
SoundCloud faces do-or-die vote by investors - mcone
https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/10/soundcloud-shut-down-possible/
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15charlimit
"Soundcloud is fine and will be around for years, stop backing up all of the
music".

Didn't the CEO say something along those lines ~2 weeks ago when they forced
the archive.org folks to stop pulling down a backup copy of everything? Funny
how quickly that was proven to be BS.

Not that anyone should be surprised by this outcome.

~~~
mathattack
Reminds me of the financial crisis when banks that were losing billions would
claim to be "Awash with liquidity." Once the CEOs admit weakness, the sharks
circle tighter.

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eggpy
> employees secretly using Spotify.

Well yeah. There's not even competition there. And shouldn't be really, they
are fundamentally different platforms.

~~~
rewrew
And that's the problem -- the CEO wasted a ton of time and resources trying to
create a Spotify competitor that just burned resources.

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jbb67
How can a website that lets people upload music files and comment on them, and
play the music POSSIBLY need $170 MILLION to operate? I just don't get what
they could possibly need that amount of money for.

~~~
pavlov
Some random guesses:

* Business development teams for the Nth media company collaboration scheme * App development teams for the Nth iOS app redesign * Back-end and ops teams for the Nth overwrought storage architecture * Front-end teams to explore rewrites in the Nth proposed in-house JS/CSS framework * Operations people to keep the aforementioned people paid and fed

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esaym
> Now it’s asking investors for $169.5 million at a pre-money enterprise
> valuation of just $150 million

Ouch. I hope they get the money. I really don't want it to go away. I have not
found an alternative that has so many 1+ hour long megamixes :(

~~~
caoilte
I've always got my mixes from mixcloud. Never really saw what differentiated
soundcloud.

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thirdsun
As someone who uses both platforms and actually prefers Mixcloud as a product,
the user base is simply not there. I see much more engagement on Soundcloud.

Maybe it's different for other creators, artists, DJs, but I'd guess that's a
very common experience when comparing both services.

~~~
matclayton
Mixcloud founder here, thanks its appreciated. Theres one big different on
engagement, we tend to see lower play counts, but higher number of minutes
listened per play. You'll start to see us surfacing this data more in the
upcoming months, and I expect everyone to be pleasantly surprised.

~~~
wiredearp
Since you are here, can you also surface anything about potential plans for
offering an improved (and possibly paid-for) streaming quality and/or offering
the mixes available for download? I'm in it for the mixes and I want to love
Mixcloud, but there is only so much fun to be had with discovering a mix that
cannot be played on a quality stereo and/or in a place without internet
connection (so at the party, in other words) and those will in any case go on
my priority list if and when Soundcloud finally goes down.

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reillyse
What a messed up article. I don't know this CEO but using a picture taken at a
festival two years ago as proof of incompetence seems very cheap.

~~~
matt4077
Indeed–that image caption serves absolutely no purpose except to beat on
someone who is at a low point anyway.

And it doesn't even make sense! Taking a vacation every now and then is likely
to improve productivity, and for SoundCloud specifically, it seems almost
necessary to go to Burning Man and mingle. The criticism is especially rich
coming from a guy who looks at least twice as stoned in his official
TechCrunch photo than the SC CEO at Burning Man.

Creating SoundCloud is more than 99.x% of people ever achieve, including me,
the author, and the editor of this shameless excuse of an article. SoundCloud
is obviously beloved by many. If they don't find a way to get those people to
pay, they're in good company.

At least they're not selling to AOL.

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bad_user
How dare you suggest that people should take vacations and have a life?

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ipsum2
Shameless plug: if you or your friends have important data on SoundCloud,
check out my free service to back it up:
[https://scupper.io](https://scupper.io).

~~~
mynewtb
Or make a true backup by _downloading_ it all with e.g. youtube-dl instead.

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autotune
Can't help but wonder what the sound quality of a downloaded youtube vid
converted to mp3 would be vs a straight up mp3 or FLAC.

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mynewtb
youtube-dl's name is unfortunate since it.grew.to support many other sites,
such as SoundCloud. You can download flac or wav files often using it on SC
content.

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sarreph
For all those looking to make a SoundCloud clone: What is HN's opinion on its
failings (from a user perspective) — i.e. how would you make SoundCloud better
right now?

Also interested to hear those who can balance with commercial viability.

~~~
nxsynonym
Go back to basics.

Keep it focused on community facing artists, remixes, dj sets, etc.

From what I've seen they suffered most from lack of direction, weak
leadership, and no real business plan from the beginning. It seems (correct me
if I'm wrong) it started as a hobby project and got twisted into a SaaS model
that didn't fit it's purpose or audience.

As far as monetization - why not have a Patreon-esque system of support
specific content producers/artists? I don't think a blanket monthly
subscription is really a good fit but personally I would pay 1-5$ / month for
specific artists/content providers and follow only them.

~~~
bad_user
> _why not have a Patreon-esque system_

You've lost me there.

You can't, because people don't pay and don't want to pay, unless they are
forced to, as in there's actual scarcity (i.e. no way to easily get that
content from anywhere else).

~~~
syrrim
Clearly it can work, because it works for Patreon. It also works for twitch,
who allow people to "subscribe" to streamers they like. This entails paying $5
a month (half to the streamer, half to twitch) to receive exclusive chatting
rights, special "emotes", and other non-essential features. People do it not
because they want access to the special features, but because they want to
support the streamer. It seems that people are adverse to paying only when it
is on an-item-by-item basis, but are not adverse to it in general.

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em3rgent0rdr
Privacy Badger would have to be disabled whenever I accessed SoundCloud. That
was my indicator to avoid it.

I miss the days of RSS podcasting.

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thinbeige
> If it can’t find funding or a buyer, SoundCloud could vaporize, destroying
> its massive archive of user-uploaded music, podcasts and other sounds.

Wrong. If Soundcloud goes bankrupt then the state tries to find a buyer for a
new SoundCloud with a virgin cap table. So Soundcloud won't disappear whatever
happens.

~~~
phreeza
Are you sure that is what happens, given that SoundCloud is a German company?
Afaik a kind of administrator gets appointed by the Court who can take over
administration of the company, not sure about the cap table though.

~~~
chinathrow
SoundCloud looks like a UK company with a german daughter company to me:

[https://m.soundcloud.com/imprint](https://m.soundcloud.com/imprint)

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ThomPete
Of course we are all thinking (hmm should we do a clone) and believe me I am
not going to deny it's tempting, hell I might even be pushing for something
like that.

But the reality is most likely that someone is going to buy them for no money
and then continue the platform trying to beat the dead horse alive.

The reality is that you don't make any money on streaming services if you
don't hold the rights. Netflix and Spotify should be a good inspiration for
how to do it and they aren't even doing as well as one might think.

But there is a very simple way to make a good (non funded) business out of
soundcloud and that is to turn it into a paid platform for artists who want to
push things up there.

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yellowapple
"Employees told us the company is “a shitshow,” with a lack of product
direction, talent leaving and employees secretly using Spotify."

Weird. I never really thought about SoundCloud and Spotify being actual
competitors. I've always felt that SoundCloud did a lot better with
indie/obscure artists, remixes, and the whole "soundclown" meme genre, whereas
Spotify did a lot better with commercial/mainstream artists and albums. I use
both frequently.

~~~
ocWavean
That's part of the problem. They focused all their attention on making a
Spotify competitor, when the core principle of what SC unique is the community
and a vast underground culture of unknown artists hoping to make it big.

The two are similar in that they're online streaming services, but insofar as
everything else, not even close.

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lousken
The reason I stopped using soundcloud as soon as I could was the fact that
soundcloud uses 128kbps mp3 for most of the songs. If that would be at least
160k or 128k opus that would've been fine. But 128k mp3 is noticeably worse.

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claudfuen
Being in the music industry, I always had a negative experience using
SoundCloud - It's not surprising that by neglecting their user's needs they
are systematically imploding.

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bcherny
Could you elaborate? I was under the impression that SoundCloud is one of the
few platforms that treats musicians well, and lets fans discover really small
bands/djs.

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jgh
i really like soundcloud for drum and bass mixes that would otherwise be
pretty difficult / impossible to find otherwise. I will miss it if it goes
under :(

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quuquuquu
devil's advocate, why not youtube, or reddit, and if downloading is a problem,
mega?

~~~
xnzakg
Not the user you replied to, but for me, Youtube's "automatic mixes" loop
pretty quickly. Also, YT is a bit more of a pain to use on mobile (either
leave a video running, uses up battery and data, or use a modded version of
Youtube which pretends it's Youtube Red and has background playback enabled).

Soundcloud "just worked". It even caches your feed after you listen to it, so
I was able to use it without it using my mobile data for a while.

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alistproducer2
I pretty much saw this coming. Posted to a IPFS group last year about using
IPFS to make a decentralized soundcloud clone. I was lucky enough to get a
response from Juan, the creator of IPFS.

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ipfs-
users/1Mu2Vh8sh...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ipfs-
users/1Mu2Vh8shI0)

~~~
alistproducer2
I honestly don't understand the hate. If you're going to DV me at least take a
sec to read the thread or let me know what your issue is. The thread has some
good responses from Juan; that's really the only reason I posted it here. I
thought of going decentralized because (at the time) I loved soundcloud. I
used it as an artist and also as a listener. I've been around long enough to
know that their model was not sustainable and eventually all the great content
would disappear. Decentralized makes sense for something like SC. Let the
people who find it valuable share in the costs of serving it a la bit torrent.

~~~
TekMol
I see 2 problems with this approach:

1) IPFS does not work in the browser.

2) People might not want to share because of the copyright issue.

~~~
lgierth
There's an alpha implementation of the IPFS and libp2p stack here:
[https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs](https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs) and
[https://github.com/libp2p/js-libp2p](https://github.com/libp2p/js-libp2p)

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xya
lol, just wondering why there is no soundcloud ico yet, as it seems so easy to
set it up [https://icobox.io/](https://icobox.io/) \- would it be too much
data for a blockchain based system? \- does anyone need a distributed
soundcloud?

