What SoundCloud created can never die

> The Berlin-founded company has maintained its relevance by embracing a simple ethos: come as you are. That’s made SoundCloud the for-everybody platform—one that embraces all genres, sexualities, religions, and definitions of music and art. By setting itself up as a hub for community-oriented music streaming, it’s become a kind of incubator for avant-garde sounds. SoundCloud is everybody’s underground.

I find this kind of politicised editorialising from publications like Wired quite tiring. I have many acquaintances who produce EDM and I was on Soundcloud from 2012 or so. They never saw it in these terms. Of _course_ a platform for hosting your music tracks isn’t exclusive to a particular race, religion or ethnicity. Can anyone name a counter-example in music for whom that’s not the case, outside of obscurity? Or indeed any comparable tech platform?

Some seem to have decided that being neither sexist, racist nor homophobic in your banal business offerings is a revolutionary development from the past decade or two.

SoundCloud is still my most used music platform. If you like electronic music, it’s second to none. I like the fact that you can have 1-2h sets where you can comment reactions or ID different songs at specific timestamps. I also like to interact with different small artists there and follow their growth in the industry. I would message them tracks that I like and they would send me private links to early versions of their next release for feedback. You can’t find that anywhere else.

SoundCloud disappearing would be a shame. There's nothing that currently exists that replaces it. Consumer-oriented streaming platforms are a dime a dozen these days, sure, but there's no real alternative for a musician-oriented platform; specifically, a platform where musicians can connect with other musicians, with zero overhead for sharing music. Just upload and done. Unlike commercial platforms like Spotify, there's a culture of bootlegs, edits, mashups and DJ sets where musicians turn a blind eye to copyright complaints, thanks to the inverted payment approach (with Spotify, they pay you for being on the platform; with SoundCloud, you pay SC to be on the platform).

IMO, from my naive outside perspective, it seems like they were trying to be yet-another generic music streaming platform and that was a losing move. SoundCloud's legacy and current relevance is essentially "a social network for musicians". Positioning themselves as yet another subscription service where Joe Average can listen to Taylor Swift is a huge misplay.

This makes me sad. I use SoundCloud to listen to one genre only (progressive trance for when I'm programming) and its gotten so good at recommending me exactly what I like. On top of that DJ sets are top notch.

There are many genres I like to listen to, but the result is a mix of all the things. It's quite rubbish to get a mix of very different genres spanning decades, which happens with Spotify all the time. And YouTube has been abandoned for all but the occasional song for me for similar reasons.

I'm not holding my breath on this sale as so many times the end result is for the worse. Guess I should see what else is out there.

For the first decade or so that I used SoundCloud, music discovery was WORK - their recommendation engine wasn't great, and their search tools were limited, so you'd have to just kind of chase links through artists & commenters, and grind it out. Every couple weeks I would spend a few hours hunting for gems.

Eventually I switched most of my listening to Spotify, on the strength of their recommendation engine, even though my heart is with mixes on SoundCloud.

Then sometime about 5 years ago they fixed their recommendation engine, and it's really just a great experience. Their search tools are still limited, and they've "pigeonholed" my tastes a bit more than Spotify, but I'm still a big fan of the platform and paying subscriber.

If you love SoundCloud ... pay them! Let's keep this beautiful thing alive.

[UPDATE] - also I've had such great interactions with artists on SoundCloud, up-to-and-including some emails to get a local copy of favorite remixes after a track disappeared from SC. So much positivity.

I think that there's a good case to be made that, when these kinds of companies turn out to be unprofitable, they should be spun into a semi-public service like USPS (as its own thing, not under any existing institution). Much like mail delivery, there's not much room for innovation on the basic service of, "Provide interface and space to upload music, provide interface to enjoy music." If whoever buys SC has to change it substantially in order to justify the costs of purchasing it + maintaining it + profiting, that would be a massive loss culturally and economically. What is the government for if not to protect foundational cultural and economic entities?

I remember when Soundcloud first launched and it was specifically aimed at musicians to encourage collaboration, so its nice that it still occupies that niche pretty well.

“We both came from backgrounds connected to music,” co-founder Alex Ljung said in a recent interview with wired.com. “And it was just really, really annoying for us to collaborate with people on music — I mean simple collaboration, just sending tracks to other people in a private setting, getting some feedback from them, and having a conversation about that piece of music. In the same way that we’d be using Flickr for our photos, and Vimeo for our videos, we didn’t have that kind of platform for our music.”

From: Wired, 2009: SoundCloud Threatens MySpace as Music Destination for Twitter Era

https://archive.is/3uFk9

I hope it never dies either. We are paying subscribers of both Apple Music and SoundCloud here and use both of them just about daily, and we have Bay Area DJ friends on there as well.

I wouldn't be upset if Apple acquired them as well. Perhaps we'd finally get an Apple TV & CarPlay version. They bought Shazam a few years ago and the sky didn't fall then either.

I'd rather see Apple acquire then rather than a venture capital firm or even worse, Google.

I would actually love to work on soundcloud. I use it everyday to discover new music, new mixes, new artists and its amazing. In particular, DJs, from all sizes, uploading their sets, it introduces me to such a breadth of new music and new sounds and then you dig through the comments to find IDs (people that identified which track is played in the mix), check out the artists and their guest mixes - and discover new music constantly. There are alteratives (mixcloud?) but I would deeply miss soundcloud, much more than any other service (like spotify, netflix), because unlike those I feel like soundcloud has a lot of content that is not hosted anywhere else.. i even wonder if its archived somewhere or if one day it will be all lost.

I really hope SoundCloud doesn't change too much with a new owner. There's something special about it's user generated mixes and commenting at different time stamps on a mix that make it unique. I often find myself coming back to SoundCloud every once in a while seeking new content or mixes that Spotify and Tidal seem to lack for me.

The risk is high that SoundCloud will follow the Flickr fate in some "creative" fashion.

Flickr became the main host for very different kind of niche photography, especially analog photography or photography with vintage gear and remained like this for some time even after sold to Yahoo.

But at one moment they came up with an idea that a free account could have only less than 1000 photos if it had more photos then it got taken offline. A lot of good content got destroyed by this. For example there was an account that had taken 10s of photos with 100s of different kind of vintage lenses, had perhaps 2000-3000 photos - all gone.

On top of all that, SoundCloud has (probably) the most positive and supporting commenting culture of any of the bigger platforms.

I follow the mastodon bot https://botsin.space/@soundcloudsaid that sprinkles random happy little comments in my timeline.

I am working on a new music platform. It is a travesty that SoundCloud and other artist-friendly platforms like Bandcamp are struggling and can't survive. Having used Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music (iTunes), YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, Qobuz, etc over the past 20+ years, it seems like without a new approach we'll continue to lose choices in how we search for, discover, listen to, and interface with music - I can't tell you how many times I've ended up in dead-end-inducing discovery and recommendation experiences in the aformentioned services. I'm not optimistic that the big players in digital streaming can get out of their own way and do anything to make stark improvements to the way listeners experience music, let alone provide anything new to artists, unsigned artists, labels, playlist creators, DJ's, or people who own and operate music venues that aren't owned or controlled by giant corporations. And this is at a time when there is more music being created, recorded, and released than ever before (120,000 new tracks get published a day and 43 million new tracks were published in 2023 alone)(1).

The music project that I have been working on aims to bring together a musical audio pre-trained language model, natural language inputs, and a novel interface that deconstructs what you hear into visualizations and user controls. The idea is to allow you to dramatically improve personalization of music search, discovery, and curation by allowing interactivity with the individual parts of music, also known as stems in music theory and music mastering.

The overarching challenge that music streaming services and more broadly media streaming services have, is building a sustainable business on somebody else's art...you have to (rightly) pay licensing costs. This is a major (and ever changing) business risk and one of the larger challenges when I think about launching a new music streaming platform. MTV discovered this in the mid 80's when margins for music and music video licensing became flat, Netflix / Apple / Amazon / etc know this which is why they invested in developing their own content in house.

If anybody is passionate about working on something new in streaming music let me know - I could really use help developing the music audio PLM prototype.

(1) https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/there-are-now-120000-...

Agree with other comments that there is simply no specific replace for Soundcloud if you have a particular taste in electronic music. I've been a paying subscriber for years not bc i find the paid tier super compelling but bc i want them to not go under. Hope SC can find its way to sustainability

Recent and related:

Music streaming service SoundCloud tunes up for sale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38911731 - Jan 2024 (38 comments)

If you make a space for community, and give it what it needs, it'll flourish. But distain it in search of cash and it'll die.

Sometimes, if you're lucky, you can find a business next to the community, to keep money coming in. But it has to be something more than advertising, or you'll be chasing your tail til it falls off.

There's still a future for a music business combined with community. There's many problems for both fans and artists that haven't been solved. Just takes somebody to solve it, without focusing on the profit. If they're very lucky it'll last.

SoundCloud only became profitable recently by laying off about 30% of the staff. They never figured out how to make it work.

I seriously doubt anyone is going to buy it, even less for $1B which is the number that has been thrown around.

Of course the investors that put some $250M into it since 2017 or so want their ROI badly but who in their right mind would buy it?

Google, Meta, Spotify, etc could buy it without much effort but what would they get in return?

Is MixCloud any good in this space? I think they were formed when private equity got involved with SoundCloud. I've heard that MixCloud pays some kind of royalties on tracks they identify in the mixtapes. I guess they don't do albums or individual songs like SoundCloud does.

This was always going to catch them eventually... Being a music storage system with streaming always has limits either in storage space/customers or bandwidth. I mean, alot of artists are paying for accounts to store their songs for years but the balance of that and all the millions of ppl streaming/downloading from those accounts? Limits. It's a fine line.

Seems like up to a point it would be a fixed number too with the upper limit of new artists willing to pay for accounts (which have more than doubled in cost since the beginning) dwindling. And throw in the ongoing evolution of copyrighted material detection etc etc (which they seem to straddle constantly, allowing mixes and such but definitely preventing direct song uploads more recently I have noticed) But the owners/capitalism is surely demanding continued growth so I dunno what SoundCloud has been telling them for the last seemingly 5+ years unchanging.

Perhaps all the free accounts need to go away too, but that hinders creative growth/opportunities that there just aren't as many on the net. Part of SC's initial boom was because there was no easy place to store and share some music.

We continue to run up against these challenges and there's no clear solution. See also related/similar bind at Bandcamp.

Prometheus? :)