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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

#331
Sad to hear about the layoffs at SC. I am a huge SC fan and It would be a tragedy if service wasn't around given the amazing community behind it.

For those that have been affected at SC:

I am one of the co-founders of Terminal 49 and we are making global trade cheaper and more efficient for businesses. We are automating the first/last mile container trucking. We are looking to bring on our first 2 engineers to join our founding team (in SF/Oakland).

Would love to chat if you are interested, drop me a line at akshay [at] terminal49.com

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#332

They also laid off the entire New York team and at least some individuals in Berlin: https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882977097232338947 https://twitter.com/katalunia_/status/882992899893460993 > Well, SoundCloud just laid off all of its New York engineering > Literally the entire payments and subscriptions team, ads-eng, monetization engineering, everybody > Not really clear to me how the execs think this company…

That says a lot. German labor laws protect their citizens strongly. I'm pretty sure they would always choose to get rid of other country staff first.

More likely the German engineers cost half as much as the New York ones. No health insurance and much lower CoL and market rates.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#333
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far, a subscription model is as close as we've come. It allows users to deal with a minimum of payment friction a minimal number of times while still paying. Any time your business is exchanging information for money - music, video games, movies, etc - there's always an incentive to circumvent it. The approach thus far has been to make it convenient, easy, and cheap enough that users are willing to pay in some fas…

A subscription model is the best that I've see so far, but it's still a shitty system, and it seems fundamentally so, IMO. > Any time your business is exchanging information for money - music, video games, movies, etc - there's always an incentive to circumvent it. Sure, but the new incentive is that it is currently a better product/service in almost every aspect. It used to be that circumvention was to save money, b…

I believe you may be underplaying the role time plays in these matters.

Curation, collection, access, and reliability are all value-adds. In my student days as a profligate music pirate, I had to put a non-zero amount of time into making sure the stuff I'd torrented was of a reasonable quality, tagged in compliance with my schema, and accessible where I wanted it to be. I was willing to do that because $10/mo was a lot of money to me at the time and I had time to spare.

Today, a new album from a band I like is one click and two seconds away from being actively in my eardrums. $10/mo is no longer a lot of money to me, and worth paying to avoid an hour of work a month.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#335

It's been a downhill trend ever since trending likes were replaced by reposts. Trending likes actually showed which tunes my friends found most interesting. Reposts allowed a single user to spam a feed with their personal taste. Then repost bots were allowed to require repost to unlock a free download and now discovery on SoundCloud is almost dead. My friends who are successful producers but refuse to play the bot an…

I originally went to SC to find new music. If that's even possible, I haven't been able to crack that code. I've given up, and typically only end up from a link. Rarely by choice.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#336
post #74

It's been a downhill trend ever since trending likes were replaced by reposts. Trending likes actually showed which tunes my friends found most interesting. Reposts allowed a single user to spam a feed with their personal taste. Then repost bots were allowed to require repost to unlock a free download and now discovery on SoundCloud is almost dead. My friends who are successful producers but refuse to play the bot an…

That’s the reason I’m using Hype Machine to listen to those "trending likes" tracks on SoundCloud. I almost find a nice new song to listen every single day.

One out of how many? I'm just curious about the signal to noise ratio. I could use a new discovery tool, with not too much noise.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#337
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A subscription model is the best that I've see so far, but it's still a shitty system, and it seems fundamentally so, IMO. > Any time your business is exchanging information for money - music, video games, movies, etc - there's always an incentive to circumvent it. Sure, but the new incentive is that it is currently a better product/service in almost every aspect. It used to be that circumvention was to save money, b…

I believe you may be underplaying the role time plays in these matters. Curation, collection, access, and reliability are all value-adds. In my student days as a profligate music pirate, I had to put a non-zero amount of time into making sure the stuff I'd torrented was of a reasonable quality, tagged in compliance with my schema, and accessible where I wanted it to be. I was willing to do that because $10/mo was a l…

[deleted]

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#338

I'm not sure if this is appropriate here (which is why I made a new account) but some friends and I have started developing a site which we hope captures the main benefits Soundcloud used to have for independent labels, DJs and artists. We can see many ways we think it could be sustainable as a business that benefits the creators and owners of the music as well as the listeners. So if anyone out there is interested i…

Delivering music online is hard. Not technically hard but legally hard. The reason for that is that there are two copyrights in a recorded song: the recording itself and then the song which is contained within that recording - the actual written words and melody.

You may well know all of this already, but a lot of people don't - or haven't fully appreciated the complexity, so I apologise if I'm telling you something you already know!

Butnwhat this means is that even if you have the agreement of the person who owns the recording to be allowed to use that recording in a stream, as soon as you make that recording available to stream you need the agreement of whoever wrote the music.

The complicated bit here is this - even if the artist owns the rights to the recording AND they wrote the song they may not actually be able to assign you the rights because quite often they have assigned the representation of their rights in the songwriting copyright to an organisation like PRS/MCPS (in the U.K. for example) - who are then required to pursue for a royalty payment anyone using the songwriting element (which is contained within the recording). The reason they assign these rights is that it makes certain things around songwriting royalty collection easier. Songwriters are paid for the use of their copyright - for example if their song is played by a DJ in a club - but the payments are often small and they cannot possibly grant a license to every single DJ who wants to play their song and they also can't admin the collection of that payment.

This causes a headache for people who want to provide streams of songs - because they need to negotiate a licence and associated payment with the organisations to which songwriters have assigned this element of their copyright.

And it means that - in essence - unless you've done that deal, at some point when you get big enough, one of those organisations is going to come knocking with a back dated request for payment.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insignificant in the grand scheme of things. The music industry is a shade of what it once was, and both CDBaby and Bandcamp are tiny slithers off of that.

Bandcamp is fine, but it's not on the level that Soundcloud was for browsing music (or for hosting your own). It's still really limited on the social side - the only way you get "likes" is when people download your stuff, the discovery tools are limited to "what's popular in this tag today" and random curated content. There's no "feed" like Soundcloud had. Also, possibly the most irritating part of the site is that f…

Sounds like BandCamp is leaving a lot of opportunity on the table.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#340

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…

I was a long-time SC engineer and can confirm, the influx of Brazilians and especially former ThoughtWorks folks was the inflection point in the destruction of the engineering organization. Conniving and intensely political, they absolutely ruined what was a compassionate, innovative, and productive culture.

I've met many decent people who work at ThoughtWorks, so it pains me to say this, but based off the interactions I've had with the organization professionally I've started to ask in interviews if the company does any work with TW (and a couple other firms, Pivotal has a poor track record as well). If so, the conversation usually ends there unless it's followed by a qualifier where the interviewer understands my reticence. I've been at two companies where TW involvement torpedoed projects, the culture, and even a sound business model. Not again.
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