
If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture? - mcone
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/magazine/if-soundcloud-disappears-what-happens-to-its-music-culture.html
======
toomuchtodo
> Archive Team promises to back up SoundCloud amid worries of a shutdown

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/17/15986952/archive-team-
bac...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/17/15986952/archive-team-back-up-
soundcloud-warrior-project)

Consider donating to the Internet Archive.

> Archive Team plans large scale backing up of Soundcloud soon, but seriously,
> please donate money to the Archive.
> [http://Archive.org/donate](http://Archive.org/donate)

[https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/885665255266955264](https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/885665255266955264)

Edit: my info is dated. Archive Team backed off. Smoke if you've got 'em.

~~~
teraflop
That article is out of date, unfortunately. The Internet Archive and Archive
Team have abandoned their backup efforts by SoundCloud's request.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6oi6fd/xpost_r...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6oi6fd/xpost_rarchiveteam_soundcloud_requests_the/dkhnesn/)

~~~
tomc1985
That is so infuriating. If the site goes down permanently Soundcloud should
swallow whatever costs this incur to pay for their failure of stewardship.

By honoring SC's request Archive Team has allowed the indie Library of
Alexandria to burn...

That's what pisses me off about VC. Everything's a fucking product...

~~~
AstralStorm
They should ransom the whole database of they're going away. It worked for
certain software (Blender), it might for the music too.

~~~
pixelHD
Whoa, I've never heard of this, can you expand on what happened with blender?

~~~
kd5bjo
Blender was developed by Neo Geo for internal use. When they were acquired,
the developer tried to sell Blender as a commercial product. During bankruptcy
proceedings, the Blender Foundation was founded and bought the source code to
release as open source.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_\(software\))

------
rb808
> How do you persuade people who have been using your services free to start
> paying $5 or $10 a month?

I've starting paying for stuff like music services, apps and newspapers just
to try to keep stuff alive. I realized I would happily pay $500 for a phone
but never wanted to pay for a $2 app.

There is so much sh*tty content out there I'm actually enjoying having ad free
access to a lot of good stuff. I still dont really like paying but if I dont
no one will. I think I'll start paying $5/mo for soundcloud too.

~~~
BlackjackCF
I wish Soundcloud would improve its UI. I really want to use Soundcloud when
I'm on the go, but it's app is so shitty it's constantly crashing.

~~~
azinman2
Doesn’t crash for me. I’m on iOS. It does, if I stop playing music, get killed
pretty quickly by the OS. I just wish it remembered where it left off.

~~~
BlackjackCF
Maybe it's just me... but sometimes in the middle of a long mix, it'll start
crashing.

But definitely agreed on the ability to hold state on the song you're
currently listening to.

------
overcast
People need to stop creating awesome services, for free. That is the issue.
You set the precedent, and attract people because it's free, and this is the
end result. No one wants to pay for it. Netflix isn't free, look how awesome
it is. People will pay for SoundCloud once you lock it down, and put a
subscription fee to use it.

~~~
feld
But they won't. The people creating content on it did not have money and just
wanted exposure. The consumers did not have money either.

~~~
myusernameisok
I don't know if that's necessarily true. Youtube is to Netflix what Soundcloud
is to Spotify. Netflix and Spotify are successful because they charge a small
fee to allow users to consume high quality content. Youtube and Soundcloud are
both free and allow users to consume community-generated content. This is a
bit of a rhetorical question, but why is Youtube so successful when Soundcloud
isn't?

~~~
btym
YouTube seems successful because Google is paying for it. It's never made a
profit.

~~~
thevardanian
No. It's successful as a profitable product otherwise you wouldn't have so
many content creators get paid a lot of money for creating videos. It's ad
revenue sustains itself, and those that create on it quite well.

~~~
MediumD
You have any numbers to support that profitability claim? YouTube wasn't
profitable when Google acquired them, and it wouldn't surprise me if they
still were not profitable now. I'm sure they make substantial ad revenue, and
it's entirely possible they are profitable. But running servers and content
creators getting paid are not proof of that - Google has more than enough
money to subsidize the endeavor.

~~~
myusernameisok
Google also seemingly hasn't been trying very hard to make Youtube profitable.
Spotify has a free tier, but you only get the "standard" 160 kpbs bitrate, as
well as ads. To get the "extreme" 320 kbps bitrate you need to subscribe.
Youtube could have easily restricted 720p and 1080p to paying customers, but
didn't. I think now it's too late for Youtube to reverse their decision on
that without some backlash.

~~~
yellowapple
Spotify also has other restrictions on the free tier, though (for example, you
have to have a premium account to run Spotify on a Fire TV Stick (or any other
Amazon device AFAICT)). Google/Alphabet might be able to get away with
imposing similar restrictions on certain YouTube integrations without too much
backlash.

------
quadrangle
This already happened (probably many times over). I had success with the
original mp3.com 17 years ago. They made certain business decisions that got
major labels angry and various details not important, they shut down.

What matters is that tons of stuff disappeared. I learned that I can't trust
these types of platforms because they are for-profit and may screw us all over
or make stupid decisions. I also can't trust non-profit options if they aren't
really stable. I trust Wikimedia to stick around, and archive.org and some
others (although everyone should donate to keep them strong!), but other, I
dunno.

Instead of fully embracing SoundCloud, I've basically stayed distrusting and
my creative publishing actually suffered a lot (although my concerns are part
of what led me into understanding free culture, free software, etc. and why
I'm aware of Hacker News now etc)

~~~
visarga
Mp3.com closedown was a disaster. So much valuable music was there.

~~~
feedbeef
Like the few on here who remember how great mp3.com was, I too lament the loss
of its huge array of excellent indy music. Hopefully the archive will be fully
restored some day[0,1,2]. Digital antiquities indeed.

Take warning: download and archive a copy of every digital asset you care
about. I highly recommend the excellent utility youtube-dl[3]. I rely on it
daily for copying obscure youtube videos that could disappear at any moment.
Fool me twice...

[0]
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/12/03/mp3_com_archive_is_...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/12/03/mp3_com_archive_is_destroyed/)

[1]
[https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/04/04/19/2318226/mp...](https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/04/04/19/2318226/mp3com-
archive-not-lost-17-million-songs-saved)

[2] [https://archive.org/post/1004359/mp3com-
archive](https://archive.org/post/1004359/mp3com-archive)

[3] [https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/)

------
janwh
People™ should learn about how to properly self-host their stuff, apply
adequate licenses that allow for remixing, etc. If "this music culture you're
a part of" really matters to you, and grows larger than the initial toe-
dipping, becoming self-sufficient should be one of the main objectives of your
craft. Being part of a culture should also imply caring for its heritage,
should it not?

Sure, this subculture would have probably never existed without a platform to
grow on. But the going-away part is actually a large scale problem, not only
regarding SoundCloud. This applies to other ~corporation~ startup backed
platforms as well.

~~~
pmoriarty
I am not a professional music producer, but I do produce music as a hobby. I'm
also a sysadmin, so I know full well how to self-host everything myself. But
it's just such a pain it's not worth it for me. So much easier to just upload
it to Soundcloud and let them worry about serving it and maintaining it.

Now, if a sysadmin like myself won't bother, I really doubt your average
musician with relatively weak or non-existant sysadmin skills is going to
bother self-hosting. Professional musicians might hire someone to do it for
them, but most music producers aren't professional.

That said, I stopped uploading my music to Soundcloud ever since they dropped
groups. That was the main way I shared my music and discovered new music
myself. Soundcloud is not mostly just a static music storage service for me
now, and without an easy way to discover new music, it's not even worth the
bother for me to upload anything there anymore.

I'm now hunting around for a good Soundcloud replacement.

~~~
falcolas
How is it a "such a pain" to host a bunch of static files with some HTML?

You could probably even do it with Jekyll and S3 (or similar) if you really
wanted.

------
fiatpandas
Glad I've had a script running for the last 6 months that has been polling +
backing up my soundcloud favorites. This is stuff that, if SoundCloud went
under, I would never be able to find nor listen to again. It really is
depressing to think how much music culture disappears with SoundCloud.

I'm doing the same with my YouTube stuff, but not because I think it's going
anywhere anytime soon.

~~~
haltingthoughts
Is that or s similar script somewhere public? I'd like to do the same.

~~~
fiatpandas
Check out YouTube-DL. It supports SoundCloud, and I believe you can point it
to playlist URLs for batch downloading.

~~~
icebraining
Yeap. Just pass --batch-file <file with urls>

Also, you can give it a SoundCloud user or a playlist, and it'll download it
all. And if you use --download-archive, you can re-run it later and it'll only
download the new songs.

I have a cron with no scripting, just the youtube-dl command, that pulls down
new videos from an YouTube channel every week. It's awesome.

------
bane
The demoscene (and by some extension the classic gaming scene) has faced this
from time-to-time. What's interesting is how many large volunteer efforts
there are to save large chunks of the visual and audio output of that scene.
There are places you can go and get literally hundreds of thousands of pieces
of music.

Every one in a while a site will need to go down and somebody else seems to
step in, mirror the content and start their own thing. Outside of the scene,
there are sites with literally thousands of post-copyright mp3s from certain
genres (classic jazz, 45s, etc.) so there's definitely a kind of appetite on
the part of preservationists to catalog music.

There's almost no commercial side to the demoscene though, so I wonder if the
commercial forces in the rest of the music world seem to prevent this kind of
community building.

~~~
Figs
> I wonder if the commercial forces in the rest of the music world seem to
> prevent this kind of community building.

SoundCloud has (for whatever reason) prohibited archivists like archive.org
and ArchiveTeam from backing it up.
[https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/888093838107189249](https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/888093838107189249)

Jason Scott Wikipedia article, if you don't know who he is:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Scott](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Scott)

------
forkLding
This really shows the impact of technology on culture in modern times, you can
see different cultures and countries adopting different practices due to their
technology (which in retrospect is how technology in history has always
worked) such as Wechat in China and its payment practices to how Soundcloud
influenced so much of modern day unsigned-label musicians and the Soundcloud
Rap/Trap community.

Also would not want to see Soundcloud disappear, I had a brief EDM and trap
phase with Soundcloud filled with vivid memories

------
Ajedi32
Maybe Bandcamp should buy them out. Seems like there's a lot they could gain
by having a major music platform like Soundcloud integrated into their
marketplace.

~~~
dyeje
Why buy a failing company when most of their userbase will organically come to
you when it shuts down?

~~~
tracker1
seamless acquisition, search engine rankings, targeted users... Give existing
artists say 90-days post-aquisition to convert to paid accounts, etc.

There's plenty of reason... now said transition could be more costly than the
buyout though.

------
joeyspn
Sounds like an awesome use case for something like Filecoin [0] (IPFS). Move
all the tracks to decentralised storage, stream with something like webtorrent
[1] and research some kind of service fees via filecoin's token...

[0] [https://filecoin.io/](https://filecoin.io/)

[1] [https://webtorrent.io/](https://webtorrent.io/)

~~~
smaddock
Take a look at LolaShare [0]. It's a decentralized audio publishing and
streaming application which uses webtorrent.

[0]
[https://github.com/LolaShare/LolaShare](https://github.com/LolaShare/LolaShare)

~~~
mynewtb
It might just be me, but as I don't think so: 'Lola' sounds super trashy and
kinky to me, if I saw a link to lolashare.tld I would assume either erotica or
spam. Consider searching for a more audioey name!

~~~
freehunter
Seriously. When I hear "Lola" I think of either the popular song about a
crossdresser, or "loli" which is anime codeword for a specific type of
pornography. I don't have any good associations with the name and absolutely
would not feel comfortable talking to my friends about "lolashare.com".

~~~
_Marak_
Lola is a popular female name in Europe and it's etymology originates from the
Virgin Mary. We chose it because it's the name of our very awesome dog ( hence
the dog wearing headphones logo )

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lola_(given_name)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lola_\(given_name\))

~~~
mynewtb
Yes, that's probably why it gives bad associations.

------
debt
Soundcloud has some of the best damn music. It'd be awful if it disappeared.
I'm surprised nobody, including Soundcloud themselves, have developed tools to
remix, sample, dj, etc. the music library on Soundcloud. They have tons of
great stuff to sample/remix etc.

~~~
twunde
I'm not terribly surprised. The rights management around that is incredibly
expensive and very complex. I also have vague memories of some startup circa
2011/2012 that did live DJing that ended up dying pretty quickly

~~~
threetimesthurs
There was turntable.fm. Now there's [https://www.jqbx.fm](https://www.jqbx.fm)
which is sort of doing live DJing but with Spotify

~~~
twunde
Ah thank you. That's what I was thinking of

------
SurrealSoul
After grooveshark died I moved to soundcloud. There will certainly be a bunch
of indie / nieche artists floating around. The culture will still exist, but
it'll be fun to watch the vacuum get filled by some other service

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
The thing that scares me is how much music will just be lost for good.

~~~
0xCMP
Yea how many people delete source content after they've uploaded. I wouldn't
be surprised a lot of people do that. General population doesn't think it's
worth to simply buy more space either online or on disk. It can be expensive
to do so even for people like me who realize that disk on the whole is cheap
compared to losing the data.

~~~
sitkack
That isn't the point. It is published in spot. The amount of breakage between
SC going down and that art being uploaded to a new site ... at most I would
think 10% or less would make the transition.

------
omnimus
Maybe this is a chance for some decentralized alternative to pop up?

This is one of the reasons why are decentralised apps so appealing.

I think most of the artists would be able host it themselfs the problem is the
interface that allows you to search it all and connect it.

HN brains should think about this.

~~~
flowless
Former Ferment built on top of Scuttlebutt can be considered -
[https://github.com/LolaShare/LolaShare](https://github.com/LolaShare/LolaShare)

~~~
fenwick67
This is awesome, thank you for sharing this.

------
baalimago
The main issues with sc:

1\. Different audio levels between songs, there must be some "automastering"
function (or, simply listen to mixes, like i prefer to do) 2\. The awful
"comment at time" system which hasn't been fixed for years 3\. The endless
spam of shitty songs from people you're following, I can barely follow anyone
now a days since the general quality of the stuff they repost isn't very good
4\. The lack of premium incentive, also the price (which is too low). I have
premium since I'm a producer, but there's not incentive for the average user
to pay any money to either sc or the producers

Possible solution: 1\. Implement some sort of "for a fee, automaster the
audiolevels so they're somwhat the same within the genre". This shouldn't be
hard at all from a technical standpoint, spotify is doing it, why not sc?
Alternatively have a crew of "quality ensurers" which listen to songs and deem
if they get the "sc mark of approval" or something like that 2\. Implement
direct donations to the users, direct payment to buy songs, where a small fee
goes to sc themselves (become the beatport for the unsigned, basically)

~~~
austinjp
> Implement direct donations to the users, direct payment to buy songs, where
> a small fee goes to sc themselves

I can't believe this doesn't already happen, even some sort of flatter/tip
function.

------
gaius
_How do you persuade people who have been using your services free to start
paying $5 or $10 a month?_

    
    
        User: OMG this service is sooooo important!
        Company: would you pay one Starbucks per month for it?
        User: Nah
    

And there you have it in a nutshell. For all the handwringing, noone actually
is willing to put their money where their mouth, ermmm, ears are.

~~~
wolfgke
It is a difference to pay some single amount of money vs. paying some
recurring sum.

~~~
gaius
So what?

Users of this service can afford laptops, phones + bandwidth, a lifestyle
necessitating streaming music etc - but its so valuable to them that they
can't afford the equivalent of one latte per month? I call shenanigans.

~~~
freehunter
Our current Internet lifestyle is unsustainable and will crash sooner rather
than later. I say this with no sarcasm: if I had to pay for everything I used
online, I would be broke. $5 to HN, $5 to Reddit, $5 to ArsTechnica, $5 for
Gmail, $5 for Google Docs, $5 for Google Search, $5 to Github, $5 to Medium,
$5 to Wordpress, $5 to StackOverflow, $5 to CNN, $5 to NYT, $5 to Wikipedia,
$5 to Weather Channel, $5 to each site I click on from HN or Reddit or
Wikipedia, we could be talking hundreds of dollars per month.

You could make your argument about anything. "If Reddit is so important to
you, why can't you pay them money?" "If HN is so important to you, why can't
you pay them money?" "If Google is so important to you, why can't you pay them
money?" You'd run out of money quicker than you'd run out of websites to pay,
or you'd seriously scale back what websites you visit.

It's coming crashing down on us that either you have to pay for something or
that something goes away. And we can't pay for everything.

Maybe the next Rails or Node can focus on making the cost of hosting
infrastructure so inconsequential that sites don't have to make that choice.

~~~
wolfgke
> Maybe the next Rails or Node can focus on making the cost of hosting
> infrastructure so inconsequential that sites don't have to make that choice.

Isn't the much larger cost driver the salaries of the employees than the
infrastructure cost (serious question!)?

~~~
CryoLogic
Depends on what you are hosting.

A text-based site like reddit is almost nothing to host. All of the data is
stored as strings, and only references media hosted elsewhere.

HQ Video and Audio files are still expensive to host. Not even just hosting,
but bandwidth can be killer. Look at S3 bandwidth costs.

~~~
wolfgke
Costs of bandwidth vary a lot worldwide:

> [https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-
> bandwidth-a...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-
> around-the-world/) [2014]

> [https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-
> world...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world/)
> [2016]

------
janitor61
Same thing that happened to mp3.com, probably.

~~~
pinebox
This. People forget so quickly...

------
thanatropism
MP3.com anyone? Hell, I had an "album" on MP3.com and even sold three copies.

The other day Standing in the Sun's album showed up on Spotify out of nowhere.
That was the music of my teenage years and I had fully lost track of it. So
many other artists I still miss.

------
lindner
I'm hoping that labels and musicians wise up and move to a coop model.

I'm liking what I'm seeing so far on [http://resonate.is](http://resonate.is)
and am hopeful that those lessons will finally be learned.

~~~
joveian
Their "9 plays to own" model with higher compensation for repeats sounds
really interesting, although I wonder if the base level of .2 cents is still
high enough that spamming enough can earn some money. On Soundcloud spamming
is a major issue even without directly earning any money from it so I imagine
this would just make it worse.

While I don't know for sure, I suspect that on Soundcloud I listen to part of
multiple thousands of songs a month that I dislike and don't want to support.
Some of these I don't want to spend money on but for a sufficiently low to me
price I wouldn't care and some of which I actively want to not pay any amount
for.

IMO first play should be free until you indicate that you like the song. There
should also be a way to note that you have listened and don't want to play the
song again (if there isn't... hopefully they have that already). However that
would be easily defeated by the same artist posting the same or very similar
content multiple times (and a block artist option wouldn't avoid the same
artist posting under multiple accounts, which happens on Soundcloud). I think
any manditory payment on the first listen is going to restrict the type of
content that can appear on that platform and make it not the same kind of
place as Soundcloud.

This is a problem in other content areas as well where money goes to those
with the most appealing advertising almost independent of content quality.
Well, it can be an major issue with anything people pay money for, but it is
particularly unnecessary for easily copied content.

Also, they should really make sure that you can get a FLAC when you have fully
paid not just a mp3. I would not use the service for this reason alone (unless
they do actually do that and are just bad at describing it). The Bandcamp
model works better for me, I just wish they had better discovery options.

I wish Soundcloud had a way for listeners to pay particular artists, first
covering the Soundcloud fees and then the vast majority of the rest going to
the artist.

------
pier25
SC wasn't the first audio sharing website and certainly won't be the last.

IMO it has become the IMGUR for audio, and users won't pay for uploading
images to IMGUR or videos to Youtube.

Maybe SC pretends to be a storage/bandwidth reseller, but in that case it's
outrageous that it is charging $7 / month for 6 hours of audio which (at the
most) are 3.6 GB in uncompressed CD quality audio (44.1Khz/16bit). You could
argue about bandwidth costs, infrastructure, etc, but Vimeo is doing great and
its smallest plan (cheaper than SC) allows you to upload 5GB per WEEK.

~~~
lavezzi
they still stream in 128kbps, even for premium customers. It's insane.

~~~
j00lz
Agreed, this is my biggest issue with soundcloud is sub par compression that
they use which complete distorts the highs. I feel it maybe better if
soundcloud does go so thats it replacement will support better codecs.

------
jmspring
Call me cynical, but does "SoundCloud's Musical Culture" actually pertain to a
significant portion of audio over the internet?

Over the years, I've used Pandora, SomaFM (still do), Spotify and others as
well as some iTunes and my own large collection.

What is actually lost with "SoundCloud's Musical Culture" and what percentage
of the internet audio listeners does it impact?

~~~
quaz3l
Its actually more on the creative side. SoundCloud has such a low barrier to
posting and acts more as a sort of Twitter or YouTube than a playlist maker.
It allows culture to form around the community of SoundCloud, not just fans
that you advertise directly.

~~~
jmspring
If that was their key differentiator, why did they need so many engineers
especially in super expensive SF?

~~~
quaz3l
I think that was their biggest mistake. They grew too fast and took too much
money before they had any clear way to make money. If it was ran as a
sustainable business, maybe it would be around for the next 5 years.

------
nthcolumn
So how come we can have Youtube but not Soundcloud?

~~~
sitkack
Mirror every sound cloud track to youtube. Boom.

------
post_break
It moves to bandcamp?

~~~
dyeje
This seems to be the most likely outcome to me. Bandcamp and Soundcloud have
always had a huge overlap in functionality. I've always much preferred
Bandcamp anyways.

~~~
k-mcgrady
As a user of both they've always seemed like two completely different services
to me. One is streaming, the other a store. One a social sharing based
platform, the other mini-sites for each artist with terrible discovery.
Bandcamp would need to change a lot to replace SoundCloud's use case.

NB: Not shitting on Bandcamp, it's great and I use it.

------
tracker1
Does it really need to be $10-15/month, per the example though? I mean would
$12-15/year be sufficient? I don't know what their staff overhead is though,
it sounds like they have a _lot_ or people on staff.

------
nodesocket
I find it hard to believe if faced with the choice of letting SoundClound shut
down or paying $5 a month, that the SoundCloud community would not be willing
to pony up $5 a month. If that is true, that is super pathetic.

~~~
2bitencryption
the "soundcloud community" is really the 2% of users who are heavily active,
involved, and attract the other 98% of users who consume the community's
output.

I'm sure the "community" would happily pay for the service. but the other 98%
probably would not, because they just want to consume content with the least
friction. payment is friction, even a $0.05 payment.

so they follow the path of least friction and go somewhere else, some other
site that is currently in the early funding rounds, providing service for free
to ramp up as quickly as possible. then, in three years, their investors will
demand they monetize... rinse and repeat.

------
fenwick67
Are there any existing, good, self-hosted platforms for music?

Personally I've been working slowly on an self-hosted Tumblr clone, but that
doesn't have the concept of albums.

------
xori
According to SoundCloud they're aren't going anywhere.
[https://blog.soundcloud.com/2017/07/14/soundcloud-is-here-
to...](https://blog.soundcloud.com/2017/07/14/soundcloud-is-here-to-stay) how
much we believe that will depend on their next finance report.

------
cJ0th
I wonder if myspace could capitalize on soundcloud disappearing. If they learn
from the mistakes they and soundcloud made in the past than myspace could have
quite a comeback. Can't really imagine this happening, though.

------
baalimago
Where will everyone go? As a sort of active sc user i didn't even know that sc
was dieing. There are alternatives sure, but... I dunno, the "meta culture" of
new electronic music is on sc... Killing sc would be like a blow to creativity
and upcoming musicians

------
tandav
Only One Right answer: move to YouTube

~~~
forkLding
Think the issue with most SoundCloud musicians is that they either dont have
the resources to constantly make music videos or dont have enough creativity
or want to study how to make viral videos on Youtube but instead need to focus
on their music.

~~~
jononor
People put music up on YouTube with just a cover image and that's just fine
for most people.

~~~
forkLding
Thats true but ultimately the people on SoundCloud and Youtube are a different
crowd as well, Soundcloud allows annotations and is more specifically built
for music, youtube doesnt have the same features

------
pmarreck
SoundCloud was my favorite source of remixes, which I have always been a huge
fan of (although I guess that market is smallish).

No idea where I'd go next :/

I'd be reasonably happy if I could just download the tracks I've "like"'d

~~~
fragmede
If you're not trying to backup the entire site, you can save individual tracks
using youtube-dl[1].

[1] [https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/)

~~~
pmarreck
hmmm. i suppose i have to collect my cookies and give them to youtube-dl...

EDIT: Nevermind, I just opened each track individually and ydl'd the URL,
there weren't that many.

------
shams93
Why not start a web label on archive.org? Not like anyone is making money on
soundcloud, there is no upsell to archive.org its a not for profit run by
donation, a lot less likely to fall victim than a commercial service.

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honestoHeminway
Could souncloud reduce it server costs by using p2p-servers of its users..

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dcow
What happened to the subscription service? I tried giving them money--multiple
times--and it seemed like SC would forget my subscription after a few months
each time. I eventually gave up.

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ahmedfromtunis
I'm wondering how is the morale over there? How is the management responding
to all this press exposure? This must very hard on the employees left.

~~~
kakarot
From what I understand, morale has been low for a while.

[https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/inside-the-storm-at-
soundcl...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/inside-the-storm-at-soundcloud)

~~~
cannonedhamster
Yeah having a tone-deaf CEO who used the company like a piggy bank and gave no
direction certainly didn't help. He truly didn't understand what he had.

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vectorEQ
it will go to bandcamp and live happily ever after. music wont get hurt by
some buisness derpings because its not about that.

~~~
divenorth
Agreed. Nothing will happen to the music. Musicians will use a different
service. No need to back everything up. The musicians already have the files
which will be easily uploaded to a different website. And it will most likely
be bandcamp.

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Sir_Cmpwn
A decentralized solution like Mastodon/GNUSocial would be the best bet. Would
probably be pretty simple, few weekends of work.

~~~
cannonedhamster
I think the difference would be in how much server space each requires. Text
and images take up a lot, but still relatively little compared to audio, which
is dwarfed by video at the scale that this would take. It's an interesting
idea, but someone always has to pay somewhere. Maybe something like
integrating Mopidy into Mastodon/GnuSocial might work and could then piggyback
off the already created software, but I'd think it would be closer to a reddit
clone than a twitter clone.

------
Raynak
They probably just stop listening to music if it gets too hard. I haven't
bothered with anything since Grooveshark died.

------
beepboopbeep
Nooooooo! I didn't know about this until now. I love soundcloud :((((

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philfrasty
DJ @deadmau5 has some thoughts on saving SC...

[1]
[http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/dance/7866215/deadmau...](http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/dance/7866215/deadmau5-save-
soundcloud-twitter)

~~~
pwython
> "In summary, sure. I could turn the SoundCloud shitshow around with a decent
> team. But why fix someone else's fuckup after paying for it?"

> "I could turn [it] around... But why..."

Looks like he's got everything figured out... except for the business side of
things.

------
Raynak
I haven't listened to music since Grooveshark shut down.

~~~
thomasvillain
Yes, agreed. If music doesn't have some copyright infringement grunginess to
it, it's not for me. Everyone knows that the best music is made by self-taught
DJs and garage bands.

