Music streaming service SoundCloud tunes up for sale

Around 2009-2010 the local scene was thriving with netlabels. Most of those netlabels were just a static HTML page with a list of releases, a ZIP file and an album cover. If you ended up at some event, you'd discover the netlabel and you'd look at their releases on their webpage. Soundcloud came at just the right time for me to become the Web 2.0 equivalent of the indie music scene. You'd discover an artist at some event, or via a netlabel release, and then find out what else they were doing and just keep up with them. If you were a musician it was just too convenient.

> It was as close as the world could practically get to copy-left, remix culture, and they threw it away because the founders lacked guts or vision or both

This is exactly what was happening locally. A few of those netlabels had releases under creative commons licenses, with artists encouraging people to remix their tracks, offering up stems for download and the whole scene thrived on some really neat remixes, which usually ended up on Soundcloud and you ended up discovering that remixer's original work in the process.

I think the tide turned when everyone started to just dump everything on soundcloud. At some point it became so popular that DJ mixes started to dominate feeds, people just started dumping other people's work on there and then not-quite-so-indie labels started using it for promotion. It was a matter of time before the rights holder collection agencies started smelling blood in the water and the first articles of "soundcloud is not paying royalties" appeared.

It's around that time that Soundcloud just became less and less useful to me. The local netlabels and indie scene ended up using Soundcloud less, opting for Twitter and other social media for promotion while releasing on Bandcamp. People who used to be very active there just reposted other people's releases until those fizzled out too. Over the course of a year or two it went from the place to discover exciting new music to the place nobody paid attention to.

> perhaps the fediverse has an opportunity to step in here… perhaps we just need a new crop of founders who believe in a world full of diverse musical culture

I honestly think it was lightning in a bottle, the right thing at the right time. The once diverse radio landscape had been dying for a while, with each station sounding the same and no longer catering to various subcultures, which often weren't very advertiser friendly. The variety of record stores were disappearing in favor of online distribution leaving only the really big chains who rarely bothered with promoting the new and unknown unless it came from a major label. With the record labels railing against online distribution at the time and various well known artists going off and directly releasing their music online, few really wanted to have anything to do with traditional labels.

I think the success of the local netlabels at the time came from all that which in turn at least locally fed into soundcloud being the missing link. I don't think you can really recreate all that, certainly not the momentum the copyleft licenses had. Adding the fediverse to it feels like just adding an extra set of hoops to jump through for discoverability.

With the Bandcamp situation I do feel it's time for something new and exciting, but it will coast on inertia for a while like Soundcloud did before becoming a shadow of its former self.

[1] https://www.mixcloud.com/mixcloud/posts/how-we-pay-creators-...

But I don't see any evidence of growth. Other platforms have stepped up their music discovery tools and broadened their catalogs. I ended up dropping the subscription because they didn't support Android Auto and said they had no plans to (in their defense, they introduced support in mid-2021).

It very much feels like SoundCloud was first to the space (were they? surely someone else did "YouTube but music" first) and have been riding that out.

However, always important to note that there are different POVs on such things:

  * customers
  * musicians
  * employees
  * partners

It's only been a couple of months since the sale[0]. They've already shut down a couple of features/services that Bandcamp previously had, as part of the layoffs which "just happened" to cover every single member of the union's bargaining team (and nearly all members of the bargaining unit). You're not necessarily going to see the full effects of a change like that so immediately.

It's too early to say what will actually happen beyond that, though signs aren't good.

[0] The Songtradr sale is the more significant of the two, because Epic only purchased Bandcamp in order to improve their legal standing for their otherwise-unrelated suit against Google. Now that that's not an issue, they sold it to Songtradr which is by far the more worrisome owner.