SoundCloud launches Go: a subscription service
wired.com
wired.com
One downside of spotify is still discoverability, discover weekly doesn't introduce you to completely new kinds of music, it sticks to what you already like. You are on you own to introduce randomness into spotify's discovery algorithms.
I think Rdio had that right idea here. I was discovering much more new music when I was with Rdio than with Spotify. Spotify leans heavily towards what is popular.
- Follow good aggregator accounts. These repost new music regularly, which appears in one's timeline.
- Follow good regular accounts and play their "likes."
- Go to a song's "related tracks" screen and play those
I find excellent music on a regular basis this way.
The whole finding people to follow is what is the problem for me. It takes time finding accounts to follow. Friends dont have similar taste in music. Apple has the right idea in picking songs/artist you like before you get to start the service so you get something you like in your feed.
someone make an app to connect users to awesome playlists based on songs/genre/and more
"DiscoverTracks" is a service to help with part of the process (it looks at your likes and plays you related tracks based on the likes of friends and friends of friends I believe.) Doesn't solve the entire issue, but it's handy: https://www.discovertracks.com/
http://furia.com/newparticles/current.html
http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html
https://open.spotify.com/user/spotify/playlist/3rgsDhGHZxZ9s...
There's more, of course but I agree that many of the curated playlists lean towards popular music. I also follow /r/spotify on reddit and every now and then there's a good playlist on there.
I wonder if this is due to GEMA preventing them from offering Go for an acceptable price. Unfortunately many services (including YouTube) have this problem.
Can we please link to an article that doesn't have an egregious pop-up that blocks my screen every two paragraphs? This isn't an exclusive article or subject. Even the AP has a write-up: http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/soundcloud-exp...
It seems to me that Spotify is fighting an uphill battle saddled with an enormous valuation ($10b-ish I believe?); SoundCloud really wants to fight against them for whoever is left after Google & Apple? And, through all of this, Spotify & SoundCloud are paying a huge chunk of their mobile revenue directly to their competitors (Apple/Google stores). It doesn't sound like a space that I want to be in!
In other words, if you want to find something completely exclusive and never heard before, Soundcloud is the place to go. If that content is good quality or not, is another topic :)
I'm not so sure they are. By charging a higher price ($12.99 in app vs. $9.99 on web), I wonder if people really are paying the higher price just for convenience. I'm definitely not.
Tidal is currently doing the same with their pricing structure.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/8/8913105/spotify-apple-app-s...
I'm not holding my breath. Overtime SoundCloud releases something cool it's only available to people they invite and never seems to become available to everyone.
On top of that I just tried to signup for Go - not available in my country (UK) so I'm guessing, as usual, US only. Pretty sucky for a company based in Germany.
Dubset is doing a great job product wise. Really well done, unfortunately they coverage of licensing is really limited. They sort of jumped ahead and sold the platform before closing at least 50% of the deals (see for instance completely absence of the Merlin catalog).
Soundcloud has been always open, but struggled a lot in having a communication channel with their users. Seams getting better lately. Finger crossed!
It just kind of feels bitter, like SoundCloud built their honest business on original content (not mashups), and then really is pivoting to the major monied players and hand-waving off the rest. If it's true I can understand it business wise, I can. I just...well, don't particularly like it on a personal level.
If they'll manage to tune their recommendation and discovery system in the right direction, they will be an appealing platform for both indies and majors.
Indies can finally get a prime time exposure within the major content. If you sound like taylor swift, and your lyrics are about breaking up with every possible person on earth, I think you should deserve a spot in an automatic generated 'San Valentine's day Single' along with her.
Majors can have a far better social layer that as it is today no one else has been able to create (Apple Ping anyone?). Soundcloud can offer that millennial generation engagement in a pure music context that so far has been lacking everywhere else. And Majors love millennials :)
I'm not saying it's an easy position to be in, and also, I wasn't myself that faithful about all this would have played out for SoundCloud, but to be honest, is an exciting time for the music industry.
Licensing in music is one of the most fkup situation ever. Compared to that, the Tech patent battle is nothing. I do expect a constant roll out of new countries, but starting from US (which is the larger audience as today) does make sense to me.
I believe Apple music covered quite a lot of countries. I think at least some part of the service hit nearly all of them. I'm fine with launching in one country but at least give a timeline and for one of Europe's leading startups to launch a product US only is a bit of a kick in the teeth. I understand it but it just feels bad.
I agree with you PR has a long way to go on on the Soundcloud side. At least a rollout list could have been included
Copyright treaties: likely the leading cause for piracy.
The problem that SoundCloud is trying to solve has nowhere else being address. Yes, spotify and Apple Music are growing at a fast pace, but they don't necessarily play in the same landscape of SoundCloud.
Content is what differentiate SoundCloud from any of its competitors. If you want exclusive content, early gems or just unreleased reworks, soundcloud is the place to go. Solving this on the legal prospective is a huge pain. That is what Soundscloud has been doing for the last ever. Allowing you to enjoy Rihanna new song as well as 'Dj in his bedroom remix of Rihanna new song'. Try to find that on Spotify or Apple Music.
Now that they've close all the deals they needed in place, you'll see how fast the product will grow.
I know about it because I'm already signed up and have an account. SoundCloud has provided nothing in the way of notification, tools, or access to a similar platform. Sure, they're getting in better position with the RIAA/Merlin groups but that's not traditionally the value proposition with SoundCloud for listeners/creators. Maybe in time we'll learn more about why SoundCloud and Dubset both have competing systems for license revenue (apparently?!), and which one might be the better of the two.
On Soundcloud it takes about 8 seconds (well maybe 8 minutes if you have a slow connection). Also, with 175M users, vs the 30M of Apple, and over 7 years of exclusive content, I don't see Apple getting ahead too fast.
If SoundCloud does essentially 'legitimize' the remix and DJ set market and corners it, with revenue, I think the music industry will be pretty happy with that outcome. As a customer/content creator I do like competition, even if it means managing more outlets.
I'd love to find out more about user adoption of all this players in about 6 months. As you correctly point out the next big technical challenge is having a unified delivery system (without any additional cuts, so no aggregators pls).
It is excellent and I cannot recommend it enough, and it is available in Canada (unlike SoundCloud Go).
they have the best recommendation system in place (radios) and curated playlist (songza acquisition).
Unfortunately is a great example that is not always a matter of quality, but more a matter of trend and hype. I'm sure SoundCloud Go will be available in Canada soon.
If an artist is on Spotify, great, I'll listen to their songs a bunch and they'll make a little money off of me. If it's a group I haven't heard much of before and they're good, I'll probably get more into them and end up seeing them when they tour in my area.
If they put themselves exclusively behind another service (cough Kanye West cough Tidal), I'll be forced to find other ways to listen to the album, which will likely be less than profitable for the artist.
- Ad free music - Listen offline - More tracks from established creators
The first two are a given with any streaming service. My point was their catalog isn't enough to make me switch over.
As an artist, unless you're getting some kind of crazy deal to just be on one of the services, your best bet is to be on every one out there.
The issue I have is with the exclusivity deals that come up as part of them trying to compete with each other. It annoying for the customer, and ends up with less money for the artist as most people will inevitably just go torrent their work if it's not on the one streaming service they're using.
I assume SoundCloud will at some point post other blog content and so in a matter of days/weeks this general link will not go to the right spot.
I'm not seeing anything about this that's exclusive. It's just another service they can also have their music on but now they can make some money from it instead of nothing.
Here's hoping that the mention of an indie library hints towards a more interesting slant on what exactly subscribers get access to. For example, it would be cool if there was a way to monetise un-signed or newly-signed artists rather than mainstream Spotify territory.
In previous versions, you could select how much content to cache locally on the device, up to 100%. This meant if you listened to a song once, you could listen to it again offline.
From using their app now, and the website (non-mobile) it seems they have removed all caching completely.
Anyway, it's absolutely trivial to download the raw songs (MP3) from SoundCloud using Developer Tools in your favourite browser. It's not the highest quality, but since SoundCloud is 90% user contributed tracks, the original quality is often questionable anyway.
I see no added value from this service. Just download the songs as MP3 files and listen to them, offline and ad free!
I feel that they have taken a step back on their apps recently.
I've been dreaming up a way to use ipfs, ethereum, and other distributed tech to create a user-owned, cryptocurrency sustained soundcloud that would persist. for anyone interested, I've got a rough use case disagram here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4gkEhfnwSVBZDE5TGtSUFlmYWc...
I'd be a little surprised if Apple will allow them to do this. It's kind of like credit card companies requiring stores to charge the same price regardless of if you use the credit card (which has fees) instead of cash (which doesn't). Charging different prices is a negative signal for Apple's ecosystem ("Why can I get this cheaper if I have an Android phone? Maybe I want an Android phone instead next time....")
While I might argue that the negative signal shoooould exist, I'm surprised Apple doesn't have it in its terms that you can't do that if you want your app on the Apple App Store.
Also, could we please amend the title? It's not a flat $12.99 a month for everyone, and it doesn't even match the headline on the actual article.
But see, I was an iOS user paying $10/month for Spotify (because I paid on the web). Does Soundcloud offer this, or is it truly every iOS user has to pay through Apple for their subscription to Soundcloud Go, and thus have no choice but to pay more? It seems like it's the latter by the wording of their copy.
It seems good to me. One of the major features is offline listening to you can now listen 'on the go'. Am I missing something?
I used to be a paying customer, but I ditched the service after they allowed Universal to harass their users. That's a while ago though, and I haven't been paying much attention to Soundcloud since.
Have they shaped up or should I still avoid them?
I had my first take down a few months ago after using the service since it launched. I got 1 strike. A few weeks ago I had another take down but there was no 'strike' mention this time. I'm not sure if this was because Universal requested the first takedown and the second one was automatically caught by SoundCloud's system but it may be that when the second one occurred these deals were finalised so they've stopped the '3 strikes' nonsense.
I've been dreaming up a way to use ipfs, ethereum, and other distributed tech to create a user-owned, cryptocurrency sustained soundcloud that would persist.
for anyone interested, I've got a rough use case disagram here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4gkEhfnwSVBZDE5TGtSUFlmYWc...
Unfortunately, Soundcloud's method for organizing your content really breaks down under heavy use. I have over 1000 songs liked, and scrolling through the like list, dynamically fetching ten songs at a time, is a huge pain. Playlist creation and maintenance is even more cumbersome and limited than Spotify, which is saying something.
Worst of all, the usefulness of the stream, arguably Soundcloud's most unique and valuable listener-facing feature, really breaks down the longer you're using the service. Most heavy users I know end up following over a few hundred artists/labels/channels, accumulated over years of use, and the signal-to-noise ratio becomes unbearable. The sad thing is that the breakdown is purely a UX problem. The webapp is an infinite-scroll nightmare: forcing you to start at the top of the stream every time and fetch tracks 10 at a time. It doesn't clean up after itself, so after an hour of slowly chipping away through your feed, the browser gets so slow and unresponsive on my top-spec Macbook Pro that I often give up and don't bother trying to listen to new tracks that have been posted to my feed over 18 hours ago. Of course, as I now check Soundcloud less and less frequently, that means I am missing a ton of content.
On top of that, due to Soundcloud's reputation as solely a promotional tool within the artist community, you end up wading through a ton of 1 - 2 minute previews and other low-quality throwaways, and songs that you like can disappear from the service at any time, without notice. You cannot build a stable music library on top of the service. In fact, I used to have a process where I'd look for new songs on Soundcloud, and if I found something good, look it up on Spotify and save it within my Spotify collection, because I knew it wouldn't just disappear on me after a few months. Once Spotify upped their discovery game and the available EDM content grew, I removed Soundcloud from the process entirely.
Soundcloud used to be the best game in town for music discovery, especially EDM, but they let that slip over the last few years of struggling to monetize and Spotify's constant progression has now really chipped away that advantage. I've signed up for this GO service, but I highly doubt I'll keep it past the 30 day free trial. $10 a month for offline download and removing ads? As far as I can tell, my stream is the same mess as it was before, and they don't even distinguish between GO-exclusive and free tracks. I don't see anywhere where I can find GO-exclusive tracks within the app at all, actually.
New music discovery is hard and the big players (Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play) still haven't fully cracked it, at least for specific-niche enthusiasts like myself. When the Soundcloud stream is working well, it is the best interface I've used for finding new music I like, but the complete lack of focus and neglect on that front from this initiative means that I probably won't be coming back.
I would separate it in two categories.
1) the bad UX when having a big library 2) the 3rd party developer experience.
Starting from 2) I'd say SoundCloud has been fairly open in their early stage, and a lot more conservative later on. I'm not sure what's the direction they are going to take in the future. If I was running SoundCloud, I'd keep the API as a playground, not for production use, and I'd try to fix the major issue in my product instead of leaving room for someone else to crack that business.
Regarding 1) you are absolutely right. It boils down to 3 major areas of the product: classification, recommendation and search. Big players are working on that, but they are all implementing some sort of social driven collaborative filter (which is sad, if we think about how personal is the listening experience). Soundcloud should try to have a more hybrid approach introducing some more advance machine learning neural network technique to get rid of the 'cold start' effect and have a better targeting of the 'long tail' of their 125m tracks. Once they have the 'data' layer done, they should complement with a product UX experience, including curated playlists, radios, personal automatic generated playlist, and an overall better UX experience for the user-listener segment of their audience.
And, as you say, it's purely a UX problem.
Also the fact that they don't have limited permission tokens is insane. A lot of artists have a "free download for followers" policy, but the integrations that enforce that require 100% complete access to your account. As in, sign me up to follow anyone, post anything, etc. Just to verify that I'm following you.
For example, Soundcloud provides artists with a switch to allow/forbid third-party clients using their API to access the audio streams of the songs they post. This restriction, naturally, doesn't affect the official Soundcloud apps. While it makes my app a second-class citizen for accessing Soundcloud content, I understand the motivation and reasoning for the feature.
However, how does the Soundcloud API surface these restrictions? Through one of the dozens of flags it attaches to the json response it returns when you query for a track's metadata? Ha, no, all the various "track downloadable" and "streamable" flags are all set to true. Instead, it just returns a 404 when you try to fetch the data from the track URL...except when it started returning 401 instead (an admittedly more appropriate return code)...until it started returning 404 again.
So as a developer, my only avenue for not surfacing non-playable tracks within my client was to attempt to download each track, catch any 4xx responses, ASSUME the reason is due to permissions rather than any other potential causes for 4xx errors, and hide the content within the app.
I can understand Soundcloud's lack of enthusiasm for providing decent 3rd-party integrations, but if your external API is this much of a mess, I'd hate to see what you vend internally. The fact their permissions token provides zero granularity is not surprising to me at all.
And here I thought their Roshi library looked pretty good. Maybe the talent is all on the backend there.
It's 20% cheaper for a little less content and a not as good client. The lesser price alone makes the service worth it.
But I actually love the Soundcloud interface, apparently others don't. Very simple, and the ability to move forwards and backwards within a track is so much better than on Google/Youtube's player.
If SoundCloud can offer the major label catalogs as well as all the indy and artist content that they have now, I'd very likely switch over.
How does that make the service "worth it"?
It sounds like subpar crap in every way but price, and even at that it's nothing to write home about either (a measly $2.5 savings).
If one can afford $9/month, I don't see how $11.5 month are prohibiting for a better experience and more content.
The big thing for me is that Groove works on Xbox, which I have and listen to, otherwise I used to be a Tidal customer. But I know there is a Tidal UWP app coming, then I will switch back.
I still have my student discount with Spotify so I only pay $5+tax, but even when I lose the discount, $10 is not expensive to me. Especially for what I get.
The actual deals are quite complex, but under the pricing model that is most advantageous to the streaming service it basically comes down to the labels get about $6.50 a month per subscriber, and then a cut above that. So that's a hard floor, and with the cut and other costs it's hard to make a business on anything less than $10/month. And obviously you can't go above $10.
This is also why everyone charges more for Apple customers, if they gave 30% to Apple, there would be no revenue at all.
>That $3.99 will buy you only so much. Rdio says the service, called Rdio Select, will include two components: 1) Pandora-like streaming radio stations, without ads, and with the ability to skip ahead as often as you want, and 2) daily access to 25 songs of your choosing. Subscribers will be able to download the 25 songs and replace some or all (or none) of them each day, so long as the number doesn’t exceed 25.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/rdio-to-launch-cheaper-...
for once I welcome this disparity, is a good thing that the users knows the real cost of picking a platform/phone.
125m tracks vs 30m (of Spotify) + offline listening (same with Spotify) + no ads makes it a killer proposition!