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Comment by cmyr | Hacker News Reader

Soundcloud is absolutely ubiquitous in the electronic music community. I was talking about this with a friend recently who is a programmer and a (relatively) well known composer, and she made the point that soundcloud actually represents a very important cultural document; there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it were to disappear. This is something I haven't heard a great deal about, and it's something that concerns me about other media platforms like Medium.

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See also the original MP3.com.

>it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it were to disappear. This is something I haven't heard a great deal about, and it's something that concerns me about other media platforms like Medium.

Of course, in all fairness (and modulo archiving by organizations like the Internet Archive), media and writing hosted on a personal web site is at least as likely to just disappear at some point. I agree with your basic point though. Any number of content sites have gone away in a manner where pretty much everything was lost.

Link Rot is a serious problem for the internet in general. From Gwern: http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs

>In a 2003 experiment, Fetterly et al. discovered that about one link out of every 200 disappeared each week from the Internet. McCown et al 2005 discovered that half of the URLs cited in D-Lib Magazine articles were no longer accessible 10 years after publication [the irony!], and other studies have shown link rot in academic literature to be even worse... Nelson and Allen... examined link rot in digital libraries and found that about 3% of the objects were no longer accessible after one year.

>Bruce Schneier remarks that one friend experienced 50% linkrot in one of his pages over less than 9 years (not that the situation was any better in 1998), and that his own blog posts link to news articles that go dead in days; Vitorio checks bookmarks from 1997, finding that hand-checking indicates a total link rot of 91% with only half of the dead available in sources like the Internet Archive; the Internet Archive itself has estimated the average lifespan of a Web page at 100 days. A Science study looked at articles in prestigious journals; they didn’t use many Internet links, but when they did, 2 years later ~13% were dead. The French company Linterweb studied external links on the French Wikipedia before setting up their cache of French external links, and found - back in 2008 - already 5% were dead. (The English Wikipedia has seen a 2010-2011 spike from a few thousand dead links to ~110,000 out of ~17.5m live links.) The dismal studies just go on and on and on (and on). Even in a highly stable, funded, curated environment, link rot happens anyway. For example, about 11% of Arab Spring-related tweets were gone within a year (even though Twitter is - currently - still around).

>My specific target date is 2070, 60 years from now... Even at the lowest estimate of 3% annual linkrot, few will survive to 2070. If each link has a 97% chance of surviving each year, then the chance a link will be alive in 2070 is... ≈0.16 (or to put it another way, an 84% chance any given link will die)... If we try to predict using a more reasonable estimate of 50% linkrot, then an average of 0 links will survive... It would be a good idea to simply assume that no link will survive.

See also physical books, letters, LPs, etc.'

Until relatively recently it wasn't expected that everything would stand the test of time.

Indeed. I, for one, am very grateful that most of my high school papers have since faded into the abyss ;-)

... or so I hope.

hs.archive.org/beta/

But people have been preserving physical books for hundreds, even thousands of years. Physical archives have been a thing for a long time and try to preserve everything from music to letters to government records. Historians often use letters and notes written by people hundreds of years ago, because people often saved that stuff.

Same with web content most of this content is likely still somewhere. While you and I have no access too it someone does, whether they'll share it with us is another thing all together.

That's not necessarily true. Some of it is preserved by the internet archive, but a lot falls through the cracks.

Maybe you mean it's still on someone's home computer. But hard drives fail over time. So do CDs, floppy disks, and flash drives. Over time all this stuff will be lost unless someone makes an effort to preserve it.

I'm referring mainly to the authors of these works likely having something lying on a hard drive sitting on a shelf or backed up on 'C: Back up 2012-06-21 4 of 7'. These are much like those piles of old letters found in Grandma's attic, mostly unintelligible (I certainly can't read the cursive scrawls) but still ultimately not 'lost' if someone is prepared to spend the time recovering them.

Oh Come on. You have never heard of the Library of Alexandria? The day this was gone, we lost one of the largest chunk of older books and parchments. We are talking about a huge collection that went up in flames.

The documents we still have now are just a tiny fraction of what existed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Library_of_...

That was over a thousand years ago. And it even proves my point that people in the past did try to preserve things.

This makes me think of the thousands of domain names that expire every day.

Most probably housed spam, but some probably housed at least some work of value.

IPFS proposes a distributed solution to link-rot and long-term storage solution

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNhFJjGcMPqpuYfxL62VVB9528NXqDNMFXiqN5...

When Grooveshark shut down, I lost some fantastic artists. There was a low-distraction music station for programmers [writhem radio] I would listen to, which was gaining some popularity and would have music guests DJ their new stuff.

When Grooveshark died, that set of original music spun by the DJs was essentially lost- which sucked because that was my go-to for "work music". I've only started to find the tracks again, some on soundcloud, YouTube, etc.

Worst part is, the guys responsible for the music station, which was definitely growing, hasn't done much to start again. It's understandable, when you think of how difficult it is to grow a brand from nothing.

Yeah, I found so much new music from grooveshark broadcasts.

I had the same experience when Grooveshark shut down. It's weird. I didn't realize just how awesome their service was. On the face of it, the technology wasn't particularly novel.

It was the content that kept me coming back. Mostly the radio shows like WritheM and Electro Chill.

The guy behind Writhem Radio is building his own service: http://wiki.writhem.com/display/radio/WritheM+Radio+Home

He's jumped from platform to platform until he just decided to do it himself.

This is certainly not a replacement for what you've lost, and I don't know if it's even the kind of music you're referring to... but you might be interested in: http://musicforprogramming.net/

Search for WritheM on Spotify. I was in the same boat until I got the playlist from their wiki and loaded it into Spotify.

I haven't looked recently, but I was only specifically interested in their "BitMix's", where they'd bring in an up and coming artist to mix an hour long set together.

If you have Spotify, try https://play.spotify.com/user/wayspurrchen/playlist/5b5SO6ic...

Writhem is still around. After Grooveshark, they moved to plug.dj, which then got shut down.

Now a couple of them are developing their own solution. I sorta stopped following them after a while, but you've reminded me to check their progress.

when people argue that "digital distribution is essentially free," then ask why Soundcloud is losing money, since distributing music is literally their only real cost of doing business.

we will continue to endure substantial cultural losses for so long as people continue to believe that content can & should be distributed and consumed for free.

ultimately some sort of micropayments + blockchain-like-cloudserving might replace Spotify, Soundcloud, and all other streaming services with a decentralized system in which listeners compensate artists directly.

until then the promise of disintermediation is just a fantasy. gatekeepers on the Internet control access to most content, particularly music.

If you used something like ipfs, syncthing, or generic torrents you could easily distribute anything you want at large scale at no cost, as long as people were interested in having it.

If you choose to centralize distribution on one web server that is your own choice, but the better phrase is "digital distribution is free if you want it to be".

I doubt we will see a return to pay-to-listen models in music. Reality has taken too big of a bite around the copyright extortion ring surrounding sine waves. The future of music is in patronage, merchandising, and live performances - which really, it has always been. Only extremely rare unicorn performers ever have the stars align to be able to monetize their music itself (in the past it was making it big with a label, today last decade it was topping itunes) while we are seeing the rise of music as a viable profession without extraordinary fame as long as you can provide a niche and be good at it, you can attract enough whale fans to support you regardless of if the tracks themselves are free - your real audience is those that not only want what you already made, but want you to continue to make.

Remember, as in all things IP, it is not the actual music file that is scarce or expensive to produce, it is the idea behind the music that took an artist hours or days to hand craft into a digital creation. The first iteration was the expensive one - all other ones are effectively free. It is essential that going forward we culturally recognize the distinction and move to seek sustainable business models around the former rather than the later, which we only invented as an imperfect way to translate ideas into the physical goods market back when they were less distinct than they are now (ie, costs of distribution did exist for paper books, so pigeonholing writing into markets via copyright was a reasonable train of thought when per-unit costs still existed and thus people could not effortlessly propagate the information on an individual basis).

  If you used something like ipfs, syncthing, or generic 
  torrents you could easily distribute anything you want at 
  large scale at no cost, as long as people were interested 
  in having it.

The problem there of course is the "as long as people were interested in having it" part. You can publish stuff for free on Freenet, but to a first approximation, nobody actually uses Freenet. If a torrent/magnet URI runs out of seeds then it dies forever, unless you have a way to contact former seeds and beg them to give you a copy, etc etc. Bandwidth costs money, and always will. Distributing files costs money, and always will.

The UX of peer-to-peer file sharing will always be more complex than "go to this WWW URL" if just to avoid the free-rider/spam problem.

This. Torrents are a terrible solution for the long tail of content.

This is false.

There are a collection of private trackers run by motivated volunteers and paid for with meager donations which have collections far superior to the best paid services or archives anywhere or at any time in history.

They do this by erecting and maintaining virtual economies where what you can get is limited by how much you've shared.

That's true, but private trackers have centralized costs and are often funded by donations or paid perks.

You don't really need 100% uptime trackers, DHT lets you do peer to peer file discovery. There are trackerless torrents, the only problem being how you get the torrents in the first place, but all that takes is a magnet URI from the original uploader / creator somewhere.

So, you're suggesting that SoundCloud seeds all the files instead of offering the download option. Perhaps this could work if "play-in-browser" vs "download" ratio is not too big.

And play in browser could be handled by something like torrent time, no?

There are implementations which approximate bittorrent written entirely in javascript. It's possible.

However, I really doubt infrastructure costs dominate SoundCloud's money problems. Significant, yes. But a major engineering overhaul developing an entirely different architecture for distribution which might either not work or alienate customers is probably not an appropriate move when in that situation.

Maybe it could be something to do as a clean shut-down to help things live on (an amazing thing when dying companies do things like this to end well) but not ... expected.

More like webtorrent[1]

I haven't actually kept up to date recently on the project, but the ML is super active. I believe they now have a working localforage backend to store torrents - the implementation already works flawlessly, and there is a hybrid client in the same node package family that can seed the same files to both webtorrent cleints and traditional UDP clients.

But it is extensionless and seamless and just uses webrtc data channels and websockets.

[1]:https://github.com/feross/webtorrent

Mathematically, as the download count for each file approaches 1.0 (or even lower), a privately-funded torrent seed server starts to look more and more like a traditional file host.

Disagree, torrents are a great solution for the most obscure stuff and very cheap. You just have to be the seed.

You just have to be the seed.

So, you have to be the person with the content. Not useful if you find a torrent with 0 seeds.

Soundcloud & co require the content provider to upload the content too. If you want to share the content, provide the seed. If you don't want to share the content, don't upload to soundcloud, don't provide the seed.

If the provider decides to shut down or no longer renews the licence for a piece of content then the content will disappear. Torrents on the other hand only require that at least one seeder has to actively seed the content. Soundcloud has to host the initial seeder anyway which means that they are in practice not worse for longevity than a central file server as long as soundcloud continues business.

> "but to a first approximation, nobody actually uses Freenet"

There's a very good reason for that. The people that know about Freenet and could promote it won't because of the issues it has with CP. Due to the distributed nature of the platform, and the high volume of CP that is supposedly hosted there (I've never used it, but that's what I've heard) you basically can't use Freenet without hosting CP.

Regardless of content, my biggest technical problem with Freenet is that it's a cache, not storage. You don't know when something is going to disappear. Link rot is even more unpredictable on Freenet than the open internet, and if you upload something, you don't know if it's going to need re-uploading.

> The problem there of course is the "as long as people were interested in having it" part.

The problem is that ISP are actively trying to constrain torrents with deep packet inspection or ongoing surveillance of other centralized bodies. Torrents would see a much more widespread use if such barriers were removed.

> The UX of peer-to-peer file sharing will always be more complex than "go to this WWW URL" if just to avoid the free-rider/spam problem.

For the end user, clicking on a torrent has zero UX issues. That's why torrents took off so easily in the first place, and why they still exist nowadays.

Pretty Lights seems to do well on their own.

Spotify used to use a peer-to-peer architecture: https://torrentfreak.com/spotify-a-massive-p2p-network-bless...

I'd be interested in knowing why they switched away from it.

The problem is that some people pay $10 a month for Spotify and others pay for services like Apple Music or Tidal.

The question is how this income is split between the services (which deservedly should be profitable) and the musicians.

Art has always had a shady connection to commerce in which the gatekeepers tend to profit more than the artists themselves.

Musicians? Artists? Don't you mean rights holders?

> since distributing music is literally their only real cost of doing business.

From the article it sounds like their main cost is paying a ton of people a lot of money.

Honestly, I don't think the solution even requires that much creativity or innovation.

Just in the past 3 or 4 months I've found half a dozen or more artists on Soundcloud, then headed over to Bandcamp or Amazon to buy and download their music. It would be awesome if I could buy it right there on Soundcloud. Every song could have a "Buy MP3" and "Buy Album" button right there by the Like, Share and other buttons.

Maybe it wouldn't solve all of their problems, but it's better than what they have now.

Or even work out some sort of revenue sharing / affiliation with Bandcamp/Amazon/iTunes

A lot of the music posted is a single here, a single there - often before official release. Sometimes it isn't weeks until that single (or larger album) is available for purchase.

Plus, for the electronic/DJ side of things, many of the tracks posted are remixes which aren't ever for sale (it seems). But from a scale standpoint, you would think that there might be some sort of revenue opportunity there.

I don't see how that changes anything.

Post the single with a "Available to buy on <some date>" notice. When it's officially released, take down the notice and put up "Buy now" buttons. And there's no reason they have to make every song available for sale or every song that's for sale available for streaming.

Even better, either 'Let me know when it's available' or 'Auto-buy and add to my collection when it's out'.

> many of the tracks posted are remixes which aren't ever for sale (it seems)

Isn't there a fair-use provision where you can remix/sample works as long as you don't sell the derivative work or something like that?

I think that's how a lot of the electronic music stuff works... people freely mix and remix stuff, give it away for free, and make their income doing live events and shows.

That's my sense... anyone know if I got these details right?

This functionality actually already exists. Artists can add a purchase link to the store of their choosing, and it will appear right next to the "Share" button.

You didn't correctly read what he said. He wants an option to directly buy mp3s (etc.) from SoundCloud directly with one click.

I wish I could buy everything from Bandcamp. I feel like I'm the only one who thinks FLAC is important. I may not be renewing Spotify, so I'm back to using my (very limited, where is my SD card Google?) local storage, therefore I'm going to be transcoding my collection to ~85 kilobit Opus which seems to be acceptable quality for listening to while out of the house.

This seems like incredibly abstract, spurious reasoning to say that something which as been around for many years will never be viable ever again.

The difference between free and essentially free does become significant when you consolidate all of those essentiallies in one place. I couldn't find how much they spend on the distribution infrastructure itself, but if their 250 million monthly users were to bring in an average of 2-3 cents per month, they would net a profit, even after all the legal and administrative expenses on top of the actual cost of distribution.

I'm kind of baffled that SoundCloud isn't already raking in profits. Presumably their stakeholders simply haven't pushed for profitability yet.

> since distributing music is literally their only real cost of doing business.

Salaries dominate many or most business costs.

I don't think we will ever overcome thousands of years of ingrained social sharing Norms, nor do I think we should. And if distribution is the problem then there are good existing solutions to the problem of bandwidth cost, e.g. torrents.

There might be a way to monetize sharing digital content using some micropayment system like you say. Though I think that will have to come about after the current players have left or been marginalized as they don't care so much about helping the artists make a living, instead wanting to maintain control so they can get the money.

HathiTrust.org, 13-14 million volumes has less than 20 FTEs and the vast majority of them are on new development projects. Put into maintenance it might take 2 FT sysadmins to keep going. Maybe double the cost for operations. Preservation and digital distribution is really really cheap. SoundCloud isn't losing $44 million on sysadmins, servers and network. It's all the other startup crap, sales, bizdev, legal that is doing them in.

> Soundcloud is absolutely ubiquitous in the electronic music community

You're not understating this. As a lifelong electronic music fan who has discovered some fantastic new remixes on SoundCloud over the years, the disappearance of SoundCloud would be a large cultural loss.

Even if one is not a fan of that sort of music, surely one could empathize.

EXAMPLE: https://soundcloud.com/moonchild/04-love-birds-vengeance-rem...

Could you recommend more music? That track made my day.

Interesting, the above track is classified as house but doesn't sound like any house music I've heard. The cut up samples sound similar to Madeon - you might also like him.

As a counter-point though, the role of SoundCloud in a diversified music commerce portfolio is not ideal as a catch-all archive. A professional elsewhere mentioned it is a useful tool for sharing and A/B/C listening tests with tracks set to private, but that's not the end use-case scenario. In principle, SoundCloud should not be the sole - or even main - distribution channel for a music act.

To put it another way, SoundCloud at its core is a free streaming site, and it also allows free downloads if enabled by the music act. There is no way I know of to set up SoundCloud for paid downloads or streams. Thus, using Bandcamp, Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, Tidal, Google, Deezr (etc) are wise to capture a modest revenue stream and listener data in ways SoundCloud simply doesn't support.

SoundCloud a lot more like Facebook than it is iTunes: socially important, great for sharing, a way for something to go viral - all important angles in modern business, sure. Is it such a monolith that I'm worried about its future? Not really; it'd be sad to watch it crumble (further, in some respects) but that doesn't seem likely for at least a couple more years. Lots can change.

A significant role of the SoundCloud that I'm most familiar with is as a distribution platform for mixes and performances by musicians for whom the _sale_ of their music is not a significant revenue source; these performers (and I'm talking about dance music, in all its varieties) almost exclusively make their living performing live, and release mixes mostly as a sort of marketing.

This obviously isn't the _only_ type of artist on SoundCloud, but they're a huge part of what makes SoundCloud culturally significant.

I'll just go to my crib-sheet response: SoundCloud isn't for "mixes" as in DJ sets. That's what MixCloud is for. That's why DJ mixes get kicked off SoundCloud routinely, and I won't fault them for it. MixCloud is for mixes, SoundCloud is for creators, in my opinion.

Mixes get kicked off of SoundCloud because they have a higher chance of one of the X songs/samples in them being picked up in the copyright detector net. The fact that it doesn't happen, or that it happens less, on MixCloud only goes to show that MixCloud isn't playing ball with copyright holders, or hasn't been approached to do so. They don't have some magical blanket license to let anyone, anywhere, for free, upload a mix with copyrighted material.

err, yes they do.

enlighten us. :)

Sure!

> Mixcloud streams the mixes and radio shows of its registered users and pays performance royalties by way of its agreements with licensing collectives around the world.

http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6221953/mixcloud-...

That's why MixCloud is for mixes and SoundCloud is for individual creators (or their PR machines who effectively control the rights to the material).

Actually quite the opposite - from what I read, MixCloud did get into arrangements with numerous labels/rights holders and therefore the risk of having a mix taken down is greatly reduced - and it's why MixCloud doesn't approve of people uploading individual tracks.

DJs are in the derivative work business, no matter how much they claim to be innovative or 'making something new!' by mixing tracks together, and while I'm an advocate for Copyright Reform, for now the way laws and commercial rules are written, DJs making and uploading mixes don't have a leg to stand on in the SoundCloud model.

Well then, color me surprised. If I can somehow, without paying at all, upload a two-hour mix to Mixcloud, with all copyrighted material, and have it not taken down.... that's great.

Yeah it is, and the player seems to work fine as well. For DJ stuff on PC I tend to use Traktor Pro and I can even upload the track list file (.NML I think) and it adds tags to the tracks. 90% of what I've used was purchased from Beatport, with the other minor amount being rips from CD purchases over the years.

It really does seem to be the proper platform for DJ mixes.

They use some track-recognition technology to generate tracklists and then remunerate copyright holders from the advertising income, I believe.

I think both these points agree: SoundCloud is the one place where you can find lots of music, especially electronica. Also, that's not a very healthy thing if you're interested in preserving history.

A lot of queer music, IME, is primarily distributed through Soundcloud - and more generally, there's a lot of people making music for reasons other than making money off it. Obviously, it's a poor business choice to keep a service running primarily for these people, but it's certainly a cultural centre for certain types of music none-the-less. I'll be sad to see it go.

Oh for sure, I think it's absolutely an equalizer. Some random kid in a small town can follow somebody famous like Chance the Rapper and then upload their own content. I'm very glad it exists and still keep mine up to date (and leave some historical tracks too, why not). Digital equipment is getting cheaper and better year by year, it's awesome.

As an Ableton Live and Propellerhead Figure user, I've always been amused by the "Upload directly to SoundCloud!" plug-ins / capabilities, because on the one hand "Yay, convenient!" and the other hand "Wait, I've still got to master these and bounce them to mp3s for other uses."

There's what "should" be, and then there's what is.

The simple truth of reality is that a lot of music is only available through soundcloud.

Smart? No. But it's how things really are.

We are living in the age of data impermanence. There is no mechanism to archive all of the content we are generating efficiently. Soundcloud represents but one of the many websites whose content will be lost forever to the digital dark ages.

Data has never been more permanent than it is now, but we're also generating much more data than ever.

What are you talking about? Stone, paper, and magnetic tape are more permanent than any hard drive or optical storage medium today.

Most things never made it to stone, paper and magnetic tape. We're recording more data now than ever before because it's so cheap to do so. Sure we lose some, but more information will be created and stored today than existed in the entire world not that long ago.

On the other hand, without them, much of the content wouldn't have been anywhere anyway. So the content is there because they are there. And if the go away, so might some of that content as well as future content which won't have a home.

> There is no mechanism to archive all of the content we are generating efficiently

While we can't archive all the content, the folk at the Internet Archives* are put heroic efforts in preserving the notable content. If Soundcloud doesn't make it, I hope they at least work with the Internet Archive to preserve the data.

1. https://archive.org/

Also, http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

When programming with immutability becomes ubiquitous, this problem will be solved. Immutable systems enable permanent & idealized caching at all layers. This is more of a research topic now but is where we are headed in 10 year timeframe i think.

Anyway, who cares. What about the last ten thousand years of content that nobody gives a shit about.

This is not a technological problem, it's a money problem.

>This is not a technological problem, it's a money problem.

It doesn't have to be, and in many cases it is not.

I'd like to offer a contrary perspective. I actually like the idea that some of our "stuff" ends up being ephemeral. By accident or design. I'm not really talking about burning the occasional Alexandrian Library, but the stuff that didn't seem important enough for anyone to really care about.

And if something I made only exists on Soundcloud, I either don't really care or I'm a bit stupid.

For most of our history nearly everything we thought, said and did was ephemeral. Not recorded and then gone. We've become pack-rats. We're at the beginning of technology civilization and already we have amassed so much that for any major genre of music there exists more content than a human being could consume in a lifetime.

And the vast majority of it is, at best, unremarkable.

I think we are wired for worrying about losing information because it used to be a disaster. We used to be terrible at recording information. We're not anymore. Oh boy are we not. We'll just make more. Or we'll repeat whatever process brought us there.

And if it can't be repeated you now have the rarest and most unique gift: a cultural experience that only exists in the memory of those present.

Imagine the storage space we as a civilization are going to use for storing worthless shit just in the next 100 years.

All of my weight behind it. SoundCloud was how Indie Music, the companion of the lonely programmer, took us all into the small bedroom corners of the struggling songwriter. The problem is obviously business model.

While not so straightforward, applying DJBooth.net's money-making viewpoint of non-intrusive angle ads or more creatively publishing short-span addictive games on the website Indie gamers can play while listening to Indie Music should start a path to a defining solution.

Soundcloud is so important for the programmer community that it is unthinkable that it will just disappear. All those background music I enjoy as I code, all those chip-tunes, livecoding musics etc. I hope they open some donation so that I can help.

Well, they do accept money -- they have a €5/month donation plan available here: https://soundcloud.com/pro

$44million is an awful lot of donations.

~6500000 monthly donations of EUR5 each.

I've never personally gotten into SoundCloud but I fill a similar void using Spotify. They have a constantly evolving set of background music playlist under "Browse" > "Genres & Moods" > "Focus".

> it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it were to disappear

And that is why everyone keeps backups of their work on their personal sites, right?

http://indiewebcamp.com/

Even if they do, people lose interest, stop paying hosting fees, or generally move on. I have a generally unmaintained personal site that was on Comcast Personal Web Pages--which were shut down last year. I do have backups (which many wouldn't have had) and I did rehost the site for now (as many also wouldn't have bothered doing).

I have a techno song on my computer that I downloaded at least 5 years ago, I think maybe 2009? I remember downloading the song when I was trying to pirate a copy of Fruity Loops Studio.

I recently came back upon it and couldn't find it on the internet, so I uploaded it to YouTube for posterity [0].

It's amazing that in something so massive like the internet, a single mp3 file can be almost lost forever. It really shows how important sites like archive.org are.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1phpSqAjgY

Are any of your friends paying for SoundCloud?

Yes, the majority of people I know who are 'professional' electronic musicians/DJs have a pro account.

I pay for it and I'm not a pro. I really only paid because I wanted the spotlight feature and I also felt that I used the site so much it would be prudent to throw them some funds. Like most I have been thoroughly disappointed with the lack of upgrades to the site but so much good content is there that it's hard to walk away from it.

I use sound cloud for finding new artists and I don't even know what I could pay for...

Their business model seems backwards. There are a lot more of us consumers than producers, so why not offer packages to us? That model does turn SC into a more traditional service, but because it has a more unique collection than the alternatives, it seems to have distinct value.

I want to pay them, but they didn't seem to have a music-listener-focused subscription level last time I looked. All of their paid features were designed for music producers, not listeners.

If I really like a track I hear on Soundcloud, I download it with youtube-dl.

Thanks, I had no idea this was possible.

All the files they host are just mp3 hosted in s3 with no encryption or authentication required.

Its 128kbps which is disappointing but its no different from how it would sound streaming on the site.

They can be better than 128kbps, it depends on the quality you upload. But that's the artists choice and obviously if you want the best quality you should buy it. Also if you don't care about the quality but really like the song you should buy it :)

Do you know under what conditions the stream is higher than 128kbps? I've only done a small amount of digging around on their APIs and have not found anything but that.

Your friend might want to look into Archive Team, then. See how well their current tools support a crawl of Soundcloud, that the documentation is up to date, plan out how a pre-closure crawl would go, and do a small test run to check that everything goes as it should.

> there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it were to disappear.

I don't know. We would obviously loose a fragment of history but if those tracks were so important culturally then they would have been distributed more widely. For instance, pressed on CD or vinyl or utilized in a movie or pirated in some way.

While I do like soundcloud I don't get what's so special about it. My hunch is that it is not so much the website but the fact that the internet is mainstream these days. There were websites where artists could share their music and have a profile before Soundcloud. Just to name a few: Besonic, mp3.com, myownmusic ...

I think you're taking a rather narrow view. soundcloud has become a storehouse not just for music, but for SOUND -- ambient environments, spoken word, audio diaries, etc. saying that anything of value is released on CD already would be like saying that the personal correspondence of Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, etc is worthless because we already have their published books.

In this way, I think it's also unique vs. other music sharing sites, in that people don't typically post their recording of a Chinese night market on their CDBaby or YouTube channel ...

Soundcloud:sound :: Flickr:photos

I was merely responding to GP who just mentioned music. And I think that most of what is released on soundcloud has no substance but that is fine.

> saying that anything of value is released on CD already would be like saying that the personal correspondence of Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, etc is worthless because we already have their published books.

No, not at all. What I meant to imply is that if something is of worth culturally then at least some people would put some effort in keeping it alive. Like I said, it needn't be a CD. A pirated rip that is spread over bit torrent would be just as good.

The bible is still around because people painstakingly copied it not because some single entity kept one copy alive for good.

As far as general sounds are concerned, there are other places like freesound.org or archive.org. Thus I don't think soundlcoud has a monopoly on sound.

I get your point, and I think it's a reasonable point of view. I guess my belief is a little different -- I feel like people are fairly bad judges of what something is worth culturally. Sure, we get the high points right, but the Internet is chock full of stories of undiscovered genius that nearly ended up in the trash bin. See for example http://www.messynessychic.com/2013/02/18/found-at-auction-th...

Soundcloud contains an incredible collection of sound clips. If you take the virtual bulldozer to it, then you're just increasing the chance that something of value doesn't get copied over to archive.org or freesound.org, because the original owner isn't willing or able to do so.

That's quite true. Trusting a company to stay alive for ever is a problematic strategy, though.

I guess the best we can do is to encourage people not to upload their stuff to soundcloud or any other for-profit website in the first place if marketing their stuff is not what they aim for.

It's generally unfortunate when major batches of content--whether MP3s or an online magazine--end up inaccessible to the future. And I find it a bit worrisome that a relatively small non-profit plays such an outsized role in archiving the Internet.

That said, a huge number of works that people create have always ended up in the trash, thrown out, or archived only in a few obscure places. What makes it a bit frustrating with digital is that it's relatively practical to save so much more--if perhaps not necessarily everything that's even been posted to a public site--but few really good mechanisms (or funding) to do so.

I am slightly optimistic that we will find better ways to archive important media in the future. However, there is also the danger that people will get too obsessed with the past and hold onto highly problematic issues that otherwise would just fade away. In other words, archiving stuff promotes all kinds of fundamentalism.

The trouble is that cultural importance is an aggregation of the preferences and behavior of millions of people, but hosting and backing up digital content requires deliberate action (and money) from individuals. In other words, stuff doesn't just automatically get hosted and backed up because a bunch of people enjoy the stuff.

I think we have to accept that life is messy and there won't be a perfect solution but many different tools that enable us to keep more and more stuff alive.

Peer2peer technology could be part of the solution. Spreading stuff on bit torrent doesn't require too much work from an individual.

I can speak directly to this. I recently started making electronic music of my own, and have been building a small community of fans and listeners. I don't want to give the wrong impression here (it's still friends and family and only a few strangers), but if SoundCloud goes down, it will basically destroy the progress I've made so far. I am a bit freaked out right now with this news. I really hope the torch gets passed and I don't have my community pulled out from underneath me.

>there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it were to disappear.

Would it be really? Most of it wasn't even heard by more than 200 people in the first place.

For something to be a "tremendous cultural loss" it should not just a cultural artifact, it should also have had cultural impact (mass appreciation or influence) to begin with.

Us dorks who have been hacking away on ways to 'decentralize' the net feel vindicated by this kind of thing.

So where's that decentralized SoundCloud?

This is why archive.org is so important.

agree 100% on EDM and soundcloud, OTOH there also are a LOT of musicians that deal with film scoring, it seems very used for demo / mockup purposes so that would be difficult for them as well if it closed

i think you are forgetting youtube

oops

Edit: Downvote all you want! Relying on a ubiqutous but unsustainable platform qualifies as oops.

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