I think that there's a good case to be made that, when these kinds of companies turn out to be unprofitable, they should be spun into a semi-public service like USPS (as its own thing, not under any existing institution). Much like mail delivery, there's not much room for innovation on the basic service of, "Provide interface and space to upload music, provide interface to enjoy music." If whoever buys SC has to change it substantially in order to justify the costs of purchasing it + maintaining it + profiting, that would be a massive loss culturally and economically. What is the government for if not to protect foundational cultural and economic entities?
What SoundCloud created can never die
11–20 of 56 posts
Re: What SoundCloud created can never die
#12The risk is high that SoundCloud will follow the Flickr fate in some "creative" fashion.
Flickr became the main host for very different kind of niche photography, especially analog photography or photography with vintage gear and remained like this for some time even after sold to Yahoo.
But at one moment they came up with an idea that a free account could have only less than 1000 photos if it had more photos then it got taken offline. A lot of good content got destroyed by this. For example there was an account that had taken 10s of photos with 100s of different kind of vintage lenses, had perhaps 2000-3000 photos - all gone.
Re: What SoundCloud created can never die
#13I remember when Soundcloud first launched and it was specifically aimed at musicians to encourage collaboration, so its nice that it still occupies that niche pretty well.
“We both came from backgrounds connected to music,” co-founder Alex Ljung said in a recent interview with wired.com. “And it was just really, really annoying for us to collaborate with people on music — I mean simple collaboration, just sending tracks to other people in a private setting, getting some feedback from them, and having a conversation about that piece of music. In the same way that we’d be using Flickr for our photos, and Vimeo for our videos, we didn’t have that kind of platform for our music.”
From: Wired, 2009: SoundCloud Threatens MySpace as Music Destination for Twitter Era
Re: What SoundCloud created can never die
#14SoundCloud disappearing would be a shame. There's nothing that currently exists that replaces it. Consumer-oriented streaming platforms are a dime a dozen these days, sure, but there's no real alternative for a musician -oriented platform; specifically, a platform where musicians can connect with other musicians, with zero overhead for sharing music. Just upload and done. Unlike commercial platforms like Spotify, the…
I’m all for turning a blind eye to bootleg so long as it’s not just the original with a minor edit, but how do Soundcloud circumvent any dmca type behaviour that would prevent YouTube effectively offering the same service?
I have noticed with YouTube that DJ sets often have muted gaps - I assume they’re legally allowed to play the muted music but the channels don’t want to deal with combatting copywrite for their content - it’s a damn shame seeing as I cannot find unmuted versions of some sets I’d like in full.
Re: What SoundCloud created can never die
#15If you make a space for community, and give it what it needs, it'll flourish. But distain it in search of cash and it'll die.
Sometimes, if you're lucky, you can find a business next to the community, to keep money coming in. But it has to be something more than advertising, or you'll be chasing your tail til it falls off.
There's still a future for a music business combined with community. There's many problems for both fans and artists that haven't been solved. Just takes somebody to solve it, without focusing on the profit. If they're very lucky it'll last.
Re: What SoundCloud created can never die
#16I would actually love to work on soundcloud. I use it everyday to discover new music, new mixes, new artists and its amazing. In particular, DJs, from all sizes, uploading their sets, it introduces me to such a breadth of new music and new sounds and then you dig through the comments to find IDs (people that identified which track is played in the mix), check out the artists and their guest mixes - and discover new music constantly. There are alteratives (mixcloud?) but I would deeply miss soundcloud, much more than any other service (like spotify, netflix), because unlike those I feel like soundcloud has a lot of content that is not hosted anywhere else.. i even wonder if its archived somewhere or if one day it will be all lost.
Re: What SoundCloud created can never die
#17On top of all that, SoundCloud has (probably) the most positive and supporting commenting culture of any of the bigger platforms.
I follow the mastodon bot https://botsin.space/@soundcloudsaid that sprinkles random happy little comments in my timeline.
Re: What SoundCloud created can never die
#18This was always going to catch them eventually... Being a music storage system with streaming always has limits either in storage space/customers or bandwidth. I mean, alot of artists are paying for accounts to store their songs for years but the balance of that and all the millions of ppl streaming/downloading from those accounts? Limits. It's a fine line.
Seems like up to a point it would be a fixed number too with the upper limit of new artists willing to pay for accounts (which have more than doubled in cost since the beginning) dwindling. And throw in the ongoing evolution of copyrighted material detection etc etc (which they seem to straddle constantly, allowing mixes and such but definitely preventing direct song uploads more recently I have noticed) But the owners/capitalism is surely demanding continued growth so I dunno what SoundCloud has been telling them for the last seemingly 5+ years unchanging.
Perhaps all the free accounts need to go away too, but that hinders creative growth/opportunities that there just aren't as many on the net. Part of SC's initial boom was because there was no easy place to store and share some music.
We continue to run up against these challenges and there's no clear solution. See also related/similar bind at Bandcamp.
Re: What SoundCloud created can never die
#19SoundCloud disappearing would be a shame. There's nothing that currently exists that replaces it. Consumer-oriented streaming platforms are a dime a dozen these days, sure, but there's no real alternative for a musician -oriented platform; specifically, a platform where musicians can connect with other musicians, with zero overhead for sharing music. Just upload and done. Unlike commercial platforms like Spotify, the…
I’m all for turning a blind eye to bootleg so long as it’s not just the original with a minor edit, but how do Soundcloud circumvent any dmca type behaviour that would prevent YouTube effectively offering the same service? I have noticed with YouTube that DJ sets often have muted gaps - I assume they’re legally allowed to play the muted music but the channels don’t want to deal with combatting copywrite for their con…
my understanding is that SoundCloud does have a content ID system similar to YouTube, but most artists and non-major labels don't opt into it. Occasionally copyright strikes do happen, which is why a lot of artists will have secondary bootleg channels to avoid getting their primary account axed.
Re: What SoundCloud created can never die
#20This makes me sad. I use SoundCloud to listen to one genre only (progressive trance for when I'm programming) and its gotten so good at recommending me exactly what I like. On top of that DJ sets are top notch. There are many genres I like to listen to, but the result is a mix of all the things. It's quite rubbish to get a mix of very different genres spanning decades, which happens with Spotify all the time. And You…
I never thought to look for music on SoundCloud but that's one of my go-to genres so I decided to give it a shot. Just a quick search and wow I've already found great new-to-me tracks!