If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture? | Hacker News Reader

If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture?

nytimes.com

283 pointsmcone207 comments

> Archive Team promises to back up SoundCloud amid worries of a shutdown

https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/17/15986952/archive-team-bac...

Consider donating to the Internet Archive.

> Archive Team plans large scale backing up of Soundcloud soon, but seriously, please donate money to the Archive. http://Archive.org/donate

https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/885665255266955264

Edit: my info is dated. Archive Team backed off. Smoke if you've got 'em.

That article is out of date, unfortunately. The Internet Archive and Archive Team have abandoned their backup efforts by SoundCloud's request.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6oi6fd/xpost_r...

Someone supposedly grabbed 900TB.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6n1pap/soundcl...

That's like $80k worth of data transfer. Also, how can you afford to store all of that unless you have gsuite?

Edit: I was mixed up. I was thinking of what it would cost SoundCloud to transfer all that music. I guess storing it would be much cheaper...

It's all in gsuite, I believe. For how long, I don't know. I can't imagine Google not taking notice.

...which means the next step is to get it out of gsuite and into more permanent archival storage.

$80k? Even at Hetzner, which is one of the more expensive hosters w.r.t. transfer, this costs less than $1100.

If you directly run traffic agreements with ISPs, and peer directly, you can get below half of that.

Where are you getting those moon prices? AWS? GCP? Never use their prices to get a fair estimate, AWS and GCP's prices are orders of magnitudes off from a fair price. Unless you're in Silicon Valley, running systems yourself at a traditional datacenter will always end up cheaper. (The issue behind that being that Amazon and Google have to pay far higher wages than you, and you can cut out a middleman)

I estimated using GCPs egress pricing since I was thinking if how much it would cost SoundCloud.

Still, it's quite impressive to be able to manage that much data.

I'd be very surprised if SoundCloud paid anything near the standard GCP pricing. It's much more likely that at their scale they pay the rates I mentioned.

That said, if they pay the rates you mentioned, then it's no wonder the company fell apart.

You can buy a dedicated server ($50-200/mo) hooked up to a 1Gbps line ($1-2k/mo). Assuming you fully saturate the link, 900TB will take 83 days to download. Of course you can also rent a bigger line, or more of them. And this doesn't consider storage costs. But it's certainly less than $80k.

Edit: I think you could even rent at a datacenter that peers with amazon, hook your server with the files up to a VPC via ipsec, then move files to s3 or glacier via a server in the VPC. Not sure if you could avoid the PUT costs, but you would avoid amazon bandwidth charges with the peering, I think (not 100% sure).

AWS Direct Connect out of AWS into the connected DC costs per GB according to https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/pricing/.. and it's quite the pretty penny!

Yes, but looks like transfer in is free (other than paying for the pipe). So in the scenario we are discussing, you could get 900tb into AWS fairly cheaply.

And how much do you need to spend on HDDs and how many do you need for 900TB of data?

WD 10TB Gold drives on newegg are $414 * 90 = 37260, now you want at least a 25% raid redundancy... $46575... now, you need how many U of space to store all those drives? It's not just something you can throw in a 1U host. Even if you can get 125 drives in servers 12 at a time, you still need at least a 3U * 10, 30U, so that's a pretty expensive hosting proposition, beyond the $50K for drives alone

This might be an application where the cost of a tape drive + many tape cartridges will be far less than the cost of HDDs. LTO-6 tapes are ~$4/TB and the drive is a few $K.

Tapes are also more reliable than HDDs for long-term archival storage.

A chassis design that holds the HD's vertically[1] would half the space; down to 12U instead of 30U, which is slightly easier to stomach. However, that's less than half of Soundcloud's reported 2.5 PB[2], though I have no idea how much of that 2.5 PB consists of downsampled copies which wouldn't need to be stored.

[1] https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/6048/SSG-6048R... [2] https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/soundcloud/

S3 transfer inbound is free, from anywhere. You'd use several dedicated servers consuming a queue of urls to warc package and push into S3, no vpc or IPSec tunnel required (random S3 key prefix ftw to prevent creating bucket hotspots).

Then you'd hope someone came along with a big chunk of AWS credits to use snowball to migrate your bucket(s) of data to the Internet Archive when they could safely accept said data.

Are we calling Google cloud gsuite now?

I estimated the cost really badly based on the go egress pricing.

Also, I was thinking that gsuite would be the cheapest option since it has "unlimited" storage.

G Suite is the new name for Google Apps. I believe the person they are referring to is storing everything in Google Drive.

He's been active on Reddit and IRC. He claims to be storing it in GSuite after ripping it with Google Compute Engine.

Since incoming traffic is free and outgoing traffic to other Google services is free, bandwidth costs would be minimal (just the size of the requests, not the responses).

Still has to pay for storage? GCS nearline?

GSuite has unlimited storage (until enough people do things like that I guess).

That's a bad request they made. IA should ignore it now.

That is so infuriating. If the site goes down permanently Soundcloud should swallow whatever costs this incur to pay for their failure of stewardship.

By honoring SC's request Archive Team has allowed the indie Library of Alexandria to burn...

That's what pisses me off about VC. Everything's a fucking product...

They should ransom the whole database of they're going away. It worked for certain software (Blender), it might for the music too.

Whoa, I've never heard of this, can you expand on what happened with blender?

Blender was developed by Neo Geo for internal use. When they were acquired, the developer tried to sell Blender as a commercial product. During bankruptcy proceedings, the Blender Foundation was founded and bought the source code to release as open source.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)

Unfortunately, I think the time to back up soundcloud was before anyone could have known we needed to backup soundcloud. A lot of my favorite artists that I discovered there have a third of their original catalog at best left up because of copyright claims, etc. Who decided free songs by hobbyist artists should be banned even from audibility simply because they contain a fraction of a sample of copyrighted materials?

The most egregious example to me was when Madlib released a remix of a Kanye West song that he had produced and it was taken down for copyright by UMG (a shareholder in Soundcloud). That's when I knew the sun had set on Soundcloud as the open creative community it had started as.

Indeed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12990346

In a similar vein, soundcloud was a hotspot for DJ mixes (not remixes) for many online hobby DJ communities, but copyright takedowns eventually stopped that as well.

Seems like his void has been filled by Mixcloud now.

This has been mixcloud since day one when soundcloud said they didnt want mixes.

What's the alternative? Seems like it would take considerable expenses to challenge the copyright claim if Soundcloud refused to take down the song and UMG sued.

*had to back off

There are still people interested in archiving in #soundbutt on EFNet but no plan as there is no place to store all the data. :(

We (rsync.net) contributed disk space to the original Archive Team effort - backing up geocities.

I continue to be interested in helping with these efforts but multiple petabytes of online storage is not trivial ...

Appreciate the contribution.

Any info on how to backup your liked songs and subscribed artists in a nice way? I've just saved the HTML of the page, so I can always retrieve them...

Youtube-dl it.

> How do you persuade people who have been using your services free to start paying $5 or $10 a month?

I've starting paying for stuff like music services, apps and newspapers just to try to keep stuff alive. I realized I would happily pay $500 for a phone but never wanted to pay for a $2 app.

There is so much sh*tty content out there I'm actually enjoying having ad free access to a lot of good stuff. I still dont really like paying but if I dont no one will. I think I'll start paying $5/mo for soundcloud too.

I wish Soundcloud would improve its UI. I really want to use Soundcloud when I'm on the go, but it's app is so shitty it's constantly crashing.

Doesn’t crash for me. I’m on iOS. It does, if I stop playing music, get killed pretty quickly by the OS. I just wish it remembered where it left off.

Maybe it's just me... but sometimes in the middle of a long mix, it'll start crashing.

But definitely agreed on the ability to hold state on the song you're currently listening to.

I've never had this issue, and I have to say as someone who listens to longer tracks(mixes on the order of 1hr+) I really enjoy their seeking functionality. It's much more thumbfriendly than any other app I've seen, but then again I haven't really looked at many other apps.

As a corollary to your point about paying money for a free service, I recently decided to help fund Riot/Matrix.org development on Patreon (currently $5 a month). Both are currently presented as a free service, and I recall them stating eventually they would have paid-for integrations and bonuses for corporate users, but predominantly most of the users are on the matrix.org instance using the free service. Needless to say though, it's been a damn good app / backend most of the time, and has made my life much better than before, when I would connect to a handful of various services to accomplish the same goal. I think the reason I didn't see contributing money to be as big of an issue, is that the work is 1) open sourced, which is almost as if I can have some part of ownership in it (don't take this too literally) and 2) I pay $5 for a vps to keep my personal website / email up. If I'm willing to part with $5 for email (which some days could be thought of as not helping my life), I might as well do it for another application / ecosystem I use everyday that does help me in many ways.

Overall I think that to an extent you can't just expect that most people will pay for something that would otherwise be free, or has been free for a long time. You end up gaining a bunch of users from the "lower pool" that will only be there as long as it's a free ride. But a certain class of users will pay for something if you ask for it, because it has made their life better in some way, and they want to ensure it continues in the future. There's an interesting parallel here to Craigslist / Kijiji, where most seasoned users will put a price on items they just want to get rid of. They do this because a very large portion of troublesome users who troll around for free stuff will outright ignore the posting. This actually makes it easier to get rid of things, because you don't have to deal with fielding fifty calls of people who might pick it up but then never show, or who just call you to ask if you have anything else for free that can go with it (and subsequently waste your time from giving unwanted items to people who will actually, you know, come get them from you).

It does make you wonder if the idea of a buffet-style, everything-is-free-forever ends up tainting the user pool, especially with regards to sites / applications that deal with art / multimedia. Sure, there's piracy out there, but companies like soundcloud don't really have the corporate backing behind them to scale infinitely for more users. Maybe from the outset they should have charged a $5 yearly membership or something. They may have had less users, but at least then they'd have something. Or perhaps I just don't understand their business model. Who knows?

Its a weird world where the biggest tech players are drowning in cash and the rest rely on goodwill, donations and volunteers. In-between there are VCs. :)

SoundCloud only takes card directly, not through PayPal/similar, which is good for them, but makes the decision harder for me since cancelling would be harder.

I use privacy.com for stuff like this. Allows you to generate new cards and pause/delete them any time.

D: Not affiliated with them.

People need to stop creating awesome services, for free. That is the issue. You set the precedent, and attract people because it's free, and this is the end result. No one wants to pay for it. Netflix isn't free, look how awesome it is. People will pay for SoundCloud once you lock it down, and put a subscription fee to use it.

But they won't. The people creating content on it did not have money and just wanted exposure. The consumers did not have money either.

I don't know if that's necessarily true. Youtube is to Netflix what Soundcloud is to Spotify. Netflix and Spotify are successful because they charge a small fee to allow users to consume high quality content. Youtube and Soundcloud are both free and allow users to consume community-generated content. This is a bit of a rhetorical question, but why is Youtube so successful when Soundcloud isn't?

YouTube seems successful because Google is paying for it. It's never made a profit.

No. It's successful as a profitable product otherwise you wouldn't have so many content creators get paid a lot of money for creating videos. It's ad revenue sustains itself, and those that create on it quite well.

You have any numbers to support that profitability claim? YouTube wasn't profitable when Google acquired them, and it wouldn't surprise me if they still were not profitable now. I'm sure they make substantial ad revenue, and it's entirely possible they are profitable. But running servers and content creators getting paid are not proof of that - Google has more than enough money to subsidize the endeavor.

Google also seemingly hasn't been trying very hard to make Youtube profitable. Spotify has a free tier, but you only get the "standard" 160 kpbs bitrate, as well as ads. To get the "extreme" 320 kbps bitrate you need to subscribe. Youtube could have easily restricted 720p and 1080p to paying customers, but didn't. I think now it's too late for Youtube to reverse their decision on that without some backlash.

Spotify also has other restrictions on the free tier, though (for example, you have to have a premium account to run Spotify on a Fire TV Stick (or any other Amazon device AFAICT)). Google/Alphabet might be able to get away with imposing similar restrictions on certain YouTube integrations without too much backlash.

Actual YouTube-based advertising revenue is notoriously incredibly low. Most creators will ultimately make more money from Amazon affiliate links or sponsorships than Adsense. In terms of actual numbers, I've often hears that the Social Blade estimates are well above what actually ends up with creators.

I could be wrong but as of last year, YouTube is still a loss leader for Google.

Youtube not only is not profitable as far as anyone knows, but has vastly reorganized its funding model for creators and most now make pennies on the dollar from what they did before.

Youtubers themselves were screaming about this recently, and almost always with any algo/payout change, and that is pre-Youtube red renegotiations.

Humans are a very visual-oriented animal would be my best guess. Videos vs. audio on the internet is a very different animal.

I've never really used SoundCloud because the ui is confusing and haphazard and it just doesn't feel like Spotify, which I pay for. Spotify makes sure and shows you the album art etc. My recollection of SoundCloud from when I tried it in the past was some sort of waveform you clicked on to listen and visualize the music.

Soundcloud is a very different platform to Spotify though. I wouldn't pay to subscribe to Soundcloud because not all of the artists I like would be on there.

Soundcloud was more of an independent artist platform, and I think Soundcloud might have been able to get artists to pay for some services like sponsored songs, pay to let users download their tracks, artist page perks.

But it's hard to know if that would have worked. Especially in retrospect.

I think it's probably as simple as two things:

(1) Video content engages a wider audience and commands more focus than audio content

(2) Video advertisements dropped into video content are more effective than audio advertisements.

But that's a guess with no empirical base.

Radio stations still exist and they survive primarily on audio advertisements. That's also without any of the internet fingerprinting which can be used to cater advertisements and potentially make Soundcloud's advertisements more lucrative.

That sounds like the perfect setup for a peer-to-peer system like the original file sharing programs. Bring back Napster / LimeWire etc. for user-generated content!

People have money, especially $5-10 a month, I don't want to hear it. If you want to get your music out there, or you want to consume others music. Bands used to create demo tapes, and distribute them for FREE. I'm sure that costs more than $5 a month.

You can scrape together one hour of minimum wage. This is how the economy works. I'm tired of the freeloader generation ever since Napster. People need money to live, expecting everything free is nonsense.

What's a paid service that facilitates access to unknown artists? How could that even work? Netflix isn't remotely like something of that sort.

The creation of new music has always involved exposing penniless people to it and no current music subscription service comes remotely close to that.

One alternative might be integrating peer-to-peer with a music discovery system.

Edit: craigslist and meetup are closest thing to "mass culture websites" and they each get a small minority of users to pay for their operations.

> What's a paid service that facilitates access to unknown artists?

Other people have been mentioning Bandcamp. Seems like signing up as an artist is free, and they market themselves as a way to discover and support new music. Am I missing something, or isn't that the kind of service you're talking about?

Not the denigrate Bandcamp but I think the thing Soundcloud has that a Bandcamp-like-system doesn't have is the ability to create a "music scene" - sure, Bandcamp is helpful for artists, allowing them to sell stuff to people who are already familiar with them. The key of soundcloud afaik is being able to share a simple link to anything you've done.

That's the line of thinking that began destroying Soundcloud's image. I used to be a heavy user and stopped when they started playing ads because I knew a subscription model must be in the works. Now they've completely backpedaled and it's usable again.

SoundCloud could easily exist just by asking artists that want to host more than 5 songs a fee, or for some extra features on their profile. Just small stuff. If they would be dealing just with sound instead of sound-that-is-music.

Serving a service like SoundCloud isn't technically challenging or expensive. It's dealing with all of the legal stuff of people uploading music that's under license, people uploading songs that have uncleared samples in them and all that bullshit.

It's proabably ran by 5 engineers working on the service itself, 25 maintaining the DMCA platform and 270 lawyers.

That's what's Bandcamp did. And they're profitable.

They did that. It apparently wasn't enough. When I signed up a few years ago, I did a thing where I wrote and recorded a song a day for a month. A few days in, I had to start handing Soundcloud money for a Pro account so I could upload more songs. And when I forgot to renew in 2015, my stuff temporarily disappeared.

IDK what they do nowadays. I only release a new song every couple of months.

(shameless plug: soundcloud.com/bphogan)

> SoundCloud could easily exist just by asking artists that want to host more than 5 songs a fee.

They do that. If you want to hsot mroe than a few hours of music and additional stats you need to pay $10 month. I happily do that and it's a perfectly reasonable business model in my opinion. The problems, as you explained, started when Soundcloud tried to become a general and major label streaming service. A rather bad one compared to Spotify & Co. It's downright silly to go after such a crowded market when you have rather little to offer.

My guess is that there are more than enough artists, labels and users who actually want to pay and use the service to deliver music to their audience and that this was a profitable niche Soundcloud occupied, but the chase for growth made them lose focus.

No! I don't create for money, I create for the sake of creation! It is a sacred act to me! No sarcasm, no joke. I acquire money in order to create more effectively, I don't create in order to gather the most money of us all.

This attitude that we must all live like neat little economic machines is seriously depressing.

Well to be fair to your take on things, you probably create out of your own pocket and with passion. Soundcloud chose to be a business when they took millions in investor funding on board.

As is their right, and mine. If their way does not work out, then they are welcome to join me for a discussion on post-corporate philosophy. BYOB.

If you do have a platform for such discussion let me know, I would love to talk a bit more about the idea. It has been a burning concept in my mind.

Gah, now I wish I did. I've been meaning to start blogging for years. I had a lot of fun in a drink-n-chat site a while ago, but the environment isn't quite right for long conversations. An opportunity, I suppose...

YouTube is free. Seems like SoundCloud was trying to be the audio version of YouTube.

YouTube is the audio version of YouTube, people listen to a TON of music on there. SoundCloud is minuscule in comparison.

YouTube is also making zero money, so if that is what they were trying to be, they've succeeded. Difference is, they don't have Google backing them.

This already happened (probably many times over). I had success with the original mp3.com 17 years ago. They made certain business decisions that got major labels angry and various details not important, they shut down.

What matters is that tons of stuff disappeared. I learned that I can't trust these types of platforms because they are for-profit and may screw us all over or make stupid decisions. I also can't trust non-profit options if they aren't really stable. I trust Wikimedia to stick around, and archive.org and some others (although everyone should donate to keep them strong!), but other, I dunno.

Instead of fully embracing SoundCloud, I've basically stayed distrusting and my creative publishing actually suffered a lot (although my concerns are part of what led me into understanding free culture, free software, etc. and why I'm aware of Hacker News now etc)

Mp3.com closedown was a disaster. So much valuable music was there.

Like the few on here who remember how great mp3.com was, I too lament the loss of its huge array of excellent indy music. Hopefully the archive will be fully restored some day[0,1,2]. Digital antiquities indeed.

Take warning: download and archive a copy of every digital asset you care about. I highly recommend the excellent utility youtube-dl[3]. I rely on it daily for copying obscure youtube videos that could disappear at any moment. Fool me twice...

[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/12/03/mp3_com_archive_is_...

[1] https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/04/04/19/2318226/mp...

[2] https://archive.org/post/1004359/mp3com-archive

[3] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

This is why I fully expect the digital dark age to become reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age

People™ should learn about how to properly self-host their stuff, apply adequate licenses that allow for remixing, etc. If "this music culture you're a part of" really matters to you, and grows larger than the initial toe-dipping, becoming self-sufficient should be one of the main objectives of your craft. Being part of a culture should also imply caring for its heritage, should it not?

Sure, this subculture would have probably never existed without a platform to grow on. But the going-away part is actually a large scale problem, not only regarding SoundCloud. This applies to other ~corporation~ startup backed platforms as well.

I am not a professional music producer, but I do produce music as a hobby. I'm also a sysadmin, so I know full well how to self-host everything myself. But it's just such a pain it's not worth it for me. So much easier to just upload it to Soundcloud and let them worry about serving it and maintaining it.

Now, if a sysadmin like myself won't bother, I really doubt your average musician with relatively weak or non-existant sysadmin skills is going to bother self-hosting. Professional musicians might hire someone to do it for them, but most music producers aren't professional.

That said, I stopped uploading my music to Soundcloud ever since they dropped groups. That was the main way I shared my music and discovered new music myself. Soundcloud is not mostly just a static music storage service for me now, and without an easy way to discover new music, it's not even worth the bother for me to upload anything there anymore.

I'm now hunting around for a good Soundcloud replacement.

I made a thing to share an s3 bucket. The files in the dir get listed with temporary download links and I use HTML <audio> tags to get the player to work.

The current version makes you authenticate with a username and password or google login as I made this to share some songs with someone who wanted to license them from me.

https://github.com/napcs/s3server

I am hacking on a branch this week that will support publicly sharing a directory. If anyone wants to hack on this, I'd love it. It's pretty minimal right now but it's open source and it works, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How is it a "such a pain" to host a bunch of static files with some HTML?

You could probably even do it with Jekyll and S3 (or similar) if you really wanted.

Self-hosting has zero value without discovery.

Discovery happens through unique marketing (v. v. hard) or when fans and artists collect into scenes.

So for most artists, putting up a custom server to distribute their creative work is a waste of time unless they're involved in a network of people who cross-promote their output, online and by word of mouth.

This usually works best informally when it's motivated by genuine enthusiasm and not pushy marketing narcissism and aggression.

SoundCloud failed to understand this, and apparently became a scene of sorts, in a limited way, for some genres only, by accident.

It could have assured its future by doing a lot more to build and support scenes arounds artists and genres.

Instead it became a nerd's idea of the ideal music hosting platform - too much file-led design, not enough social intelligence.

Funny thing is the cost of self hosting and self distribution is probably more than paying $5/mo to sound cloud

Glad I've had a script running for the last 6 months that has been polling + backing up my soundcloud favorites. This is stuff that, if SoundCloud went under, I would never be able to find nor listen to again. It really is depressing to think how much music culture disappears with SoundCloud.

I'm doing the same with my YouTube stuff, but not because I think it's going anywhere anytime soon.

Is that or s similar script somewhere public? I'd like to do the same.

Yea, I would love that script. Online services I've used to download my likes kinda suck.

https://github.com/flyingrub/scdl

I used this one to download all of my soundcloud likes and some tracks/likes of other users, was pretty fast/painless

Check out YouTube-DL. It supports SoundCloud, and I believe you can point it to playlist URLs for batch downloading.

Yeap. Just pass --batch-file <file with urls>

Also, you can give it a SoundCloud user or a playlist, and it'll download it all. And if you use --download-archive, you can re-run it later and it'll only download the new songs.

I have a cron with no scripting, just the youtube-dl command, that pulls down new videos from an YouTube channel every week. It's awesome.

Heres my script https://github.com/jbhamilton/Soundcloud-Downloader

"Glad I've had a script running for the last 6 months that has been polling + backing up my soundcloud favorites."

Can you share who your soundcloud favorites are ?

Seriously, when the shit hits the fan, it is data troves like this that will re-ignite culture and humanity. So many things from my youth that we highly prevalent are totally gone to the sands of time. Remembering via downloading is to internalize your own memories. Vendor your own ephemeral existence.

That's exactly it. With the internet, you have to take your memories into your own hands. Everything is ephemeral. Even if you think you're paying for it, it can disappear.

The demoscene (and by some extension the classic gaming scene) has faced this from time-to-time. What's interesting is how many large volunteer efforts there are to save large chunks of the visual and audio output of that scene. There are places you can go and get literally hundreds of thousands of pieces of music.

Every one in a while a site will need to go down and somebody else seems to step in, mirror the content and start their own thing. Outside of the scene, there are sites with literally thousands of post-copyright mp3s from certain genres (classic jazz, 45s, etc.) so there's definitely a kind of appetite on the part of preservationists to catalog music.

There's almost no commercial side to the demoscene though, so I wonder if the commercial forces in the rest of the music world seem to prevent this kind of community building.

> I wonder if the commercial forces in the rest of the music world seem to prevent this kind of community building.

SoundCloud has (for whatever reason) prohibited archivists like archive.org and ArchiveTeam from backing it up. https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/888093838107189249

Jason Scott Wikipedia article, if you don't know who he is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Scott

That's a bit easier with a medium where in which small file sizes are considered part of the art form and most of the content is ~64KB

This really shows the impact of technology on culture in modern times, you can see different cultures and countries adopting different practices due to their technology (which in retrospect is how technology in history has always worked) such as Wechat in China and its payment practices to how Soundcloud influenced so much of modern day unsigned-label musicians and the Soundcloud Rap/Trap community.

Also would not want to see Soundcloud disappear, I had a brief EDM and trap phase with Soundcloud filled with vivid memories

Maybe Bandcamp should buy them out. Seems like there's a lot they could gain by having a major music platform like Soundcloud integrated into their marketplace.

Why buy a failing company when most of their userbase will organically come to you when it shuts down?

seamless acquisition, search engine rankings, targeted users... Give existing artists say 90-days post-aquisition to convert to paid accounts, etc.

There's plenty of reason... now said transition could be more costly than the buyout though.

Sounds like an awesome use case for something like Filecoin [0] (IPFS). Move all the tracks to decentralised storage, stream with something like webtorrent [1] and research some kind of service fees via filecoin's token...

[0] https://filecoin.io/

[1] https://webtorrent.io/

Yeah that would be super cool. But what about the timed commenting + discovery features of SoundCloud?

That's the difficult part. :P maybe current comments could be stored in json files and loaded with the song. New comments could update the json on IPFS:

https://flyingzumwalt.github.io/ipfs-tutorials/curriculum/fi...

It's possible but far from efficient. Those are the pain points where decentralisation doesn't really cut it.

Haha yeah... I kind of like the world writable comments file. Kind of like the original internet guestbooks with just a Name and Comments field.

I'm sure there's some blockchain based commenting thing out there... but the flat file feels so quaint. I might take a stab at this as a way to play around with IPFS.

> I'm sure there's some blockchain based commenting thing out there...

Now that you name it, I totally forgot that Steem has a pretty good commenting system, and probably they're storing the entries on-chain. So maybe the answer is adding Graphene to the mix (Filecoin + Webtorrent + Graphene 2.0 as Blockchain-based distributed DB):

https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/steem-developer-updat...

Take a look at LolaShare [0]. It's a decentralized audio publishing and streaming application which uses webtorrent.

[0] https://github.com/LolaShare/LolaShare

Didn't know about this! Really cool

Looks very cool, but no source updates in 9 months.

We've been actively working on pushing out a new version since we heard the news about SoundCloud. In the past weeks, there has been a lot of activity and discussion over the SSB network.

Expect an announcement posted in the next day or two.

It might just be me, but as I don't think so: 'Lola' sounds super trashy and kinky to me, if I saw a link to lolashare.tld I would assume either erotica or spam. Consider searching for a more audioey name!

Seriously. When I hear "Lola" I think of either the popular song about a crossdresser, or "loli" which is anime codeword for a specific type of pornography. I don't have any good associations with the name and absolutely would not feel comfortable talking to my friends about "lolashare.com".

Lola is a popular female name in Europe and it's etymology originates from the Virgin Mary. We chose it because it's the name of our very awesome dog ( hence the dog wearing headphones logo )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lola_(given_name)

Yes, that's probably why it gives bad associations.

Soundcloud has some of the best damn music. It'd be awful if it disappeared. I'm surprised nobody, including Soundcloud themselves, have developed tools to remix, sample, dj, etc. the music library on Soundcloud. They have tons of great stuff to sample/remix etc.

Would that be legal? What is the music on Soundcloud licensed under?

I'm not terribly surprised. The rights management around that is incredibly expensive and very complex. I also have vague memories of some startup circa 2011/2012 that did live DJing that ended up dying pretty quickly

It was probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turntable.fm

There was turntable.fm. Now there's https://www.jqbx.fm which is sort of doing live DJing but with Spotify

Ah thank you. That's what I was thinking of

It's easy. Artists define a license for each track which explains whether it can be remixed.

That's not actually true within the US. Each song sample needs to be licensed individually. This becomes more complex when a song you want to remix contains samples of other songs. In general, this has become prohibitively expensive, which is why most modern songs only have a few "samples". Any company that does remixing as suggested above would have to manage the licensing in some way or pass on the risk to the users while still risking lawsuits from the music industry.

After grooveshark died I moved to soundcloud. There will certainly be a bunch of indie / nieche artists floating around. The culture will still exist, but it'll be fun to watch the vacuum get filled by some other service

The thing that scares me is how much music will just be lost for good.

Yea how many people delete source content after they've uploaded. I wouldn't be surprised a lot of people do that. General population doesn't think it's worth to simply buy more space either online or on disk. It can be expensive to do so even for people like me who realize that disk on the whole is cheap compared to losing the data.

That isn't the point. It is published in spot. The amount of breakage between SC going down and that art being uploaded to a new site ... at most I would think 10% or less would make the transition.

Maybe this is a chance for some decentralized alternative to pop up?

This is one of the reasons why are decentralised apps so appealing.

I think most of the artists would be able host it themselfs the problem is the interface that allows you to search it all and connect it.

HN brains should think about this.

Former Ferment built on top of Scuttlebutt can be considered - https://github.com/LolaShare/LolaShare

This is awesome, thank you for sharing this.

The main issues with sc:

1. Different audio levels between songs, there must be some "automastering" function (or, simply listen to mixes, like i prefer to do) 2. The awful "comment at time" system which hasn't been fixed for years 3. The endless spam of shitty songs from people you're following, I can barely follow anyone now a days since the general quality of the stuff they repost isn't very good 4. The lack of premium incentive, also the price (which is too low). I have premium since I'm a producer, but there's not incentive for the average user to pay any money to either sc or the producers

Possible solution: 1. Implement some sort of "for a fee, automaster the audiolevels so they're somwhat the same within the genre". This shouldn't be hard at all from a technical standpoint, spotify is doing it, why not sc? Alternatively have a crew of "quality ensurers" which listen to songs and deem if they get the "sc mark of approval" or something like that 2. Implement direct donations to the users, direct payment to buy songs, where a small fee goes to sc themselves (become the beatport for the unsigned, basically)

> Implement direct donations to the users, direct payment to buy songs, where a small fee goes to sc themselves

I can't believe this doesn't already happen, even some sort of flatter/tip function.

How would you fix the "comment at time" feature?

And about that "automastering" thing, it would be sufficient for them to implement ReplayGain loudness leveling. Of course it's a solved problem.

http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=ReplayGain

How do you persuade people who have been using your services free to start paying $5 or $10 a month?

    User: OMG this service is sooooo important!
    Company: would you pay one Starbucks per month for it?
    User: Nah

And there you have it in a nutshell. For all the handwringing, noone actually is willing to put their money where their mouth, ermmm, ears are.

It is a difference to pay some single amount of money vs. paying some recurring sum.

So what?

Users of this service can afford laptops, phones + bandwidth, a lifestyle necessitating streaming music etc - but its so valuable to them that they can't afford the equivalent of one latte per month? I call shenanigans.

Our current Internet lifestyle is unsustainable and will crash sooner rather than later. I say this with no sarcasm: if I had to pay for everything I used online, I would be broke. $5 to HN, $5 to Reddit, $5 to ArsTechnica, $5 for Gmail, $5 for Google Docs, $5 for Google Search, $5 to Github, $5 to Medium, $5 to Wordpress, $5 to StackOverflow, $5 to CNN, $5 to NYT, $5 to Wikipedia, $5 to Weather Channel, $5 to each site I click on from HN or Reddit or Wikipedia, we could be talking hundreds of dollars per month.

You could make your argument about anything. "If Reddit is so important to you, why can't you pay them money?" "If HN is so important to you, why can't you pay them money?" "If Google is so important to you, why can't you pay them money?" You'd run out of money quicker than you'd run out of websites to pay, or you'd seriously scale back what websites you visit.

It's coming crashing down on us that either you have to pay for something or that something goes away. And we can't pay for everything.

Maybe the next Rails or Node can focus on making the cost of hosting infrastructure so inconsequential that sites don't have to make that choice.

> Maybe the next Rails or Node can focus on making the cost of hosting infrastructure so inconsequential that sites don't have to make that choice.

Isn't the much larger cost driver the salaries of the employees than the infrastructure cost (serious question!)?

Depends on what you are hosting.

A text-based site like reddit is almost nothing to host. All of the data is stored as strings, and only references media hosted elsewhere.

HQ Video and Audio files are still expensive to host. Not even just hosting, but bandwidth can be killer. Look at S3 bandwidth costs.

Costs of bandwidth vary a lot worldwide:

> https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a... [2014]

> https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world... [2016]

An alternative direction would be for everything to be decentralized (whether federated or peer-to-peer). That way, if reddit/HN/Google/etc. (or perhaps some new equivalents) are important to you, you can set aside some resources on your computer to let them run.

I would be very careful with this kind of statement: Even if it were technically feasible, this would quasi require trusted computing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing), since the company can never be sure that you won't influence some computations. This is something that probably every hacker should oppose.

By "run", I more meant "distribute data" (probably with digital signatures to detect tampering, and probably also with encryption).

Even in the sense of "running" sites in a computational sense, projects like Ethereum and BOINC seem to suggest the feasability of such a distributed model without necessarily requiring TC. If the computation itself is actually performed in parallel by different nodes, then outlier nodes (e.g. ones trying to tamper with computation) can be ignored.

Of course, there's the possibility of an attack where the attacker has control over the majority of the nodes running that particular computation. Hopefully such a system could grow to the point where such an attack is infeasible.

Even with that aside, though, most websites nowadays already run to some extent on untrusted hardware (thanks to JavaScript), thus warranting measures to handle untrustworthy IPC.

All in all, it's a hard problem, but not one that's impossible to solve. We already have quite a few of the tools on hand.

> Even with that aside, though, most websites nowadays already run to some extent on untrusted hardware (thanks to JavaScript), thus warranting measures to handle untrustworthy IPC.

From a security perspective it is a very bad idea to rely on untrusted data (i.e. that only passed "client validation", but is not validated again on the server). In other words: If the client tampers with some of its data, only it itself should be affected from any problems that this causes.

Agreed, hence the clause "thus warranting measures to handle untrustworthy IPC".

So the question here would be one of replacing server-side verification of untrusted data with peer-to-peer distributed verification of untrusted data.

> but its so valuable to them that they can't afford the equivalent of one latte per month?

Ignoring the fact that the prices in the student café in Germany where I get my coffee specialties are much cheaper - which is why I find this comparison unsuitable: All these equivalents of one latte per month sum up when concerning multiple services that think similarly. And these individual "one lattes" sum up over many years when they are recurring.

Same thing that happened to mp3.com, probably.

This. People forget so quickly...

MP3.com anyone? Hell, I had an "album" on MP3.com and even sold three copies.

The other day Standing in the Sun's album showed up on Spotify out of nowhere. That was the music of my teenage years and I had fully lost track of it. So many other artists I still miss.

I'm hoping that labels and musicians wise up and move to a coop model.

I'm liking what I'm seeing so far on http://resonate.is and am hopeful that those lessons will finally be learned.

Their "9 plays to own" model with higher compensation for repeats sounds really interesting, although I wonder if the base level of .2 cents is still high enough that spamming enough can earn some money. On Soundcloud spamming is a major issue even without directly earning any money from it so I imagine this would just make it worse.

While I don't know for sure, I suspect that on Soundcloud I listen to part of multiple thousands of songs a month that I dislike and don't want to support. Some of these I don't want to spend money on but for a sufficiently low to me price I wouldn't care and some of which I actively want to not pay any amount for.

IMO first play should be free until you indicate that you like the song. There should also be a way to note that you have listened and don't want to play the song again (if there isn't... hopefully they have that already). However that would be easily defeated by the same artist posting the same or very similar content multiple times (and a block artist option wouldn't avoid the same artist posting under multiple accounts, which happens on Soundcloud). I think any manditory payment on the first listen is going to restrict the type of content that can appear on that platform and make it not the same kind of place as Soundcloud.

This is a problem in other content areas as well where money goes to those with the most appealing advertising almost independent of content quality. Well, it can be an major issue with anything people pay money for, but it is particularly unnecessary for easily copied content.

Also, they should really make sure that you can get a FLAC when you have fully paid not just a mp3. I would not use the service for this reason alone (unless they do actually do that and are just bad at describing it). The Bandcamp model works better for me, I just wish they had better discovery options.

I wish Soundcloud had a way for listeners to pay particular artists, first covering the Soundcloud fees and then the vast majority of the rest going to the artist.

Haven't heard of this yet, really cool. Seems like a good team too. For sure going to keep my eye on this.

SC wasn't the first audio sharing website and certainly won't be the last.

IMO it has become the IMGUR for audio, and users won't pay for uploading images to IMGUR or videos to Youtube.

Maybe SC pretends to be a storage/bandwidth reseller, but in that case it's outrageous that it is charging $7 / month for 6 hours of audio which (at the most) are 3.6 GB in uncompressed CD quality audio (44.1Khz/16bit). You could argue about bandwidth costs, infrastructure, etc, but Vimeo is doing great and its smallest plan (cheaper than SC) allows you to upload 5GB per WEEK.

they still stream in 128kbps, even for premium customers. It's insane.

Agreed, this is my biggest issue with soundcloud is sub par compression that they use which complete distorts the highs. I feel it maybe better if soundcloud does go so thats it replacement will support better codecs.

afaik Vimeo is still running on VC cash and will in the same position. Start mirroring vimeo.

Any source on that?

Call me cynical, but does "SoundCloud's Musical Culture" actually pertain to a significant portion of audio over the internet?

Over the years, I've used Pandora, SomaFM (still do), Spotify and others as well as some iTunes and my own large collection.

What is actually lost with "SoundCloud's Musical Culture" and what percentage of the internet audio listeners does it impact?

Its actually more on the creative side. SoundCloud has such a low barrier to posting and acts more as a sort of Twitter or YouTube than a playlist maker. It allows culture to form around the community of SoundCloud, not just fans that you advertise directly.

If that was their key differentiator, why did they need so many engineers especially in super expensive SF?

I think that was their biggest mistake. They grew too fast and took too much money before they had any clear way to make money. If it was ran as a sustainable business, maybe it would be around for the next 5 years.

Probably around 6 or 7 years ago (I think?) when I was in high school, I would go on SoundCloud all the time. I downloaded the free trial version of FL Studio and made electronic music in my basement that I uploaded to SoundCloud. Because it was a trial, you could do everything but save, so I had to make the entire song in one sitting over the span of a whole evening after school.

I'm not good at putting this into words, but I felt like I was a part of some thing, even if that sounds silly. There were so many people like me that I could find on SoundCloud and listen to what they made. I found a guy from the university I wanted to go to and messaged him about it and then told him I liked his music. A guy from my mom's work heard from her that I was using SoundCloud and he was on it too playing acoustic guitar. We would listen to each other's stuff when it came out. There were young producers from the UK who put out all sorts of awesome stuff without needing a record label or anything to go through. A few of them have gotten bigger now and I can't even find their old stuff any more, so of course it feels cool knowing that you listened to their stuff when they weren't "big".

I wish I had something moving to say at the end of this, but those memories are all I have.

So how come we can have Youtube but not Soundcloud?

Mirror every sound cloud track to youtube. Boom.

It moves to bandcamp?

This seems to be the most likely outcome to me. Bandcamp and Soundcloud have always had a huge overlap in functionality. I've always much preferred Bandcamp anyways.

As a user of both they've always seemed like two completely different services to me. One is streaming, the other a store. One a social sharing based platform, the other mini-sites for each artist with terrible discovery. Bandcamp would need to change a lot to replace SoundCloud's use case.

NB: Not shitting on Bandcamp, it's great and I use it.

I see people sharing WIP mixes here also: https://clyp.it/

Does it really need to be $10-15/month, per the example though? I mean would $12-15/year be sufficient? I don't know what their staff overhead is though, it sounds like they have a lot or people on staff.

I find it hard to believe if faced with the choice of letting SoundClound shut down or paying $5 a month, that the SoundCloud community would not be willing to pony up $5 a month. If that is true, that is super pathetic.

the "soundcloud community" is really the 2% of users who are heavily active, involved, and attract the other 98% of users who consume the community's output.

I'm sure the "community" would happily pay for the service. but the other 98% probably would not, because they just want to consume content with the least friction. payment is friction, even a $0.05 payment.

so they follow the path of least friction and go somewhere else, some other site that is currently in the early funding rounds, providing service for free to ramp up as quickly as possible. then, in three years, their investors will demand they monetize... rinse and repeat.

The thing is, SoundCloud took so much VC money that making a modest profit is no longer an option. The investors won't back off until they get their 10x payout or SoundCloud dies trying. I hate it when this happens.

Are there any existing, good, self-hosted platforms for music?

Personally I've been working slowly on an self-hosted Tumblr clone, but that doesn't have the concept of albums.

According to SoundCloud they're aren't going anywhere. https://blog.soundcloud.com/2017/07/14/soundcloud-is-here-to... how much we believe that will depend on their next finance report.

I wonder if myspace could capitalize on soundcloud disappearing. If they learn from the mistakes they and soundcloud made in the past than myspace could have quite a comeback. Can't really imagine this happening, though.

Where will everyone go? As a sort of active sc user i didn't even know that sc was dieing. There are alternatives sure, but... I dunno, the "meta culture" of new electronic music is on sc... Killing sc would be like a blow to creativity and upcoming musicians

Only One Right answer: move to YouTube

Think the issue with most SoundCloud musicians is that they either dont have the resources to constantly make music videos or dont have enough creativity or want to study how to make viral videos on Youtube but instead need to focus on their music.

People put music up on YouTube with just a cover image and that's just fine for most people.

Thats true but ultimately the people on SoundCloud and Youtube are a different crowd as well, Soundcloud allows annotations and is more specifically built for music, youtube doesnt have the same features

So that some big labels would autoclaim copyright on it because they doomed it similar enough, no thanks

SoundCloud was my favorite source of remixes, which I have always been a huge fan of (although I guess that market is smallish).

No idea where I'd go next :/

I'd be reasonably happy if I could just download the tracks I've "like"'d

If you're not trying to backup the entire site, you can save individual tracks using youtube-dl[1].

[1] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

hmmm. i suppose i have to collect my cookies and give them to youtube-dl...

EDIT: Nevermind, I just opened each track individually and ydl'd the URL, there weren't that many.

Why not start a web label on archive.org? Not like anyone is making money on soundcloud, there is no upsell to archive.org its a not for profit run by donation, a lot less likely to fall victim than a commercial service.

Could souncloud reduce it server costs by using p2p-servers of its users..

What happened to the subscription service? I tried giving them money--multiple times--and it seemed like SC would forget my subscription after a few months each time. I eventually gave up.

I'm wondering how is the morale over there? How is the management responding to all this press exposure? This must very hard on the employees left.

From what I understand, morale has been low for a while.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/inside-the-storm-at-soundcl...

Yeah having a tone-deaf CEO who used the company like a piggy bank and gave no direction certainly didn't help. He truly didn't understand what he had.

it will go to bandcamp and live happily ever after. music wont get hurt by some buisness derpings because its not about that.

Agreed. Nothing will happen to the music. Musicians will use a different service. No need to back everything up. The musicians already have the files which will be easily uploaded to a different website. And it will most likely be bandcamp.

A decentralized solution like Mastodon/GNUSocial would be the best bet. Would probably be pretty simple, few weekends of work.

I think the difference would be in how much server space each requires. Text and images take up a lot, but still relatively little compared to audio, which is dwarfed by video at the scale that this would take. It's an interesting idea, but someone always has to pay somewhere. Maybe something like integrating Mopidy into Mastodon/GnuSocial might work and could then piggyback off the already created software, but I'd think it would be closer to a reddit clone than a twitter clone.

They probably just stop listening to music if it gets too hard. I haven't bothered with anything since Grooveshark died.

Nooooooo! I didn't know about this until now. I love soundcloud :((((

DJ @deadmau5 has some thoughts on saving SC...

[1] http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/dance/7866215/deadmau...

glad to see hes still up to being completely insufferable

> "In summary, sure. I could turn the SoundCloud shitshow around with a decent team. But why fix someone else's fuckup after paying for it?"

> "I could turn [it] around... But why..."

Looks like he's got everything figured out... except for the business side of things.

I haven't listened to music since Grooveshark shut down.

Yes, agreed. If music doesn't have some copyright infringement grunginess to it, it's not for me. Everyone knows that the best music is made by self-taught DJs and garage bands.

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