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SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

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Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#301

Post by adamstober »

jkarraker wrote: post #197
aaronlevin wrote: post #19

SoundCloud 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.

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Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#302

Post by adamstober »

ghancock wrote: post #265
aaronlevin wrote: post #19

SoundCloud 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.

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Even if you don't join, very much appreciate you posting here and making yourself available.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#303

Post by tomcam »

kogepathic wrote: post #239
samcat116 wrote: post #206

Things I hate about Soundcloud: 1. They haven't updated their iOS app seemingly in years. It lacks basic controls and makes it impossible to listen to more than a single song at a time. 2. The really shitty "artist engagement" sites that force you to follow 20 other social media accounts in order to get a download. I know this isn't Soundcloud directly, but they're the ones letting artists link off to these basically…

> Things I hate about Soundcloud I actually liked SoundCloud a lot, before they introduced SoundCloud Go. It wasn't perfect, but since it was free I didn't have an issue to live with the flaws. But they really burned all the goodwill they had with me and others when they introduced SoundCloud Go. Here's a list of the "features" of SoundCloud Go [0] and why it's difficult to accept them as a user: 1. Access the world’…

Your points are understandable. But what would your plan be to keep the doors open? They need to make money somehow. Not being sarcastic, am genuinely interested.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#304

Post by vr46 »

justanton wrote: post #83
vr46 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do elaborate, please - I have often considered moving but various things people have said keep putting me off, such as a mildly racist culture.

If you're deliberately looking for it — you will definitely find/experience it at some point. In my personal experience, Berlin is very foreigner-friendly.

I'm told both things, actually, in equal measure. That there's ample casual racism compared to London and yet it's incredibly foreigner friendly. I'm married to a German so I have spent a lot of time in Germany, just not Berlin yet. No idea why my question was downvoted, I was quite interested to hear what the poster had to say about the scene.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#305

Post by Kalium »

CaptSpify wrote: post #260
JohnnyConatus wrote: post #156

ITT no one admitting that the problem with the recorded music industry is now the fans who expect bits that make sound to be free while other bits are paid. Spotify, Pandora, and Soundcloud fixed just about everything that people said was wrong with the industry from the consumer point of view. And don't give me that line about the labels screwing artists because thanks to fans who won't even pay for a premium subscr…

I keep thinking about this problem, and music isn't the only industry affected. I wonder if this is us hitting some of the limits of capitalism? It's not that I mind paying, in fact, I want to support artists I like. But the entire ecosystem of media is set up in a way that it is just more efficient for everyone to get stuff for free. I feel like financial transactions get in the way more than they help, but this is…

I get it. You feel like maybe we're hitting some fundamental limitation of capitalism, whereby deserving artists aren't properly supported by the economic ecosystem around them. You're right in the media ecosystem is weird here. Music is relatively unique in that it is something that's easy to consume more or less piecemeal. Nobody reads only 1/12th of a book or watches 3/10ths of a movie, but these are common in how people relate to music.

But what if there's another possibility?

I think we're expecting the future and present of music to not look like the past of music. Music, like pretty much all forms of art, has a small number of professionals and a large number of very talented non-professionals.

What's changed is how professionals attain that status. Once upon a time it was impress something really rich enough to be hired on permanently. Then this complex system involving record labels came into being. Now we have a couple of different viable models at hand, and we have yet to settle on one as the dominant new model.

Couple this with a lowered barrier to entry and generally increased competition for entertainment dollars (which compete with mobile games, ebooks, etc.), and users have good reason to favor subscription models. Artists have yet to puzzle out how best to interact with this, but I have faith people will get there.

I wouldn't call it a limit of capitalism. I would call it a limit of the old music business model.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#306

Post by matclayton »

kogepathic wrote: post #239
samcat116 wrote: post #206

Things I hate about Soundcloud: 1. They haven't updated their iOS app seemingly in years. It lacks basic controls and makes it impossible to listen to more than a single song at a time. 2. The really shitty "artist engagement" sites that force you to follow 20 other social media accounts in order to get a download. I know this isn't Soundcloud directly, but they're the ones letting artists link off to these basically…

> Things I hate about Soundcloud I actually liked SoundCloud a lot, before they introduced SoundCloud Go. It wasn't perfect, but since it was free I didn't have an issue to live with the flaws. But they really burned all the goodwill they had with me and others when they introduced SoundCloud Go. Here's a list of the "features" of SoundCloud Go [0] and why it's difficult to accept them as a user: 1. Access the world’…

Mixcloud Founder here, thanks for the support and if you ever have issues reach out. We're working hard on the app, but we're a super small team, so bear with us!

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#307

Post by rb808 »

lukashed wrote: post #52
phreeza wrote: post #15

Their Github org seems to have gone from 45 to 37 members. Not sure what that means, do they only have 37 devs? https://github.com/orgs/soundcloud/people https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Lo9slf... edit: now it's at 35... ouch

I wonder why they decided to remove them from GitHub already [1] when they were given a 90 days notice [2]. [1] https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882983954059595776 [2] https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882981765064871937

WARN layoffs in NY require 90 days protection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#309

Post by matclayton »

thirdsun wrote: post #254
matclayton wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mixcloud founder here, thanks for the vote of confidence. One key difference is we internally measure success or engagement in terms of minutes listened not play counts, and actively optimise for this. So often the visible play metrics don't actually respresent true human engagement. It's something we're thinking about a lot internally right now, and we might start exposing it shortly. I suspect most people will be v…

Nice to see you here. Don’t get me wrong - I agree that minutes played is a much better metric than play count - in fact I always wondered why Soundcloud wouldn‘t go a few steps further and not only show minutes listened, but also where those minutes were spent within your mix, like a heatmap over your upload‘s waveform to see which sections were most popular or where listeners stopped listening. However, regardless…

That's fair and we're highly focussed on improving that this year. The groundwork is now laid, time to crunch out the features :)

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#310

Post by rb808 »

thowaway9999 wrote: post #203
thowaway999 wrote: post #185

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…

follow the money: http://philcalcado.com/2017/06/26/on_leaving_digitalocean.ht...

I'm surprised that anyone architect or manager would blog that they're leaving a senior role after just 20 months. However when I've seen architects leaving a trail of destruction that looks familiar.
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