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

SoundCloud faces do-or-die vote by investors

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 131 posts

Re: SoundCloud faces do-or-die vote by investors

#91

Post by wiredearp »

sarreph wrote: post #6

For all those looking to make a SoundCloud clone: What is HN's opinion on its failings (from a user perspective) — i.e. how would you make SoundCloud better right now? Also interested to hear those who can balance with commercial viability.

I would pay a premium price to stream in better quality and I cannot for my life figure out why no one has ever suggested this in any of the many recent SoundCloud threads or why SoundCloud hasn't thought of this themselves. But I guess that the two are connected – and that I really am the only person who would pay for this.

SoundCloud uses an encoding algorithm that is extremely bad even for the lousy 128 Kbps they are streaming in. Why should a dedicated music service feature worse audio quality than YouTube? Of course I would pay to improve this during the six hours I spend on SoundCloud each and every working day.

Re: SoundCloud faces do-or-die vote by investors

#92

Post by webreac »

autotune wrote: post #86
mynewtb wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or make a true backup by downloading it all with e.g. youtube-dl instead.

Can't help but wonder what the sound quality of a downloaded youtube vid converted to mp3 would be vs a straight up mp3 or FLAC.

YouTube-dl provides the list of all the available formats. You choose the desired quality.

Re: SoundCloud faces do-or-die vote by investors

#93

Post by caoilte »

esaym wrote: post #3

> Now it’s asking investors for $169.5 million at a pre-money enterprise valuation of just $150 million Ouch. I hope they get the money. I really don't want it to go away. I have not found an alternative that has so many 1+ hour long megamixes :(

I've always got my mixes from mixcloud. Never really saw what differentiated soundcloud.

Re: SoundCloud faces do-or-die vote by investors

#94

Post by mynewtb »

autotune wrote: post #86
mynewtb wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or make a true backup by downloading it all with e.g. youtube-dl instead.

Can't help but wonder what the sound quality of a downloaded youtube vid converted to mp3 would be vs a straight up mp3 or FLAC.

youtube-dl's name is unfortunate since it.grew.to support many other sites, such as SoundCloud. You can download flac or wav files often using it on SC content.

Re: SoundCloud faces do-or-die vote by investors

#95

Post by munchhausen »

xnzakg wrote: post #71
nxsynonym wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go back to basics. Keep it focused on community facing artists, remixes, dj sets, etc. From what I've seen they suffered most from lack of direction, weak leadership, and no real business plan from the beginning. It seems (correct me if I'm wrong) it started as a hobby project and got twisted into a SaaS model that didn't fit it's purpose or audience. As far as monetization - why not have a Patreon-esque system of su…

See Bandcamp. The main thing that it doesn't have that SC does is a feed, but otherwise, they do have a Patreon-esque system - you can listen to the music on the website for free, but you can either buy the albums you like (and download them) or subscribe to users you like (and get subscriber-exclusive releases, which may include earlier versions of songs, stems etc)

Bandcamp does have a feed.

It is also not particularly Patreon-esque. You don't pay the artist a recurring fee. You can listen to the music for free only a handful of times, then you need to buy it, in a one-time transaction.

Bandcamp is really a place to discover music, buy it and download it. It's not similar to Soundcloud, or Spotify, which focus on streaming. A more apt comparison would be Beatport.

The target audience of Bandcamp are DJs and music connoisseurs, who want to own the music they like, in high-quality formats.

Bandcamp does a really good job of staying focused on these core user groups, and apparently is also doing rather well, financially:

https://daily.bandcamp.com/2017/01/24/everything-is-terrific...

I guess they're something of a reverse Soundcloud.

Re: SoundCloud faces do-or-die vote by investors

#96

Post by k-mcgrady »

sarreph wrote: post #6

For all those looking to make a SoundCloud clone: What is HN's opinion on its failings (from a user perspective) — i.e. how would you make SoundCloud better right now? Also interested to hear those who can balance with commercial viability.

I’ve commented extensively on this before if you check my comment history but basically they need to go back to their roots. No commercial music. No copyrighted music. It should be a great place and community for indie and unsigned artists to post content and they can monetise it using paid artist accounts as they originally did (pay for more storage, better listener stats, etc). Commercial music means licensing and lawyers and paying money you can’t afford. Stay away from it. You can’t compete with Spotify et al. Maybe try to implement the tech Moxcloud used to allow DJ mixes but I wouldn’t go further than that commercially.

Re: SoundCloud faces do-or-die vote by investors

#97

Post by ocWavean »

yellowapple wrote: post #54

"Employees told us the company is “a shitshow,” with a lack of product direction, talent leaving and employees secretly using Spotify." Weird. I never really thought about SoundCloud and Spotify being actual competitors. I've always felt that SoundCloud did a lot better with indie/obscure artists, remixes, and the whole "soundclown" meme genre, whereas Spotify did a lot better with commercial/mainstream artists and a…

That's part of the problem. They focused all their attention on making a Spotify competitor, when the core principle of what SC unique is the community and a vast underground culture of unknown artists hoping to make it big.

The two are similar in that they're online streaming services, but insofar as everything else, not even close.

Re: SoundCloud faces do-or-die vote by investors

#98

Post by matt4077 »

syrrim wrote: post #74
matt4077 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get copyright laws changed to allow free sampling, as long as the new work has a creative identity that is distinct from all the samples it contains.

Isn't this already true? You are allowed to flaunt copyright under certain conditions, including if the portion copied is sufficiently small, or if the new work is considered transformative. I would imagine that many instances of sampling would be protected because of this. SoundCloud's responsibility should be to defend the rights of their users. If a DMCA claim is filed in a way that SoundCloud deems to be unfair,…

Yes and no. The limit is something like 4 bars I believe. That may be a sensible limit for the traditional 3:20 minute song on the radio, where such a snippet can often capture the central motif of the song.

But most of what makes SoundCloud different are the 3-hour DJ sets that can draw on hundreds of different sources, including other songs, or movie dialog, or noises recorded in nature.

There's no absolute truth how to value each and every contribution to something like that, and it may well be fair to keep some royalties flowing to many of these sources. But as far as I understand it, the current regime is somewhat lopsided in the original creators' favour.

Re: SoundCloud faces do-or-die vote by investors

#99

Post by [deleted] »

pmoriarty wrote: post #72
ocWavean wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been using SoundCloud almost exclusively for the better part of 7 years. I have playlists (eg., Personal Favourites for ` ) dating all the way back to early 2011. It's the /only/ online music service I subscribe to. Zero interest in Spotify, don't care for Apple Music, and even other services (eg., Mixcloud, Bandcamp, Audiomack, etc) miss the point of being driven by a community. It's a service where, at this…

To download from SC, I just use youtube-dl.[1] It's free, open source, well respected, and works great. In fact, I don't listen to SC (or watch youtube) any other way. [1] - https://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/

[deleted]

Re: SoundCloud faces do-or-die vote by investors

#100

Post by lgierth »

ocWavean wrote: post #37
sarreph wrote: post #6

For all those looking to make a SoundCloud clone: What is HN's opinion on its failings (from a user perspective) — i.e. how would you make SoundCloud better right now? Also interested to hear those who can balance with commercial viability.

I have been using SoundCloud almost exclusively for the better part of 7 years. I have playlists (eg., Personal Favourites for ` ) dating all the way back to early 2011. It's the /only/ online music service I subscribe to. Zero interest in Spotify, don't care for Apple Music, and even other services (eg., Mixcloud, Bandcamp, Audiomack, etc) miss the point of being driven by a community. It's a service where, at this…

> SoundCloud just chose to not solve it once it became too hard on their database, including when they famously had issues with being early adopters of Mongo

Do you have more info on the Mongo angle? I worked in SoundCloud engineering for a while (long ago) so I'm curious how that happened :D

> Please don't die. I have nobody else.

Yeah I share that sentiment :(

Post reply on HN