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Comment by BlackjackCF | Hacker News Reader

Ooooh boy. This feels like the kiss of death for SC. So many startups hit this point and then get rescued at the 11th hour with more funding... on the condition of ushering in a new CEO and COO to try and pivot the company's direction. They completely change up the product and drive away the users, and the entire thing collapses like a house of cards.

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Seems to me like completely changing up the product was the previous direction (trying to squeeze in some kind of spotify-like product), and the article mentions explicitly the new CEO want to get back to the core value of the service.

Of course, we'll see what they mean by that and how it will be executed, but it sounds like good news, actually.

That's the problem tho, isn't it? The core value of the service was great for fans, but not for any sort of business and certainly not for the labels (without whom SC cannot exist and hope to make any money whatsoever).

Why does SoundCloud need labels? They just need a way to make money with independent musicians.

I also believe it can make money on independent musicians. But can independent musicians money scale to VC expectations?

Well at this point the expectations are a little lower. "Anything but going all the way to zero" seems like the current tone.

> "Anything but going all the way to zero" seems like the current tone.

You don't invest in a company without expectations of ROI

I'm not a VC so I may be totally wrong here, but it seems to me that what they expect to scale is not revenue, but valuation (providing further investors match this valuation). Should Soundcloud revenue raises slowly but they do an IPO, I guess investors would be perfectly fine.

Edit : of course, it seems their doing a downround, so those expectations are not in good shape either.

The problem is much of the independent content like remixes touches major label copyrights.

I think it's tricky specifically with DJ culture in that if I make a remix or a mashup and that includes somebody else's content, that content needs to be licensed.

When a DJ is spinning in a club or venue however using someone else's content is covered by the venue in the form of fees paid to ASCAP, BMI or some other such publishing rights society.

> When a DJ is spinning in a club or venue however using someone else's content is covered by the venue in the form of fees paid to ASCAP, BMI or some other such publishing rights society.

This is not true in many parts of the world.

Care to elaborate where in the world artists don't have access to performance rights societies or copyright collectives?

See:

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

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

https://www.ascap.com/help/international/affiliated-foreign-...

Its up to the artist to register with a PRO or to affiliate with a publisher that will do so for them. ASCAP despite the A in the name will collect performance rights worldwide and anyone that meets the basic requirements is welcome to join regardless of what country you live in. See:

http://blog.songtrust.com/uncategorized/ask-songtrust-publis...

Without a label licensing deal, soundcloud is not worth buying due the risk of a lawsuit.

Then some enterprising lawyer should arrange a class action lawsuit on behalf of one-off independent musicians against the labels for those labels interfering in the independent musicians' ability to exercise their copyrights.

SC existed fine without labels. Most of the music underground that SC originally hosted for was micro-labels and independent producers. Soudncloud as a platform was NEVER a good fit for mainstream music as published by Hollywood labels, and I think much of the site's woes are because they tried to make it fit.

Soundcloud needs a blanket "no music published by a major label is permitted" There are of course copyright issues on remixes/whatnot but those really needs to be worked out in a court of law, in favor of producers.

>"Seems to me like completely changing up the product was the previous direction (trying to squeeze in some kind of spotify-like product), ..."

Wasn't this a necessity though due to some of the content hosted by SC being owned by the 4 major record labels?

Don't worry, SoundCloud has been driving away core users and artists for years now. Can't see what's wrong at this stage with a final throw of the dice from someone with different ideas.

what kind of things has it been doing to drive them away?

Where are the bedroom DJs and indies going now, then? I think soundcloud is still the place to be. I'm a daily user.

mixcloud, bandcamp

Those who didn't leave soundcloud in 2014, left after the 2015 purge. Many went to mixcloud.

I've been using SC since 2011 and didn't even know about these exoduses. I even though it was getting more popular. Guess I was out of the loop.

EDIT: I just created an account on Mixcloud and searched for 11 artists i'm following on SC and not a single one had a presence on Mixcloud. I'm calling bs on that.

Isn't the point that SC messed up by trying to compete with Spotify and now the new CEO/COO are going to double down on the "Youtube for music" option?

I mean I get why SC went the direction of Spotify, Youtube is going that direction too!

Unfortunately, Youtube is the youtube for music. :(

Unless you turn your screen off. Then it's just silence. Lots of it.

I thought they allowed that? Though, pay only via Red

edit: Why the down vote? I was serious - I thought with Youtube Red you could listen with the screen off, am I wrong? Perhaps I misunderstood your screen on statement.

edit2: Well, as others confirmed, it is indeed allowed via Youtube Red like I said. So my post being down voted makes no sense, the OP was wrong. Get your shit together HNer.

edit3: Well, the down vote has been reverted (or upvoted out of it) - regardless, I probably overreacted. To be clear, I don't care about the "Karma" (I try to recreate accounts somewhat often for privacy), I just get irrationally angry when it feels like people try to silence you for an unexplained reason. It's why I hate Reddit.

Just getting YouTube red is a great solution - for those two or so countries where it's available. Most of us here in the non-US part of the world don't really have that option.

This is payback for everyone else getting Spotify before we did.

I often forget how broken the web is for the rest of the world.

I flip out if a Youtube video isn't "available in my country", I can't imagine seeing that frequently. My sympathies.

Making you pay to turn your screen off is not "allowing" it in the normal sense. It's valid for someone to see your comment as wrong. And since it's easy to figure out why, you should not get upset over lack of explanation.

I mean, it's a video service that is paid through visual ads. Expecting free content is a bit entitled, imo.

Though, if Youtube was to become "Soundcloud", having Radio specific ads would be a nicely adaptive feature for the "free" audience. However, given that ads are required, screen on vs pay is very reasonable. There is an avenue for screen off, legit and implemented as a feature.

> Making you pay to turn your screen off is not "allowing" it in the normal sense. It's valid for someone to see your comment as wrong.

I disagree, the feature is there, that someone just doesn't like how to access it. Saying something doesn't exist / isn't allowed is a false statement if it does exist. The requirements for being allowed were not being discussed.

This isn't about presence of ads. They are there either way. I will be looking somewhere else either way. This is purely about annoying the user.

> I disagree, the feature is there, that someone just doesn't like how to access it. Saying something doesn't exist / isn't allowed is a false statement if it does exist. The requirements for being allowed were not being discussed.

You are not allowed to park here. And by that I mean you are 100% capable of parking here, parking here exists as an option, but you will be fined $75.

It's valid to see turning off the screen as "not allowed".

Well in your parking example, I think the better example would be, "not allowed to park here without a pass".

You are allowed to park there, if you have the pass. If someone told me I wasn't allowed, I'd assume there was no way for me to park there. If someone told me I was allowed with requirements, then I know I can, if I can obtain the requirements.

However I see your point of capable vs allowed, I just think it's a valid distinction to make. I'd never tell someone that they'd not be allowed to park somewhere, because that's not the complete picture. They might leave, thinking that there's no way for them to park there. That's not true at all, and I'd be in the wrong for misleading them, imo.

Unless you are a paid subscriber, then it keeps playing!

Ironically enough I last got bit by that trying to listen to Depeche Mode.

A happy side-effect of getting YouTube Red was this doesn't happen anymore.

Yea.. I got down voted for saying the same thing. Thanks for confirming, I thought I was going crazy.

Load YouTube in Firefox for Android. Turn off screen. Enjoy music.

Sidenote to all these youtube red comments - probably you're paying for youtube red through your google play music subscription. Just a FYI, you can just use google play music as a youtube music video browser. Helps when for example you're chrome casting to something and don't want to change back and forth between GPM and youtube apps.

Thankfully, as Youtube is not using DRM yet, you can simply use a different browser or client to stream or download things however you like, where ever you like and as often as you like. Embrace your freedom.

youtube-dl can pull the m4a files, vanilla music on android plays them without re-encoding and my desktops which are all Linux support m4a just fine.

It's almost embarrassingly easy to pull a 400 song playlist of the genres I like (outruns and synthwave).

All I need now is a simple, lightweight youtube browser to find URLs to plug into youtube-dl.

In fact you've helped me remember that I haven't donated in a long while.

Kiss of death is probably the wrong term. It's not like these companies are healthy and decide to cash out to some rapacious VC. More like like CPR: lifesaving but usually comes with a lot of injurious complications. Yes, grandpa was never the same after his heart attack, but the nursing home seems like a better option than the funeral home.

They already pivoted, though, and that pivot was their downfall.

I understand that the goal of any business is to make money be profitable, but SoundCloud went from being a resource for independent musicians to an also-ran in the subscription music streaming race.

> They completely change up the product and drive away the users, and the entire thing collapses like a house of cards.

The company will collapse if nothing is done. The only downside to trying something new is that the company might collapse a little bit sooner if the new direction doesn't work out. On the other hand, there is a chance the company can be saved, so it seems like they might as well try it.

SoundCloud's problem was going too big too fast. The investors think that SC is going to compete with iTunes/YouTube/Spotify/etc. It's not. It's an audio file hosting service. It has incredible professional use cases, but it is not a mass market audio streaming service.

Agreed. I've never personally seen it as a source for music I want to listen to on a daily basis (though clearly a lot of people do use it that way).

At one point, back in like 2012 when trap was all the rage, SoundCloud had interesting stuff coming out every day. I'd listen to it in the car, and was annoyed at the bug where turning your phone to landscape required switch apps then switching back to trigger SoundCloud to actually reorient itself. It was my source of new music, and going to trap shows and clubs in the Bay Area, I'd know what was being played even if it was super new. I remember making a joke at one point when some friends commented on my SC usage that "I only listen to music that was released today".

We lived in the future for a little while there.

I'll evolve that wonderful quote slightly: "I only listen to music that was made today" could be an amazing guiding principal for SoundCloud that differentiates it from Spotify et al.

It wasn't too big too fast. It was the wrong direction entirely. They misunderstood their market and their product, and thought they could become Spotify.

It's like Etsy deciding they want to be the next Amazon.

Agreed. They decided to chase more users, instead of trying to foster relationships with artists and smaller labels.

Chasing more users makes sense if your objective is to increase the price tag and be bought.

Foster relationships with users makes sense if you want to build a long lasting community and service. But the record industry will attempt to destroy you if you grow too much.

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