If soundcloud has mended their ways with regard to allowing takedowns etc by third parties, this hasn't really been communicated all that well.
I used to be a paying customer, but I ditched the service after they allowed Universal to harass their users. That's a while ago though, and I haven't been paying much attention to Soundcloud since.
>> "If soundcloud has mended their ways with regard to allowing takedowns etc by third parties, this hasn't really been communicated all that well."
I had my first take down a few months ago after using the service since it launched. I got 1 strike. A few weeks ago I had another take down but there was no 'strike' mention this time. I'm not sure if this was because Universal requested the first takedown and the second one was automatically caught by SoundCloud's system but it may be that when the second one occurred these deals were finalised so they've stopped the '3 strikes' nonsense.
I was really hoping that they wouldn't have to pivot into competing with Spotify (somewhat indirectly, although that is TBD depending on what deals they've signed).
Here's hoping that the mention of an indie library hints towards a more interesting slant on what exactly subscribers get access to. For example, it would be cool if there was a way to monetise un-signed or newly-signed artists rather than mainstream Spotify territory.
Honestly I don't see Bandcamp as really doing more than filling a niche for artists who refuse to be on Spotify and/or don't know how to get into the 'major' digital outlets like Spotify, iTunes, Google, etc. It's a different ecosystem with all the same 'quality' issues as SoundCloud but not the same social interaction type stuff. I'm not trying to knock it, but I don't see it as a major player outside of a really indie circle (re: critics, obsessives) and not quite the casual listener(s).
"If you’re an iOS user, it’ll cost more, with the company charging $12.99 for signups to account for Apple’s mandatory 30 percent cut."
I'd be a little surprised if Apple will allow them to do this. It's kind of like credit card companies requiring stores to charge the same price regardless of if you use the credit card (which has fees) instead of cash (which doesn't). Charging different prices is a negative signal for Apple's ecosystem ("Why can I get this cheaper if I have an Android phone? Maybe I want an Android phone instead next time....")
While I might argue that the negative signal shoooould exist, I'm surprised Apple doesn't have it in its terms that you can't do that if you want your app on the Apple App Store.
Also, could we please amend the title? It's not a flat $12.99 a month for everyone, and it doesn't even match the headline on the actual article.
Huh. I guess since I signed up for it through their website so it was always $10/month for me, so I didn't notice.
But see, I was an iOS user paying $10/month for Spotify (because I paid on the web). Does Soundcloud offer this, or is it truly every iOS user has to pay through Apple for their subscription to Soundcloud Go, and thus have no choice but to pay more? It seems like it's the latter by the wording of their copy.
125m tracks made mostly by guys dinking around with Ableton in their bedroom vs 30m tracks from artists you might actually have heard of. Whatever the proposition in pure numbers is doesn't matter when your experience will suck.
but looks like SoundCloud will have all the Spotify tracks, so still it's a win for them. Plus there are many great mixtapes, podcasts and indie artists there!
why doesn't any music service come up with a less expensive price plan? I would like to try one, but am pretty sure I would not use it so much as to justify paying 10$ (or £) per month. How about a less expensive plan with limited features (e.g. only n hours of music per month)?
I honestly don't see how the $10 price point can be considered anything but affordable. When individual songs are over $1 each on iTunes and other digital music stores, and one album bought digitally or physically is more than a single month of renting 30+ million songs for a month, the thought of considering $10 to be expensive seems crazy to me.
I still have my student discount with Spotify so I only pay $5+tax, but even when I lose the discount, $10 is not expensive to me. Especially for what I get.
>That $3.99 will buy you only so much. Rdio says the service, called Rdio Select, will include two components: 1) Pandora-like streaming radio stations, without ads, and with the ability to skip ahead as often as you want, and 2) daily access to 25 songs of your choosing. Subscribers will be able to download the 25 songs and replace some or all (or none) of them each day, so long as the number doesn’t exceed 25.
The real reason is the deals they have with the record labels. There's only 4 record labels, plus a block of indies that make a 5th, and they don't have any interest in picking a winner between the services, so everyone basically pays the same price.
The actual deals are quite complex, but under the pricing model that is most advantageous to the streaming service it basically comes down to the labels get about $6.50 a month per subscriber, and then a cut above that. So that's a hard floor, and with the cut and other costs it's hard to make a business on anything less than $10/month. And obviously you can't go above $10.
This is also why everyone charges more for Apple customers, if they gave 30% to Apple, there would be no revenue at all.
How much Spotify cost in the states? As a Swede it costs 99kr which is more than $9. I use Groove and that costs $9 which translates to about 79kr or something like that.
It's 20% cheaper for a little less content and a not as good client. The lesser price alone makes the service worth it.
I don't have Spotify but I do have Google Play Music/Youtube Red. I don't really care about the video part of YouTube but there is a lot of music there and the ad-free is nice.
But I actually love the Soundcloud interface, apparently others don't. Very simple, and the ability to move forwards and backwards within a track is so much better than on Google/Youtube's player.
If SoundCloud can offer the major label catalogs as well as all the indy and artist content that they have now, I'd very likely switch over.
Well, it's not super bad and the content is almost as good. It's not 20% worse.
The big thing for me is that Groove works on Xbox, which I have and listen to, otherwise I used to be a Tidal customer. But I know there is a Tidal UWP app coming, then I will switch back.
I'm not sure I see what this is really offering customers. It seems like just another paywell for creators to put their content behind. While that's good for them, as a consumer I don't really have much motivation to sign up for another streaming service when I already pay for Spotify.
If an artist is on Spotify, great, I'll listen to their songs a bunch and they'll make a little money off of me. If it's a group I haven't heard much of before and they're good, I'll probably get more into them and end up seeing them when they tour in my area.
If they put themselves exclusively behind another service (cough Kanye West cough Tidal), I'll be forced to find other ways to listen to the album, which will likely be less than profitable for the artist.
>> "If they put themselves exclusively behind another service"
I'm not seeing anything about this that's exclusive. It's just another service they can also have their music on but now they can make some money from it instead of nothing.
Hey there - It's a huge catalog of tracks which contains all content from both emerging and established creators. The full details of which can be found on https://blog.soundcloud.com/
Where in the article does it say you have be exclusively on this platform? The word is exclusive is mentioned twice and both times in relation to Tidal.
That's the only thing that really separates these services. They all have similar catalogs and features for the most part.
The issue I have is with the exclusivity deals that come up
as part of them trying to compete with each other. It annoying for the customer, and ends up with less money for the artist as most people will inevitably just go torrent their work if it's not on the one streaming service they're using.
YMMV then, because their catalog is the only reason I want this. Soundclouds service in general kind of sucks, but they are the only place to get a ton of new smaller niche music very quickly. If you're really into electronic music stuff like spotify just doesn't cut it. This is a godsend for me, I've been begging for years to pay them a monthly fee to cache/not have ads.
>> "Eventually, everyone from DJs to podcasters will be able to monetize the same way, though the system is invite-only for now."
I'm not holding my breath. Overtime SoundCloud releases something cool it's only available to people they invite and never seems to become available to everyone.
On top of that I just tried to signup for Go - not available in my country (UK) so I'm guessing, as usual, US only. Pretty sucky for a company based in Germany.
Thanks for pointing that out. Yeah it seems like Dubset and Apple almost forced SoundCloud's hand - I'm already signed up to that collaborative service (Mixbank) and it looks very, very well put together. SoundCloud's reputation hasn't been the greatest lately from the user/producer experience so I'm with you that their 'open-ness' is suspect.
I doubt Apple forced anything. Soundcloud has been working on this for literally 18 months. the only thing holding on was the Sony deal.
Dubset is doing a great job product wise. Really well done, unfortunately they coverage of licensing is really limited. They sort of jumped ahead and sold the platform before closing at least 50% of the deals (see for instance completely absence of the Merlin catalog).
Soundcloud has been always open, but struggled a lot in having a communication channel with their users. Seams getting better lately. Finger crossed!
Fair counter and I was being a bit more tongue in cheek, sorry about that if it came off as sort of ignorant. I agree these deals are massive to construct, and the back-end has to be really interesting from a tech / rights standpoint. It has been, without a doubt, one of the biggest riddles for the instiutional players (re: rights & revenue). Again, sort of trying to be joking about the subject, but I bet it's a lot easier for SoundCloud to get 100% cooperation with major labels/societies by catering exclusively to them, and basically ignoring any potential compensation for the independent content creators (however minor it might be) - yeah I'm kind of slighting Merlin for only capturing its market, because I think there's probably a single digit percentage of content creators unaffiliated...not much, I know...
It just kind of feels bitter, like SoundCloud built their honest business on original content (not mashups), and then really is pivoting to the major monied players and hand-waving off the rest. If it's true I can understand it business wise, I can. I just...well, don't particularly like it on a personal level.
I think, and I hope there is going to be a room for compromise there.
If they'll manage to tune their recommendation and discovery system in the right direction, they will be an appealing platform for both indies and majors.
Indies can finally get a prime time exposure within the major content. If you sound like taylor swift, and your lyrics are about breaking up with every possible person on earth, I think you should deserve a spot in an automatic generated 'San Valentine's day Single' along with her.
Majors can have a far better social layer that as it is today no one else has been able to create (Apple Ping anyone?). Soundcloud can offer that millennial generation engagement in a pure music context that so far has been lacking everywhere else.
And Majors love millennials :)
I'm not saying it's an easy position to be in, and also, I wasn't myself that faithful about all this would have played out for SoundCloud, but to be honest, is an exciting time for the music industry.
Very well stated and I like the perspective you've put forward. Rational and, it seems, also quite healthy for the major stakeholders. Breaking 'new' artists is a big deal, and profitable in the long run - especially if there's SoundCloud analytics behind the scenes pointing to new targets. Without a doubt I agree the majors have been successful in protecting their role as curators of taste in their own way; they've always been in a pretty strong position. Totally with you that this is a great time to be watching the tech and distribution and rights discussions taking place in music.
I can't remember any service in the music industry that started from day one World Wide.
Licensing in music is one of the most fkup situation ever. Compared to that, the Tech patent battle is nothing.
I do expect a constant roll out of new countries, but starting from US (which is the larger audience as today) does make sense to me.
>> "I can't remember any service in the music industry that started from day one World Wide."
I believe Apple music covered quite a lot of countries. I think at least some part of the service hit nearly all of them. I'm fine with launching in one country but at least give a timeline and for one of Europe's leading startups to launch a product US only is a bit of a kick in the teeth. I understand it but it just feels bad.
I'm trying to find out if there's any announcement by SoundCloud about paying non-RIAA affiliated independents. Yeah yeah I'm pretty sure it's a Nope but it'd be nice to look into. At least Spotify pays. And Apple pays. And Google pays. And Deezr pays. And Tidal pays...
What will be hard for many consumers and artists is that Soundcloud has so many DJ's and/or podcasters who've been putting out something like a weekly mixtape or podcast for years. Now let's say all of the sudden they now put it behind the paywall. Consumers who have gotten used to getting this free content for years will now be irked. I'm afraid people already equate Soundcloud with great free content, so transitioning to anything else will be difficult.
HBO Go is the only real clash there (very few people are going to confuse an offering by a well known music site with a programming language or board game). I don't see HBO ever making Go available outside the US so it probably won't be a real issue for many people.
I think the bigger problem with these generic names is that they are hard to search for and crowd the search space. Go is a common enough word that you'll need to search for `"SoundCloud Go"`, since `SoundCloud Go` will bring up a bunch of unrelated stuff about SoundCloud, e.g. "go to your SoundCloud account panel and..." But using quotes will miss sentences like, "SoundCloud has released a new service, Go."
Probably as a result of Google's use of ngrams for searching. It also seems likely that users instinctively (or rather, by years of experience from using Google) know to search for the proper noun rather than just "go" alone...basing that on my own anecdotal evidence of always searching for "hbo now" instead of just "now"
While I like SoundCloud a lot, what the hell have they been up to for the last few years? From where I'm sitting Spotify, Apple Music and many more out-innovated them and SoundCloud did... well, nothing.
they have the best recommendation system in place (radios) and curated playlist (songza acquisition).
Unfortunately is a great example that is not always a matter of quality, but more a matter of trend and hype.
I'm sure SoundCloud Go will be available in Canada soon.
I think that's a fair perspective. With all these deals shaking out as a customer I'm quite happy with Amazon Prime Music for streaming/mainstream and then purchasing tracks or the occasional album via Beatport/CDs/etc. So now SoundCloud wants creators to pay for a Pro account and listeners to pay for a Go account...hmmm...well it does sound like they are genuinely trying to get revenue up. We'll see if this works.
as the article states they were trying to score deals around content derivatives (e.g remixes, dj sets) that never existed before. I wouldn't underestimate that!
Another article over on Billboard points out that Apple Music and Dubset just announced a system for remixes and DJ sets that actually pays the remixer and DJ a portion of funds while also compensating the original content owners, and about a week before this SoundCloud announcement.
I know about it because I'm already signed up and have an account. SoundCloud has provided nothing in the way of notification, tools, or access to a similar platform. Sure, they're getting in better position with the RIAA/Merlin groups but that's not traditionally the value proposition with SoundCloud for listeners/creators. Maybe in time we'll learn more about why SoundCloud and Dubset both have competing systems for license revenue (apparently?!), and which one might be the better of the two.
What scares me the most is the bureaucracy that apple has in place.
It takes about 8 weeks to get a content live in Apple music. No matter what sort of content.
On Soundcloud it takes about 8 seconds (well maybe 8 minutes if you have a slow connection).
Also, with 175M users, vs the 30M of Apple, and over 7 years of exclusive content, I don't see Apple getting ahead too fast.
Well I know Apple has that turnaround potential - up to 16 days I think is the wording - but I've had very good success with 24-48 hour turnaround time on most of my material. I'd have to double check, but your point is a good one. Spotify, Amazon, Tidal, Google, YouTube all have the content up within 24 hours, and some even quicker it seems. If the lag is a bit of an inconvenience I understand, but I find the results worthwhile in my use case.
If SoundCloud does essentially 'legitimize' the remix and DJ set market and corners it, with revenue, I think the music industry will be pretty happy with that outcome. As a customer/content creator I do like competition, even if it means managing more outlets.
Correct. Spotify has an optimistic scheduler that sometimes swings under 2hours for point to point ingestions.
Google Play is fast too.
I'd love to find out more about user adoption of all this players in about 6 months.
As you correctly point out the next big technical challenge is having a unified delivery system (without any additional cuts, so no aggregators pls).
What sort of innovation are you talking about? I always felt like Soundcloud got it right way before everyone else and it makes sense they spent the last few years getting the business right.
The problem that SoundCloud is trying to solve has nowhere else being address.
Yes, spotify and Apple Music are growing at a fast pace, but they don't necessarily play in the same landscape of SoundCloud.
Content is what differentiate SoundCloud from any of its competitors. If you want exclusive content, early gems or just unreleased reworks, soundcloud is the place to go.
Solving this on the legal prospective is a huge pain. That is what Soundscloud has been doing for the last ever.
Allowing you to enjoy Rihanna new song as well as 'Dj in his bedroom remix of Rihanna new song'. Try to find that on Spotify or Apple Music.
Now that they've close all the deals they needed in place, you'll see how fast the product will grow.
I completely agree with you. Although Video vs Audio content can be a differentiation, especially in the growing market where there is a shortage of data.
I don't think you can compare SoundCloud with Spotify or Apple Music. I use SoundCloud to follow artists directly, where they post snippets, WIPs, free downloads, re-post other artists tunes etc.
This would explain why they have removed the local cache option in their Android app.
In previous versions, you could select how much content to cache locally on the device, up to 100%. This meant if you listened to a song once, you could listen to it again offline.
From using their app now, and the website (non-mobile) it seems they have removed all caching completely.
Anyway, it's absolutely trivial to download the raw songs (MP3) from SoundCloud using Developer Tools in your favourite browser. It's not the highest quality, but since SoundCloud is 90% user contributed tracks, the original quality is often questionable anyway.
I see no added value from this service. Just download the songs as MP3 files and listen to them, offline and ad free!
This is one of the reasons I don't like the iOS app. There was never any caching. On the commute to work (where I listen to the most music) I could listen to the same track as long as I had net connection which isn't always the case.
I feel that they have taken a step back on their apps recently.
This would be appealing if the Soundcloud apps (including web) werent so atrocious. Navigating through your collection on Android is a mess, and the webapp shows as few as 2 tracks on a full laptop screen (while eating up gigabytes of RAM after only casual listening). I still love how the webapp "shuffle" mode will only shuffle through the songs already loaded by the client, so its just a mix of your most recent 25 or 50 songs.
The iOS app (last I used it, 1-2 months ago) was trash as well. Constant issues with buffering, no offline, crashing all the time. I use Mixcloud exclusively now and while it doesn't have offline either it works 1000x better and has more of what I really want.
I used to use soundcloud all the time but switched to 'Discover weekely' on Spotify, like the author of the article. Spotify hit it out of park with Discover weekly.
One downside of spotify is still discoverability, discover weekly doesn't introduce you to completely new kinds of music, it sticks to what you already like. You are on you own to introduce randomness into spotify's discovery algorithms.
I think Rdio had that right idea here. I was discovering much more new music when I was with Rdio than with Spotify. Spotify leans heavily towards what is popular.
There's more, of course but I agree that many of the curated playlists lean towards popular music. I also follow /r/spotify on reddit and every now and then there's a good playlist on there.
So sad that Rdio is gone. Their discovery and design were both fantastic. I can't bring myself to use Spotify, but I've been using Deezer in the meantime. Its immaturity (as a product) shows, but it gets the basics right and the UI isn't nearly as confusing as Spotify's.
Agree completely. Rdio did a much better job with music discovery, but they were limited by selection. Soundcloud doesn't have typical discovery features, but the ones they do have are quite good. Here's how I find good (relatively unknown/esoteric) music there:
- Follow good aggregator accounts. These repost new music regularly, which appears in one's timeline.
- Follow good regular accounts and play their "likes."
- Go to a song's "related tracks" screen and play those
I find excellent music on a regular basis this way.
Thanks for the tip. I used rdio, currently spotify, and pandora. My method in finding songs was going to Pandora and adding songs I loved from their to spotify. Pandora seems to be great at finding similar sounding songs to what I request.
The whole finding people to follow is what is the problem for me. It takes time finding accounts to follow. Friends dont have similar taste in music. Apple has the right idea in picking songs/artist you like before you get to start the service so you get something you like in your feed.
someone make an app to connect users to awesome playlists based on songs/genre/and more
The initial bootstrap period is definitely a missing piece that Soundcloud could and should build.
"DiscoverTracks" is a service to help with part of the process (it looks at your likes and plays you related tracks based on the likes of friends and friends of friends I believe.) Doesn't solve the entire issue, but it's handy: https://www.discovertracks.com/
You can try 8tracks.com. They have curated playlists based on genre/mood/etc. I generally just search by an artist I like then browse through all the different playlists to find something else I like.
This is where I disagree with Justin Kan who said "turns out most people don't really care that much about discovering new music." Maybe he's right in the nuance of monetizing that specific feature, but Discover Weekly by Spotify is one of the most killer features I've seen in a music app in a long time. These days I don't have much time to browse blogs/twitter for new music and it's great that I have a temporary inbox of new songs that I should be listening to that often results in at min. one new favorite song.
Isn't it weird that so much of what makes Discover Weekly great seems to be in its presentation as a weekly changing playlist (of all things!) and not in the discovery algorithm itself, which is fine, but nothing we haven't seen before.
I am a long-time user of Soundcloud that has recently stepped back from the service. As an EDM enthusiast, the service is the best place for finding up-and-coming talent and great remixes that you can't find anywhere else. The killer feature is the personal stream. Once you've started following a large enough pool of artists and labels, there is no better mechanism for wading through the pool of mediocrity to search out those rare gems.
Unfortunately, Soundcloud's method for organizing your content really breaks down under heavy use. I have over 1000 songs liked, and scrolling through the like list, dynamically fetching ten songs at a time, is a huge pain. Playlist creation and maintenance is even more cumbersome and limited than Spotify, which is saying something.
Worst of all, the usefulness of the stream, arguably Soundcloud's most unique and valuable listener-facing feature, really breaks down the longer you're using the service. Most heavy users I know end up following over a few hundred artists/labels/channels, accumulated over years of use, and the signal-to-noise ratio becomes unbearable. The sad thing is that the breakdown is purely a UX problem. The webapp is an infinite-scroll nightmare: forcing you to start at the top of the stream every time and fetch tracks 10 at a time. It doesn't clean up after itself, so after an hour of slowly chipping away through your feed, the browser gets so slow and unresponsive on my top-spec Macbook Pro that I often give up and don't bother trying to listen to new tracks that have been posted to my feed over 18 hours ago. Of course, as I now check Soundcloud less and less frequently, that means I am missing a ton of content.
On top of that, due to Soundcloud's reputation as solely a promotional tool within the artist community, you end up wading through a ton of 1 - 2 minute previews and other low-quality throwaways, and songs that you like can disappear from the service at any time, without notice. You cannot build a stable music library on top of the service. In fact, I used to have a process where I'd look for new songs on Soundcloud, and if I found something good, look it up on Spotify and save it within my Spotify collection, because I knew it wouldn't just disappear on me after a few months. Once Spotify upped their discovery game and the available EDM content grew, I removed Soundcloud from the process entirely.
Soundcloud used to be the best game in town for music discovery, especially EDM, but they let that slip over the last few years of struggling to monetize and Spotify's constant progression has now really chipped away that advantage. I've signed up for this GO service, but I highly doubt I'll keep it past the 30 day free trial. $10 a month for offline download and removing ads? As far as I can tell, my stream is the same mess as it was before, and they don't even distinguish between GO-exclusive and free tracks. I don't see anywhere where I can find GO-exclusive tracks within the app at all, actually.
New music discovery is hard and the big players (Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play) still haven't fully cracked it, at least for specific-niche enthusiasts like myself. When the Soundcloud stream is working well, it is the best interface I've used for finding new music I like, but the complete lack of focus and neglect on that front from this initiative means that I probably won't be coming back.
Great analysis of Soundcloud's problems. I love it for all the same reasons (something like 90% of the new music I've found over the past 4 years is via soundcloud), but any ability to filter/manage/sort/search your favorites or your stream is basically missing.
And, as you say, it's purely a UX problem.
Also the fact that they don't have limited permission tokens is insane. A lot of artists have a "free download for followers" policy, but the integrations that enforce that require 100% complete access to your account. As in, sign me up to follow anyone, post anything, etc. Just to verify that I'm following you.
I actually spent the last two years writing a music app that integrated with the Soundcloud API to provide the bulk of the music content. To call their iOS SDK "neglected" is an understatement, but what I found worse was the opaque failure modes and restricted access provided by the official REST API.
For example, Soundcloud provides artists with a switch to allow/forbid third-party clients using their API to access the audio streams of the songs they post. This restriction, naturally, doesn't affect the official Soundcloud apps. While it makes my app a second-class citizen for accessing Soundcloud content, I understand the motivation and reasoning for the feature.
However, how does the Soundcloud API surface these restrictions? Through one of the dozens of flags it attaches to the json response it returns when you query for a track's metadata? Ha, no, all the various "track downloadable" and "streamable" flags are all set to true. Instead, it just returns a 404 when you try to fetch the data from the track URL...except when it started returning 401 instead (an admittedly more appropriate return code)...until it started returning 404 again.
So as a developer, my only avenue for not surfacing non-playable tracks within my client was to attempt to download each track, catch any 4xx responses, ASSUME the reason is due to permissions rather than any other potential causes for 4xx errors, and hide the content within the app.
I can understand Soundcloud's lack of enthusiasm for providing decent 3rd-party integrations, but if your external API is this much of a mess, I'd hate to see what you vend internally. The fact their permissions token provides zero granularity is not surprising to me at all.
That is tragic. I'm such a huge fan of SoundCloud - I even pay for a pro account, even though I don't post that much audio, just to give them $$ - but ... sigh. These are not good problems.
And here I thought their Roshi library looked pretty good. Maybe the talent is all on the backend there.
1) the bad UX when having a big library
2) the 3rd party developer experience.
Starting from 2) I'd say SoundCloud has been fairly open in their early stage, and a lot more conservative later on. I'm not sure what's the direction they are going to take in the future. If I was running SoundCloud, I'd keep the API as a playground, not for production use, and I'd try to fix the major issue in my product instead of leaving room for someone else to crack that business.
Regarding 1) you are absolutely right. It boils down to 3 major areas of the product: classification, recommendation and search.
Big players are working on that, but they are all implementing some sort of social driven collaborative filter (which is sad, if we think about how personal is the listening experience). Soundcloud should try to have a more hybrid approach introducing some more advance machine learning neural network technique to get rid of the 'cold start' effect and have a better targeting of the 'long tail' of their 125m tracks.
Once they have the 'data' layer done, they should complement with a product UX experience, including curated playlists, radios, personal automatic generated playlist, and an overall better UX experience for the user-listener segment of their audience.
Taking on Spotify seems like an odd choice to me. To me it would seem that Spotify has a huge fight ahead of it, even though it has raised well over a billion dollars at this point. They're fighting against the platforms that already exist: Apple Music & Google Play. Apple Music offers basically the same thing except with tighter integration with their hardware (and iTunes for buying the songs that artists don't allow to be streamed), as does Google Play.
It seems to me that Spotify is fighting an uphill battle saddled with an enormous valuation ($10b-ish I believe?); SoundCloud really wants to fight against them for whoever is left after Google & Apple? And, through all of this, Spotify & SoundCloud are paying a huge chunk of their mobile revenue directly to their competitors (Apple/Google stores). It doesn't sound like a space that I want to be in!
> And, through all of this, Spotify & SoundCloud are paying a huge chunk of their mobile revenue directly to their competitors (Apple/Google stores).
I'm not so sure they are. By charging a higher price ($12.99 in app vs. $9.99 on web), I wonder if people really are paying the higher price just for convenience. I'm definitely not.
Tidal is currently doing the same with their pricing structure.
The thing that differentiate Soundcloud from all the competitors you are mentioning is the social network that it's build on. Hence the size of the catalog that is by far (3.5x) bigger.
In other words, if you want to find something completely exclusive and never heard before, Soundcloud is the place to go. If that content is good quality or not, is another topic :)
Not that I'm opposed to Soundcloud charging money, but I've been concerned with what happens to all that cool music if/when the business model fails.
I've been dreaming up a way to use ipfs, ethereum, and other distributed tech to create a user-owned, cryptocurrency sustained soundcloud that would persist.
Not that I'm opposed to Soundcloud charging money, but I've been concerned with what happens to all that cool music if/when the business model fails.
I've been dreaming up a way to use ipfs, ethereum, and other distributed tech to create a user-owned, cryptocurrency sustained soundcloud that would persist.
for anyone interested, I've got a rough use case disagram here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4gkEhfnwSVBZDE5TGtSUFlmYWc...
Their competitive advantage will be their unique catalog and social features but Google with YouTube Red already provides a similar catalog and experience. Most remixes I find on Soundcloud I've also been able to find on YouTube and YouTube has more live clips in my experience.
Either the brand value of soundcloud is high, it can attract artists to post exclusives on its site or the second-by-second social feature is an important deal or they will have difficulty competing with Google Play/YouTube Red and the others.
SoundCloud Go is not available in Germany. It's kind of ironic given it's a Berlin, Germany based company.
I wonder if this is due to GEMA preventing them from offering Go for an acceptable price. Unfortunately many services (including YouTube) have this problem.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadI used to be a paying customer, but I ditched the service after they allowed Universal to harass their users. That's a while ago though, and I haven't been paying much attention to Soundcloud since.
Have they shaped up or should I still avoid them?
I had my first take down a few months ago after using the service since it launched. I got 1 strike. A few weeks ago I had another take down but there was no 'strike' mention this time. I'm not sure if this was because Universal requested the first takedown and the second one was automatically caught by SoundCloud's system but it may be that when the second one occurred these deals were finalised so they've stopped the '3 strikes' nonsense.
Here's hoping that the mention of an indie library hints towards a more interesting slant on what exactly subscribers get access to. For example, it would be cool if there was a way to monetise un-signed or newly-signed artists rather than mainstream Spotify territory.
I'd be a little surprised if Apple will allow them to do this. It's kind of like credit card companies requiring stores to charge the same price regardless of if you use the credit card (which has fees) instead of cash (which doesn't). Charging different prices is a negative signal for Apple's ecosystem ("Why can I get this cheaper if I have an Android phone? Maybe I want an Android phone instead next time....")
While I might argue that the negative signal shoooould exist, I'm surprised Apple doesn't have it in its terms that you can't do that if you want your app on the Apple App Store.
Also, could we please amend the title? It's not a flat $12.99 a month for everyone, and it doesn't even match the headline on the actual article.
But see, I was an iOS user paying $10/month for Spotify (because I paid on the web). Does Soundcloud offer this, or is it truly every iOS user has to pay through Apple for their subscription to Soundcloud Go, and thus have no choice but to pay more? It seems like it's the latter by the wording of their copy.
125m tracks vs 30m (of Spotify) + offline listening (same with Spotify) + no ads makes it a killer proposition!
for once I welcome this disparity, is a good thing that the users knows the real cost of picking a platform/phone.
I still have my student discount with Spotify so I only pay $5+tax, but even when I lose the discount, $10 is not expensive to me. Especially for what I get.
>That $3.99 will buy you only so much. Rdio says the service, called Rdio Select, will include two components: 1) Pandora-like streaming radio stations, without ads, and with the ability to skip ahead as often as you want, and 2) daily access to 25 songs of your choosing. Subscribers will be able to download the 25 songs and replace some or all (or none) of them each day, so long as the number doesn’t exceed 25.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/rdio-to-launch-cheaper-...
The actual deals are quite complex, but under the pricing model that is most advantageous to the streaming service it basically comes down to the labels get about $6.50 a month per subscriber, and then a cut above that. So that's a hard floor, and with the cut and other costs it's hard to make a business on anything less than $10/month. And obviously you can't go above $10.
This is also why everyone charges more for Apple customers, if they gave 30% to Apple, there would be no revenue at all.
It's 20% cheaper for a little less content and a not as good client. The lesser price alone makes the service worth it.
But I actually love the Soundcloud interface, apparently others don't. Very simple, and the ability to move forwards and backwards within a track is so much better than on Google/Youtube's player.
If SoundCloud can offer the major label catalogs as well as all the indy and artist content that they have now, I'd very likely switch over.
How does that make the service "worth it"?
It sounds like subpar crap in every way but price, and even at that it's nothing to write home about either (a measly $2.5 savings).
If one can afford $9/month, I don't see how $11.5 month are prohibiting for a better experience and more content.
The big thing for me is that Groove works on Xbox, which I have and listen to, otherwise I used to be a Tidal customer. But I know there is a Tidal UWP app coming, then I will switch back.
If an artist is on Spotify, great, I'll listen to their songs a bunch and they'll make a little money off of me. If it's a group I haven't heard much of before and they're good, I'll probably get more into them and end up seeing them when they tour in my area.
If they put themselves exclusively behind another service (cough Kanye West cough Tidal), I'll be forced to find other ways to listen to the album, which will likely be less than profitable for the artist.
I'm not seeing anything about this that's exclusive. It's just another service they can also have their music on but now they can make some money from it instead of nothing.
I assume SoundCloud will at some point post other blog content and so in a matter of days/weeks this general link will not go to the right spot.
- Ad free music - Listen offline - More tracks from established creators
The first two are a given with any streaming service. My point was their catalog isn't enough to make me switch over.
As an artist, unless you're getting some kind of crazy deal to just be on one of the services, your best bet is to be on every one out there.
The issue I have is with the exclusivity deals that come up as part of them trying to compete with each other. It annoying for the customer, and ends up with less money for the artist as most people will inevitably just go torrent their work if it's not on the one streaming service they're using.
I'm not holding my breath. Overtime SoundCloud releases something cool it's only available to people they invite and never seems to become available to everyone.
On top of that I just tried to signup for Go - not available in my country (UK) so I'm guessing, as usual, US only. Pretty sucky for a company based in Germany.
Dubset is doing a great job product wise. Really well done, unfortunately they coverage of licensing is really limited. They sort of jumped ahead and sold the platform before closing at least 50% of the deals (see for instance completely absence of the Merlin catalog).
Soundcloud has been always open, but struggled a lot in having a communication channel with their users. Seams getting better lately. Finger crossed!
It just kind of feels bitter, like SoundCloud built their honest business on original content (not mashups), and then really is pivoting to the major monied players and hand-waving off the rest. If it's true I can understand it business wise, I can. I just...well, don't particularly like it on a personal level.
If they'll manage to tune their recommendation and discovery system in the right direction, they will be an appealing platform for both indies and majors.
Indies can finally get a prime time exposure within the major content. If you sound like taylor swift, and your lyrics are about breaking up with every possible person on earth, I think you should deserve a spot in an automatic generated 'San Valentine's day Single' along with her.
Majors can have a far better social layer that as it is today no one else has been able to create (Apple Ping anyone?). Soundcloud can offer that millennial generation engagement in a pure music context that so far has been lacking everywhere else. And Majors love millennials :)
I'm not saying it's an easy position to be in, and also, I wasn't myself that faithful about all this would have played out for SoundCloud, but to be honest, is an exciting time for the music industry.
Copyright treaties: likely the leading cause for piracy.
Licensing in music is one of the most fkup situation ever. Compared to that, the Tech patent battle is nothing. I do expect a constant roll out of new countries, but starting from US (which is the larger audience as today) does make sense to me.
I believe Apple music covered quite a lot of countries. I think at least some part of the service hit nearly all of them. I'm fine with launching in one country but at least give a timeline and for one of Europe's leading startups to launch a product US only is a bit of a kick in the teeth. I understand it but it just feels bad.
I agree with you PR has a long way to go on on the Soundcloud side. At least a rollout list could have been included
Can we please link to an article that doesn't have an egregious pop-up that blocks my screen every two paragraphs? This isn't an exclusive article or subject. Even the AP has a write-up: http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/soundcloud-exp...
It seems good to me. One of the major features is offline listening to you can now listen 'on the go'. Am I missing something?
https://www.google.com/search?q=SoundCloud+Go
It is excellent and I cannot recommend it enough, and it is available in Canada (unlike SoundCloud Go).
they have the best recommendation system in place (radios) and curated playlist (songza acquisition).
Unfortunately is a great example that is not always a matter of quality, but more a matter of trend and hype. I'm sure SoundCloud Go will be available in Canada soon.
I know about it because I'm already signed up and have an account. SoundCloud has provided nothing in the way of notification, tools, or access to a similar platform. Sure, they're getting in better position with the RIAA/Merlin groups but that's not traditionally the value proposition with SoundCloud for listeners/creators. Maybe in time we'll learn more about why SoundCloud and Dubset both have competing systems for license revenue (apparently?!), and which one might be the better of the two.
On Soundcloud it takes about 8 seconds (well maybe 8 minutes if you have a slow connection). Also, with 175M users, vs the 30M of Apple, and over 7 years of exclusive content, I don't see Apple getting ahead too fast.
If SoundCloud does essentially 'legitimize' the remix and DJ set market and corners it, with revenue, I think the music industry will be pretty happy with that outcome. As a customer/content creator I do like competition, even if it means managing more outlets.
I'd love to find out more about user adoption of all this players in about 6 months. As you correctly point out the next big technical challenge is having a unified delivery system (without any additional cuts, so no aggregators pls).
The problem that SoundCloud is trying to solve has nowhere else being address. Yes, spotify and Apple Music are growing at a fast pace, but they don't necessarily play in the same landscape of SoundCloud.
Content is what differentiate SoundCloud from any of its competitors. If you want exclusive content, early gems or just unreleased reworks, soundcloud is the place to go. Solving this on the legal prospective is a huge pain. That is what Soundscloud has been doing for the last ever. Allowing you to enjoy Rihanna new song as well as 'Dj in his bedroom remix of Rihanna new song'. Try to find that on Spotify or Apple Music.
Now that they've close all the deals they needed in place, you'll see how fast the product will grow.
In previous versions, you could select how much content to cache locally on the device, up to 100%. This meant if you listened to a song once, you could listen to it again offline.
From using their app now, and the website (non-mobile) it seems they have removed all caching completely.
Anyway, it's absolutely trivial to download the raw songs (MP3) from SoundCloud using Developer Tools in your favourite browser. It's not the highest quality, but since SoundCloud is 90% user contributed tracks, the original quality is often questionable anyway.
I see no added value from this service. Just download the songs as MP3 files and listen to them, offline and ad free!
I feel that they have taken a step back on their apps recently.
One downside of spotify is still discoverability, discover weekly doesn't introduce you to completely new kinds of music, it sticks to what you already like. You are on you own to introduce randomness into spotify's discovery algorithms.
I think Rdio had that right idea here. I was discovering much more new music when I was with Rdio than with Spotify. Spotify leans heavily towards what is popular.
http://furia.com/newparticles/current.html
http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html
https://open.spotify.com/user/spotify/playlist/3rgsDhGHZxZ9s...
There's more, of course but I agree that many of the curated playlists lean towards popular music. I also follow /r/spotify on reddit and every now and then there's a good playlist on there.
- Follow good aggregator accounts. These repost new music regularly, which appears in one's timeline.
- Follow good regular accounts and play their "likes."
- Go to a song's "related tracks" screen and play those
I find excellent music on a regular basis this way.
The whole finding people to follow is what is the problem for me. It takes time finding accounts to follow. Friends dont have similar taste in music. Apple has the right idea in picking songs/artist you like before you get to start the service so you get something you like in your feed.
someone make an app to connect users to awesome playlists based on songs/genre/and more
"DiscoverTracks" is a service to help with part of the process (it looks at your likes and plays you related tracks based on the likes of friends and friends of friends I believe.) Doesn't solve the entire issue, but it's handy: https://www.discovertracks.com/
Unfortunately, Soundcloud's method for organizing your content really breaks down under heavy use. I have over 1000 songs liked, and scrolling through the like list, dynamically fetching ten songs at a time, is a huge pain. Playlist creation and maintenance is even more cumbersome and limited than Spotify, which is saying something.
Worst of all, the usefulness of the stream, arguably Soundcloud's most unique and valuable listener-facing feature, really breaks down the longer you're using the service. Most heavy users I know end up following over a few hundred artists/labels/channels, accumulated over years of use, and the signal-to-noise ratio becomes unbearable. The sad thing is that the breakdown is purely a UX problem. The webapp is an infinite-scroll nightmare: forcing you to start at the top of the stream every time and fetch tracks 10 at a time. It doesn't clean up after itself, so after an hour of slowly chipping away through your feed, the browser gets so slow and unresponsive on my top-spec Macbook Pro that I often give up and don't bother trying to listen to new tracks that have been posted to my feed over 18 hours ago. Of course, as I now check Soundcloud less and less frequently, that means I am missing a ton of content.
On top of that, due to Soundcloud's reputation as solely a promotional tool within the artist community, you end up wading through a ton of 1 - 2 minute previews and other low-quality throwaways, and songs that you like can disappear from the service at any time, without notice. You cannot build a stable music library on top of the service. In fact, I used to have a process where I'd look for new songs on Soundcloud, and if I found something good, look it up on Spotify and save it within my Spotify collection, because I knew it wouldn't just disappear on me after a few months. Once Spotify upped their discovery game and the available EDM content grew, I removed Soundcloud from the process entirely.
Soundcloud used to be the best game in town for music discovery, especially EDM, but they let that slip over the last few years of struggling to monetize and Spotify's constant progression has now really chipped away that advantage. I've signed up for this GO service, but I highly doubt I'll keep it past the 30 day free trial. $10 a month for offline download and removing ads? As far as I can tell, my stream is the same mess as it was before, and they don't even distinguish between GO-exclusive and free tracks. I don't see anywhere where I can find GO-exclusive tracks within the app at all, actually.
New music discovery is hard and the big players (Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play) still haven't fully cracked it, at least for specific-niche enthusiasts like myself. When the Soundcloud stream is working well, it is the best interface I've used for finding new music I like, but the complete lack of focus and neglect on that front from this initiative means that I probably won't be coming back.
And, as you say, it's purely a UX problem.
Also the fact that they don't have limited permission tokens is insane. A lot of artists have a "free download for followers" policy, but the integrations that enforce that require 100% complete access to your account. As in, sign me up to follow anyone, post anything, etc. Just to verify that I'm following you.
For example, Soundcloud provides artists with a switch to allow/forbid third-party clients using their API to access the audio streams of the songs they post. This restriction, naturally, doesn't affect the official Soundcloud apps. While it makes my app a second-class citizen for accessing Soundcloud content, I understand the motivation and reasoning for the feature.
However, how does the Soundcloud API surface these restrictions? Through one of the dozens of flags it attaches to the json response it returns when you query for a track's metadata? Ha, no, all the various "track downloadable" and "streamable" flags are all set to true. Instead, it just returns a 404 when you try to fetch the data from the track URL...except when it started returning 401 instead (an admittedly more appropriate return code)...until it started returning 404 again.
So as a developer, my only avenue for not surfacing non-playable tracks within my client was to attempt to download each track, catch any 4xx responses, ASSUME the reason is due to permissions rather than any other potential causes for 4xx errors, and hide the content within the app.
I can understand Soundcloud's lack of enthusiasm for providing decent 3rd-party integrations, but if your external API is this much of a mess, I'd hate to see what you vend internally. The fact their permissions token provides zero granularity is not surprising to me at all.
And here I thought their Roshi library looked pretty good. Maybe the talent is all on the backend there.
I would separate it in two categories.
1) the bad UX when having a big library 2) the 3rd party developer experience.
Starting from 2) I'd say SoundCloud has been fairly open in their early stage, and a lot more conservative later on. I'm not sure what's the direction they are going to take in the future. If I was running SoundCloud, I'd keep the API as a playground, not for production use, and I'd try to fix the major issue in my product instead of leaving room for someone else to crack that business.
Regarding 1) you are absolutely right. It boils down to 3 major areas of the product: classification, recommendation and search. Big players are working on that, but they are all implementing some sort of social driven collaborative filter (which is sad, if we think about how personal is the listening experience). Soundcloud should try to have a more hybrid approach introducing some more advance machine learning neural network technique to get rid of the 'cold start' effect and have a better targeting of the 'long tail' of their 125m tracks. Once they have the 'data' layer done, they should complement with a product UX experience, including curated playlists, radios, personal automatic generated playlist, and an overall better UX experience for the user-listener segment of their audience.
It seems to me that Spotify is fighting an uphill battle saddled with an enormous valuation ($10b-ish I believe?); SoundCloud really wants to fight against them for whoever is left after Google & Apple? And, through all of this, Spotify & SoundCloud are paying a huge chunk of their mobile revenue directly to their competitors (Apple/Google stores). It doesn't sound like a space that I want to be in!
I'm not so sure they are. By charging a higher price ($12.99 in app vs. $9.99 on web), I wonder if people really are paying the higher price just for convenience. I'm definitely not.
Tidal is currently doing the same with their pricing structure.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/8/8913105/spotify-apple-app-s...
In other words, if you want to find something completely exclusive and never heard before, Soundcloud is the place to go. If that content is good quality or not, is another topic :)
I've been dreaming up a way to use ipfs, ethereum, and other distributed tech to create a user-owned, cryptocurrency sustained soundcloud that would persist.
for anyone interested, I've got a rough use case disagram here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4gkEhfnwSVBZDE5TGtSUFlmYWc...
I've been dreaming up a way to use ipfs, ethereum, and other distributed tech to create a user-owned, cryptocurrency sustained soundcloud that would persist. for anyone interested, I've got a rough use case disagram here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4gkEhfnwSVBZDE5TGtSUFlmYWc...
I wonder if this is due to GEMA preventing them from offering Go for an acceptable price. Unfortunately many services (including YouTube) have this problem.