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Comment by janwh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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