Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 455 posts

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#341

Post by CaptSpify »

Kalium wrote: post #333
CaptSpify wrote: post #327

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…

> Curation, collection, access, and reliability are all value-adds.

That's even more of an argument that our current system isn't working. You might want to look into the current non-official music scene. Non-official sources of music come way better organized and faster than the legit sources that I've bought from. Tags are done correctly, quality is much better, and it's online before a lot of sites put it up. I've also had music that I paid for disappear because the company I "bought" it from went away.

Having a middle-man for this transaction has mostly been a waste of time for me.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#342

Post by rhizome »

imhelpingu wrote: post #317
rhizome wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why must the model of terrestrial radio always be left out of "customers are cheapskates" harangues?

Because it's a an irrelevant, circumstantial argument that is largely made-up to begin with.

No, it isn't. Billboard released their first charts in 1912 for Top 10 sheet music, but people have been using radio to listen to music since the early 1920s. The foundation of the contemporary music industry is based in free radio.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#343

Post by saaaaaam »

cturitzin wrote: post #29

I use SoundCloud daily for music I can't find anywhere else. I'm amazed they haven't tried harder to make people like me pay for the service. I would pay if I hit a paywall at some point of usage.

The reason that they couldn't do this faster is that until recently they were not in a legal position to ask for payment because they hadn't negotiated a deal with the organisations who collect royalties on behalf of songwriters - and it is important to understand that a songwriter isn't always the same person as the recording copyright owner and sometimes neither of those people are the artist, and in the early days particularly sometimes none of those people was the person uploading the music to SoundCloud. Legally making music available to stream is legally complex.

So they were in a bit of a chicken and egg situation - they needed to monetise the service but couldn't because they weren't legally able to, and to compound this they were sitting on a liability because technically they had been infringing the copyright of songwriters - but to do a deal to be legally able to monetise they had to be able to generate some sort of revenue stream to be able to get forward investment to settle the terms of that negotiation.

TL;DR - Soundcloud couldn't charge people without potentially being sued at some point about a copyright issue. To be able to charge people they needed to settle that problem and it seems like that all went on too long and now maybe they've hit a point where the model for monetising soundcloud isn't working as fast as they hoped.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#344

Post by kasey_junk »

imhelpingu wrote: post #316
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…

It's not the artists who are struggling, it's the platform. By your logic, I'm oppressing Youtube creators because I didn't buy Youtube Red. In terms of artists posting on Soundcloud, the fact that there's any demand for Soundcloud at all pretty much torpedoes this entire worldview you're espousing. It is extremely common for artists to simply give away mixtapes on Soundcloud. When/if Soundcloud is gone, those same a…

It doesn't seem like a controversial position for those of us who enjoy music to wish there were some professionals making it.

If we are going to have professionals they must make money some how & the current status quo requires them to be constantly touring.

Talk to them and this is taking its toll both in longevity & album quality. I listen to albums a lot more than live concerts so I find this concerning.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#345

Post by brazilianboy »

delegate wrote: post #224
throwaway52342 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Could you go into a bit more detail ? What did the Brazilians do / change ? As for ThoughtWorks, I've been at an interview with them and got a strong cultish vibe from the whole thing. Especially when they made it clear that their 'social responsibility pillar' is cool and all, but "we're still a commercial company that needs to make a profit so don't imagine you'll be doing charity here"... I'm curious how the peopl…

I happen to be one of the "incestuous" Brazilian boys. Also, I came from ThoughtWorks. I doubt thowaway999 considers me one of the "bad ones", but I do need to give my two cents here.

1. I fully agree about the fractured organisation with lots of in-fighting.

2. I relate with the statement about "confused hipsters who couldn't differentiate between language du jour and its monads and delivering a product". I think it was more a matter of very clever yet immature kids that loved to play around with eccentric language features. That was not the root of any problem, though. The problem was lack of leadership to curb the in-fighting and give the engineers some direction so that they don't get lost on their drive to experiment around with whatever they feel like it.

3. It's ironical to blame the ex-TWers Brazilians _and_ the monad-loving hipsters. From my perspective, these were distinct groups. The Brazilians were not the stronger advocates of monads and other Scala typing tricks. Quite the opposite. The few Brazilians that were more fond of Scala were not ex-TWers. In short, simplifying the blame to one nationality is very short-sighted.

4. I'm very curious about who we supposedly bully. Or who was bullied at all, for that matter. Perhaps, I was too far from the director ranks to witness that. I'd imagine a director could do something about lowly engineers bullying people.

5. About ThoughtWorks, there's another misconception here. There's a strong cult-like culture there, yes. It happens that the former ThoughtWorkers that joined SoundCloud were exactly the ones that we dissatisfied with the cult, and joined SC in search for a better work culture. The ones that I knew personally have some quite strong feelings _against_ the "social justice" hypocrisy that is rampant at TW.

6. How were we "incestuous"?

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#346

Post by kazinator »

kasey_junk wrote: post #344
imhelpingu wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the artists who are struggling, it's the platform. By your logic, I'm oppressing Youtube creators because I didn't buy Youtube Red. In terms of artists posting on Soundcloud, the fact that there's any demand for Soundcloud at all pretty much torpedoes this entire worldview you're espousing. It is extremely common for artists to simply give away mixtapes on Soundcloud. When/if Soundcloud is gone, those same a…

It doesn't seem like a controversial position for those of us who enjoy music to wish there were some professionals making it. If we are going to have professionals they must make money some how & the current status quo requires them to be constantly touring. Talk to them and this is taking its toll both in longevity & album quality. I listen to albums a lot more than live concerts so I find this concerning.

> I listen to albums a lot more than live concerts so I find this concerning.

Or .. disconcerting?

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#347

Post by rtisdale »

_kyran wrote: post #231
aspenmayer wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there's an incompatibility with another extension or they have changed the site, but I can't get the Uploads Only tab to show up.

What browser are you using? Care to take a look in Chrome's console for any errors and submit your findings as an issue?

Howdy,

I investigated your issues page and the previous comment may be related to the following issue.

https://github.com/kyranb/SoundCloud-Feed-Cleaner/issues/10

After loading a fresh copy of the page, the tab appeared.

With that said I opened an additional issue. Chrome console log did not appear to provide any relevant information.

https://github.com/kyranb/SoundCloud-Feed-Cleaner/issues/11

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#348

Post by jonknee »

notyourwork wrote: post #146
skylark wrote: post #50

This is a perfect example of how strong software engineering from competitors can result in you getting completely left in the dust. YouTube and Spotify have great algorithms for suggesting new songs - I feel like when my current song is done, I have a really high chance of hearing another song that I've never heard, but will enjoy. This is not the case on SoundCloud, where I'm almost always jolted back to reality wh…

> YouTube and Spotify have great algorithms for suggesting new songs Spotify recommendations are far from great. They crowd source based on popularity, Pandora's recommendation engine is far superior.

They do a lot more than that. I just looked at my Discover Weekly playlist and the second track is from someone with 5,500 monthly plays. That's not showing up anywhere based on popularity. I'd say about half the playlist is similarly sized artists.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#349

Post by flog »

pryelluw wrote: post #167
flog wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pinterest is always looking for great people! I'm always on the hunt for engineers with experience in "Growth".

A software / marketing engineer?

There's probably a few titles for it: but people who build experiences which grow sign ups and engagement.
Post reply on HN