
SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses - neokya
http://www.factmag.com/2016/02/11/soundcloud-financial-report-44m-losses/
======
cmyr
Soundcloud is absolutely ubiquitous in the electronic music community. I was
talking about this with a friend recently who is a programmer and a
(relatively) well known composer, and she made the point that soundcloud
actually represents a very important cultural document; there is tons of music
that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and
it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it were to disappear. This is
something I haven't heard a great deal about, and it's something that concerns
me about other media platforms like Medium.

~~~
aback
when people argue that "digital distribution is essentially free," then ask
why Soundcloud is losing money, since distributing music is literally their
only real cost of doing business.

we will continue to endure substantial cultural losses for so long as people
continue to believe that content can & should be distributed and consumed for
free.

ultimately some sort of micropayments + blockchain-like-cloudserving might
replace Spotify, Soundcloud, and all other streaming services with a
decentralized system in which listeners compensate artists directly.

until then the promise of disintermediation is just a fantasy. gatekeepers on
the Internet control access to most content, particularly music.

~~~
jlarocco
Honestly, I don't think the solution even requires that much creativity or
innovation.

Just in the past 3 or 4 months I've found half a dozen or more artists on
Soundcloud, then headed over to Bandcamp or Amazon to buy and download their
music. It would be awesome if I could buy it right there on Soundcloud. Every
song could have a "Buy MP3" and "Buy Album" button right there by the Like,
Share and other buttons.

Maybe it wouldn't solve all of their problems, but it's better than what they
have now.

~~~
erickhill
A lot of the music posted is a single here, a single there - often before
official release. Sometimes it isn't weeks until that single (or larger album)
is available for purchase.

Plus, for the electronic/DJ side of things, many of the tracks posted are
remixes which aren't ever for sale (it seems). But from a scale standpoint,
you would think that there might be _some_ sort of revenue opportunity there.

~~~
jlarocco
I don't see how that changes anything.

Post the single with a "Available to buy on <some date>" notice. When it's
officially released, take down the notice and put up "Buy now" buttons. And
there's no reason they have to make every song available for sale or every
song that's for sale available for streaming.

~~~
tomaskafka
Even better, either 'Let me know when it's available' or 'Auto-buy and add to
my collection when it's out'.

------
strgrd
I've been a daily soundcloud user for almost 6 years. At some point they gave
up on trying to change or improve the user experience. Soundcloud has done
nothing to facilitate the growth of users who focus on
reposting/finding/sharing/curating content, vs. content creators who upload
their own music. There is no way to gain a following or reputation as someone
who reposts content on soundcloud -- and even if you have that following,
there's no way to communicate to your audience.

In three years, it seems they've just made the UI elements bigger, and added
background images for songs and profiles. I was really hoping to see the
ability to post text messages into people's timelines. Something to
communicate to your followers.

~~~
nbzklr
Reposts? They are currently my #1 annoyance on soundcloud. I'm following 300+
artists and they increased my stream's size by at least 4x.

It's not about "finding, sharing and curating" but to spam your stream with
duplicate tracks.

Imagine an artist reposting his own tracks. Then his network does. As does his
label. And his friend. And then all of them repost a playlist with this track
on it. Yay!

Please give us an option to hide them...

~~~
thirdsun
Agreed, and the solution is painfully obvious: Show the item once in the feed
and just let me know that "DJ Joe Doe, Awesome Records, [guy who is in my
network] and 27 other people reposted this."

Come to think about it, isn't that how most other social feeds handle this
problem?

~~~
CydeWeys
Facebook has been doing this for years and it works great. The duplicated
content is shown once, and then the separate comment feeds from the different
reposts (if there are any) are put below it. Soundcloud wouldn't even have to
innovate here; they just need to copy what's already working elsewhere.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Perhaps they found the duplication better for revenue?

~~~
CydeWeys
Not having duplication is better for revenue because having duplicate content
fill up your feed because lots of your friends re-shared something is bad UI.
I'm not really that much more likely to click on something after the first
time I'm shown something, and I start to get actively pissed off at it after a
few unnecessary repetitions (this was a big complaint about the spam coming
from Facebook games in the early days). Spamming up the feed with duplicate
content means that for the same time spent browsing, someone sees fewer pieces
of _original_ content, meaning their average click rate is less, and yes, that
costs revenue.

But fundamentally duplication costs revenue because it's a bad UI and bad UIs
piss off users, leading them to use your product less.

------
rgbrenner
Article is bs.

they lost 44m in _2014_. Raised 77m last year. They may need to raise more in
2016.

Nothing else. No other facts. No info on their balance sheet, etc. Doesn't
even know if they're growing, what their revenue or losses for 2015 were.

And based on that, Fact thinks that's enough to say they "may be forced to
close".

~~~
npalli
The auditor has clearly stated that it has doubts about the company as a
'going concern'. This is a technical term in auditing that implies the auditor
has doubts that the company will survive (i.e, will have to liquidate) another
twelve months. It's not a willy nilly "growing company is losing money" type
statement, it means there is a fundamental problem in how the company is
financed and operated.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_concern](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_concern)

~~~
taylorwc
Auditors are required to issue such statements when there is no line of sight
to the company being solvent (and no one can guarantee that the company can
close a financing round.) I'd venture a guess that almost every startup at a
similar stage to SoundCloud would have the same issue if they are audited.

~~~
TheLogothete
Soundcloud is almost 10 years old. At what point a company stops being a
startup? At what point it stops being feasible for a company to operate at a
loss?

~~~
taylorwc
Are these meant to be rhetorical? You decide when you're going to stop calling
it a startup. They are venture-backed and founded within the past decade. I'm
going to call them a startup.

As for question number two, I'll let you count how many publicly-traded
companies aren't profitable that have been around for decades.

I didn't register an opinion on whether SoundCloud should or shouldn't be
profitable, I merely said what GAAS[0] requires an auditor to do.

[0]
[http://pcaobus.org/Standards/Auditing/Pages/AU341.aspx](http://pcaobus.org/Standards/Auditing/Pages/AU341.aspx)

~~~
sosborn
There is operating at a loss because you are reinvesting (see: Amazon) and
there is operating at a loss because your business isn't viable. Soundcloud is
somewhere in between those two extremes.

~~~
taylorwc
Very true--Amazon would never have a going concern statement issued in its
audit, because it voluntarily reinvests what would otherwise be operating
profit. I was thinking more along the lines of a company like Sprint, where
they are only solvent through issuance of debt and outside investment.

------
petercooper
I hope this is just an alarmist headline. SoundCloud is pretty essential in
its space, it's one of the few services that lets you natively get audio on to
Twitter, the main place musicians share snapshots of their work and remixes,
and a key part of numerous podcasts and ways to embed easily shared audio on
the Web. This is one startup I absolutely don't want to see go down the pan.

~~~
hathym
have you ever paid a cent to soundcloud?

~~~
delgaudm
I'm a voice actor, and soundcloud has been vital to me. I've been a paying
customer for years.

~~~
bitJericho
One reason businesses fail is the lack of the business to be able to cope with
a service disruption. I hope you have other avenues!

------
downandout
Am I missing something? This report is from 2014. Despite the fact that "
_SoundCloud was heavily reliant on further capital investment to continue
operating in 2015._ "....it did indeed raise money, made it through 2015, and
is still operating in 2016.

It seems that this "report" is coming out now because stories about startup
implosions get more clicks these days. It shouldn't surprise anyone that they
are and have been losing money. That's why these companies raise such large
rounds.

------
djt
All my production buddies hate it. They pay full price, your the world and yet
Soundcloud take down the tracks that they OWN. With no recourse or apology.
Their system has been broken for 5 years at least for the power users in the
community.

~~~
runn1ng
Another anecdote: I have played with their JavaScript API about 2 or 3 years
ago and it was constantly broken, with no way to report those bugs.

Their support page states "ask on StackOverflow" as it stated back then, which
is a terrible way to report bugs.
[https://developers.soundcloud.com/support](https://developers.soundcloud.com/support)

------
pavlov
They raised $77M USD last year. The auditor's statement is just standard
boilerplate for a company that's losing money.

Given the involvement of big investors, it seems extremely unlikely that
SoundCloud would shut down rather than raise another round or get acquired.

~~~
joeblau
The sensationalized title tricked me.

------
mtalantikite
Not being able to save tracks for offline use on mobile has been bothering me
for a while. Maybe I'm an edge case, but I do a lot of listening while
commuting, which means no Internet on the subway here in NYC. That means
SoundCloud isn't even an option for me unless I'm at my desk.

Also, I can't save a collection of favorite tracks in any meaningful way. I
can favorite them, but they quickly get lost in the mobile UI if I do too much
of that. I end up relying on global search every time I want to revisit a song
or artist.

Overall it seems like UX hasn't been a top priority for them.

~~~
bonniemuffin
I'd love to pay Soundcloud actual money for the ability to cache songs for
offline listening in the mobile app! This would be a killer feature for a
listener-focused subscription tier.

~~~
zimpenfish
I'd love to have offline copies of just -my own stuff-, never mind anyone
else's.

------
anotheryou
What do 200 people do in such a company? (serious question, I just wonder how
the workforce is usually distributed for a single online product of that size)

~~~
camillomiller
The way a startup can become a bloated corporation-like structure here in
Europe is a surprisingly fast process.

~~~
dragonwriter
Aren't startups usually corporations _ab initio_?

~~~
camillomiller
Well, they shouldn't gain the bloated-ness of a 40yo bureaucratic corporation
that fast, though? At least, that's what all the theories about the way
startups should operate are about...

~~~
mercer
Perhaps it's a variation on Parkinson's Law [1]? "The amount of
bloat/bureacracy expands so as to fill the budget available to the company?"

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law)

------
crabasa
Obligatory link to HN story from 16 days ago about SoundCloud being worth more
than Spotify:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10965558](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10965558)

------
prateekdayal
Having run a music site for 7 years or so I am not surprised. We started
before Soundcloud and created a very engaged community for musicians that many
paid for.

However I never understood how Soundcloud could justify raising so much money
given the revenue potential (from producers) in the space. By the way, the
site I ran was [http://www.muziboo.com](http://www.muziboo.com)

------
adinew
Considering techcrunch article was published less than a month ago it is safe
to ignore the article.

[http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/24/why-soundcloud-will-be-
wort...](http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/24/why-soundcloud-will-be-worth-more-
than-spotify/)

------
Mizza
"Forced to close" is a really, really big stretch here.

They have a huge community, play an important role in online music, and have a
seemingly excellent engineering team. I'm sure they would be acquired by a
major media player long before they ever closed, but I don't see that
happening any time more. I bet they'll just double-down and raise more money
while trying to develop more subscription revenue offerings to music
consumers.

------
jfoster
Is this article based on anything substantial?

They lost $44m in 2014 but raised $77m in 2015.

The article refers to a report saying SoundCloud is heavily reliant on
“further capital investment” to continue operating. Isn't that just another
way of saying they're currently not turning a profit? Wouldn't that have been
true of YouTube prior to acquisition?

I'm not familiar with FACT. Looks like it may be a legitimate music industry
publication. Looking at the other SoundCloud articles, it seems about 50% of
them are in some way negative. That suggests to me that they might have an
agenda they're pushing.

[http://www.factmag.com/tag/soundcloud/](http://www.factmag.com/tag/soundcloud/)

------
Theodores
Soundcloud has not done 'peak mySpace' yet:

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=soundcloud&geo=US](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=soundcloud&geo=US)

All seems on the up in terms of interest from people using the search engine.
Very enviable curve.

~~~
Majestic121
It seems it has reached a peak, or at least has not been really growing in
2015, if you check worldwide

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#geo&q=soundcloud](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#geo&q=soundcloud)

~~~
Theodores
Weird how Pakistan seems to be Soundcloud central! I suspect that the
advertising sales team at Soundcloud only care about the Western markets,
hence I posted the US 'trend'.

~~~
matheweis
Soundcloud may have good reasons for that...

Anecdotally I see 10x conversion rates in western countries, despite having
higher active user counts outside of there.

------
_ak
> While SoundCloud brought in €17.35m ($15.37m) in 2014, it lost a total of
> €39.14m ($44.19m). Employee wages during that period also increased 42.5% to
> €17.9m, meaning that the average wage per employee for that year totalled
> €79,980.

Wow, that is ridiculously high, especially so for Berlin.

~~~
roel_v
How is that 'ridiculously high'? That's say e4000/month after taxes (if total
tax pressure is 40%). These costs also include e.g. the director's salaries,
which I presume are more than 80k/year for a 10 year old company with 200
employees.

~~~
distances
For developer positions in Berlin 4000 € after taxes would be a considerably
high salary.

~~~
roel_v
Glassdoor says 50-65k before tax for run of the mill 'software dev' in Berlin,
with soundcloud being on the upper end of that range; and it seems I
underestimated tax pressure with 40%. Considering that 80k is the average
(including directors, mgmt, legal, ...), I wouldn't say that those salaries
are 'outrageous'.

------
mful
I use Soundcloud for hours every day, and would GLADLY pay a Spotify type
premium for it. As others have noted, it has an incredible amount of music
that exists nowhere else (including a lot of non-EDM), but it is a great
listening platform for many other reasons. The biggest, for me, is that
SoundCloud has far and away the best discovery mechanisms. The 'play related
tracks' feature is the most effective radio I've found (better than Pandora,
light years better than Spotify) and my feed is always full of new songs that
I enjoy.

But SoundCloud has one big problem holding it back, in my opinion:

Getting a great SoundCloud experience requires a lot of upfront work. To have
a good feed, you need to find and follow a bunch of artists and/or 'like' a
bunch of tracks (from when I first started: the default feed, or low-data
feed, gets stale quickly, and had many songs that did not align with my
preferences). This sounds simple, but it's not, as SoundCloud is designed for
discovery rather than building/organizing your music library. For example,
there is no library-like simple list view, and you can't filter/sort your
'likes' as you can in Spotify/iTunes. Also, the radio-like features are not
immediately apparent, making it hard to bootstrap your SoundCloud preferences
by passively listening/liking tracks as you go.

Looking to the alluded future monetization: The ads are infrequent, and not at
all annoying. Unless they ramp up the ads, it will not be a big incentive to
pay for premium.

There is really nothing like SoundCloud if you like EDM or EDM-influenced
indie music (think Miike Snow).

~~~
tetraodonpuffer
you can pay a spotify-type premium for it, if you want to support them just
upload to a pro account (even if you don't upload any music). I am going to do
that myself as I just realized pretty much 90+% of the listening I do at work
while coding is on soundcloud (I also have a subscription to google music, but
don't use it as much for EDM)

------
bborud
They lost me as a paying customer when they decided to allow Universal Music
Group to remove content directly. Overnight I just stopped caring about
Soundcloud. They might have done more such things to piss off users since
then, but I wouldn't know. I, at least, decided it would not be worth
investing my time in the site after that.

Apart from that; yeah, it is the Flickr of music -- promising at first, but
then a whole lot of non-evolution of the site.

------
Zigurd
This is a badly written article. Impossible to tell if the headline is
accurate or if the writer made an alarmist guess.

~~~
kyleknighted
When the first sentence has "but the its" in it, I gave up on even trying to
read the article.

------
krisdol
I thought it was supposed to be worth more than Spotify a few weeks ago? [1]

1:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10965558](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10965558)

------
shams93
This is why archive.org with your own netlabel is a better choice, theyre not
for profit so the bar is lower fir their survival. The more we donate to them
the better they get too!

~~~
degenerate
Thanks for sharing - first time I've heard of their Netlabels (weird name
imo):

[https://archive.org/details/netlabels](https://archive.org/details/netlabels)

------
greggman
Soundcloud seems like the only service that allows other sites to use the
music data. By that I mean the ability to use actually use the track's sample
data for creative coding audio reactive projects like
[http://vertexshaderart.com](http://vertexshaderart.com)

On the negative side, as others have pointed out, they haven't done much to
make the site better for various definitions of better. I've found searching
fairly lacking. I'd love something that tried to find tracks I'd like (is that
something deep learning could figure out?).

Also when searching for music I type in some keyword and then start listening
to tracks. The browser gets more and more bogged down the more tracks I listen
to. Something about their design is adding more parallel work with each new
track clicked on. Maybe that's a browser bug? Eventually I have to refresh the
page and then scroll back down to the last track I played and continue the
process of listening to tracks.

~~~
pmarreck
TIL about vertexshaderart.com. Amazing and right up my alley and making me
feel like I was under a rock!

------
asabjorn
As a music consumer I personally want to pay for soundcloud instead of getting
ads, which could bring more revenue than ads and be more flexible in prizing,
but when I asked soundcloud support for the option they said they had no
immediate plans for one. In the end money is king and I don't understand why
they haven't explored more revenue options.

Edit: typo

------
Futurebot
I really hope this isn't true. I've hosted my own music there for years (and
am a paying customers), and almost all of the interesting new music I find is
from there.

One thing that might help them is to charge non-creators for some services.
Right now there just doesn't appear to be any reason to if you're just a
listener.

------
EGreg
I don't say this about many start ups, but sound cloud has created an amazing
experience and interface for publishing sound. I don't know how defendable it
is, but they are one of those start ups that definitely needs more capital
before they build out their revenue streams. And I think they are going to get
it.

------
ajsharp
Unfortunately, none of this is surprising. Soundcloud has no real revenue
model due to a seemingly inability to court rights-holders, and the product is
mediocre at best. Soundcloud provided an outlet for the indie and electronic
music communities to share and consume music early on, and that has more or
less remained their bread and butter to this day. Even if they were charging
end-users for access, the viability of it is as a competitor to Spotify and
Apple music, at the prevailing market price-point ($10 / month) is slim.
Ultimately Soundcloud is a niche product competing against broad market
products with no real path to revenue other than somehow bringing mainstream
music onboard. And it seems pretty clear that mainstream music isn't
interested in collaborating with Soundcloud.

------
javery
Terrible article and sensational headline - the problem with all the YC guys
being asleep right now.

------
jafingi
Reminds me of the danish site MyMusic.dk that was founded in 1998, and became
the go-to site of danish underground artists. In 2010 it just disappeared from
the web, and 12 years of music from 16.000 danish artists were just _gone_.

It reappeared as Bandbase.dk for a while, but then went bankrupt again.

That said, I think Soundcloud has missed a huge opportunity by being market
leaders. They could have taken the best from Bandcamp, and earned royalties
from each sale. It would make it so easy for indie artists to earn a little
money from what they love, and also make Soundcloud money. Instead, artists
are putting up 30 second previews on Soundcloud with a link to Bandcamp to
buy/download for free.

------
beatpanda
I seriously don't understand how this is possible. I was the multimedia editor
of a college newspaper in about 2008 and we needed a place to host podcasts.
We were looking around for a solution that could serve as infrastructure for
audio files, and soundcloud was the only game in town.

It still is, and now, eight years later, podcasts as a business are booming.
How are they not making enough money selling their product as infrastructure?
Their API is _so unbelievably good_ that even a cash-strapped community
college was prepared to pay for their service. Are they really not earning
enough revenue to keep it going?

------
norea-armozel
I think it would be a shame if SoundCloud disappeared considering how many of
my music discoveries come from there. If it wasn't for SoundCloud I wouldn't
have known Pilotpriest, Dance with the dead, Droid Bishop, and other synthwave
artists even existed. Bandcamp is okay but I find it hard to find new
synthwave and related genre artists on their search. If SoundCloud dies
someone over at Bandcamp needs to beef up the search and tagging system over
there (I buy much of my music now through BandCamp).

------
chrisblackwell
How many of these services will have to shut down before it's user's will
start supporting them? Please give me the option of paying money, and making
sure you will be in business for the next few years.

~~~
kpennell
BandCamp seems to have figured out a good model for this

------
sakopov
I used to produce tech/progressive trance back in the day as a hobby (you can
checkout snippets from some of my tracks from SC link below) and remember when
SoundCloud first came into the picture. It was a great platform to connect
with others who dabble in music production and share tips. It has since become
the breeding ground for up and coming EDM producers. A really cool place on
the web and it'd be a shame if they closed down shop.

[https://soundcloud.com/sergei-a](https://soundcloud.com/sergei-a)

------
romaniv
I would be happy to pay something to Soundcloud as long as it's not per-song.
It's a good service. Really easy to use as a musician and great for finding
new music as a consumer.

Hm, maybe they should be selling some "audiophile" subscriptions with ability
to tag and hierarchically categorize songs you liked? I would buy that if the
price is not astronomical.

But I also think it's really important that the basic usage stays free for
people who randomly wonder in from other websites.

------
brudgers
Article at Financial Times, _SoundCloud to seek more funding in 2016_ :

[http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fcb06850-c66e-11e5-808f-8231c...](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fcb06850-c66e-11e5-808f-8231cd71622e.html#axzz3zsBbAXyy)

This appears to be the basis for the report. Startups tend to post losses.
Amazon did for many years. That's because all the money that comes in gets
spent to grow.

------
kidsil
Youtube is not making any profit either, I suppose streaming based websites
are very difficult to make profitable. Must be the constant growing expenses
for servers.

~~~
throwaway2048
All the sites that have predicted youtube as unprofitable assume google is
paying standard bandwidth rates, with the peering arrangements they have with
ISPs of virtually any size, they pay next to nothing to reach 95% of end
users.

------
leroy_masochist
While I understand the appeal for Soundcloud as a platform for people to get
their music "out there" (especially with EDM), I personally don't like the UX
at all. The big gripe I have is that the categories are often jacked up. I'm a
big metal fan and almost half of the songs in the "Metal" category do not
remotely meet that description.....as in, dubstep remixes of Taylor Swift
songs and crap like that.

------
elcct
I remember few years ago there was something like forum (or groups) on
Soundcloud. It was really nice way to collaborate with other musicians, but
they decided to kill it. I lost interest in SoundCloud since... I still have
an account, but I am not using it that often. Also how they present tracks is
very annoying, so I stopped sharing soundcloud stuff with friends. It actually
got me into creating my own service.

------
freddref
It's difficult to discover new music on SC outside of what's currently
popular. Maybe it's there somewhere but I find the UI frustrating.

------
sebringj
SoundCloud is a grassroots thing really necessary for creativity coming out of
no where exposing music on an even playing field compared with other services.
I love them.

They should not only charge for music uploading but have a premium plan for
listeners like myself similar to Spotify. No ads the ability to archive songs
outside of normal release windows, something like that.

------
DanFeldman
Losing soundcloud would be terrible. Half of my music discovery is through
soundcloud; Though I find myself listening 80% of the time on Spotify instead,
moving over once I find an artist through soundcloud.

Soundcloud's mobile app is terrible though, randomly freezing and crashing.
Wonder if poor engagement through the app contributed to the this loss
posting.

------
imartin2k
A few days early this news already circulated on multiple sites - and I had to
blog about how the media was covering these "news":
[http://meshedsociety.com/how-the-media-reports-about-
soundcl...](http://meshedsociety.com/how-the-media-reports-about-soundclouds-
financials/)

------
andistuder
Don't think FACT interpret the funcials of this Startup very well. A FT
article responinding to the same release seems more to the point:
[https://next.ft.com/content/fcb06850-c66e-11e5-808f-8231cd71...](https://next.ft.com/content/fcb06850-c66e-11e5-808f-8231cd71622e)

------
kolmogorov
80k average salary is crazy for a Berlin based company. They have a reputation
of poaching engineers and granting them crazy salary increases. They then also
let them do kind of whatever they feel like with whatever tech stack which may
work if you have a money printing service but is questionable for the stage
they are in.

------
gtirloni
_The report makes it clear that while the company had “adequate resources to
continue in operational existence for the forseeable future,” SoundCloud was
heavily reliant on “further capital investment” to continue operating in
2015._

What's the difference between "operational existence" and "continue operating"
here?

------
pbreit
That looks like sloppy reporting or at least a misleading headline. Although I
guess anything "could" happen.

------
doener
Just add "could be" to your headline and you can write anything.

There is absolutely no evidence that SoundCloud is forced to shut down and the
$44m loss for 2014 is was reported before.

So a VC backup company is still losing money and is still dependent on new
financing rounds or loans? Not something totally unheard of.

------
ptha
_While SoundCloud brought in €17.35m ($15.37m) in 2014, it lost a total of
€39.14m ($44.19m). Employee wages during that period also increased 42.5% to
€17.9m, meaning that the average wage per employee for that year totalled
€79,980_

Seems like a pretty generous wage increase for a company in the red.

~~~
camillomiller
Especially given that good talent here in Berlin is much much cheaper.
80k/year scores you some superstar devs, while that's probably the peanuts
some out-of-school pre-puberal intern would earn at a Valley startup.

What's really expensive here is management people and the way German hire the
mid-level management is broken most of the time. I don't know if it's a German
thing or a global corporate thing, but I've personally witnessed some pretty
interesting hiring horror stories.

~~~
rb2k_
80k/year probably includes the 28-ish% "Lohnnebenkosten" (incidental wage
costs)

So the actual paycheck would be around 60k. I think that's pretty ok for
Berlin?

Having worked in both, Germany and Silicon Valley, I'd say that the middle
management hiring is certainly a bigger problem in Germany than I've seen on
either the east or west coast in the US.

~~~
uberger
No, it is around 70k/year pre-tax. Note that social sec payments are capped
and Arbeitgeberanteil is smaller.

[http://www.brutto-netto-
rechner.info/gehalt/gehaltsrechner-a...](http://www.brutto-netto-
rechner.info/gehalt/gehaltsrechner-arbeitgeber.php)

------
y04nn
I didn't expected that, Soundcloud is such a nice plateforme. I thought that
they were still growing, there is so much potential, with artists promotion
and so on. I also wonder why they never became a selling platform. Is there
any company that would buy the service ?

------
mark242
My obligatory show HN link: [https://octave.is](https://octave.is) is the
Vimeo to Soundcloud's Youtube. No crap comments, no ads, no garbage on your
artist page.

~~~
alias240
It looks nice. Good luck with it. As with all audio hosting services, after a
moderate amount of success you will surely find yourself on the radar of the
anti-piracy agencies. I hope you are well prepared and can overcome this
challenge.

------
gnrlbzik
I do not upload any music on to sound cloud, but never the less, it is one of
my primary ways of discovery. I would happily pay $2-4 a month to so called
get rid of "ADs" and support them.

------
speby
This is unfortunate news... I remember seeing this video ( years ago)
introducing SoundCloud: [https://vimeo.com/1857085](https://vimeo.com/1857085)

Nostalgic, now.

------
aw3c2
Anyone know how big it is in terms of available files and total file size?

------
scosman
KPMG's statement is pretty standard in any GAAP financial statement. If your
company is losing money, it pretty much has to be included. Not many startups
wouldn't have it.

------
harel
I will be very sad if they go, as I have my music (from another life) on that
service. However, I doubt that will happen. At worst they will scale down
their operations and cut costs.

------
ryan-allen
How much data does soundcloud host?

I can't deal with another mp3.com :( My CD backups of MP3.com in 2001 were
damaged and I had lost songs for ever. It was tragic.

------
techthumb
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11083954](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11083954)

------
jacquesm
Does anybody remember the name of the indie music website that was very
popular around 2000 or so? For the life of me I can't remember it.

~~~
markplindsay
Insound?

~~~
jacquesm
Another blast from the past, but no, that wasn't it either :(

grrr. Now I really have to figure this out.

------
amelius
Can we have some more data?

How many visits do they have per day? How much data do they stream per day?
What is the total amount of data that they serve?

------
jegutman
Maybe Google or other bigco could buy out of bankruptcy? Is there too much
tail liability from some copyright infringement??

------
unixhero
I have a strong belief in heartis.at as the new soundcloud and baboom.com as
the real marketplace (which disrupts the industry).

~~~
patrickbolle
I love hearthis.at, it's like soundcloud properly done. never heard of baboom,
is it essentially bandcamp? bandcamp seems to do everything right imo

------
pindropm
There is a great cultural and emotional content that these services contains.
Shutting these services will cause a big damage to this heritage.

We are trying to solve some of the biggest problems of music industry with
PindropMusic

[https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/pindropmusic/id1042553162?mt...](https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/pindropmusic/id1042553162?mt=8)

------
yueq
Loss of 44m dollars is nothing in internet industry. As long as that loss
contributes to growth!

------
kyrre
soundcloud charges musicians around $150 for an annual pro subscription and
then sends the consumers to bandcamp to buy the music and merch.

doesn't sound like the right monetization approach

------
ogezi
it's a great service, they just need to monetise properly.

------
circa
That is a bummer. I love SoundCloud and use it frequently.

------
slackstation
What we need is something that isn't centralized. The problem that needs to be
solved is how to pay for the things that you care about but, keep enough in a
common pot to not only share the service but, to make systems for discovery.

Soundcloud is awesome. It's needed, it's culturally important but, it doesn't
make money. We should stop thinking of things like Soundcloud like business
but, more like museums with infinite square footage.

We can pay the artists as patrons directly, we can pay tour guides who show us
interesting and amazing things. We have decent micropayments. What's left is
the thing that hackers aren't great at, the cultural work of changing public
perception.

Most artists just want to eat, pay rent and live well enough to create more
art. I love that Soundcloud allowed people to experiment, get good enough to
book gigs and then I could see them live.

What we need is a system that does that efficiently. We need a better
managerial structure than VCs + Founders. Soundcloud is a pretty solved
problem, both technology wise and UI wise. What isn't solved is funding and
management.

There are so many services that would be wonderful to have but, will never be
$1bn+ exits for anyone.

Twitter should be. IMHO I think it will be eventually.

Every social network gets abandoned once people put up ads. It's pretty crazy
that we live in a world where conversation, speech both personal and public
are strip-mined for profit.

People will eventually realize that freedom costs something. Thankfully,
technology should make that cost in dollars very cheap.

A Facebook scale social network could charge $1/yr and pull in $1.5bn/yr. A
decentralized FB-scale network isn't trivial both technically and socially
but, it's something that we as hackers should figure out.

A decentralized social network would be a huge win for freedom of speech,
thought and information. Facebook already filters everything that people see.
It's a centralized, easily subpoena-able entity.

The larger, much harder problem is how do you convince teenage girls to join a
service. They are both the heavy users and set the communication norms for the
next generation.

The next problem is how do you build something that is wanted by society but,
don't do it by setting up a relationship with a VC looking to exit for 100X
what they put in.

Once we solve those two issues, social and funding then the world will very
quickly become a place where we can build things that are self-sustaining,
less link rot, less invasion of privacy, less filtering of thought and speech
by centralized powers.

------
eruditely
I'll purchase a subscription service immediately.

------
monkeywork
What would you consider to be a viable alternative?

~~~
throwawayaway
bandcamp and mixcloud

------
dreamdu5t
The worst part: we all knew this day was coming from many years back. Because
we all know but don't want to accept that advertising is the only viable
business model on the web.

------
blairanderson
GO BACK TO BUZZFEED YOU FEARMONGER

------
aiw1nters
factmag talking financials is like Trump talking politics

------
exabrial
This blows my mind! SoundCloud is ubiquitous

