of massive negative sentiment is going to do VERY WELL. I wish I had a way to buy in at this point.
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Or Instagram - they had 13 employees when they were acquired.
Yes, but you could argue that WhatsUp is even more impressive because it can be considered much latter stage and aquisition value also reflects that being 19x more than Instagram.
Sounds cools.
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That definition of "startup" is very valley-centric. Most of the rest of the world still means it the way the grandparent meant. A small, fairly young company that is building a new product/service.
I disagree, here in CT of all places the distinction between business and startup is the same, focused on growth. I've heard multiple in the area VCs on multiple occasions confirm their worst nightmare is a "lifestyle business", not growing fast enough for 10x growth but not dying so they can write off their losses
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Best comment in the thread. It shows that one of SoundCloud's key problem is an oligopolostic industry they are dealing with.
I'm not so sure that's true. Their key problem is that they didn't understand how much value there is in up-and-coming, amateur, and underground music. The record labels only have power when it comes to their catalogue. SoundCloud could have truly disrupted the labels by providing an alternative way to promote, monetize, and discover music. But they somehow got off that track.