I hope this is just an alarmist headline. SoundCloud is pretty essential in its space, it's one of the few services that lets you natively get audio on to Twitter, the main place musicians share snapshots of their work and remixes, and a key part of numerous podcasts and ways to embed easily shared audio on the Web. This is one startup I absolutely don't want to see go down the pan.
As a music producer I pay 79 EUR / year since 2011 because I enjoy having a practically unlimited storage space for my own productions, may it be a complete song or stems (individual instruments) that I share with musicians I collaborate with.
80% of the tracks on my account are private. I mostly use Soundcloud as a musical post-it system so I can easily listen to my productions in different settings (car, friend's hifi system, earphones etc.), share tracks with label in a "secure" fashion.
I was really saddened to see they introduced ads even for people who actually pay for their service, I felt literally betrayed and angry but fortunately it did not last long. However it leaves traces.
I still find it amazing that they did not introduce basic filters for the stream, like "just grab house mixes at least 45 minutes long"...
Anyway, I am still quite happy with the service even if I could do the same on my own dedicated server, minus the social network thing.
I just wish them good luck but I hope that their longevity will not be due to ads served even to subscribers...
Do you have backups of your tracks into case Soundcloud goes away?
EDIT: Its on my to do list to write a pipeline for Soundcloud for Archive Team this weekend. Just in case. That doesn't pickup private tracks though. Backup your stuff!!
At my company we have a bunch of content that's only archived on SoundCloud. The main barrier I've had to backing up original uploads (only available through the web interface) is the terrible reliability of all the AJAX calls. Even with browser automation, it requires a LOT of error-handling just to navigate between resources successfully.
It seems that all these microservices[1] are there for the sake of blogging about using microservices[2] as there haven't been any new significant new features delivered in years, and the whole application now seems to be delivered through AJAX calls.
Oh, I didn't know that. I ended up writing my own SoundcloudSync.py to keep a backup. Not very sophisticated but easy enough to run by hand whenever I upload something new.
Yes I have all the originals on my music computer, plus do regular backups of all my music projects to my dedicated server.
I'm not afraid to loose what I created. 8 years ago, I lost 200 tracks. When I realized it, I decided consciously to make it a good experience, no grief at all.
I found it to be a formidable opportunity to start fresh, change my process, change my habits and create more!
Not yet but nothing they charge for has been relevant to me yet as a consumer. I am launching a couple of podcasts in the next month though and want to embed audio on Twitter so will be doing so soon which is one reason I'm concerned at this news as nothing else is suitable IMHO. (I pay for lots of online services, but not if there's no product targeted at my use case.)
As a heavy user (but not uploader) I remain almost entirely unmonetised (for better and for worse). I'm fed almost no ads either on the web or app, and there is no premium plan for listening.
I still don't think it will happen. Worst case scenario, someone's gonna make a very nice deal when buying them.
What alarms me is the amount of Teslas, Mercedes-AMG M models and other kind of extremely expensive cars parked in their parking lots and in the area surrounding their HQ here in Berlin. In the last one and a half year I've witnessed such a crescendo of the car show-off level that's I'm worried about their paychecks politics. An average salary of ~80k/y, as reported in the linked piece, explains a lot.
Is that the actual paycheck, or the company expenses on salaries? I'm not an expert on German finances, but I would expect the actual paycheck to be only about 50% of total employer expenses.
And then the state takes about 40% of the actual paycheck in taxes and social payments. Teslas and Mercedeses are not the car of the file-and-rank employees if that ~80k was the full company expense per employee.
You can't even consider buying a car like that with 80k in Berlin, after tax and insurances it becomes ~40k and if you got an expat family and possibly kids that’s enough for owning a bicycle and an OK flat and feeding your family. The offices are rented from an incubator with ties to the gov that has space in the building (and come to have meetings there with their expensive cars).
german here. a net income of 40k will put you somewhere in the top 20% of german households [1], . berlin is generally a really cheap city (see this [2] article from 2014.. cost of living/rents below german average), so saying "that's enough for owning a bicycle" is just not true.
I don't know where you have those numbers from, but they are very inaccurate. The average household income in Berlin in 2012 was 1650€ net per month [1], so that would be about 20k per year. According to what you wrote, Berlin streets should be essentially free from cars, but I can assure you that this is not the case.
Let me give you some real numbers. I am married and have a small child. I earn 55k gross, which is ~38k after taxes. My wife earns significantly less, providing another 7k per year. I don't know right now how much she earns before taxes, but our gross income combined is well below 80k. So we have about 45k per year and we easily get by. We have a nice flat, eat out several times a week, take ~3 vacations a year, are paying into a private pension plan, and are still saving money. Granted, we don't own a car, but we could if we wanted.
I have no idea if the reported 80k are accurate, but I would be very surprised, as it would be far above the average income for software developers in Berlin (and I think most of their employees are devs).
I'm absolutely certain those cars don't belong to the employees. Also do take in consideration the average would include salaries from execs and teams in SF and NYC.
Also, the amount you take home from 80k, while good for Berlin standards, is hardly enough to buy a 120k car (depending on your personal priorities, of course)
Of course not, I'm not talking about 200 Teslas parked outside. My reasoning was more or less this: devs, general low level employees, IT technician - they're not paid that much. They would probably be the low end of the pool of salaries. To rise the average so much it would take some good amount of overpayment for upper management and executives. All for a company that doesn't make money. Hence the observation about the cars.
AFAIK the two Teslas frequently seen around the Factory belong to the same guy (one of the founders of the Factory). There's not that many execs at the Soundcloud office as well, from what I reckon.
Also: there's multiple companies in the building complex (including a bunch of seats on the coworking space reserved for offsites from executives from Lufthansa and some other giants)
That would explain the high concentration of super cars, then, but It was at least 4 teslas, 2 blue ones, one in red, one in white.
Source: I lived in the area for 7 months last year
All my production buddies hate it. They pay full price, your the world and yet Soundcloud take down the tracks that they OWN. With no recourse or apology. Their system has been broken for 5 years at least for the power users in the community.
Weird how Pakistan seems to be Soundcloud central! I suspect that the advertising sales team at Soundcloud only care about the Western markets, hence I posted the US 'trend'.
Joke aside, it is a great place to find free music. I am not surprised that it is more popular in countries I would assume does not have the same availability of streaming services.
Since I'm from Sweden I've been living the life with Spotify and similar services for years but still I've found myself go to SoundCloud to find the music which I cannot find on Spotify.
I'm not sure I'd agree there's no other facts. links from the article include excerpts from their financial accounts which don't look good (losing 39M on a 17M turnover is not healthy).
And the quote from the auditor is significant, auditors don't put that kind of thing in unless they have to as it annoys their customers to be reminded that there's significant concern over their ability to continue operations.
one excerpt of their P&L does not equal "excerpts from their financial accounts" (plural). And again, it's from 2014.
For all we know Soundcloud was profitable last year. Maybe it's not likely.. but the article has no information at all on last year, yet they feel comfortable making this statement.
The auditor statement is standard boilerplate. It applies to every company that is losing money. That's right -- if the company is losing money, they may need to raise money in the future to continue. No kidding.
there are two excerpts from their financial accounts in there if that makes you any happier (and justifies my use of the plural :) one from the P&L and one from the staffing section
The article is working on what's publicly available (there's a surprise), as they can hardly work on what Soundcloud hasn't released! My guess would be that if Soundcloud had managed to get into profitability that quickly then soundcloud would've got a press release out to say that.
Do they have public accounts? I can't understand what SoundCloud could spend $60M USD on? Apparently they have over 300 employees, what do they do all day? Clearly I don't understand their operation.
According to the 2014 accounts the employees earn a little less than €100,000 each, on average. So there's a huge wage bill.
I have no idea what they do either. Legal compliance - DMCAs, and avoiding DMCAs - seems to be a big problem. But I don't understand why they need 300 people to work on that.
if they raised $77m last year that gives them another year or two of runway. But given the continuing losses the current business model doesn't seem to be working, and the burn rate is too high for long term survival without real income growth.
As a user, I love finding music on SC. But I worry they'll try to make the site yet another pay-to-play streaming service, which will kill most of the interest.
Becoming a sales site seems like a better move. IMO there's a big niche for a Bandcamp-but-better site just waiting to be filled.
I'd guess interfacing with music labels and copyright holders must be a special kind of tedious. Seems to be a recurring problem of music platforms who don't fit the industry's royalty model
Agree. The article could just as well be written about any other successful high-growth company. Continued survival will require further capital investment...no sh@*t! Obviously the author is just trolling for views. If SC announces another round, and then turns a profit in 3 years, someone will write another article about their "amazing turnaround".
Twitter is a public company now, not a high-growth company. It's quite fair to criticize Twitter, or Zynga, for selling to the public at an inflated price based on hype -- after which their respective stock prices have languished. Keep in mind that there has been plenty of criticism of twitter from the very beginning, all while they went from being worth zero to $20 billion. The point is, criticizing a high-growth, privately-backed company like SoundCloud for losing money only makes sense if you want to criticize the entire model of venture-backed entrepreneurship.
If we listen to you, it would seem that SC is both blameless, and - in fact - not in trouble at all.
And that's all fine and well. It sounds plausible. But it seems like every company is "blameless, and things are actually going peachy... but we still need more funding". And at that point the whole thing starts to become unraveled.
Really, is that what I said? You are committing a logical fallacy concluding that "this article doesn't prove SC is in trouble" implies "SC is not in trouble". Also you are making a big assumption that I approve of the venture funding model as applied here.
The auditor has clearly stated that it has doubts about the company as a 'going concern'. This is a technical term in auditing that implies the auditor has doubts that the company will survive (i.e, will have to liquidate) another twelve months. It's not a willy nilly "growing company is losing money" type statement, it means there is a fundamental problem in how the company is financed and operated.
By reducing the statement to that, you're overstating what the auditor actually said:
KPMG said in the report that the need for more investment represented “a material uncertainty which may cast significant doubt on the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”
And again, this was in their 2014 report. So clearly they've last more than a year at this point.
From your link: "This accounting principle assumes that, a company will continue to exist long enough to carry out its objectives and commitments and will not liquidate in the foreseeable future."
Auditors are required to issue such statements when there is no line of sight to the company being solvent (and no one can guarantee that the company can close a financing round.) I'd venture a guess that almost every startup at a similar stage to SoundCloud would have the same issue if they are audited.
Soundcloud is almost 10 years old. At what point a company stops being a startup? At what point it stops being feasible for a company to operate at a loss?
Are these meant to be rhetorical? You decide when you're going to stop calling it a startup. They are venture-backed and founded within the past decade. I'm going to call them a startup.
As for question number two, I'll let you count how many publicly-traded companies aren't profitable that have been around for decades.
I didn't register an opinion on whether SoundCloud should or shouldn't be profitable, I merely said what GAAS[0] requires an auditor to do.
There is operating at a loss because you are reinvesting (see: Amazon) and there is operating at a loss because your business isn't viable. Soundcloud is somewhere in between those two extremes.
Very true--Amazon would never have a going concern statement issued in its audit, because it voluntarily reinvests what would otherwise be operating profit. I was thinking more along the lines of a company like Sprint, where they are only solvent through issuance of debt and outside investment.
I'm sure the same would have been said about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and a billion other startups that eventually made it. Aren't auditors supposed to be very conservative? It's unsurprising to me that KPM, PWC, or any other auditing firm would have a pessimistic out look of a startup that is relying on raising money to exist.
The problem is that now investors are asking themselves more frequently, after a few years of sight-unseen venture investing, if it really makes sense for them to keep funneling money into companies that might never turn a profit, let alone have a profitable exit at the horizon.
The talk around here (let me say that again: "the talk") is that investors are getting tighter and tighter and money is not so easy to get anymore. If you follow the startup scene here you can certainly spot some worrying indicators that confirm that sentiment. Add to the mix that the traditionally conservative German/European investor is reading the same news we're all reading about the imminent burst of the Silicon Valley hyper-valuation bubble.
Where is the evidence that Soundcloud is or will have trouble raising money? Pandora just raised $300m in December. Deezer (france) raised €100m less than 2 weeks ago. And Spotify is looking for $500m (just 8 months after raising ~$500m) right now.
No evidence yet. I stated pretty clearly that it's "talk" I was writing about, and it was centered around the Berlin scene. Which is global, of course, but has its own peculiarities.
I've been a daily soundcloud user for almost 6 years. At some point they gave up on trying to change or improve the user experience. Soundcloud has done nothing to facilitate the growth of users who focus on reposting/finding/sharing/curating content, vs. content creators who upload their own music. There is no way to gain a following or reputation as someone who reposts content on soundcloud -- and even if you have that following, there's no way to communicate to your audience.
In three years, it seems they've just made the UI elements bigger, and added background images for songs and profiles. I was really hoping to see the ability to post text messages into people's timelines. Something to communicate to your followers.
And the annoying bug on the native mobile app where it randomly stops playing, which has been a problem for so long and still hasn't been fixed despite the companies worth...
> I've been a daily soundcloud user for almost 6 years. At some point they gave up on trying to change or improve the user experience.
Yeah, probably at the point when they started hemorrhaging money. Why do people expect a company that is dying to focus on UI improvements? Like any other business in the world, their focus is on staying alive.
How do developers focus on "staying alive" if not by making the product better (or leaving)? I'd expect that the architecture issues of growing larger have mostly been solved by now.
They probably work on things that help bring in more paying customers. UI tweaks isn't among those things. I'm betting they have a whole analytics team, for example.
Reposts? They are currently my #1 annoyance on soundcloud.
I'm following 300+ artists and they increased my stream's size by at least 4x.
It's not about "finding, sharing and curating" but to spam your stream with duplicate tracks.
Imagine an artist reposting his own tracks. Then his network does. As does his label. And his friend. And then all of them repost a playlist with this track on it. Yay!
Exactly. And those creating content are the ones who fork out for a paid account. It wasn't designed for 'curators' because they add nothing but noise to the ecosystem.
In one regard, I think it's really cool to be able to follow artists and put together a public playlist for others to be interested in. That's neat. If it's more for recognition and trying to be a sort-of icon for 'picking out great tunes' then I don't think they add much - as in, established music review sites do a pretty good job still of curating and reviewing. SoundCloud isn't really a review platform per se.
Agreed, and the solution is painfully obvious: Show the item once in the feed and just let me know that "DJ Joe Doe, Awesome Records, [guy who is in my network] and 27 other people reposted this."
Come to think about it, isn't that how most other social feeds handle this problem?
Facebook has been doing this for years and it works great. The duplicated content is shown once, and then the separate comment feeds from the different reposts (if there are any) are put below it. Soundcloud wouldn't even have to innovate here; they just need to copy what's already working elsewhere.
Not having duplication is better for revenue because having duplicate content fill up your feed because lots of your friends re-shared something is bad UI. I'm not really that much more likely to click on something after the first time I'm shown something, and I start to get actively pissed off at it after a few unnecessary repetitions (this was a big complaint about the spam coming from Facebook games in the early days). Spamming up the feed with duplicate content means that for the same time spent browsing, someone sees fewer pieces of original content, meaning their average click rate is less, and yes, that costs revenue.
But fundamentally duplication costs revenue because it's a bad UI and bad UIs piss off users, leading them to use your product less.
I follow 2,000 on soundcloud and wish I could follow more (there is a limit currently). I agree that the way reposts are shared on timelines is annoying in the sense that it is inadequate. Obviously the user needs the ability to filter reposts and just see tracks posted by artists (not currently possible). But I also follow people because I know they repost quality content from obscure artists. That's the main way to discover content on soundcloud right now, and it seems completely broken, both for the person doing the discovering, and the person being discovered.
Keep in mind I am primarily interested in DJ-oriented music, which is not music designed to be listened to beginning-to-end, but rather mixed and beat-matched with other music. You can often get the gist of a beat and rhythm in a matter of bars. I'll usually click around a track for 5-10s before I repost it, and move on to the next track. When I'm ready to actually listen, I go back to my profile and play back everything I've reposted for the day, and unpost the stuff that doesn't stand for the full length of the track.
Wouldn't it be better to 'like' tracks as a bookmarking mechanism, then repost when you go back to listen. That's how I do it and that way I'm not filling my followers feeds with stuff I haven't even listened to.
Vine seems to have the same problem. Most regular people only occasionally post an original Vine, but if you want to see those, you have to scroll through tons of their reposts first.
I absolutely love Soundcloud and also use it daily - I am listening to it right now - but it's an absolute disgrace how little they've done to improve the platform. It seems like such a total waste of potential.
The issues with the UI/UX are obvious and there are clear ways to improve on the situation. A number of people have done unsolicited Soundcloud redesigns, but there was an excellent one in December 2014 that is worth taking a look at:
In addition to showcasing a beautiful, thoughtful redesign, this post makes a series of criticisms that are both justified and still in urgent need of rectification. For example, in the stream:
* It’s hard to discern which song is playing.
* Only three to five songs are visible at once.
* The Stream doesn’t automatically scroll.
* The avatars [of commenters] on the waveform are virtually meaningless.
* Reloading the Stream is slow and clunky.
I would really hate to lose Soundcloud, as a long time fan of electronic music (going on 20 years now!) it's been a big part of my life for years now and I love it.
My biggest complaint about Soundcloud is their lack of pagination, sorting, or shuffling (real shuffling, not just shuffling the 20 tracks that come in with every infinite scroll page). I have well over a thousand likes on my profile and the only way to listen to some of my earlier likes is to sit there like an idiot and scroll through a hundred pages of infinite scroll.
Also, their iOS app doesn't cache songs. The lack of caching on its own has forced me to go back to Spotify for 99% of my music. I'm not about to pay $80/month for data just for Soundcloud.
re pagination/infinite scroll: I had the same problem, it was fucking unbearable to check out peoples' earlier stuff. Luckily, Soundcloud has a very decent public API, which you can use to roll your own narrow client, for whatever you're looking for with the features you want: https://developers.soundcloud.com/docs/api
----
Here, start from my own (extremely crude, for personal use, not for public consumption) "Soundcloud User Unpaginator":
I really love Soundcloud but the "Shuffle" is the only thing I don't like. I am actually planning to design a small single-page one-purpose site for exactly that: A real Shuffle for Soundcloud!
Older versions of the Android app allowed for "Stream caching" which you could select up to 100%, allowing you to listen to songs entirely offline if they had been listened to once before and you had not cleared the cache.
Recent versions of the app have removed this setting entirely, and from the behaviour I've noticed indicates that no caching is taking place on the phone.
Which honestly is just really stupid from an operations stand point. Why is there any point to transferring hundreds of megabytes of songs on a playlist over and over? Bandwidth isn't free for users, or SoundCloud's CDN.
This is why I have started to download music from SoundCloud more, and consuming it offline with VLC. It's pretty easy to do, even if SoundCloud doesn't offer the download button.
I personally want it to go back to (or more likely at this point, find a new website dedicated to) being a community for people who make music. It's now more about listening to music together, or broadcasting to an audience, than sharing music creation.
I miss the Friday nights spent working on music in Ableton, rendering a clip and posting to soundcloud, then commenting/giving feedback to friends who had just done the same. I made several friends by searching genre tags I was interested in, and following people who I would also trade feedback with. Soundcloud (or at least the little bubble in which my friends and I used it) used to be much more about the "work in progress" than the finished results.
Now I only post polished mixes of arrangements or melodies I'm proud of. Nothing that I'd like criticism on, because I know some of my family and non-musician friends will see the tracks and say something. I've gone from posting 4 times a day, to once every 4 months. Maybe going back there isn't a good business decision for Soundcloud, but the "magic" is just gone for me with it's current experience.
Thanks for telling me about this, I'm going to give it a try! Now the tough part will be getting my other friends to try it out as well as the same time.
Yeah it's a pretty neat system though using Dropbox and if anything it can give you some tips about sharing just on your own (Save All, Uploading in proper folders). There are lots of remix contests and the like if you feel up for a challenge.
Thanks for the heads-up about the site - honestly I've found a lot of good, new, or developing channels through this site and comments like yours. I've taken a look and joined up, and will be definitely interested to play around with it! This fits perfectly in the discussion in my opinion. Looking forward to exploring more.
By tidying some licensing loose ends with that Big Label agreement they signed a couple of weeks ago it seems to me they're readying themselves to be acquired pretty soon.
Youtube is not making any profit either, I suppose streaming based websites are very difficult to make profitable. Must be the constant growing expenses for servers.
All the sites that have predicted youtube as unprofitable assume google is paying standard bandwidth rates, with the peering arrangements they have with ISPs of virtually any size, they pay next to nothing to reach 95% of end users.
I am not sure of the exact details, but "free" video always had a long way to go. I remember one of my favorite sites pre-2000 was adcritic.com, they were essentially only showing ads, and failed.
Youtube is not making any profit either, I suppose streaming based websites are very difficult to make profitable. Must be the constant growing expenses for servers.
Having run a music site for 7 years or so I am not surprised. We started before Soundcloud and created a very engaged community for musicians that many paid for.
However I never understood how Soundcloud could justify raising so much money given the revenue potential (from producers) in the space. By the way, the site I ran was http://www.muziboo.com
What do 200 people do in such a company? (serious question, I just wonder how the workforce is usually distributed for a single online product of that size)
Well, they shouldn't gain the bloated-ness of a 40yo bureaucratic corporation that fast, though? At least, that's what all the theories about the way startups should operate are about...
But that doesn't answer the question of what all these people do! I wouldn't have thought they'd be more than 20 people max. Surely they don't have many developers, or we wouldn't see all these remarks here about how they have not updated their site in years. So what's everyone in such a "bloated corporation-like structure" doing? Filling out TPS reports and sending them to each other to get stamped?
I've worked in a place that built and shipped 3 or 4 product lines: actual physical hardware with software, and did it with fewer than 50 people, most of them on the manufacturing line.
The company accounts [1] break this down a bit, reporting the staff numbers as 123 "builders", 73 "operators" and 40 "pushers".
A slide deck about SoundCloud [2] explains that "builders" are the design, engineering and product teams, "operators" are finance, HR and legal, and "pushers" are the platform, community, content and marketing teams.
"Forced to close" is a really, really big stretch here.
They have a huge community, play an important role in online music, and have a seemingly excellent engineering team. I'm sure they would be acquired by a major media player long before they ever closed, but I don't see that happening any time more. I bet they'll just double-down and raise more money while trying to develop more subscription revenue offerings to music consumers.
> While SoundCloud brought in €17.35m ($15.37m) in 2014, it lost a total of €39.14m ($44.19m). Employee wages during that period also increased 42.5% to €17.9m, meaning that the average wage per employee for that year totalled €79,980.
Wow, that is ridiculously high, especially so for Berlin.
Perhaps this was the total employee cost for the company, and not the actual pay check the employee herself sees? Then this would be about within expectations.
Why do you think that is ridiculously high? Isn't everyone complaining how impossible it is to hire people? As mentioned elsewhere, this number probably includes employee overhead. But even if it didn't, I'd consider that about the minimum for accepting a salaried job. Maybe that's why I'm still contracting...
How is that 'ridiculously high'? That's say e4000/month after taxes (if total tax pressure is 40%). These costs also include e.g. the director's salaries, which I presume are more than 80k/year for a 10 year old company with 200 employees.
Glassdoor says 50-65k before tax for run of the mill 'software dev' in Berlin, with soundcloud being on the upper end of that range; and it seems I underestimated tax pressure with 40%. Considering that 80k is the average (including directors, mgmt, legal, ...), I wouldn't say that those salaries are 'outrageous'.
While SoundCloud brought in €17.35m ($15.37m) in 2014, it lost a total of €39.14m ($44.19m). Employee wages during that period also increased 42.5% to €17.9m, meaning that the average wage per employee for that year totalled €79,980
Seems like a pretty generous wage increase for a company in the red.
Especially given that good talent here in Berlin is much much cheaper. 80k/year scores you some superstar devs, while that's probably the peanuts some out-of-school pre-puberal intern would earn at a Valley startup.
What's really expensive here is management people and the way German hire the mid-level management is broken most of the time. I don't know if it's a German thing or a global corporate thing, but I've personally witnessed some pretty interesting hiring horror stories.
80k/year probably includes the 28-ish% "Lohnnebenkosten" (incidental wage costs)
So the actual paycheck would be around 60k. I think that's pretty ok for Berlin?
Having worked in both, Germany and Silicon Valley, I'd say that the middle management hiring is certainly a bigger problem in Germany than I've seen on either the east or west coast in the US.
Yes, but the Soundcloud devs are average and as such overpaid. I think it is a combination of non-merit in hiring and a culture that is toxic for good development (favoring coolness to getting things done i.e. effectivity/doing the things that earns money).
I don't say this about many start ups, but sound cloud has created an amazing experience and interface for publishing sound. I don't know how defendable it is, but they are one of those start ups that definitely needs more capital before they build out their revenue streams. And I think they are going to get it.
The report makes it clear that while the company had “adequate resources to continue in operational existence for the forseeable future,” SoundCloud was heavily reliant on “further capital investment” to continue operating in 2015.
What's the difference between "operational existence" and "continue operating" here?
How many of these services will have to shut down before it's user's will start supporting them? Please give me the option of paying money, and making sure you will be in business for the next few years.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 323 ms ] thread80% of the tracks on my account are private. I mostly use Soundcloud as a musical post-it system so I can easily listen to my productions in different settings (car, friend's hifi system, earphones etc.), share tracks with label in a "secure" fashion.
I was really saddened to see they introduced ads even for people who actually pay for their service, I felt literally betrayed and angry but fortunately it did not last long. However it leaves traces.
I still find it amazing that they did not introduce basic filters for the stream, like "just grab house mixes at least 45 minutes long"...
Anyway, I am still quite happy with the service even if I could do the same on my own dedicated server, minus the social network thing.
I just wish them good luck but I hope that their longevity will not be due to ads served even to subscribers...
EDIT: Its on my to do list to write a pipeline for Soundcloud for Archive Team this weekend. Just in case. That doesn't pickup private tracks though. Backup your stuff!!
It seems that all these microservices[1] are there for the sake of blogging about using microservices[2] as there haven't been any new significant new features delivered in years, and the whole application now seems to be delivered through AJAX calls.
[1]: https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/building-products-at-... [2]: http://philcalcado.com/2015/09/08/how_we_ended_up_with_micro...
https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
I know you mentioned originals are only accessible through the web interface, but I was not sure if you were aware of the JSON API.
I'm not afraid to loose what I created. 8 years ago, I lost 200 tracks. When I realized it, I decided consciously to make it a good experience, no grief at all.
I found it to be a formidable opportunity to start fresh, change my process, change my habits and create more!
And then the state takes about 40% of the actual paycheck in taxes and social payments. Teslas and Mercedeses are not the car of the file-and-rank employees if that ~80k was the full company expense per employee.
[1] (https://www.bundesbank.de/Redaktion/EN/Downloads/Publication...)
[1] bit.ly/1Tb8tMz, best I could find right now
Also, the amount you take home from 80k, while good for Berlin standards, is hardly enough to buy a 120k car (depending on your personal priorities, of course)
Also: there's multiple companies in the building complex (including a bunch of seats on the coworking space reserved for offsites from executives from Lufthansa and some other giants)
Their support page states "ask on StackOverflow" as it stated back then, which is a terrible way to report bugs. https://developers.soundcloud.com/support
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=soundcloud&geo=US
All seems on the up in terms of interest from people using the search engine. Very enviable curve.
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#geo&q=soundcloud
Anecdotally I see 10x conversion rates in western countries, despite having higher active user counts outside of there.
Joke aside, it is a great place to find free music. I am not surprised that it is more popular in countries I would assume does not have the same availability of streaming services.
Since I'm from Sweden I've been living the life with Spotify and similar services for years but still I've found myself go to SoundCloud to find the music which I cannot find on Spotify.
they lost 44m in _2014_. Raised 77m last year. They may need to raise more in 2016.
Nothing else. No other facts. No info on their balance sheet, etc. Doesn't even know if they're growing, what their revenue or losses for 2015 were.
And based on that, Fact thinks that's enough to say they "may be forced to close".
And the quote from the auditor is significant, auditors don't put that kind of thing in unless they have to as it annoys their customers to be reminded that there's significant concern over their ability to continue operations.
For all we know Soundcloud was profitable last year. Maybe it's not likely.. but the article has no information at all on last year, yet they feel comfortable making this statement.
The auditor statement is standard boilerplate. It applies to every company that is losing money. That's right -- if the company is losing money, they may need to raise money in the future to continue. No kidding.
The article is working on what's publicly available (there's a surprise), as they can hardly work on what Soundcloud hasn't released! My guess would be that if Soundcloud had managed to get into profitability that quickly then soundcloud would've got a press release out to say that.
edit - didn't realise they were a UK company. So the full accounts and company filing history are https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/06343600/filing-h...
definitely their cash position at the end of 2014 was not of the best...
I've obviously been living under a rock
I have no idea what they do either. Legal compliance - DMCAs, and avoiding DMCAs - seems to be a big problem. But I don't understand why they need 300 people to work on that.
if they raised $77m last year that gives them another year or two of runway. But given the continuing losses the current business model doesn't seem to be working, and the burn rate is too high for long term survival without real income growth.
As a user, I love finding music on SC. But I worry they'll try to make the site yet another pay-to-play streaming service, which will kill most of the interest.
Becoming a sales site seems like a better move. IMO there's a big niche for a Bandcamp-but-better site just waiting to be filled.
And that's all fine and well. It sounds plausible. But it seems like every company is "blameless, and things are actually going peachy... but we still need more funding". And at that point the whole thing starts to become unraveled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_concern
KPMG said in the report that the need for more investment represented “a material uncertainty which may cast significant doubt on the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”
And again, this was in their 2014 report. So clearly they've last more than a year at this point.
From your link: "This accounting principle assumes that, a company will continue to exist long enough to carry out its objectives and commitments and will not liquidate in the foreseeable future."
As for question number two, I'll let you count how many publicly-traded companies aren't profitable that have been around for decades.
I didn't register an opinion on whether SoundCloud should or shouldn't be profitable, I merely said what GAAS[0] requires an auditor to do.
[0] http://pcaobus.org/Standards/Auditing/Pages/AU341.aspx
This is data point #8794390820385 that the bubble has been pricked.
Given the involvement of big investors, it seems extremely unlikely that SoundCloud would shut down rather than raise another round or get acquired.
In three years, it seems they've just made the UI elements bigger, and added background images for songs and profiles. I was really hoping to see the ability to post text messages into people's timelines. Something to communicate to your followers.
Yeah, probably at the point when they started hemorrhaging money. Why do people expect a company that is dying to focus on UI improvements? Like any other business in the world, their focus is on staying alive.
The last major attempt at "improving" UI/UX that stands out to me was in 2014 when they launched the redesigned iOS app.
That was when I stopped using soundcloud on my iOS devices. Everything became more difficult for me.
You mean, stealing content from others, right?
It's not about "finding, sharing and curating" but to spam your stream with duplicate tracks.
Imagine an artist reposting his own tracks. Then his network does. As does his label. And his friend. And then all of them repost a playlist with this track on it. Yay!
Please give us an option to hide them...
Come to think about it, isn't that how most other social feeds handle this problem?
But honestly, the complete lack of stream customization is just sad for $1B startup that has been in the game since 2007.
But fundamentally duplication costs revenue because it's a bad UI and bad UIs piss off users, leading them to use your product less.
It takes me ~1h to listen trough all of the tracks posted on one day. And I'm not even listening the full length.
The issues with the UI/UX are obvious and there are clear ways to improve on the situation. A number of people have done unsolicited Soundcloud redesigns, but there was an excellent one in December 2014 that is worth taking a look at:
https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/redesig...
In addition to showcasing a beautiful, thoughtful redesign, this post makes a series of criticisms that are both justified and still in urgent need of rectification. For example, in the stream:
* It’s hard to discern which song is playing.
* Only three to five songs are visible at once.
* The Stream doesn’t automatically scroll.
* The avatars [of commenters] on the waveform are virtually meaningless.
* Reloading the Stream is slow and clunky.
I would really hate to lose Soundcloud, as a long time fan of electronic music (going on 20 years now!) it's been a big part of my life for years now and I love it.
Also, their iOS app doesn't cache songs. The lack of caching on its own has forced me to go back to Spotify for 99% of my music. I'm not about to pay $80/month for data just for Soundcloud.
----
Here, start from my own (extremely crude, for personal use, not for public consumption) "Soundcloud User Unpaginator":
Source: https://github.com/gadtfly/Soundcloud-User-Unpaginator/
Running: https://soundcloud-user-unpaginator.herokuapp.com/ (warning: heavy, totally synchronous, server-side blocking, on Heroku free tier)
Could be easily modified to download instead of list, if you want an archive.
Recent versions of the app have removed this setting entirely, and from the behaviour I've noticed indicates that no caching is taking place on the phone.
Which honestly is just really stupid from an operations stand point. Why is there any point to transferring hundreds of megabytes of songs on a playlist over and over? Bandwidth isn't free for users, or SoundCloud's CDN.
This is why I have started to download music from SoundCloud more, and consuming it offline with VLC. It's pretty easy to do, even if SoundCloud doesn't offer the download button.
I miss the Friday nights spent working on music in Ableton, rendering a clip and posting to soundcloud, then commenting/giving feedback to friends who had just done the same. I made several friends by searching genre tags I was interested in, and following people who I would also trade feedback with. Soundcloud (or at least the little bubble in which my friends and I used it) used to be much more about the "work in progress" than the finished results.
Now I only post polished mixes of arrangements or melodies I'm proud of. Nothing that I'd like criticism on, because I know some of my family and non-musician friends will see the tracks and say something. I've gone from posting 4 times a day, to once every 4 months. Maybe going back there isn't a good business decision for Soundcloud, but the "magic" is just gone for me with it's current experience.
I see a lot of complaints about stagnation on SoundCloud, and while I'm not a user, I completely understand the frustration that brings.
There's a new kid on the block with these kind of services, clyp.it. I liken them to imgur for audio, focusing around music for the most part.
They've got strong ties to the community and even have some big names using their tool like Eric Clapton.
The community aspects are still being worked out, but I know they're actively looking for feedback to help build that out to be the best it can be.
If you check them out and have suggestions, I know they'd love to hear it (There's a link to their twitter on their site)
However I never understood how Soundcloud could justify raising so much money given the revenue potential (from producers) in the space. By the way, the site I ran was http://www.muziboo.com
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
I've worked in a place that built and shipped 3 or 4 product lines: actual physical hardware with software, and did it with fewer than 50 people, most of them on the manufacturing line.
A slide deck about SoundCloud [2] explains that "builders" are the design, engineering and product teams, "operators" are finance, HR and legal, and "pushers" are the platform, community, content and marketing teams.
[1] https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/06343600/filing-h... [2] http://www.slideshare.net/dagrobie/16-months-soundcloud/5-Or...
Those who do not have to account for their productivity (like managers, accountants, and marketers) are probably in excess.
They have a huge community, play an important role in online music, and have a seemingly excellent engineering team. I'm sure they would be acquired by a major media player long before they ever closed, but I don't see that happening any time more. I bet they'll just double-down and raise more money while trying to develop more subscription revenue offerings to music consumers.
Wow, that is ridiculously high, especially so for Berlin.
edit: grammar
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10965558
Seems like a pretty generous wage increase for a company in the red.
What's really expensive here is management people and the way German hire the mid-level management is broken most of the time. I don't know if it's a German thing or a global corporate thing, but I've personally witnessed some pretty interesting hiring horror stories.
So the actual paycheck would be around 60k. I think that's pretty ok for Berlin?
Having worked in both, Germany and Silicon Valley, I'd say that the middle management hiring is certainly a bigger problem in Germany than I've seen on either the east or west coast in the US.
http://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gehaltsrechner-a...
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/24/why-soundcloud-will-be-wort...
What's the difference between "operational existence" and "continue operating" here?