What SoundCloud created can never die

Agree with other comments that there is simply no specific replace for Soundcloud if you have a particular taste in electronic music. I've been a paying subscriber for years not bc i find the paid tier super compelling but bc i want them to not go under. Hope SC can find its way to sustainability

For the first decade or so that I used SoundCloud, music discovery was WORK - their recommendation engine wasn't great, and their search tools were limited, so you'd have to just kind of chase links through artists & commenters, and grind it out. Every couple weeks I would spend a few hours hunting for gems.

Eventually I switched most of my listening to Spotify, on the strength of their recommendation engine, even though my heart is with mixes on SoundCloud.

Then sometime about 5 years ago they fixed their recommendation engine, and it's really just a great experience. Their search tools are still limited, and they've "pigeonholed" my tastes a bit more than Spotify, but I'm still a big fan of the platform and paying subscriber.

If you love SoundCloud ... pay them! Let's keep this beautiful thing alive.

[UPDATE] - also I've had such great interactions with artists on SoundCloud, up-to-and-including some emails to get a local copy of favorite remixes after a track disappeared from SC. So much positivity.

I am working on a new music platform. It is a travesty that SoundCloud and other artist-friendly platforms like Bandcamp are struggling and can't survive. Having used Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music (iTunes), YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, Qobuz, etc over the past 20+ years, it seems like without a new approach we'll continue to lose choices in how we search for, discover, listen to, and interface with music - I can't tell you how many times I've ended up in dead-end-inducing discovery and recommendation experiences in the aformentioned services. I'm not optimistic that the big players in digital streaming can get out of their own way and do anything to make stark improvements to the way listeners experience music, let alone provide anything new to artists, unsigned artists, labels, playlist creators, DJ's, or people who own and operate music venues that aren't owned or controlled by giant corporations. And this is at a time when there is more music being created, recorded, and released than ever before (120,000 new tracks get published a day and 43 million new tracks were published in 2023 alone)(1).

The music project that I have been working on aims to bring together a musical audio pre-trained language model, natural language inputs, and a novel interface that deconstructs what you hear into visualizations and user controls. The idea is to allow you to dramatically improve personalization of music search, discovery, and curation by allowing interactivity with the individual parts of music, also known as stems in music theory and music mastering.

The overarching challenge that music streaming services and more broadly media streaming services have, is building a sustainable business on somebody else's art...you have to (rightly) pay licensing costs. This is a major (and ever changing) business risk and one of the larger challenges when I think about launching a new music streaming platform. MTV discovered this in the mid 80's when margins for music and music video licensing became flat, Netflix / Apple / Amazon / etc know this which is why they invested in developing their own content in house.

If anybody is passionate about working on something new in streaming music let me know - I could really use help developing the music audio PLM prototype.

(1) https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/there-are-now-120000-...

Noble goal and one I considered for a while after Streamus got shut down (https://thenextweb.com/news/how-youtube-killed-an-extension-...). I got to the point where I spoke with UMG on the phone (prick started the call talking about his Porsche) and Monstercat (they're cool in my book) but no further before YouTube's lawyers crushed me.

Yes, sustainable business model is hard. Just look at Spotify's stock - it's basically break even since IPO. The music industry adjusts their fees to keep Spotify alive, but never significantly profitable, and Spotify has little ability to push back on this.

...but there's also soooooooooo much entrenchment going on in this space. There's special contracts written that whitelist which platforms tracks can be played on and tricky "favored nation" clauses (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/business/media/sony-terms....) So, if you create a new platform, and it's a real threat to the others, then you just get denied a seat at the table unless you make concessions to the point of impotency... or you only have indie music that struggles to attract masses.

Ultimately I decided that, while I cared a LOT about this sector, that it's just too much of an uphill battle.

Your idea sounds cool though. I wish you luck. Is it your intent to build a music catalog that is entirely unique to your platform, to bring in indie artists, or to try and bring in the big names, too? If you're not trying to bring in the big names... how do you prevent the situation where someone says, "I love this song, but next I want to hear ____.", it's not on your platform, and so they open Spotify/YT, and now suddenly you've lost engagement with your platform. I don't feel that consumers maintain playlists across multiple music services and bounce between them based on their current listening preferences. Do you?

Their platform is just so badly designed once you do pay them as a musician. I signed up for an electronic project I was working on and I found the entire thing incredibly confusing. The design, the naming of things, the way some things connected with other things and not others, it all felt like a mishmash.

The last straw for me was when I couldn’t master a track. The plan included IIRC three masters per month. After working on a new track and uploading it, I was unable to find any way to master it. The buttons just weren’t there. The only reason I could come up with was that it had been flagged for a copyright violation, which ostensibly disables mastering. But it wasn’t yet public, and it was entirely original content, and there was no visible explanation. I was left mystified and frustrated and I canceled.

Post-cancellation, I thought maybe there’d be some follow up to find out why. A survey or something. Nope. Not a peep.

The whole enterprise gives the impression that it’s from ten or fifteen years ago. I still use it everyday. But the fact it’s struggling is not surprising at all.