Awful news. But I'm glad to see that it's part of an attempt to stay independent - I hope Soundcloud sticks around, in control of its own destiny, for a long time.
> Some rough news today for SoundCloud, the audio streaming site whose content is largely based around uploads from its 175 million users in 190 countries.
Does SoundCloud see itself as an audio streaming service now, as opposed to an audio hosting service? That seems like a focus shift away from where they started, and puts them up against behemoths like Spotify. Maybe that's related to why they're struggling.
Tangentially: does anyone have any idea of how Bandcamp is doing?
File hosting is just not a profitable enterprise. This pattern should be familiar by now: gain prominence by giving away tons of stuff to draw in users, and then clamp down when the bill comes due, resulting in a hard pivot that alienates the users.
The truth is that users are not loyal. If you are offering something for free, they will be happy to take it, and they will have no qualms about moving on when you stop giving them the free stuff that they came for. Selling eyeballs is a very tough business. People who want a realistic chance to make money should have plans besides "sell ads".
Yes, though it's 1) the largest such service with 2) some very sticky features.
(Not that I use it.)
Realise that the flipside of such services is their real customers -- the adverts side. For online advertising, the two largest agencies claim over 60% of the market, and are named "Google" and "Facebook".
Everyone else is an also-ran. Which for any ads purchaser means "a lot more work for a lot less reach".
Facebook is infrastructure. It provides the connections out to your personal network. Facebook's staying power comes from its ability to say "This is the best way to communicate with your personal network at any time". "File hosting" is just one subelement of that, because one of the things that you may want to share is a file.
Couldn't the whole internet be generalized as "file hosting with a bunch of links"? A "file host" is a company whose primary purpose is for you to upload a file and give the link to someone else; they're a middleman that exists only because a more convenient/direct means of distribution to the intended network isn't available. This does not make the company nearly loud enough to establish its own identity/user base.
Facebook has always been its own repository of people intelligence. It was never just an "upload your photos here". Such platforms, like Photobucket or Imgur, sometimes prosper for a while, until the communication channels that reach the intended audience directly offer something easier. (imgur is going down now as reddit introduced its own image host last year)
Was actually just trying to create a counterpoint to the claim that file hosting services don't make money. Facebook is a hosting service for pictures and comments, and it makes money.
>File hosting is just not a profitable enterprise.
Yep. There's simply no money in just "pushing bits" anymore. That business has been consolidated by people like Google and Amazon.
You have to both provide a valuable service, as well as create a "network effect" around your product. Otherwise you're easily susceptible to being out competed.
Bandcamp, Spotify, and Pandora are for the most part an afterthought to my social circle compared to SoundCloud. I'm genuinely surprised they aren't doing well; they have great engineers and have a fearless attitude that helped them reach a large audience quickly
I'm too very happy with Bandcamp, and it's usually the first place I check to see if an album I want is available, if it's not directly for sale on an artist's website.
That said, music is extremely portable, so it's easy to buy from several online shops and combine it all in your own library later.
Based on that I sometimes remind myself that, unlike streaming services, where you are forced to put all your eggs in one basket and can only have one source, with music sales there might be other options too. There's actually a free market out there!
That's extremely rare on today's internet, and I want to support that. Therefore I consciously try to buy stuff from other sources too, like Ninjashop, 7 digital, Waste, etc. But it's just very easy to come back to bandcamp.
For me as a producer is also a joy to sell my music through Bandcamp. The tools to release and monetize my content are far superior than Soundcloud, which in our label we use just to showcase singles without download option.
Yes, SoundCloud (IMO wrongfully) saw streaming services cut their market share (I believe it was actually product decisions.). So to get paid end user subscribers they offered streaming fully released albums and downloading them to play later.
This is completely at odds with securely streaming unreleased music, as a preview for the final album. They always have charged producers, and now are charging both sides for (in many cases) the same content.
This shifted their product focus and shafted producers who didn't have a major label deal that could afford the streaming SoundCloud partnership deal. Basically giving the finger to the early community that made them popular.
I would have focused on the producers and dissemination of their tracks that led to more and better discovery. I believe producers would pay a premium for that -- they already do with other forms of media delivery.
As far as I know Bandcamp is doing better than ever - they are also a completely different service, not very similar to Soundcloud at all. At Bandcamp you buy and truly own your music. While they offer streaming of those purchases, I‘d surprised if the vast majority of Bandcamp users doesn’t maintain and prefer their local music collection, which Bandcamp probably has contributed to a lot.
It‘s my impression that the Bandcamp userbase is very loyal and full of music enthusiasts - at. least I buy there weekly, about 5-10 releases.
I'm a musician who's planning on releasing an album through bandcamp, and I've been a fan of soundcloud since I discovered it.
bandcamp has a very different business model from soundcloud. it's set up to cater to artists selling music, and they take a cut of any music sold through bandcamp. This is a valuable service and they charge a straightforward fee for providing it. the downside of this model is that it assumes people will buy music. Which, to be clear, they very much do today. Streaming is popular but there are still tons of people actually buying music.
soundcloud's early business model was for artists to pay for more storage, or something, and in recent years, I'm honestly not sure what their business model is.
So, not surprising that bandcamp is profitable and doing well and has apparently not raised tons of money yet gotten to profitability, and also not surprising that soundcloud, which has taken a lot of VC capital, is not going to be betting on a business model that seems to be going away (but in the meantime is presumably quite profitable).
It's been a downhill trend ever since trending likes were replaced by reposts. Trending likes actually showed which tunes my friends found most interesting. Reposts allowed a single user to spam a feed with their personal taste. Then repost bots were allowed to require repost to unlock a free download and now discovery on SoundCloud is almost dead. My friends who are successful producers but refuse to play the bot and pay-for-repost game are completely drowned in the noise.
My bet is that since trending likes are a Graph DB problem, SoundCloud just chose not to solve it once it became too hard on their database. They famously had issues with early Mongo adoption so this would fit right in. Their most recent frontend HTML5 rewrite always winds up my CPU and hasn't changed in a couple years.
SoundCloud to me has always been a great idea with some great design that got ruined by some poor engineering choices from the top. And at the end by a desperate grab for stats and cash. I think producers would have paid more, better subsidizing free plans, if discovery hadn't gone downhill. I ran the numbers once on how CDbaby and Bandcamp became successful (based on stats trickled out over the years) while SoundCloud could never turn a profit. There's still plenty of room for someone to do this right.
I haven't been using it long enough to have an opinion, but I did notice that the hosts of podcasts I enjoy would repost when they guested on another podcast, which I otherwise would not have noticed, and did appreciate.
Trending likes solved this, because even an upvote brigade required the user to have multiple friends in the brigade. All I had to do was follow a few key influencers on a topic and the post would show in my feed.
I used to go to SC every day. When reposts started becoming a thing I loved it, since the people I followed would repost stuff I would have never found. But I guess I quit in time, as I never saw bots or what you are describing. That's too bad :(
> Comments would be littered with things like "hey, great, check out my stuff!"
> That type of shallow "like for like" culture is absolutely cancerous for what was previously a very maker-heavy audience.
Man, I've been in there since day one practically and it was always like that, as has been every service of that kind I've ever used (hands up anyone who ever maintained an MP3.com playlist). Music runs on shameless self promotion. Players gonna play. Etc.
Ideally, promoters would always be trusted experts. Question is: How do those experts, without engaging other promoters, discover potential tracks for promotion?
The amount of music in my feed and the trouble of curating it all. I found new songs I loved every day, but being a programmer, and having to switch to the SC browser window/tab to hit shift-right-arrow to skip a song, or space to pause it, became too troublesome.
I eventually switched to Spotify, since I could have global keyboard shortcuts for the app. If SoundCloud had a desktop app I would use that instead of Spotify in a heartbeat (assuming I could play my own music as well).
Is the API dependent on popularity of songs you listen to? Because I find I dont hit limit until a whole day of use (4 to 6 hours) but guessing this could be because I don't have much popular music in my queue. I ask because I notice that now they introduced advertisements but these also only come up on songs with over 60k plays
I only started using sc once reposts were already out and never had an issue with them, but there's this new trend I've started noticing on SC, where artists add their new songs to a playlist and then repost the playlist every day. If a playlist has 20 songs it can be impossible to listen to anything else on your stream because the whole playlist gets added to the queue. I find it extremely selfish since it just makes it that much harder for other artists on the stream to get their fair share of air time.
That’s the reason I’m using Hype Machine to listen to those "trending likes" tracks on SoundCloud. I almost find a nice new song to listen every single day.
Yeah me too, Hype Machine is fantastic for that. Such an undervalued service nowadays. If you haven't subscribed as a supporter I'd recommend it http://hypem.com/supporters
I wasn't a fan of the UI refresh for the same reason, so I made my own alternate homepage which sorts the feed by artist and de-emphasizes reposts (http://gurlitz.org/soundcloud-digest/). Unfortunately like you said, content also dried up around the same time.
Iterface not changing in years makes me think it's ripe for an acquisition from Barry Diller's IAC. They specialize in sites that don't update their interfaces for years at a time.
(Apologies to those that work for one of those companies.)
I signed up years ago, but only became a user in the past year or so. It's never really appealed to me for music discovery but it's been great for checking out new podcasts.
I use pocket casts on mobile and soundcloud on the desktop. Soundcloud's better for discovery and it lets me listen without going through a subscription workflow.
For anyone confused by this: SoundCloud can't play podcasts, but a small percentage of podcasters host their show on SoundCloud, and the app can (naturally) play those.
However, SoundCloud has probably seen the peak of its podcast-driven business. Podcasters have been wary of SoundCloud's fortunes for some time, and most have a Plan B in place. Today's news has likely expedited plans to find alternatives among at least some podcasters.
Bandcamp is fine, but it's not on the level that Soundcloud was for browsing music (or for hosting your own). It's still really limited on the social side - the only way you get "likes" is when people download your stuff, the discovery tools are limited to "what's popular in this tag today" and random curated content. There's no "feed" like Soundcloud had.
Also, possibly the most irritating part of the site is that fan profiles and artist profiles are distinct entities. So if you want to buy someone else's music but you're signed in, you have to sign out, get on your other account, purchase, and then log out/in again. Super clunky. Last, there's no way to communicate with other people, other than the email that you send when you buy things. I used to legitimately befriend like minded musicians through SC messaging and we'd collab or remix each others stuff. Not a thing on Bandcamp, or not as much. Everything lives outside of their network - in Facebook chats or Reddit threads or some random forum.
However, despite its shortcomings, Bandcamp is where cutting edge music lives in an age without Soundcloud. Labels like PC Music, Mall Music and Dream Catalogue have all pushed independent music to bizarre new limits in the last 4 years alone. Orchid tapes, an indie outfit, made their name off of Bandcamp releases. Alex G, Katie Dey, Elvis Depressedy, and a slew of other musicians have been recognized for their indie releases and now enjoy moderate indie popularity. As long as no one else is beating them, Bandcamp will continue to run on its skeleton frame and empower artists who use it.
I think bandcamp didn't take money - so they can operate as they want. I totally agree with you with respect to bandcamp being where cutting edge music lives.
That's exactly what's going on. It could be, however, that the cost of that opportunity outweighs what they're working with right now. Building a social network is a ton of work and could be a lot of risk. Allowing users to upload homemade music and post it to other social media is apparently tried and true, as they've been doing it for 10 years. While Soundcloud went "full social media" and then ended up with losses and layoffs, it could be that Bandcamp has opted for a slower and more measured approached to growth.
Def yeah they are insignificant, but OP said they ran numbers and used the word "successful". I was wondering if that meant something pretty impressive like in the range of $1M a week in rev or something closer to $1M a month in rev, which is still good, but really small.
I originally went to SC to find new music. If that's even possible, I haven't been able to crack that code. I've given up, and typically only end up from a link. Rarely by choice.
420 still seems like a rather unreasonably large number (to me) for something that is basically a file hosting service with a couple barely maintained mobile apps and a web site.
Quite a few artists I follow are on Soundcloud primarily for new material. I would happily pay for Soundcloud if they'd bother to update their app for Android Auto and Android TV.
420 is total employee count, only a fraction of that (i believe substantially below 100) are devs, which for a site of that size is adequate i guess. They also have quite a few engineers working with the data instead of product development.
What is the max dev (+ engineer) to other office worker ratio?
Even in tech companies with no physical product to get out the door it is easy to get a 1:10 ratio. You just need an army of sales, press, marketing, social media managing, customer service, HR, management, legal, design, print design, accounting, finance, office management and other random people with important jobs to do.
How about a 1:75 ratio?!?
With three offices you are going to need nine receptionists at a bare minimum if you are to cover reception for an hour either side of when everyone turns up. At a minimum the IT guys that plug people in and get them setup on 'Exchange' are of a similar number if all the offices are to be covered.
So there must be a 'dev to total headcount' ratio, a maximum sustainable upper number, any higher and the company is doomed to 'miss the web' and get totally stuck in 1990's ways of working. I have seen a 1:75 ratio 'tech company' and saw great opportunity in changing it, although a long way off the desired 1:10 or lower.
There must be companies where the ratio is the other way around. A programming concern with little of the normal sales/marketing requirements could be a 3:1 company.
What's up with reductionist posts like this every time a company announces layoffs? Scaling out a global business takes a lot more work than it does to run a no-SLA side project. And you hire people to build out businesses that don't yet exist. When you've overreached, or targets are consistently not being met, you re-org, or, if that isn't possible, you scale back.
> What's up with reductionist posts like this every time a company announces layoffs?
I hate people like this. "Oh I could build that in like a weekend with Go and React no need for 100s of devs..." Those statements only come from people who never built something even remotely in this size and have no idea how complex this stuff becomes when done proper.
Well it comes from having been part of companies that were going through this explosive growth phase, and seeing the corrosive effect it can have on productivity if not managed properly. I've seen formerly efficient and productive and happy teams get completely demoralized as truck loads of new people are added but nothing new gets done.
I'm not saying this is exactly what happened there, but as a user of their product I'm disappointed because I simply did not see a growth in features or improvement quality that I would associate with a company that was scaling out like it apparently was?
That sounds about right. When I left there 1-2 years ago what I heard was, that SC would be profitable if they were running on 1/3 of the engineers they had at the time.
For me as a music producer and consumer, one of the most frustrating changes recently made my Soundcloud has been their cancellation of groups, which used to be a decent means of discovering new music related to kinds of music you already like.
Once groups were cancelled, the listens on the songs I post to Soundcloud plummeted to virtually nothing, and I really don't bother to upload my music there anymore, nor to go to Soundcloud to discover new music.
I'm not a SoundCloud user, but as someone who just started using groups on Flickr i noticed that the views on my uploaded photos went from barely anything to at least a thousand per image (and with just a handful of groups). I can definitely see how this can break your audience. Seems like an incredibly dumb move on SC's part.
This shows why the modern trend of not buying music and just subscribing to streaming services is so short-sighted. The companies are all basically fly-by-night, and can change their product in a heartbeat, leaving you with something substantially different from what you're used to.
I use streaming services all the time, but this is why I buy albums from artists I like and keep a self-hosted plex library.
Should anything I like ever be taken down, I can still listen to it.
The good thing about music is that it is ultra portable so mixing music from many sources, services and providers is hardly a problem.
And you can clearly see that in how the market for online music works. Unlike video, which is so dysfunctional I'd be hard pressed to even say there is a market.
End result: despite streaming services I still spend $100s of dollars on music every year. 0 on video.
I think it's great you have a two-pronged approach (buying stuff you really like, so you're not out of luck if the streaming provider folds like this), but I have to question your assertion about online video: Netflix is clearly a success story I think. Maybe the only real standout, but still it exists. Lots of people are signed up for it. There's also Amazon video; I don't know how successful it is, but people do rent videos on there.
But those are closed services, closed silos letting me stream content through closed source apps running on a extremely tiny subset of the digital devices out there capable of playing digital video.
Hardly any service lets me buy and curate my own videos, without DRM, from several sources and build my own library which I can play on all digital devices out there.
It's just a few big giant services, each with their own DRM and limited platform support.
It's nowhere near a real market where I can pick and choose and providers compete on merit.
The problem with groups was it was used by 0.5% of users, and most of the playback was actually fake spam plays. The soundcloud spammers had all the gaming figured out on that part of the system and it was basically worthless.
I know, because I worked on getting it shutdown. Not because I disliked the idea myself, but with no developers working on fixing it, the feature needed to be removed in order to cleanup the database spam and a huge chunk of a legacy code base.
We wanted to replace it, but nobody could convince management to fund it with headcount. But that's the story of SoundCloud, fantastic levels of miss-management.
Severance is pretty common, and some companies will just keep you technically employed (and thus paid, and even given health insurance) with no expectation of you doing work or coming into the office. Three months is definitely on the generous side, but not that unusual from what I've seen and heard.
Yep. Severance is pretty common when employees are "laid off" i.e. their employment is terminated not because of employees fault. And generally, you are informed of it, and your credentials and such are revoked almost immediately.
Quite different from when you voluntarily leave, when you give notice and do knowledge transfer and such. I imagine that is because the employee is unlikely to do anything bad, since they likely have a better future.
Often times (in the US) the 90 days notice doesn't mean anything badge/credentials wise. You are walked out that evening (sometimes supervised) and your credentials are revoked asap.
Soundcloud started dying when they decided to be more like Spotify and less like the independent music discovery service they started out as. Now they have an app and experience that is not particularly good at either.
Oddly enough, when I first heard of SoundCloud, it was in a completely different context from either. I first saw it used as a pastebin for voice recordings.
Specifically, members of some online transgender communities use it to solicit community feedback on their voices. They'll record themselves talking, post it to SoundCloud, and ask the community for input on what they could do better.
I don't think there's enough of a market for "pastebin for voice recordings" to be a successful business though.
Pastebin for voice recordings is basically what vocaroo.com is, and I discovered that in the same context you discovered SoundCloud. And also because popular use by 4chan.
When I first heard of SoundCloud it was mostly used by self-releasing EDM artists as a place to upload their music, before YouTube was a popular alternative. Nowadays I see a lot of artists buying visualizer templates and uploading their music with that - or sending it to an aggregator on YouTube who displays a certain style of music (many of these aggregators don't seek artist permission and just upload popular songs and such, but many of the ones I follow get things sent to them by indie artists because a channel with 60,000+ subs will beat their own personal channel for recognition).
Exactly - I'm a hobbyist musician and have all my music there. But, the last year or so they've been focusing on podcasting, etc. and, as you say, it's not good at any of that. For people like me, they haven't offered any new features in a long time.
I've worked at a few places that died this way. CEO: "We're #1 in $NICHE. But growth is the only way, so we need to compete in $BIG_MARKET." [months of de-focus later] CEO: "We're only #10 in $BIG_MARKET and now we totally lost $NICHE!!" Resume writing ensues...
Expanding to $BIG_MARKET is not a bad thing, in fact this is the textbook example of "crossing the chasm", where you start with a niche and expand--if you try to go mainstream from the beginning you will always fail.
The problem when you're expanding is you need to have a clear idea of what you are. Because knowing what you are means you can scale by taking advantage of your strengths instead of dumbing it down. Amazon is a great example.
But if you just expand without knowing what you are, you'll end up like Soundcloud.
Also another thing is this idea of "what you are" (aka vision) shouldn't come from some media coverage or VCs or pundits. You should have already had the vision before these people started talking about you. See Snapchat for example, media pundits started calling them "a camera company", and Snapchat itself started believing the hype, and even renamed themselves "Snap". Snapchat is not a camera company. It's a social network that revolutionized private sharing. But they don't seem to think so anymore because they have to match the stratospheric expectation set by their IPO. Instead of expanding their own playing field they jumped into other giants' playground (competing with Apple in AR, competing with Instagram in public photo sharing, etc.), this pattern never ends well historically.
Soundcloud fell into the same trap. Their investor called them "The Youtube of Audio", instead of seeing it for what it is. If they had realized they were popular because they were a great service for indie musicians and focused on that aspect it is possible that by now they are more influential than any existing music tech companies. Instead they tried to become "the youtube of audio", which is the most uninteresting thing I've ever heard, it's the definition of "dumbing down" in order to expand.
> Their investor called them "The Youtube of Audio"
And now, of course, (and for quite a while) YouTube is the YouTube of audio.
It should have been apparent that it was foolish to try and beat google on that turf. Google beat them easily with a simpler interface and raw performance. The biggest difference, though: The audio quality on YouTube is actually better. Nail after nail in the coffin.
Ain't no way I'm listening to mixes on YT when they put brickwall-compressed ads cutting in on un-normalized audio every 10 minutes. It's a non-starter; when I see those little yellow dots I hit the back button.
God no. The only way I'll consider paying YT a single red cent for anything they make is if I can permanently turn off annotations on videos, and I haven't been able to find anything that indicates a yes or no to that question, so I have to assume their stance is "GFY."
That's a good point, actually - I've been wondering what I can do with my music that's hosted on SC and putting them on YouTube (with some generated visuals, I guess) might work.
I don't know how SoundCloud is managed and what their balance sheet looks like, but it's deeply unfortunate that a site that caters largely to up-and-coming musicians has so much trouble getting out of the red.
Presumably they're hurt by the presence of platforms such as Youtube or the 2010s' rebooted Myspace, where musicians can reach a larger audience and where both sides of the equation are subsidized by ads.
Meanwhile, more focused sites like Beatport appeared to have a successful recipe by selling actual tracks for download despite essentially offering unlimited streaming, yet even they ran into some trouble with their latest pivot.
It's a tough space to make money in, despite seemingly meeting a popular need.
I wonder what their terms were when they signed up with the labels to be yet another Spotify clone. If it was any sort of upfront payment that would hit them hard since I don't think they have many subscribers to their SoundCloud plus (or whatever it's called)
If you are hiring, please reach out to people from SoundCloud. The decisions of who to let go were not based on performance. A lot of amazing people, both attitude and technically.
We (Fraugster Gmbh) are hiring Go developers and devops in Berlin. We've always held a great amount of respect for soundcloud given all that you guys have done for the golang community in Berlin.
If any of you are not based here we can offer relocation/visa support, check my previous comments on whoishiring for more details or contact me directly stefan <at> fraugster <dot> com
On that note, my team (I am the technical lead) at Rocket Lawyer is hiring engineers in San Francisco to work on Scala/Finagle/Finch services within our legal services platform. Rocket Lawyer is replacing a distributed monolith with a proper API-oriented application designed to run on Kubernetes and this team is at the center of that effort. Feel free to contact me by email (chodapp at rocketlawyer dot com).
Edit: My company is also hiring backend devs for another team in London.
If there's a internal documents with links getting passed around (there was a similar thing when Skype shut down their London office) please add our company to it as we're hiring https://thoughtmachine.workable.com/
Thanks Aaron - we're aggressively hiring for iOS and Android at Speak (YC W17) in San Francisco.
Speak is an AI English tutor that has spoken conversations with users who want to become better at speaking English -- so audio is core to our experience. If you were on the mobile team at Soundcloud we'd love to talk - email me personally at connorzwick <at> gmail.
The fact that the word after 'turn' is 're-turn' makes my mind go to the usual purpose of prefixing words with 're': to do again. That's not how it's used here but then in 'repurchases' it is. There's too many twists and turns (no pun intended) from a language standpoint.
I'm trying to follow your logic here and am failing. I automatically read it the way I'm sure it was intended, and there is no alternative meaning to "return" (not-hyphenated) that would cause ambiguity. Are you a native English speaker?
I clicked just because I was curious and then discovered that this company is founded by someone I went to high school with and haven't seen if 13 years. Small world.
If anyone fancies a pivot from audio to robotics, Automata are a growing robotics startup in London looking for developers all the way down our stack from the web interface to embedded C, with some C++ and rails in between. Drop us an email!
I actually did it for a while. I started my career in biotech and worked on an instrument. When I told them I was moving they wanted to keep me on and sent a couple of scanners to me.
I do realize that's a special case. They knew me for eight years prior, not nearly the same thing... but I thought I'd ask. There may be a fair amount of work that can be done via simulation, or applications level stuff, but yeah, a long shot.
Two things - not every engineer in good standing at a well known company can do FizzBuzz. And it speaks to compliance -- if someone is annoyed by a simple coding exercise, imagine how annoyed they might be if I ask them to do some not fun wizzbang work task after they're actually hired.
Sorry, my wording left out a bit of detail and was confusing. Our process is:
1) 30 minute intro phone call to see if both parties are pushing in the same direction
2) technical review, which can take one of two forms:
a) 1 hour phone call (no computer needed)
b) take home coding exercise
3) in person phase to meet team, cross functional team members, and ceo
Because of the nature of this comment, I thought it'd be helpful to offer up option 2b directly if someone wants todo it without a phone call blocking things.
We offer the coding exercise as an option for a few reasons, but the most important one is that some great engineers are good on the phone and some aren't. While good communication skills are a must to performing well, doing well on a tech phone call isn't.
I really don't see much wrong with a 1-2 hour coding exercise. I'm really averse to "projects" that are supposed to span more time though, since I have a full time job and also a life besides.
Others have mentioned engineers not being able to do fizzbuzz, and that is certainly the most important part. Another one is, I've personally worked in larger orgs where "engineers" stick around for years, but haven't really done any solid coding whatsoever in years. They use tools developed by others to "assist" their team, but are actually the least productive people. One of the strategies that help this is by not automating certain repetitive tasks, so that it seems to require the attention of a full time engineer. e.g. I knew a person whose job day in and out was clicking in the Jenkins UI to run the jobs (!).
Of course this is not universal. But a small coding exercise is a good compromise imo.
Atrium is hiring for Senior Full-Stack Engineer, Senior Backend Engineer, and Frontend Engineer. See postings here! We want you! https://www.atriumlts.com/
Personally love SoundCloud and use it as my primary source for discovering music. I'm a software engineer at 10x Genomics, a Bay Area biotech startup, and we're hiring all sorts of engineers. If anyone is looking to move into a different industry and want to develop technologies that enable discoveries in the fight against cancer, feel free to reach out: kevin.wu@10xgenomics.com.
We (Managed by Q) are hiring in NYC, especially Backend Engineers, Engineering Managers and Product Managers - https://www.managedbyq.com/careers. Feel free to drop me a line - eseidohl@<our domain name>
I am sorry to hear what you guys are going through, and kudos for posting this here.
We are hiring for several positions at Amazon in our Seattle office working on some really cool stuff. Please send resumes to sarthomp at amazon.com and say you found out on Hacker News. We'd love to make this work for you.
We (Songtrust) are a music startup helping songwriters get paid more money, we are hiring python engineers, tech support, and a marketing/growth lead: http://blog.songtrust.com/jobs/
If an entire office is being shut down, then there's no issue with adverse selection. It's a rare chance for great engineers to be actively on the market.
I am hiring for a project I am running at A^3 ("A Cubed"), Airbus' office in San Jose. Looking for smart generalists with experience in Python and interested in a hybrid R&D and product environment.
We're hiring at S23NYC, Nike's Digital Innovation Lab in NYC. We're very close to the SoundCloud NYC office -- we can see your Wifi!
Feel free to spread this to anyone in engineering in the NYC office (or anyone willing to relocate to NYC). Hit me up directly: jon.apostoles(at)nike.com
Mainly looking for native iOS and Android engineers, and backend engineers.
Living in Berlin, doing freelance. Just giving my advice here.
Now is a good opportunity for you guys to go that road. It's never been easier to find projects and there are lots of companies that can benefit the experience you got and offer short-term contractor work.
If someone needs help to get started in Berlin ( taxes, advice, etc. ) feel free to contact me.
Hey, SoundCloud employee here who's leaving -- I'd actually love to take you up on this offer. @brianegan on Twitter if you have a bit of time to DM. Thanks so much!
Pandora is hiring for a few positions in our analytics teams. If you're interested in a career in big data analytics or data science have a look at some of our open roles.
These aren't under the best circumstances but if folks who are affected are interested in continuing their career in music in Oakland Pandora is an awesome place to work.
Feel free to contact me for any questions about our open roles, good luck with your search!
Sorry to hear this news. We have a position for a Senior Software Developer at Rainforest QA. We're looking for several years with Postgres (or other SQL experience) and Ruby-on-Rails (or similar technology). We're a distributed team so you can be based in the Bay Area or anywhere in the world. More here https://www.rainforestqa.com/jobs/ or reach out directly. Best of luck to you all.
Aha! is always hiring quality folks to work on our Ruby on Rails and Javascript (React) application. We are fully remote (work from anywhere in North America), profitable, and we offer excellent benefits.
NFL is hiring in Los Angeles. We get to work with a lot of bleeding edge JavaScript and have a few popular open source projects like React Helmet that we actively maintain https://github.com/nfl/react-helmet. Drop me a line and I can get your resume to the right place (james.hush@nfl.com)
- You ideally have 4+ years of full-time experience and a salary expectation of $90-110k
- You have worked with or are interested in Unix, functional programming, Elixir, Elm, JavaScript, PostgreSQL
- We build cloud software for the marine shipping industry; thousands of people at companies like BC Ferries, Seaspan and many others use our products to build ships, reduce fuel consumption and manage their day-to-day operations
- We have a disparate stack with technologies like Rails, Meteor, Angular and React in production, but are standardizing our product line on Elixir/Elm
- We have group benefits, flexible time off, flexible work hours, working from home, and will buy you the tools you need to do your job well
Hey Aaron, sorry to hear and thanks for posting. We're hiring at Instagram for roles in NYC, SF and Menlo Park; if you/folks on your team want a direct line feel free to email me and I'll connect them to the right folks on the team.
Alto Pharmacy is hiring in SF! We are a tech-focused pharmacy, and we are focused on building software that makes a meaningful impact on people's lives by providing a better pharmacy experience. We've raise $23 million to work toward our mission of building the best pharmacy for everybody, and we're looking for other caring, scrappy, humble engineers to join us! We are looking for full stack generalists, and our tech stack is Rails, React, and Go.
Would love to have you join our network, so candidates can find great new homes quickly and easily whenever they're ready http://www.layoff-aid.com/hiring
If you're interested in solving problems in transportation and connected cars, we're hiring at Smartcar. We're based out of Mountain View and are looking for Frontend and Backend engineers, as well as Sales/Business Development.
We're hiring at Adobe | Behance in NYC. We're a diverse team of people passionate about our craft, our product, and open source. https://www.behance.net/careers
We're hiring software engineers, machine learning engineers, and ML scientists at Freenome to work on early detection of cancer: https://www.freenome.com/careers.
My email is in my profile; feel free to reach out if you have questions.
Twitch Berlin is hiring. We're looking for data scientists and distributed systems engineers working on one of the largest live video CDNs in the world at a huge scale that makes things interesting.
Shutterstock is looking to hire top-flight talent in NYC, we have a number of roles open: https://www.shutterstock.com/jobs/listings. For the search team we are working on building the best image and video search experience out there and could use more ML engineers, data engineers, or experienced development managers.
Shutterstock is looking to hire top-flight talent in NYC, we have a number of roles open: https://www.shutterstock.com/jobs/listings. For the search team we are working on building the best image and video search experience out there and could use more ML engineers, data engineers, or experienced development managers.
If any SoundClouders are reading this thread, consider Flexport!
Flexport is a freight forwarder, which is a really old industry. We're bringing it to the information era. (It turns out computers are really good at solving information problems.)
Flexport is growing the engineering team of ~35 in our downtown SF office. It's a great time to join: we have 20% MoM growth and we're about to enter the peak season where retailers are getting ready for the holidays. There's lots of opportunity for personal growth because we still have tonnes of stuff to build.
Our stack is React, Rails, Postgres, AWS. We're experimenting with GraphQL & Relay too.
We're hiring across the stack. Check out our careers page below. If you're interested in frontend, contact me directly! (email is in my profile).
Flexport is great, and we're proud to have your team as one of our awesome http://www.Layoff-Aid.com startups that are already on our hiring network in SF.
Thank you for posting here, for making yourself available directly.
Would love to chat with anyone from SoundCloud interested in earnest.com. We're building the future of finance.
I'm a tech lead for one of the teams, feel free to email directly: alex (dot) cusack (at) earnest (dot) com
Looking for smart people interested in solving hard problems. Stack is JavaScript/Node and Java, but flexible on background in those specific languages
ClassPass is hiring engineers in both New York and San Francisco.
We're a marketplace that connects people with studios and gyms so they can take yoga, martial arts, or other classes near them. We have a solid working business model and are growing. We're hiring for backend, frontend, full-stack, and infrastructure roles.
I'm a technical lead in SF and happy to talk to anyone on either coast. Contact me at (my HN username)@classpass.com or apply directly at https://classpass.com/jobs/openings.
Would love to have ClassPass join our network, so candidates can find great new homes quickly and easily whenever they're ready: http://www.layoff-aid.com/hiring
Feel free to apply yourself, forward to recruiting, or give me a shout with questions.
Even if you don't join, very much appreciate you posting here and making yourself available.
Teachable (online course platform) is hiring across the stack in NYC - well funded, we control the board, have 10 years of burn left, come have a great time building awesome software with us. Teachable.com/careers or email me directly at noah@teachable.com if you're interested, would love to chat
We recently closed a $50m Series B from a consortium of the six largest global banks, as well as Google. We are growing rapidly (in Harvard Square, NYC and DC) and are looking for exceptional engineers to complete our team.
We are hiring across the stack. See more on our careers page:
www.kensho.com/careers
Hey Aaron -- super sorry to hear about the situation. Soundcloud is a fantastic product and company. If you or your colleagues are interested, Plaid is hiring engineers in SF. You can find a full description here: https://plaid.com/careers.
Or, better, just drop me a line directly: zach [at] plaid [dot] com
We're big fans of SoundCloud here at Feed.fm. If you still want to deliver music to the world, then join up with us! We cater to businesses already making money, instead of struggling to make a profit selling directly to consumers.
Although we're not in SF or Berlin we (CliniCloud) are actively hiring a backend developer well versed in Golang. If anyone is interested in a change of hemisphere to Melbourne, Australia check it out here - https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/389443269/
Prefer(https://prefer.com) is looking at hiring both frontend engineer and product designer in both NY and SF. We are a Benchmark-backed company working on rebuilding the service professional marketplace.
Feel free to reach out, my email is siong [at] prefer [dot] com.
we (Pusher.com) will be happy to welcome engineers from Soundcloud to our London Office. we have some job listing on https://pusher.com/jobs but please still do reach out even if any job description fits your profile, we are always looking for talented people in every area.
CeleraOne is hiring in Berlin, actually around the corner of Soundcloud's HQ in Berlin Mitte. We 're looking for engineers in Python, C++, JavaScript as well as Operations and Machine Learning. See http://www.celeraone.com/en/careers for a complete list or contact us directly career@celeraone.com.
Trello's hiring for a bunch of different roles, Front and Back-End (node), Internal Tools Developer, and Site Reliability Engineer are all listed at https://trello.com/jobs . Anywhere in the US.
We've also got a lot of Product roles coming up, specifically PM positions and some product design stuff on the horizon. Feel free to reach out to me (Lydia M: lydia@trello.com) or my colleague Carrie (Carrie Marvin: carrie@trello.com)
Sorry to hear about the closure, Aaron. If you or your colleagues are interested, Parabola Labs is hiring React and Node engineers in SF. We build tools that let non-technical people leverage data science and automation. https://parabola.io/ Feel free to email me at brian [at] parabola.io
They're done in preparation as well, in order to juke the burn rate numbers by reducing overhead. Make no mistake, an acquisition would likely result in further cuts (acq is always bad for the little guy) if not a complete wind-down, but cutting staff historically does make a company more attractive to acquirers.
Yes but operational reasons such as we can't afford to pay them falls under a fair reason. Only issue could be they would have to a certain amount of notice, so it could be more costly.
I'm also hiring in New York for Time Out.
I would like to think that engineers from Sound Cloud may be excited by the music, theater, film, and event domain.
Drop me a line at [hn_username]@timeout.com
I just quit the payments team with Pje a month ago and I can say no one saw this coming. The entire payments and subscriptions infrastructure is now unmanned. Pje was a veteran but most of the team was <6 months and we just moved into a new space. The numbers seemed good to me.
The silver lining here is that recruiters are in a blood frenzy; I've had ~30 messages come in today.
I did the back of the napkin math, and saw this coming a year ago. The numbers just didn't work out.
When the whole finance team quit late last year, I knew it wasn't good.
I got out of there earlier this year. I feel bad for the new hires that were just coming in. I heard that a atleast one was just moving from the US to Germany, their things are still in transit in a shipping container and they just got laid off.
I use SoundCloud daily for music I can't find anywhere else. I'm amazed they haven't tried harder to make people like me pay for the service. I would pay if I hit a paywall at some point of usage.
There are ads like every 3 songs on mobile. That would make someone like me either pay for their $4.99 service, (which I didn't even realize existed until recently because they only seem to advertise their $9.99 service) or use something else.
The ads are mostly regionally targeted/restricted so users might not see them if they have the right IP. E.g. in Canada and France I can't recall hearing an ad but they spammed me in the US until I finally paid.
I don't think they have ads in all countries. I live in Norway and have not heard a single ad. When I was in the UK a couple of months ago, I received ads.
The problem is that they couldn't get away with it. Most of the stuff I listen to on SoundCloud is available on other platforms which are free and run by companies that can afford to take a loss (YouTube) or on services I already pay for (Spotify, DI.fm).
I'm also greatly disappointed that they seem to have settled on 128kbit MP3 as the peak of quality.
I feel like SoundCloud (and similar indie music services) could really benefit from a microtransaction-based model. I don't want to pay SoundCloud $10/month for what they offer, because a competitor is fulfilling an aspect of that offering for me already and doing a better job of it, but I'd be keen on paying them something for what their competitor doesn't offer.
Essentially I want to pay them something to be able to listen to SoundCloud's uploaded tracks on my phone offline. That's it! Until they can compete with Spotify on a technical front and make me switch, I can't justify the $10/month, but I can certainly justify paying less for a sliver of that offering.
The reason that they couldn't do this faster is that until recently they were not in a legal position to ask for payment because they hadn't negotiated a deal with the organisations who collect royalties on behalf of songwriters - and it is important to understand that a songwriter isn't always the same person as the recording copyright owner and sometimes neither of those people are the artist, and in the early days particularly sometimes none of those people was the person uploading the music to SoundCloud. Legally making music available to stream is legally complex.
So they were in a bit of a chicken and egg situation - they needed to monetise the service but couldn't because they weren't legally able to, and to compound this they were sitting on a liability because technically they had been infringing the copyright of songwriters - but to do a deal to be legally able to monetise they had to be able to generate some sort of revenue stream to be able to get forward investment to settle the terms of that negotiation.
TL;DR - Soundcloud couldn't charge people without potentially being sued at some point about a copyright issue. To be able to charge people they needed to settle that problem and it seems like that all went on too long and now maybe they've hit a point where the model for monetising soundcloud isn't working as fast as they hoped.
SoundCloud is one of Berlin's prime examples when it comes to it's startup credentials, so them stumbling is really hard to see for someone working in the city.
Also signals the difficulty in building large companies in the European market. I've been to Berlin a handful of times, and even tried to raise money from Berlin investors... Needless to say it was a very frustrating process. They are very conservative and risk adverse. Additionally the bureaucracy and "red-tape" hampers business.
As somebody who listens to SoundCloud almost daily I really hope they can turn things around. They should completely ditch the free plan, and just have a $2.99 or $3.99 plan. I am actually signing up for SoundCloud Go+ (offline listening) now.
I'm told both things, actually, in equal measure. That there's ample casual racism compared to London and yet it's incredibly foreigner friendly. I'm married to a German so I have spent a lot of time in Germany, just not Berlin yet. No idea why my question was downvoted, I was quite interested to hear what the poster had to say about the scene.
Big tech hubs are bound to see startups fail, especially leaking ships that never turn a profit.
Berlin isn't perfect but whatever happens to SoundCloud doesn't really say anything about its tech scene. Were SoundCloud be London/NYC/SF based, it would have gone under much, much quicker.
This is a perfect example of how strong software engineering from competitors can result in you getting completely left in the dust. YouTube and Spotify have great algorithms for suggesting new songs - I feel like when my current song is done, I have a really high chance of hearing another song that I've never heard, but will enjoy.
This is not the case on SoundCloud, where I'm almost always jolted back to reality when the next song comes on.
Exactly this point came up in a conversation with non-technical friends recently, everyone agreed. The nice thing soundcloud has is the ability to host mixes, which can last hours.
And that‘s exactly what they should have focused on. I never saw them as a service for listening to tracks and albums or storing my collection. It‘s not a Spotify or Apple Music competitor.
It’s a great place for DJ mixes, sets and live recording, though I think Mixcloud is the better product - unfortunately I see way less engagement over there. That might change when Soundcloud goes down.
Mixcloud founder here, thanks for the vote of confidence. One key difference is we internally measure success or engagement in terms of minutes listened not play counts, and actively optimise for this. So often the visible play metrics don't actually respresent true human engagement. It's something we're thinking about a lot internally right now, and we might start exposing it shortly. I suspect most people will be very surprised for the better when we do.
Don’t get me wrong - I agree that minutes played is a much better metric than play count - in fact I always wondered why Soundcloud wouldn‘t go a few steps further and not only show minutes listened, but also where those minutes were spent within your mix, like a heatmap over your upload‘s waveform to see which sections were most popular or where listeners stopped listening.
However, regardless of the fact that you use different metrics, for me it feels much harder to find an audience at Mixcloud. It‘s not that I‘m very popular at Soundcloud, but the small circle of like-minded followers I found there doesn‘t seem to translate very well to Mixcloud. Again, that may change with Soundcloud‘s demise.
That is the same internal goal that SoundCloud has. Play counts is just what users want to see. All of SoundCloud's internal optimization is around listening time.
Neither Youtube or Spotify make any real money. Recommendation algorithms are the least of Soundcloud's worries as the platform just doesn't have any real business plan and just can't play the "growth game" anymore.
There is just no real money in selling access to or hosting digital music.
Soundcloud used to be a place for DJs. They died when they tried to go mainstream instead of focusing on DJs and selling them services.
Spotify looses money because they have to pay massive royalties to the music industry. Hosting content that is not part of that oligopoly should in theory be feasible, but of course it doesn't attract the same amount of attention. I wouldn't say it is a foregone conclusion though.
I hope you mean specifically on music, because that comment is laughable.
> Recommendation algorithms are the least of Soundcloud's worries as the platform just doesn't have any real business plan and just can't play the "growth game" anymore.
YouTube as of present day is profitable. To me, and I'm sure Google thinks the same too, the data they've amassed and are exponentially amassing far outweigh in value any notion of profits. This is about playing the long game, not focusing on quarterly earnings.
How do you get that to work? I'm not on Spotify, but I use YouTube (Red subscriber in fact) and I find the suggestions to be pretty bad. It just seems to suggest random songs in the same genre mixed with stuff I've listened to before.
I generally don't subscribe to channels or upvote/downvote songs. Is that critical to getting good suggestions? I would have thought just listening history would be enough.
I cannot comment on Spotify, but I pretty much dislike all Youtube recommendations.
I get sometimes different version of the same song again followed by some other song that is also popular but has nothing to do with what I'm listening to followed by something else I "liked before" but obviously don't want to listen to since I already heard it many times. That is followed by a different version of the same song again finally eventually converging on pop music that I generally dislike.
SoundCloud on the other hand sometimes recommends interesting things that I like but have never heard of. Other times, it recommends things that are completely unrelated and that I don't particularly like. However, they're still new/interesting.
My biggest gripe with YT recommendations is that songs I hit dislike on and always browse away from are constantly placed in my autoplay queue. There are some songs out there that I just hate and there's just no way for me to avoid them.
I've never had this issue with Spotify - mostly because of how differently its recommendations work - and it's probably one of the biggest reasons I've abandoned YT for Spotify.
My anecdata indicates the opposite, as far as quality of recommendations is concerned. Curious how matters of taste might mean that you can't accurately make sweeping generalizations like this.
Music preference is not something you can generalize to a group of people. For example, I may like one song from Taylor Swift but not anything else. You may be right for popular songs but where Pandora's genome project shines is recommending music you would never otherwise discover.
If your suggestions are based on crowd sourced data like play count, your recommendations will be further encouraged by recommendations and thus become obsolete over time.
They do a lot more than that. I just looked at my Discover Weekly playlist and the second track is from someone with 5,500 monthly plays. That's not showing up anywhere based on popularity. I'd say about half the playlist is similarly sized artists.
SoundCloud is my go-to for music while programming. I've spent countless hours curating my likes, playlists, follows, etc. I'd be quite upset if the service shuts down, 1) for the artists that have gained large followings through the service and 2) for all the personal time spent that will in the end mean nothing.
I think I'm reiterating what has been said before, but the reposting is horrendous. It's made the listening experience quite poor from just using the activity stream. I've also been really unimpressed with the lack of track uniqueness - if 2 artists repost the same song, it'll show up in my stream twice. Even more frustrating was the lack of uniqueness between tracks & playlists, where one could conceivably listen to the same song multiple times in a row because artists would post the track and then a single-track playlist with that track inside it.
The UI is also lacking for quickly adding to playlists, etc. The simplicity was a feature, not a bug, and the power of SoundCloud has been their artist community.
Carbon-Based Lifeforms, Solar Fields, Aes Dana, Miktek, HUVA Network (this is actually Solar Fields and Aes Dana), Sync24 (a side project of Daniel from CBL)... I could go on, but there's a good start!
Same here. I pay for the subscription so I can cache mixes I find, if I lose those it's gonna be pretty devastating.
Wouldn't be impossible to go rip them off the internet somewhere else but would require a lot of extra work etc.
Soundcloud should have stuck with boosting amateurs rather than play for the big guys and funded with subscriptions from the bottom up in my opinion. Leave the professional track streaming to spotify, this was youtube for sounds, a wild west just short of Grooveshark bootleg territory. Deep down, we know the ride is coming to an end and when soundcloud retires it will be missed.
I'm from Berlin and happen to have found an awesome employer, who is constantly looking for talent, so if someone from Soundcloud needs a hint for a job in Germany, message me.
Not that it would be hard to get a job in our industry, but well.. :)
Come work with us at Atrium in SF (Portero) and disrupt the legal industry.
Cofounders: Justin Kan, Bebe Chueh, Augie Rakow, Chris Smoak.
Atrium is hiring for Senior Full-Stack Engineers, Senior Backend Engineers, Frontend Engineers + more. See postings here! We want you!
https://www.atriumlts.com/
They've been futzing around a bit too, they started as WeAreHunted, then got acquired by Twitter to become Twitter Music, then shut down, then restarted as Wonder.fm.
I liked the idea of SoundCloud but it was horribly designed. The app was just so so clunky. I know some producers and they were early adopters on SoundCloud. The community was begging for this and jumped on early. They had the demand, they just failed to execute.
One thing that they did right was their use of HTLM5 to keep what you're listening to playing while you browse the site. Especially for long running podcasts it's nice not to feel like you would drop the thing you were listening to if you weren't careful.
Oh. I remember a post on HN from SC employee couple weeks ago asking if he/she should stay given that salary reviews have been postponed. In retrospect it seems he/she should have left.
I was actually thinking the same thing. My general advice after being at a company that went through multiple rounds of layoffs within 4 years: Get your resume together and start networking when you have any of the following scenarios: new management, new consultants, in acquisition talks, in a cash crunch.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 299 ms ] threadhttps://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/google-mulling-soundc...
Does SoundCloud see itself as an audio streaming service now, as opposed to an audio hosting service? That seems like a focus shift away from where they started, and puts them up against behemoths like Spotify. Maybe that's related to why they're struggling.
Tangentially: does anyone have any idea of how Bandcamp is doing?
The truth is that users are not loyal. If you are offering something for free, they will be happy to take it, and they will have no qualms about moving on when you stop giving them the free stuff that they came for. Selling eyeballs is a very tough business. People who want a realistic chance to make money should have plans besides "sell ads".
(Not that I use it.)
Realise that the flipside of such services is their real customers -- the adverts side. For online advertising, the two largest agencies claim over 60% of the market, and are named "Google" and "Facebook".
Everyone else is an also-ran. Which for any ads purchaser means "a lot more work for a lot less reach".
Couldn't the whole internet be generalized as "file hosting with a bunch of links"? A "file host" is a company whose primary purpose is for you to upload a file and give the link to someone else; they're a middleman that exists only because a more convenient/direct means of distribution to the intended network isn't available. This does not make the company nearly loud enough to establish its own identity/user base.
Facebook has always been its own repository of people intelligence. It was never just an "upload your photos here". Such platforms, like Photobucket or Imgur, sometimes prosper for a while, until the communication channels that reach the intended audience directly offer something easier. (imgur is going down now as reddit introduced its own image host last year)
Yep. There's simply no money in just "pushing bits" anymore. That business has been consolidated by people like Google and Amazon.
You have to both provide a valuable service, as well as create a "network effect" around your product. Otherwise you're easily susceptible to being out competed.
Apparently great[1] and profitable since 2012[2].
[1] https://daily.bandcamp.com/2017/01/24/everything-is-terrific...
[2] http://5chicago.com/technology/bandcamp-profitable/
That said, music is extremely portable, so it's easy to buy from several online shops and combine it all in your own library later.
Based on that I sometimes remind myself that, unlike streaming services, where you are forced to put all your eggs in one basket and can only have one source, with music sales there might be other options too. There's actually a free market out there!
That's extremely rare on today's internet, and I want to support that. Therefore I consciously try to buy stuff from other sources too, like Ninjashop, 7 digital, Waste, etc. But it's just very easy to come back to bandcamp.
This is completely at odds with securely streaming unreleased music, as a preview for the final album. They always have charged producers, and now are charging both sides for (in many cases) the same content.
This shifted their product focus and shafted producers who didn't have a major label deal that could afford the streaming SoundCloud partnership deal. Basically giving the finger to the early community that made them popular.
I would have focused on the producers and dissemination of their tracks that led to more and better discovery. I believe producers would pay a premium for that -- they already do with other forms of media delivery.
It‘s my impression that the Bandcamp userbase is very loyal and full of music enthusiasts - at. least I buy there weekly, about 5-10 releases.
bandcamp has a very different business model from soundcloud. it's set up to cater to artists selling music, and they take a cut of any music sold through bandcamp. This is a valuable service and they charge a straightforward fee for providing it. the downside of this model is that it assumes people will buy music. Which, to be clear, they very much do today. Streaming is popular but there are still tons of people actually buying music.
soundcloud's early business model was for artists to pay for more storage, or something, and in recent years, I'm honestly not sure what their business model is.
So, not surprising that bandcamp is profitable and doing well and has apparently not raised tons of money yet gotten to profitability, and also not surprising that soundcloud, which has taken a lot of VC capital, is not going to be betting on a business model that seems to be going away (but in the meantime is presumably quite profitable).
My bet is that since trending likes are a Graph DB problem, SoundCloud just chose not to solve it once it became too hard on their database. They famously had issues with early Mongo adoption so this would fit right in. Their most recent frontend HTML5 rewrite always winds up my CPU and hasn't changed in a couple years.
SoundCloud to me has always been a great idea with some great design that got ruined by some poor engineering choices from the top. And at the end by a desperate grab for stats and cash. I think producers would have paid more, better subsidizing free plans, if discovery hadn't gone downhill. I ran the numbers once on how CDbaby and Bandcamp became successful (based on stats trickled out over the years) while SoundCloud could never turn a profit. There's still plenty of room for someone to do this right.
I only use it for podcasts though, never music.
Comments would be littered with things like "hey, great, check out my stuff!"
That type of shallow "like for like" culture is absolutely cancerous for what was previously a very maker-heavy audience.
> That type of shallow "like for like" culture is absolutely cancerous for what was previously a very maker-heavy audience.
Man, I've been in there since day one practically and it was always like that, as has been every service of that kind I've ever used (hands up anyone who ever maintained an MP3.com playlist). Music runs on shameless self promotion. Players gonna play. Etc.
I eventually switched to Spotify, since I could have global keyboard shortcuts for the app. If SoundCloud had a desktop app I would use that instead of Spotify in a heartbeat (assuming I could play my own music as well).
https://github.com/Soundnode/soundnode-app
They are failing not to provide an alternative and to prevent you from using an alternative.
I wish there was a firefox port.
(Apologies to those that work for one of those companies.)
Unfortunately for SC, IAC tends to price acquisitions based on historical revenues...
For anyone confused by this: SoundCloud can't play podcasts, but a small percentage of podcasters host their show on SoundCloud, and the app can (naturally) play those.
However, SoundCloud has probably seen the peak of its podcast-driven business. Podcasters have been wary of SoundCloud's fortunes for some time, and most have a Plan B in place. Today's news has likely expedited plans to find alternatives among at least some podcasters.
The music industry is a shade of what it once was, and both CDBaby and Bandcamp are tiny slithers off of that.
However, despite its shortcomings, Bandcamp is where cutting edge music lives in an age without Soundcloud. Labels like PC Music, Mall Music and Dream Catalogue have all pushed independent music to bizarre new limits in the last 4 years alone. Orchid tapes, an indie outfit, made their name off of Bandcamp releases. Alex G, Katie Dey, Elvis Depressedy, and a slew of other musicians have been recognized for their indie releases and now enjoy moderate indie popularity. As long as no one else is beating them, Bandcamp will continue to run on its skeleton frame and empower artists who use it.
They don't have to go crazy. But something less than the current clinical experience would be a step in the right direction.
But, like you said, most of my discovery occurs on YouTube and a small forum thread.
MATCH (u:User {Id:123})-[:FRIENDS]->(f)-[:LIKED_ON_2017_07_08]->(t:Track) RETURN t, COUNT(f) ORDER BY COUNT(f) DESC LIMIT 25
I made this if it helps anyone: https://github.com/kyranb/SoundCloud-Feed-Cleaner
I investigated your issues page and the previous comment may be related to the following issue.
https://github.com/kyranb/SoundCloud-Feed-Cleaner/issues/10
After loading a fresh copy of the page, the tab appeared.
With that said I opened an additional issue. Chrome console log did not appear to provide any relevant information.
https://github.com/kyranb/SoundCloud-Feed-Cleaner/issues/11
Quite a few artists I follow are on Soundcloud primarily for new material. I would happily pay for Soundcloud if they'd bother to update their app for Android Auto and Android TV.
Even in tech companies with no physical product to get out the door it is easy to get a 1:10 ratio. You just need an army of sales, press, marketing, social media managing, customer service, HR, management, legal, design, print design, accounting, finance, office management and other random people with important jobs to do.
How about a 1:75 ratio?!?
With three offices you are going to need nine receptionists at a bare minimum if you are to cover reception for an hour either side of when everyone turns up. At a minimum the IT guys that plug people in and get them setup on 'Exchange' are of a similar number if all the offices are to be covered.
So there must be a 'dev to total headcount' ratio, a maximum sustainable upper number, any higher and the company is doomed to 'miss the web' and get totally stuck in 1990's ways of working. I have seen a 1:75 ratio 'tech company' and saw great opportunity in changing it, although a long way off the desired 1:10 or lower.
There must be companies where the ratio is the other way around. A programming concern with little of the normal sales/marketing requirements could be a 3:1 company.
I hate people like this. "Oh I could build that in like a weekend with Go and React no need for 100s of devs..." Those statements only come from people who never built something even remotely in this size and have no idea how complex this stuff becomes when done proper.
I'm not saying this is exactly what happened there, but as a user of their product I'm disappointed because I simply did not see a growth in features or improvement quality that I would associate with a company that was scaling out like it apparently was?
Once groups were cancelled, the listens on the songs I post to Soundcloud plummeted to virtually nothing, and I really don't bother to upload my music there anymore, nor to go to Soundcloud to discover new music.
Should anything I like ever be taken down, I can still listen to it.
The good thing about music is that it is ultra portable so mixing music from many sources, services and providers is hardly a problem.
And you can clearly see that in how the market for online music works. Unlike video, which is so dysfunctional I'd be hard pressed to even say there is a market.
End result: despite streaming services I still spend $100s of dollars on music every year. 0 on video.
Hardly any service lets me buy and curate my own videos, without DRM, from several sources and build my own library which I can play on all digital devices out there.
It's just a few big giant services, each with their own DRM and limited platform support.
It's nowhere near a real market where I can pick and choose and providers compete on merit.
I know, because I worked on getting it shutdown. Not because I disliked the idea myself, but with no developers working on fixing it, the feature needed to be removed in order to cleanup the database spam and a huge chunk of a legacy code base.
We wanted to replace it, but nobody could convince management to fund it with headcount. But that's the story of SoundCloud, fantastic levels of miss-management.
I know that SoundCloud's interview process is tough, so I guess it's a good day for companies looking for talent around Berlin.
https://github.com/orgs/soundcloud/people
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Lo9slf...
edit: now it's at 35... ouch
With these layoffs, I'm guessing it's hovering around 60
[1] https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882983954059595776 [2] https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882981765064871937
Quite different from when you voluntarily leave, when you give notice and do knowledge transfer and such. I imagine that is because the employee is unlikely to do anything bad, since they likely have a better future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
Specifically, members of some online transgender communities use it to solicit community feedback on their voices. They'll record themselves talking, post it to SoundCloud, and ask the community for input on what they could do better.
I don't think there's enough of a market for "pastebin for voice recordings" to be a successful business though.
When I first heard of SoundCloud it was mostly used by self-releasing EDM artists as a place to upload their music, before YouTube was a popular alternative. Nowadays I see a lot of artists buying visualizer templates and uploading their music with that - or sending it to an aggregator on YouTube who displays a certain style of music (many of these aggregators don't seek artist permission and just upload popular songs and such, but many of the ones I follow get things sent to them by indie artists because a channel with 60,000+ subs will beat their own personal channel for recognition).
The problem when you're expanding is you need to have a clear idea of what you are. Because knowing what you are means you can scale by taking advantage of your strengths instead of dumbing it down. Amazon is a great example.
But if you just expand without knowing what you are, you'll end up like Soundcloud.
Also another thing is this idea of "what you are" (aka vision) shouldn't come from some media coverage or VCs or pundits. You should have already had the vision before these people started talking about you. See Snapchat for example, media pundits started calling them "a camera company", and Snapchat itself started believing the hype, and even renamed themselves "Snap". Snapchat is not a camera company. It's a social network that revolutionized private sharing. But they don't seem to think so anymore because they have to match the stratospheric expectation set by their IPO. Instead of expanding their own playing field they jumped into other giants' playground (competing with Apple in AR, competing with Instagram in public photo sharing, etc.), this pattern never ends well historically.
Soundcloud fell into the same trap. Their investor called them "The Youtube of Audio", instead of seeing it for what it is. If they had realized they were popular because they were a great service for indie musicians and focused on that aspect it is possible that by now they are more influential than any existing music tech companies. Instead they tried to become "the youtube of audio", which is the most uninteresting thing I've ever heard, it's the definition of "dumbing down" in order to expand.
And now, of course, (and for quite a while) YouTube is the YouTube of audio.
It should have been apparent that it was foolish to try and beat google on that turf. Google beat them easily with a simpler interface and raw performance. The biggest difference, though: The audio quality on YouTube is actually better. Nail after nail in the coffin.
Ta!
Presumably they're hurt by the presence of platforms such as Youtube or the 2010s' rebooted Myspace, where musicians can reach a larger audience and where both sides of the equation are subsidized by ads.
Meanwhile, more focused sites like Beatport appeared to have a successful recipe by selling actual tracks for download despite essentially offering unlimited streaming, yet even they ran into some trouble with their latest pivot.
It's a tough space to make money in, despite seemingly meeting a popular need.
looking at their accounts to Dec 2015 (latest available), they don't make great reading. The balance sheet value went from £8m to -£34m in one year...
If you are hiring, please reach out to people from SoundCloud. The decisions of who to let go were not based on performance. A lot of amazing people, both attitude and technically.
If any of you are not based here we can offer relocation/visa support, check my previous comments on whoishiring for more details or contact me directly stefan <at> fraugster <dot> com
- Mobile Engineering Lead - http://grnh.se/0sikan1
- Senior UX Designer - http://grnh.se/4hd0ix1
- Software Engineering Manager - http://grnh.se/8qix6m1
- Senior Product Owner - http://grnh.se/qdkir31
Edit: My company is also hiring backend devs for another team in London.
If there's a internal documents with links getting passed around (there was a similar thing when Skype shut down their London office) please add our company to it as we're hiring https://thoughtmachine.workable.com/
Speak is an AI English tutor that has spoken conversations with users who want to become better at speaking English -- so audio is core to our experience. If you were on the mobile team at Soundcloud we'd love to talk - email me personally at connorzwick <at> gmail.
That slogan took multiple passes to grok.
The fact that the word after 'turn' is 're-turn' makes my mind go to the usual purpose of prefixing words with 're': to do again. That's not how it's used here but then in 'repurchases' it is. There's too many twists and turns (no pun intended) from a language standpoint.
http://getautomata.com
I actually did it for a while. I started my career in biotech and worked on an instrument. When I told them I was moving they wanted to keep me on and sent a couple of scanners to me.
I do realize that's a special case. They knew me for eight years prior, not nearly the same thing... but I thought I'd ask. There may be a fair amount of work that can be done via simulation, or applications level stuff, but yeah, a long shot.
If you are a frontend dev and hate speculative hiring phone calls, you can jump straight to coding excecise: https://github.com/Tout/tout_fe_interview
http://corp.tout.com/careers
Ping me at tom@tout.com if interested.
1) 30 minute intro phone call to see if both parties are pushing in the same direction
2) technical review, which can take one of two forms:
a) 1 hour phone call (no computer needed)
b) take home coding exercise
3) in person phase to meet team, cross functional team members, and ceo
Because of the nature of this comment, I thought it'd be helpful to offer up option 2b directly if someone wants todo it without a phone call blocking things.
We offer the coding exercise as an option for a few reasons, but the most important one is that some great engineers are good on the phone and some aren't. While good communication skills are a must to performing well, doing well on a tech phone call isn't.
Others have mentioned engineers not being able to do fizzbuzz, and that is certainly the most important part. Another one is, I've personally worked in larger orgs where "engineers" stick around for years, but haven't really done any solid coding whatsoever in years. They use tools developed by others to "assist" their team, but are actually the least productive people. One of the strategies that help this is by not automating certain repetitive tasks, so that it seems to require the attention of a full time engineer. e.g. I knew a person whose job day in and out was clicking in the Jenkins UI to run the jobs (!).
Of course this is not universal. But a small coding exercise is a good compromise imo.
FastBill.com/jobs - We're Hiring, Go/PHP/Python/JS/React, but also non-dev positions
We are working on the democratization of entrepreneurship by making it easier to do company finances, write invoices and file taxes.
You can ping me via https://twitter.com/roritharr
https://www.thirdlight.com/chorus
Cambridge, UK.
Lead Backend: https://tungsten.workable.com/jobs/481949
Product Owner: https://tungsten.workable.com/j/B89A0EA7A1
San Francisco / Bay Area:
We're hiring UX Designers and Engineers at Common Networks (building a better ISP).
https://common.net | https://jobs.lever.co/common-networks
Feel free to reach out to ralston [at] common [dot] net
[1] https://www.yup.com
https://www.capsulecares.com/
https://jobs.lever.co/capsulecares
Here's the job posting: https://theinfatuation.com/careers/38/software-engineer-plat...
Feel free to PM me or reach out at buck@theinfatuation.com
We are hiring for several positions at Amazon in our Seattle office working on some really cool stuff. Please send resumes to sarthomp at amazon.com and say you found out on Hacker News. We'd love to make this work for you.
I'm not a recruiter
https://home.tapjoy.com/careers/
Software Engineer - AI and Learning: https://jobs.lever.co/askspoke/135f082c-de82-4875-bbd1-35f6a...
Software Engineer - Backend: https://jobs.lever.co/askspoke/cb915664-4ba0-482c-b824-73a3d...
http://airbus-sv.com
You can email me - [HN username minus last letter] @ airbus-sv.com
Feel free to spread this to anyone in engineering in the NYC office (or anyone willing to relocate to NYC). Hit me up directly: jon.apostoles(at)nike.com
Mainly looking for native iOS and Android engineers, and backend engineers.
Thanks, and good luck!
Now is a good opportunity for you guys to go that road. It's never been easier to find projects and there are lots of companies that can benefit the experience you got and offer short-term contractor work.
If someone needs help to get started in Berlin ( taxes, advice, etc. ) feel free to contact me.
Wish you good luck!
Apply here: https://boards.greenhouse.io/demandbase/jobs/732055#.WV6CrhM...
- https://pandora.com/careers/position?id=oRme5fwg - https://pandora.com/careers/position?id=oSMG4fw8
These aren't under the best circumstances but if folks who are affected are interested in continuing their career in music in Oakland Pandora is an awesome place to work.
Feel free to contact me for any questions about our open roles, good luck with your search!
phowe at pandora dot com
http://www.aha.io | email: engineering-jobs@aha.io
Some highlights:
- You ideally have 4+ years of full-time experience and a salary expectation of $90-110k
- You have worked with or are interested in Unix, functional programming, Elixir, Elm, JavaScript, PostgreSQL
- We build cloud software for the marine shipping industry; thousands of people at companies like BC Ferries, Seaspan and many others use our products to build ships, reduce fuel consumption and manage their day-to-day operations
- We have a disparate stack with technologies like Rails, Meteor, Angular and React in production, but are standardizing our product line on Elixir/Elm
- We have group benefits, flexible time off, flexible work hours, working from home, and will buy you the tools you need to do your job well
mike [at] instagram [dot] com.
https://alto.com/careers/software_engineer?gh_jid=737797
https://smartcar.com | sanketh@smartcar.com
I would like to think that engineers from Sound Cloud may be excited by the music, theater, film, and event domain.
Drop me a line at [hn_username]@timeout.com
My email is in my profile; feel free to reach out if you have questions.
Posted this as a top level comment already before I saw this one. Sorry about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=14713062&goto=item%3Fi...
Flexport is a freight forwarder, which is a really old industry. We're bringing it to the information era. (It turns out computers are really good at solving information problems.)
Flexport is growing the engineering team of ~35 in our downtown SF office. It's a great time to join: we have 20% MoM growth and we're about to enter the peak season where retailers are getting ready for the holidays. There's lots of opportunity for personal growth because we still have tonnes of stuff to build.
Our stack is React, Rails, Postgres, AWS. We're experimenting with GraphQL & Relay too.
We're hiring across the stack. Check out our careers page below. If you're interested in frontend, contact me directly! (email is in my profile).
https://www.flexport.com/careers/department/engineering
Thank you for posting here, for making yourself available directly.
https://www.earnest.com/careers/#/engineering/730199/sr-soft...
We're a marketplace that connects people with studios and gyms so they can take yoga, martial arts, or other classes near them. We have a solid working business model and are growing. We're hiring for backend, frontend, full-stack, and infrastructure roles.
I'm a technical lead in SF and happy to talk to anyone on either coast. Contact me at (my HN username)@classpass.com or apply directly at https://classpass.com/jobs/openings.
Feel free to apply yourself, forward to recruiting, or give me a shout with questions.
Even if you don't join, very much appreciate you posting here and making yourself available.
We recently closed a $50m Series B from a consortium of the six largest global banks, as well as Google. We are growing rapidly (in Harvard Square, NYC and DC) and are looking for exceptional engineers to complete our team.
We are hiring across the stack. See more on our careers page: www.kensho.com/careers
You guys probably know, but we're located 5 minutes from the Factory :)
Or, better, just drop me a line directly: zach [at] plaid [dot] com
If any of your colleagues are interested, Square Cash (https://cash.me) is hiring backend/server, iOS and Android engineers in SF. Reach out to ayo (at) squareup dot com if interested: https://www.smartrecruiters.com/Square/743999652546124
Best of luck regardless. Looks like lots of great options in this thread.
Best of luck!
http://feed.fm/jobs
Prefer(https://prefer.com) is looking at hiring both frontend engineer and product designer in both NY and SF. We are a Benchmark-backed company working on rebuilding the service professional marketplace.
Feel free to reach out, my email is siong [at] prefer [dot] com.
https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882977097232338947
https://twitter.com/katalunia_/status/882992899893460993
> Well, SoundCloud just laid off all of its New York engineering
> Literally the entire payments and subscriptions team, ads-eng, monetization engineering, everybody
> Not really clear to me how the execs think this company will be able to make money from now on
The silver lining here is that recruiters are in a blood frenzy; I've had ~30 messages come in today.
When the whole finance team quit late last year, I knew it wasn't good.
I got out of there earlier this year. I feel bad for the new hires that were just coming in. I heard that a atleast one was just moving from the US to Germany, their things are still in transit in a shipping container and they just got laid off.
I'm also greatly disappointed that they seem to have settled on 128kbit MP3 as the peak of quality.
Essentially I want to pay them something to be able to listen to SoundCloud's uploaded tracks on my phone offline. That's it! Until they can compete with Spotify on a technical front and make me switch, I can't justify the $10/month, but I can certainly justify paying less for a sliver of that offering.
So they were in a bit of a chicken and egg situation - they needed to monetise the service but couldn't because they weren't legally able to, and to compound this they were sitting on a liability because technically they had been infringing the copyright of songwriters - but to do a deal to be legally able to monetise they had to be able to generate some sort of revenue stream to be able to get forward investment to settle the terms of that negotiation.
TL;DR - Soundcloud couldn't charge people without potentially being sued at some point about a copyright issue. To be able to charge people they needed to settle that problem and it seems like that all went on too long and now maybe they've hit a point where the model for monetising soundcloud isn't working as fast as they hoped.
Would love to hear details.
In my personal experience, Berlin is very foreigner-friendly.
Big tech hubs are bound to see startups fail, especially leaking ships that never turn a profit.
Berlin isn't perfect but whatever happens to SoundCloud doesn't really say anything about its tech scene. Were SoundCloud be London/NYC/SF based, it would have gone under much, much quicker.
Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14653564
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14653741
Other indicators: delayed salary reviews
This is not the case on SoundCloud, where I'm almost always jolted back to reality when the next song comes on.
Don’t get me wrong - I agree that minutes played is a much better metric than play count - in fact I always wondered why Soundcloud wouldn‘t go a few steps further and not only show minutes listened, but also where those minutes were spent within your mix, like a heatmap over your upload‘s waveform to see which sections were most popular or where listeners stopped listening.
However, regardless of the fact that you use different metrics, for me it feels much harder to find an audience at Mixcloud. It‘s not that I‘m very popular at Soundcloud, but the small circle of like-minded followers I found there doesn‘t seem to translate very well to Mixcloud. Again, that may change with Soundcloud‘s demise.
There is just no real money in selling access to or hosting digital music.
Soundcloud used to be a place for DJs. They died when they tried to go mainstream instead of focusing on DJs and selling them services.
I hope you mean specifically on music, because that comment is laughable.
> Recommendation algorithms are the least of Soundcloud's worries as the platform just doesn't have any real business plan and just can't play the "growth game" anymore.
This 1000%
I generally don't subscribe to channels or upvote/downvote songs. Is that critical to getting good suggestions? I would have thought just listening history would be enough.
I get sometimes different version of the same song again followed by some other song that is also popular but has nothing to do with what I'm listening to followed by something else I "liked before" but obviously don't want to listen to since I already heard it many times. That is followed by a different version of the same song again finally eventually converging on pop music that I generally dislike.
SoundCloud on the other hand sometimes recommends interesting things that I like but have never heard of. Other times, it recommends things that are completely unrelated and that I don't particularly like. However, they're still new/interesting.
I've never had this issue with Spotify - mostly because of how differently its recommendations work - and it's probably one of the biggest reasons I've abandoned YT for Spotify.
I kind of feel too much money and not a strong org structure destroyed sound cloud.
Spotify recommendations are far from great. They crowd source based on popularity, Pandora's recommendation engine is far superior.
If your suggestions are based on crowd sourced data like play count, your recommendations will be further encouraged by recommendations and thus become obsolete over time.
I think I'm reiterating what has been said before, but the reposting is horrendous. It's made the listening experience quite poor from just using the activity stream. I've also been really unimpressed with the lack of track uniqueness - if 2 artists repost the same song, it'll show up in my stream twice. Even more frustrating was the lack of uniqueness between tracks & playlists, where one could conceivably listen to the same song multiple times in a row because artists would post the track and then a single-track playlist with that track inside it.
The UI is also lacking for quickly adding to playlists, etc. The simplicity was a feature, not a bug, and the power of SoundCloud has been their artist community.
https://soundcloud.com/miloh-fliger
https://soundcloud.com/wilddark
https://soundcloud.com/bedouin-official
https://soundcloud.com/hishamzahran
https://soundcloud.com/theokottis
https://soundcloud.com/hraach
https://soundcloud.com/ldsroom
https://soundcloud.com/zeroparty
https://soundcloud.com/foxloveeeeee
https://soundcloud.com/sound-of-dev/sets/milieu
Wouldn't be impossible to go rip them off the internet somewhere else but would require a lot of extra work etc.
Soundcloud should have stuck with boosting amateurs rather than play for the big guys and funded with subscriptions from the bottom up in my opinion. Leave the professional track streaming to spotify, this was youtube for sounds, a wild west just short of Grooveshark bootleg territory. Deep down, we know the ride is coming to an end and when soundcloud retires it will be missed.
Not that it would be hard to get a job in our industry, but well.. :)
They've been futzing around a bit too, they started as WeAreHunted, then got acquired by Twitter to become Twitter Music, then shut down, then restarted as Wonder.fm.
Making money in music is HARD.
I was actually thinking the same thing. My general advice after being at a company that went through multiple rounds of layoffs within 4 years: Get your resume together and start networking when you have any of the following scenarios: new management, new consultants, in acquisition talks, in a cash crunch.