I really hope SoundCloud doesn't change too much with a new owner. There's something special about it's user generated mixes and commenting at different time stamps on a mix that make it unique. I often find myself coming back to SoundCloud every once in a while seeking new content or mixes that Spotify and Tidal seem to lack for me.
Yes, Spotify and SoundCloud togethrr nearly completely scratch my music itch. Would love to see more SoundCloud integrations, e.g. with Yamaha receivers, which only support Spotify and airplay.
This makes me sad. I use SoundCloud to listen to one genre only (progressive trance for when I'm programming) and its gotten so good at recommending me exactly what I like. On top of that DJ sets are top notch.
There are many genres I like to listen to, but the result is a mix of all the things. It's quite rubbish to get a mix of very different genres spanning decades, which happens with Spotify all the time. And YouTube has been abandoned for all but the occasional song for me for similar reasons.
I'm not holding my breath on this sale as so many times the end result is for the worse.
Guess I should see what else is out there.
Here are some of my favorite sets, the Kai Lie one is the best imo. And the 'taking you higher' series has many more parts (the one here is my favorite)
I never thought to look for music on SoundCloud but that's one of my go-to genres so I decided to give it a shot. Just a quick search and wow I've already found great new-to-me tracks!
SoundCloud is still my most used music platform. If you like electronic music, it’s second to none. I like the fact that you can have 1-2h sets where you can comment reactions or ID different songs at specific timestamps. I also like to interact with different small artists there and follow their growth in the industry. I would message them tracks that I like and they would send me private links to early versions of their next release for feedback. You can’t find that anywhere else.
Yeah, I agree with all of this. SoundCloud continues to get my music subscription after all these years because of how well it represents the electronic music space.
I hope it never dies either. We are paying subscribers of both Apple Music and SoundCloud here and use both of them just about daily, and we have Bay Area DJ friends on there as well.
I wouldn't be upset if Apple acquired them as well. Perhaps we'd finally get an Apple TV & CarPlay version. They bought Shazam a few years ago and the sky didn't fall then either.
I'd rather see Apple acquire then rather than a venture capital firm or even worse, Google.
SoundCloud disappearing would be a shame. There's nothing that currently exists that replaces it. Consumer-oriented streaming platforms are a dime a dozen these days, sure, but there's no real alternative for a musician-oriented platform; specifically, a platform where musicians can connect with other musicians, with zero overhead for sharing music. Just upload and done. Unlike commercial platforms like Spotify, there's a culture of bootlegs, edits, mashups and DJ sets where musicians turn a blind eye to copyright complaints, thanks to the inverted payment approach (with Spotify, they pay you for being on the platform; with SoundCloud, you pay SC to be on the platform).
IMO, from my naive outside perspective, it seems like they were trying to be yet-another generic music streaming platform and that was a losing move. SoundCloud's legacy and current relevance is essentially "a social network for musicians". Positioning themselves as yet another subscription service where Joe Average can listen to Taylor Swift is a huge misplay.
I’m all for turning a blind eye to bootleg so long as it’s not just the original with a minor edit, but how do Soundcloud circumvent any dmca type behaviour that would prevent YouTube effectively offering the same service?
I have noticed with YouTube that DJ sets often have muted gaps - I assume they’re legally allowed to play the muted music but the channels don’t want to deal with combatting copywrite for their content - it’s a damn shame seeing as I cannot find unmuted versions of some sets I’d like in full.
my understanding is that SoundCloud does have a content ID system similar to YouTube, but most artists and non-major labels don't opt into it. Occasionally copyright strikes do happen, which is why a lot of artists will have secondary bootleg channels to avoid getting their primary account axed.
Their platform is just so badly designed once you do pay them as a musician. I signed up for an electronic project I was working on and I found the entire thing incredibly confusing. The design, the naming of things, the way some things connected with other things and not others, it all felt like a mishmash.
The last straw for me was when I couldn’t master a track. The plan included IIRC three masters per month. After working on a new track and uploading it, I was unable to find any way to master it. The buttons just weren’t there. The only reason I could come up with was that it had been flagged for a copyright violation, which ostensibly disables mastering. But it wasn’t yet public, and it was entirely original content, and there was no visible explanation. I was left mystified and frustrated and I canceled.
Post-cancellation, I thought maybe there’d be some follow up to find out why. A survey or something. Nope. Not a peep.
The whole enterprise gives the impression that it’s from ten or fifteen years ago. I still use it everyday. But the fact it’s struggling is not surprising at all.
The fact that they even have an AI mastering service--which, to be blunt, is an exploitative scam to bilk hobbyist/newbie musicians out of their money--just shows how much shit they've been throwing at the wall, hoping it sticks. Mastering services, distribution services (SoundCloud for Artists, which lets you also post on Spotify), making some tracks eligible for streaming payouts, Next vs Next Pro vs Go vs Go+ vs...
They've acted like a company on their last legs for a while. The Insights view is the most frustrating; they half-rolled it out a few years ago, sending out an apology email because it was half-baked and didn't have the same feature set as the old statistics viewer, but now they've removed the old one and the new Insights still sucks. Just smells of a half-completed project that no longer has the engineering or product support it needs to actually be good.
Yes, this is exactly what I am talking about! It's all feels very random. And it's all such a series of missed opportunities because they still have so much credibility in the hobbyist, underground and "urban" music scenes... The front-end is another example, the UI has barely changed in years, and yet, there are so many opportunities for improvement there too.
I think that there's a good case to be made that, when these kinds of companies turn out to be unprofitable, they should be spun into a semi-public service like USPS (as its own thing, not under any existing institution). Much like mail delivery, there's not much room for innovation on the basic service of, "Provide interface and space to upload music, provide interface to enjoy music." If whoever buys SC has to change it substantially in order to justify the costs of purchasing it + maintaining it + profiting, that would be a massive loss culturally and economically. What is the government for if not to protect foundational cultural and economic entities?
This is something that libraries might be in a good position to offer. They're increasingly pushing people to use private third parties for anything digital (and putting the public at risk of being tracked and advertised to in the process) but I'd love to see them doing more hosting of online services themselves.
The risk is high that SoundCloud will follow the Flickr fate in some "creative" fashion.
Flickr became the main host for very different kind of niche photography, especially analog photography or photography with vintage gear and remained like this for some time even after sold to Yahoo.
But at one moment they came up with an idea that a free account could have only less than 1000 photos if it had more photos then it got taken offline. A lot of good content got destroyed by this. For example there was an account that had taken 10s of photos with 100s of different kind of vintage lenses, had perhaps 2000-3000 photos - all gone.
I remember when Soundcloud first launched and it was specifically aimed at musicians to encourage collaboration, so its nice that it still occupies that niche pretty well.
“We both came from backgrounds connected to music,” co-founder Alex Ljung said in a recent interview with wired.com. “And it was just really, really annoying for us to collaborate with people on music — I mean simple collaboration, just sending tracks to other people in a private setting, getting some feedback from them, and having a conversation about that piece of music. In the same way that we’d be using Flickr for our photos, and Vimeo for our videos, we didn’t have that kind of platform for our music.”
From: Wired, 2009: SoundCloud Threatens MySpace as Music Destination for Twitter Era
I already posted this article on the previous SoundCloud thread last week, but it's worth mentioning that a string of decisions that SoundCloud made after their glory years of the late 00s lost them support from the very artists and DJs that originally made the site popular: https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/21/15999172/soundcloud-busin...
Speaking only for myself, I canceled my paid account in 2014 after already not visiting for a year or two due to the spam problem and copyright strikes.
I am not deeply involved in making music any more, so I don't know where the hot spot for musicians to collaborate is today, but cloud storage is counted in the terabytes now so sharing projects, samples and stems is much less expensive than it used to be. Timestamped comments and being able to scrub back and forward without loading up your DAW is probably the main differentiator that SoundCloud offered, but I'm not sure that's as unique as it used to be either.
One weird site I saw linked on last week's thread was this one from Audacity's new owners: https://audio.com/ It's full of janky little samples and snippets that people have uploaded. It reminds me of the early days of musicians uploading whatever unfinished ideas to BBSes and newsgroups for feedback or just to feel like they weren't alone in the world. Artists will always find a way.
If you make a space for community, and give it what it needs, it'll flourish. But distain it in search of cash and it'll die.
Sometimes, if you're lucky, you can find a business next to the community, to keep money coming in. But it has to be something more than advertising, or you'll be chasing your tail til it falls off.
There's still a future for a music business combined with community. There's many problems for both fans and artists that haven't been solved. Just takes somebody to solve it, without focusing on the profit. If they're very lucky it'll last.
I would actually love to work on soundcloud. I use it everyday to discover new music, new mixes, new artists and its amazing. In particular, DJs, from all sizes, uploading their sets, it introduces me to such a breadth of new music and new sounds and then you dig through the comments to find IDs (people that identified which track is played in the mix), check out the artists and their guest mixes - and discover new music constantly. There are alteratives (mixcloud?) but I would deeply miss soundcloud, much more than any other service (like spotify, netflix), because unlike those I feel like soundcloud has a lot of content that is not hosted anywhere else.. i even wonder if its archived somewhere or if one day it will be all lost.
This was always going to catch them eventually... Being a music storage system with streaming always has limits either in storage space/customers or bandwidth. I mean, alot of artists are paying for accounts to store their songs for years but the balance of that and all the millions of ppl streaming/downloading from those accounts? Limits. It's a fine line.
Seems like up to a point it would be a fixed number too with the upper limit of new artists willing to pay for accounts (which have more than doubled in cost since the beginning) dwindling. And throw in the ongoing evolution of copyrighted material detection etc etc (which they seem to straddle constantly, allowing mixes and such but definitely preventing direct song uploads more recently I have noticed)
But the owners/capitalism is surely demanding continued growth so I dunno what SoundCloud has been telling them for the last seemingly 5+ years unchanging.
Perhaps all the free accounts need to go away too, but that hinders creative growth/opportunities that there just aren't as many on the net. Part of SC's initial boom was because there was no easy place to store and share some music.
We continue to run up against these challenges and there's no clear solution. See also related/similar bind at Bandcamp.
Agree with other comments that there is simply no specific replace for Soundcloud if you have a particular taste in electronic music. I've been a paying subscriber for years not bc i find the paid tier super compelling but bc i want them to not go under. Hope SC can find its way to sustainability
I highly recommend getting into Bandcamp if you haven't already. SoundCloud has proven over and over that when it comes to supporting indie artists versus selling out to the majors they will choose the latter, and ironically they still can't turn a profit. Meanwhile Bandcamp has been profitable for years, and you can discover and buy all kinds of great electronic music from the most obscure bedroom musicians to established names. I feel much happier giving my money to them, at least for now. (It remains to be seen if their new owners will mess it all up.)
Is MixCloud any good in this space? I think they were formed when private equity got involved with SoundCloud. I've heard that MixCloud pays some kind of royalties on tracks they identify in the mixtapes. I guess they don't do albums or individual songs like SoundCloud does.
MixCloud has higher quality streaming for the free service, but they don't have the same social aspects to it (comment at timestamps within a track/set, start threads, etc.)
For the first decade or so that I used SoundCloud, music discovery was WORK - their recommendation engine wasn't great, and their search tools were limited, so you'd have to just kind of chase links through artists & commenters, and grind it out. Every couple weeks I would spend a few hours hunting for gems.
Eventually I switched most of my listening to Spotify, on the strength of their recommendation engine, even though my heart is with mixes on SoundCloud.
Then sometime about 5 years ago they fixed their recommendation engine, and it's really just a great experience. Their search tools are still limited, and they've "pigeonholed" my tastes a bit more than Spotify, but I'm still a big fan of the platform and paying subscriber.
If you love SoundCloud ... pay them! Let's keep this beautiful thing alive.
[UPDATE] - also I've had such great interactions with artists on SoundCloud, up-to-and-including some emails to get a local copy of favorite remixes after a track disappeared from SC. So much positivity.
I am working on a new music platform. It is a travesty that SoundCloud and other artist-friendly platforms like Bandcamp are struggling and can't survive. Having used Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music (iTunes), YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, Qobuz, etc over the past 20+ years, it seems like without a new approach we'll continue to lose choices in how we search for, discover, listen to, and interface with music - I can't tell you how many times I've ended up in dead-end-inducing discovery and recommendation experiences in the aformentioned services. I'm not optimistic that the big players in digital streaming can get out of their own way and do anything to make stark improvements to the way listeners experience music, let alone provide anything new to artists, unsigned artists, labels, playlist creators, DJ's, or people who own and operate music venues that aren't owned or controlled by giant corporations. And this is at a time when there is more music being created, recorded, and released than ever before (120,000 new tracks get published a day and 43 million new tracks were published in 2023 alone)(1).
The music project that I have been working on aims to bring together a musical audio pre-trained language model, natural language inputs, and a novel interface that deconstructs what you hear into visualizations and user controls. The idea is to allow you to dramatically improve personalization of music search, discovery, and curation by allowing interactivity with the individual parts of music, also known as stems in music theory and music mastering.
The overarching challenge that music streaming services and more broadly media streaming services have, is building a sustainable business on somebody else's art...you have to (rightly) pay licensing costs. This is a major (and ever changing) business risk and one of the larger challenges when I think about launching a new music streaming platform. MTV discovered this in the mid 80's when margins for music and music video licensing became flat, Netflix / Apple / Amazon / etc know this which is why they invested in developing their own content in house.
If anybody is passionate about working on something new in streaming music let me know - I could really use help developing the music audio PLM prototype.
Noble goal and one I considered for a while after Streamus got shut down (https://thenextweb.com/news/how-youtube-killed-an-extension-...). I got to the point where I spoke with UMG on the phone (prick started the call talking about his Porsche) and Monstercat (they're cool in my book) but no further before YouTube's lawyers crushed me.
Yes, sustainable business model is hard. Just look at Spotify's stock - it's basically break even since IPO. The music industry adjusts their fees to keep Spotify alive, but never significantly profitable, and Spotify has little ability to push back on this.
...but there's also soooooooooo much entrenchment going on in this space. There's special contracts written that whitelist which platforms tracks can be played on and tricky "favored nation" clauses (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/business/media/sony-terms....) So, if you create a new platform, and it's a real threat to the others, then you just get denied a seat at the table unless you make concessions to the point of impotency... or you only have indie music that struggles to attract masses.
Ultimately I decided that, while I cared a LOT about this sector, that it's just too much of an uphill battle.
Your idea sounds cool though. I wish you luck. Is it your intent to build a music catalog that is entirely unique to your platform, to bring in indie artists, or to try and bring in the big names, too? If you're not trying to bring in the big names... how do you prevent the situation where someone says, "I love this song, but next I want to hear ____.", it's not on your platform, and so they open Spotify/YT, and now suddenly you've lost engagement with your platform. I don't feel that consumers maintain playlists across multiple music services and bounce between them based on their current listening preferences. Do you?
I am mostly focused on getting the PLM working right now but have sketched out a pretty sizable product that has a sort of re-envisioning of what a musical community is such as better identity building tools for artists, listeners, labels, publishers (non-musicians such as playlist builders and DJ's) and a bunch of other fundamental things that I think are flat out missing from music streaming apps.
I've had two thoughts re: how to start and how to build an interesting music catalog without getting crushed by the lawyers and labels who are in cahoots with each other. First, the concept of breaking music into its stems and letting people directly interface with music "particles" that their ear-brains love most has made me think that the most important thing to get right is recommending more music that has the sonic characteristics that someone enjoys most, not necessarily broad things that come from music metadata like genre, lyrics, or what your friends liked or listened to. Rather, things like melody, groove or rhythmic patterns, BPM, timbre, harmonics, textures, or music structural preferences are how you get recommendations on what to listen to next. When thinking about it that way, it seems like how the music sounds can be used to recommend, regardless of who big or small or new or established or signed or unsigned an artist might be. In my mind, there's an interesting democratic nature to that too where new artists get a fair shake at discovery as much as major artists (whereas today there's a lot of editorial control over who gets bubbled up into recommendations algos). Second, I've thought about developing a solid prototype and then going for sizeable investment so that I could afford to strike deals, join the cabal, and establish the relationships and access the catalogs of labels big and small.
I’m dying to build a new music app and it’s something I spend all my time thinking about. I have so many ideas wrt stems and lyrics but I’m personally not willing to take the risk of angering WMG or RIAA.
Would love to have a discussion, email is in my bio.
I been working on UX with the team at https://www.radiooooo.com and I believe there is a lot of space for new UI and discovery interactions that treat finding new music as a game.
There is an unspeakable ‘uncanny valley‘ quality that’d algo generated playlists create. Like the music is too similar too aligned, it sends my ears to sleep.
> The Berlin-founded company has maintained its relevance by embracing a simple ethos: come as you are. That’s made SoundCloud the for-everybody platform—one that embraces all genres, sexualities, religions, and definitions of music and art. By setting itself up as a hub for community-oriented music streaming, it’s become a kind of incubator for avant-garde sounds. SoundCloud is everybody’s underground.
I find this kind of politicised editorialising from publications like Wired quite tiring. I have many acquaintances who produce EDM and I was on Soundcloud from 2012 or so. They never saw it in these terms. Of _course_ a platform for hosting your music tracks isn’t exclusive to a particular race, religion or ethnicity. Can anyone name a counter-example in music for whom that’s not the case, outside of obscurity? Or indeed any comparable tech platform?
Some seem to have decided that being neither sexist, racist nor homophobic in your banal business offerings is a revolutionary development from the past decade or two.
Well, the quote you mentioned said nothing about sexism or racism, you added that. So I think you should wonder why the references in that paragraph made you bring a whole gamut of "political" considerations you then deemed irrelevant in one swoop.
The only one they said is "sexualities", and here again I would challenge your re-framing. "Embracing all sexualities" doesn't just mean "not being homophobic". Not actively discriminating against differences between people is the first step. The next step is being welcoming of differences.
Now, is Soundcloud doing that? I'm not sure. I don't know, I'm not a soundcloud user, nor am I queer. But there are absolutely spaces and websites that attract queer creators/users, and ones that don't. There are some that are neutral bland neutered corporate spaces. And some that are unapologetically vibrant and attract a greater percentage of people from - well "all genres, sexualities, religions, and definitions of music and art".
Perhaps Wired hasn't proven to you that Soundcloud isn't one of those sites, but it doesn't sound like you want them to.
Trying not to put words in OP's mouth, but I definitely know people in real life with this attitude, who also get weirdly bristled by innocent mentioning of things like "sexualities" in businesses' PR/positioning pieces. If I were to open a cafe and mentioned somewhere in my Grand Opening PR that the cafe is "inclusive to all genders and races," I know real acquaintances who would absolutely complain to me that my business was "too political". It's weird that the mere act of affirming that your business is welcome to people has become politicized but, hey, welcome to 2024.
It’s almost as if mentioning it, you’re implying that the majority of businesses close to you are not inclusive. If this is the case, go ahead and mention it to stand out.
Otherwise you’re just trying to get brownie points in how cool and progressive you are while solving your imagined problem.
I don't get how it's any different than hanging a big sign outside that says "We love to serve truckers and bikers!" It's just marketing/positioning. What makes one "brownie points" and the other not?
Do we apply the same standard to brands that position themselves as patriotic? If not, it seems that the positioning is less of an issue to certain people than the position.
> I find this kind of politicised editorialising from publications like Wired quite tiring.
You're making it political, but it's just positioning. A PR firm pitched Wired this story as part of a campaign to remind everyone that SoundCloud once mattered¹ in preparation for their forthcoming fire sale.
¹ Probably not as much as this story suggests, though. Artists who started on SoundCloud weren't using it exclusively. For example, TikTok (not SoundCloud) broke "Old Town Road".
55 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 78.4 ms ] threadThere are many genres I like to listen to, but the result is a mix of all the things. It's quite rubbish to get a mix of very different genres spanning decades, which happens with Spotify all the time. And YouTube has been abandoned for all but the occasional song for me for similar reasons.
I'm not holding my breath on this sale as so many times the end result is for the worse. Guess I should see what else is out there.
https://soundcloud.com/perplexitymusic/perplexity-music-show...
https://soundcloud.com/user-668153210-253263600/newprogressi...
https://soundcloud.com/shane-c/progressive-trance-a
https://soundcloud.com/pineappledigitalmusic/melodic-progres...
https://soundcloud.com/weraveyou/sunsetsessions1
https://soundcloud.com/kai-lie/falling-star-compilation-4
https://soundcloud.com/fluidified/cosmic-energy-pt-2
https://soundcloud.com/mrsuicidesheep/taking-you-higher-part...
I wouldn't be upset if Apple acquired them as well. Perhaps we'd finally get an Apple TV & CarPlay version. They bought Shazam a few years ago and the sky didn't fall then either.
I'd rather see Apple acquire then rather than a venture capital firm or even worse, Google.
IMO, from my naive outside perspective, it seems like they were trying to be yet-another generic music streaming platform and that was a losing move. SoundCloud's legacy and current relevance is essentially "a social network for musicians". Positioning themselves as yet another subscription service where Joe Average can listen to Taylor Swift is a huge misplay.
I have noticed with YouTube that DJ sets often have muted gaps - I assume they’re legally allowed to play the muted music but the channels don’t want to deal with combatting copywrite for their content - it’s a damn shame seeing as I cannot find unmuted versions of some sets I’d like in full.
The last straw for me was when I couldn’t master a track. The plan included IIRC three masters per month. After working on a new track and uploading it, I was unable to find any way to master it. The buttons just weren’t there. The only reason I could come up with was that it had been flagged for a copyright violation, which ostensibly disables mastering. But it wasn’t yet public, and it was entirely original content, and there was no visible explanation. I was left mystified and frustrated and I canceled.
Post-cancellation, I thought maybe there’d be some follow up to find out why. A survey or something. Nope. Not a peep.
The whole enterprise gives the impression that it’s from ten or fifteen years ago. I still use it everyday. But the fact it’s struggling is not surprising at all.
They've acted like a company on their last legs for a while. The Insights view is the most frustrating; they half-rolled it out a few years ago, sending out an apology email because it was half-baked and didn't have the same feature set as the old statistics viewer, but now they've removed the old one and the new Insights still sucks. Just smells of a half-completed project that no longer has the engineering or product support it needs to actually be good.
Flickr became the main host for very different kind of niche photography, especially analog photography or photography with vintage gear and remained like this for some time even after sold to Yahoo.
But at one moment they came up with an idea that a free account could have only less than 1000 photos if it had more photos then it got taken offline. A lot of good content got destroyed by this. For example there was an account that had taken 10s of photos with 100s of different kind of vintage lenses, had perhaps 2000-3000 photos - all gone.
“We both came from backgrounds connected to music,” co-founder Alex Ljung said in a recent interview with wired.com. “And it was just really, really annoying for us to collaborate with people on music — I mean simple collaboration, just sending tracks to other people in a private setting, getting some feedback from them, and having a conversation about that piece of music. In the same way that we’d be using Flickr for our photos, and Vimeo for our videos, we didn’t have that kind of platform for our music.”
From: Wired, 2009: SoundCloud Threatens MySpace as Music Destination for Twitter Era
https://archive.is/3uFk9
Speaking only for myself, I canceled my paid account in 2014 after already not visiting for a year or two due to the spam problem and copyright strikes.
I am not deeply involved in making music any more, so I don't know where the hot spot for musicians to collaborate is today, but cloud storage is counted in the terabytes now so sharing projects, samples and stems is much less expensive than it used to be. Timestamped comments and being able to scrub back and forward without loading up your DAW is probably the main differentiator that SoundCloud offered, but I'm not sure that's as unique as it used to be either.
One weird site I saw linked on last week's thread was this one from Audacity's new owners: https://audio.com/ It's full of janky little samples and snippets that people have uploaded. It reminds me of the early days of musicians uploading whatever unfinished ideas to BBSes and newsgroups for feedback or just to feel like they weren't alone in the world. Artists will always find a way.
Sometimes, if you're lucky, you can find a business next to the community, to keep money coming in. But it has to be something more than advertising, or you'll be chasing your tail til it falls off.
There's still a future for a music business combined with community. There's many problems for both fans and artists that haven't been solved. Just takes somebody to solve it, without focusing on the profit. If they're very lucky it'll last.
I follow the mastodon bot https://botsin.space/@soundcloudsaid that sprinkles random happy little comments in my timeline.
Seems like up to a point it would be a fixed number too with the upper limit of new artists willing to pay for accounts (which have more than doubled in cost since the beginning) dwindling. And throw in the ongoing evolution of copyrighted material detection etc etc (which they seem to straddle constantly, allowing mixes and such but definitely preventing direct song uploads more recently I have noticed) But the owners/capitalism is surely demanding continued growth so I dunno what SoundCloud has been telling them for the last seemingly 5+ years unchanging.
Perhaps all the free accounts need to go away too, but that hinders creative growth/opportunities that there just aren't as many on the net. Part of SC's initial boom was because there was no easy place to store and share some music.
We continue to run up against these challenges and there's no clear solution. See also related/similar bind at Bandcamp.
Eventually I switched most of my listening to Spotify, on the strength of their recommendation engine, even though my heart is with mixes on SoundCloud.
Then sometime about 5 years ago they fixed their recommendation engine, and it's really just a great experience. Their search tools are still limited, and they've "pigeonholed" my tastes a bit more than Spotify, but I'm still a big fan of the platform and paying subscriber.
If you love SoundCloud ... pay them! Let's keep this beautiful thing alive.
[UPDATE] - also I've had such great interactions with artists on SoundCloud, up-to-and-including some emails to get a local copy of favorite remixes after a track disappeared from SC. So much positivity.
Both of those platforms steered users in such a nuanced and strange way which platforms like Spotify and Apple Music couldn’t capture.
The music project that I have been working on aims to bring together a musical audio pre-trained language model, natural language inputs, and a novel interface that deconstructs what you hear into visualizations and user controls. The idea is to allow you to dramatically improve personalization of music search, discovery, and curation by allowing interactivity with the individual parts of music, also known as stems in music theory and music mastering.
The overarching challenge that music streaming services and more broadly media streaming services have, is building a sustainable business on somebody else's art...you have to (rightly) pay licensing costs. This is a major (and ever changing) business risk and one of the larger challenges when I think about launching a new music streaming platform. MTV discovered this in the mid 80's when margins for music and music video licensing became flat, Netflix / Apple / Amazon / etc know this which is why they invested in developing their own content in house.
If anybody is passionate about working on something new in streaming music let me know - I could really use help developing the music audio PLM prototype.
(1) https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/there-are-now-120000-...
Yes, sustainable business model is hard. Just look at Spotify's stock - it's basically break even since IPO. The music industry adjusts their fees to keep Spotify alive, but never significantly profitable, and Spotify has little ability to push back on this.
...but there's also soooooooooo much entrenchment going on in this space. There's special contracts written that whitelist which platforms tracks can be played on and tricky "favored nation" clauses (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/business/media/sony-terms....) So, if you create a new platform, and it's a real threat to the others, then you just get denied a seat at the table unless you make concessions to the point of impotency... or you only have indie music that struggles to attract masses.
Ultimately I decided that, while I cared a LOT about this sector, that it's just too much of an uphill battle.
Your idea sounds cool though. I wish you luck. Is it your intent to build a music catalog that is entirely unique to your platform, to bring in indie artists, or to try and bring in the big names, too? If you're not trying to bring in the big names... how do you prevent the situation where someone says, "I love this song, but next I want to hear ____.", it's not on your platform, and so they open Spotify/YT, and now suddenly you've lost engagement with your platform. I don't feel that consumers maintain playlists across multiple music services and bounce between them based on their current listening preferences. Do you?
I've had two thoughts re: how to start and how to build an interesting music catalog without getting crushed by the lawyers and labels who are in cahoots with each other. First, the concept of breaking music into its stems and letting people directly interface with music "particles" that their ear-brains love most has made me think that the most important thing to get right is recommending more music that has the sonic characteristics that someone enjoys most, not necessarily broad things that come from music metadata like genre, lyrics, or what your friends liked or listened to. Rather, things like melody, groove or rhythmic patterns, BPM, timbre, harmonics, textures, or music structural preferences are how you get recommendations on what to listen to next. When thinking about it that way, it seems like how the music sounds can be used to recommend, regardless of who big or small or new or established or signed or unsigned an artist might be. In my mind, there's an interesting democratic nature to that too where new artists get a fair shake at discovery as much as major artists (whereas today there's a lot of editorial control over who gets bubbled up into recommendations algos). Second, I've thought about developing a solid prototype and then going for sizeable investment so that I could afford to strike deals, join the cabal, and establish the relationships and access the catalogs of labels big and small.
Would love to have a discussion, email is in my bio.
I been working on UX with the team at https://www.radiooooo.com and I believe there is a lot of space for new UI and discovery interactions that treat finding new music as a game.
There is an unspeakable ‘uncanny valley‘ quality that’d algo generated playlists create. Like the music is too similar too aligned, it sends my ears to sleep.
Music streaming service SoundCloud tunes up for sale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38911731 - Jan 2024 (38 comments)
I find this kind of politicised editorialising from publications like Wired quite tiring. I have many acquaintances who produce EDM and I was on Soundcloud from 2012 or so. They never saw it in these terms. Of _course_ a platform for hosting your music tracks isn’t exclusive to a particular race, religion or ethnicity. Can anyone name a counter-example in music for whom that’s not the case, outside of obscurity? Or indeed any comparable tech platform?
Some seem to have decided that being neither sexist, racist nor homophobic in your banal business offerings is a revolutionary development from the past decade or two.
The only one they said is "sexualities", and here again I would challenge your re-framing. "Embracing all sexualities" doesn't just mean "not being homophobic". Not actively discriminating against differences between people is the first step. The next step is being welcoming of differences.
Now, is Soundcloud doing that? I'm not sure. I don't know, I'm not a soundcloud user, nor am I queer. But there are absolutely spaces and websites that attract queer creators/users, and ones that don't. There are some that are neutral bland neutered corporate spaces. And some that are unapologetically vibrant and attract a greater percentage of people from - well "all genres, sexualities, religions, and definitions of music and art".
Perhaps Wired hasn't proven to you that Soundcloud isn't one of those sites, but it doesn't sound like you want them to.
Otherwise you’re just trying to get brownie points in how cool and progressive you are while solving your imagined problem.
You're making it political, but it's just positioning. A PR firm pitched Wired this story as part of a campaign to remind everyone that SoundCloud once mattered¹ in preparation for their forthcoming fire sale.
¹ Probably not as much as this story suggests, though. Artists who started on SoundCloud weren't using it exclusively. For example, TikTok (not SoundCloud) broke "Old Town Road".
I seriously doubt anyone is going to buy it, even less for $1B which is the number that has been thrown around.
Of course the investors that put some $250M into it since 2017 or so want their ROI badly but who in their right mind would buy it?
Google, Meta, Spotify, etc could buy it without much effort but what would they get in return?