
SoundCloud raises $75M from SiriusXM - theomega
https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/11/music-streaming-pioneer-soundcloud-raises-75m-from-pandora-owner-siriusxm
======
UI_at_80x24
When I was a truck driver, Satellite Radio was practically a necessity. Sure I
loaded up my ipod with music, but the selection was too damn limited and I
would tire of hearing the same songs over & over again.

The best case scenario for FM radio (when you would finally find something
that you could tolerate) was 1 hour. 1 hour of variety to stave off bordem and
try to save your sanity. The effective range of the FM signal bubble was
around 75 miles/120km. If you were unlucky 'Seek/Scan' button would be broken
on the radio. Most radios in company supplied trucks were very shitty.

MY favorite times would be at night and manually adjusting the AM reception
and picking up stations from all over the world. Trying to discern their
location based on the commercials.

Sat. radio offered me consistency. It was wholly replaced once I discovered
that audiobooks could be downloaded (and not cumbersome audio-cassettes).

Then as the years passed the variety on the stations offered diminished to the
point that it seemed like they were playing the same 5-6 over & over again.

Mergers happened. Personal audio players got better. I could download enough
books to keep me entertained for a month AND have music playlists that saved
my sanity.

So I cancelled.

I STILL miss 'Spa Radio' channel73(?) when I am driving in hectic or tense
traffic. That always enhanced my calm.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
I actually find Sirius frustrating for long road trips or commutes; most of
the channels repeat their content every 6 or 7 or 8 hours. I often find the
same programming on my home journey that was on when I was on the way in. Many
news type channels like BBC endlessly repeat every hour.

Having a pile of podcasts and audiobooks ready at hand makes long drives on
ski trips much more tolerable to me... But I do keep the Sirius subscription
around just for NPR and BBC...

~~~
hermitdev
I also found Sirius frustrating in the same manner. Except for me, it was my
daily commute. I could set the clock by the playlist. I only listened to 2
channels and for some reason, the traffic updates to my car stopped working.
When they wanted something like $400 to renew for 1 year, I said fuck off.

~~~
heywire
A tip for anyone reading here — SiriusXM will gladly give you a year of
service for $60+fees (about $74 last time for me). You don’t even need to
threaten to cancel. Every year I call, tell them it is too expensive, but I’d
stay if they give me the same price, and they always do. Something like the
last 10 years...

------
mojuba
I feel like I'm in the minority of those who love SoundCloud. It's one the
very few places for indie music makers and DJs to showcase their work that
otherwise may not necessarily be published via the official publishing
channels. That includes e.g. long running DJ mixes, not exactly the type of
material for the official release bureaucracy and associated costs.

The only problem with SoundCloud is that instead of following the Spotify
model, i.e. get listeners to pay for listening, they could have done it the
other way around: get makers pay some nominal fee for hosting. Which they kind
of did in the beginning but gradually drifted towards the listener-
subscription model. As a paid music hosting service they'd at least provide an
alternative for specific class of artists, i.e. those who make music for the
love of it and want to be heard via unofficial channels.

SC failed to become one. They've had some back and forth and experimentation
with pricing and subscription models over the years but never settled at
anything targeted clearly and unambiguously. The current offerings are
confusing and inconvenient for all classes of users. There's now an all-time
upload limit for non-paying makers, and ads for non-paying users. What's the
point of this? Getting both makers and listeners pay you? Sounds like a poor
plan to me, that leads to nowehere.

~~~
golergka
> That includes e.g. long running DJ mixes, not exactly the type of material
> for the official release bureaucracy and associated costs.

Mixcloud does a much better job at this.

~~~
morrbo
Mixcloud is great however the people in charge seem to be intent on killing
the platform with bad ideas. I say this as a huge fan and a paying customer
(premium user).

The android app is horrible. They used to have 10-30 minutes of cache time,
now they have 0. You go under a tunnel, on the tube, whatever, and your stream
cuts out. Also lots of UI bugs. This might have gotten better but I wouldn't
know as I am on an older version of the app and refuse to upgrade due to no
more caching.

You have to pay to rewind stuff apparently (I do pay so have never been
impacted here)

Search is horrible, even now.

Web has some major bugs like randomly reloading half the page when you scroll
down your feed and click listen to something. Old app has some ridiculous UI
bugs, can't comment on the newer ones though.

Mixcloud select may have been done with the best intentions, but it's just a
bunk idea. Half of my feed is now "select" stuff I can't listen to. The idea
is you pay the individual artist and get premium features. But the select
costs a fair bit of money, a lot more than id be willing to pay. Effectively,
even as a paying user I'm now being paywalled. They should have kept the stuff
free and heavily integrated with patreon or done a tipping style platform.

Sorry for the long rant but I figure this is a chance to actually have someone
from team mixcloud potentially read some actual feedback that they're probably
sheltered from normally.

~~~
Plyphon_
> You have to pay to rewind stuff apparently

This is true. It is also the worst piece of hostile-UX I've ever seen. I'd
love to have seen the Product Designer and Product Manager tie this one back
to revenue forecasts. Who knows, maybe its a huge converter?

It just seems overly hostile to me, as if thats the only way they could think
to increase revenue - instead of, you know, working on their core value
proposition.

~~~
Larrikin
When I discovered mixcloud, this was described as a "feature" that essentially
turned them into radio which allowed them to have much more generous licensing
terms with the labels. It allowed small DJs to essentially upload mixes
containing none of their own music. At the time it made sense and may still be
true to an extent, but SoundCloud is far more popular and seems to have become
much more lax in their policy of long form audio.

I've only lost one mix in my favorites in the past few years and that was the
rare good mix I found consisting solely of popular rap.

Pretty much everything else I listen to on there is EDM and most of the time
they are DJs uploading sets they played for money at huge festivals. I only
lose those when the artist removes music to force people to listen to their
new stuff. In those situations it makes an easy filter for who to unfollow
since if the new stuff was any good they wouldn't need to remove the old
stuff.

~~~
senorjazz
> When I discovered mixcloud, this was described as a "feature" that
> essentially turned them into radio which allowed them to have much more
> generous licensing terms with the labels

Fairly sure that was only applied to some locations.

------
kevinherron
Wait, what?

I’m already surprised SiriusXM is still somehow around, let alone that they
have $75 million to invest in another company and not that they’re taking $75
million to stay afloat...

~~~
eric_cc
SiriusXM has no competition in the satellite radio space as far as I know.

~~~
kingbirdy
It used to be that Sirius and XM were two separate companies providing
competing services. Unfortunately in 2008 the US DoJ allowed them to merge on
the basis that FM & internet radio were sufficient competition.

~~~
nolok
Is the DOJ ever denying merger anymore though? European here so probably
biased but I feel like US regulatory tools have taken a serious step back the
last 15 / 20 years

~~~
tdhoot
The DOJ sued to stop the merger of AT&T and Time Warner (DOJ lost). The DOJ
sued to stop the merger of T-Mobile and AT&T when they tried a few years back
(AT&T backed down). It also sued to stop the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint
(DOJ settled).

------
braindongle
Yes! Soundcloud, to me, _is_ meritocracy in music today. Are they, will they,
be as evil as everyone else in sneakily selling personal data? Sure, that's
beside the point; a society-wide problem. Soundcloud provides a direct
connection between fully independent music creators and an audience, large or
small. If my music were _that_ good, I would blow up on Soundcloud, at some
scale. Disagree? Ask Billie Eilish what she thinks of Soundcloud.

~~~
mojuba
So what does Billie Eilish think of SoundCloud?

~~~
kamikaz1k
"Soundcloud is the only reason I am anything. 100%. We are in a time where
anyone can make music which is so dope and Soundcloud is the only reason we
can all do this."

[https://omr.com/en/billie-eilish-omr-podcast/](https://omr.com/en/billie-
eilish-omr-podcast/)

------
cyberferret
And they still haven't fixed the bug that doesn't let you drag and drop to
rearrange the songs in your 'Spotlight' list on your profile in Chrome. I
reported it about 6 years ago, and repeatedly re-report it at least every 12
months. Hopefully some of this $75M goes towards a competent javascript
programmer for their frontend.

~~~
seppin
They should give you a refund.

~~~
cyberferret
Yep - I've been a Pro plan member since almost the beginning (Spotlight is a
PRO only feature), so this isn't me simply railing against a +free+ service.
BTW this bug totally crashes Chrome - all tabs, not just the tab that SC is
open on, so it does cause a massive hit on my productivity whenever it
happens.

------
subpixel
I just listen to the streams of the radio stations I love:

WWOZ - New Orleans gold mine, especially 2 week audio archive

KCRW - live + curated streams

Cultura Brasil - a curated, updated stream of Brazilian music

BR Heimat - odd, but I find corny alpine brass bands a great working
soundtrack

WKHR - a high school radio station in Cleveland where old people play 78rpm
records

~~~
myself248
Oooh, I might have to check out that WKHR! I get WAHS over the air here, it's
likewise a high school with a bunch of music programs throughout the day. No
screaming ads, just the occasional PSA, and the DJs genuinely care about the
music. It's a breath of fresh air.

------
S_A_P
I stopped liking soundcloud when I realized that 99.999999% of my followers
are bots. I dont need a bunch of followers that mean nothing. I would rather
have 0 than 100 fake followers.

I also realized that at my production rate, its cheaper to just use Distrokid
and throw things out on iTunes than to hope for discovery on soundcloud. Now I
just use sound cloud to distribute examples of hardware mods or how a piece of
gear sounds. no more music...

~~~
csunbird
I am interested in what are the benefits of following people, since (by your
definition) bots are following random people, there must be an incentive for
it.

~~~
RandomBacon
People pay for followers (bots). To make the bots look more organic rather
than 10,000 bots only following the same handful of people that paid for
followers, the bots will also follow random people.

------
liminal
Soundcloud is the only music service I happily pay for even though I really
don't need to. There aren't enough ads to justify giving them money, so it's
really just because if they went away I'd lose access to all the best music

~~~
non-entity
I paid for Soundcloud for a while. Unfortunately I ended up cancelling for two
reasons. For one, with Soundcloud Go+, I'm supposed to be able to listen to
albums, artists, songs that arent independent soundcloud artists, but for some
reason, albums that were available on just about any other streaming platform
from US artists, weren't available in my country. Secondly, there's no volume
normalization, which I understand why, but it gets annoying having to re-
adjust the volume constantly because I had to turn it all the way up to hear
one song while the next will nearly blow my ears on that level.

------
adamcccc
Eh? The last I heard was the Soundcloud was going bust and letting all it's
employees go?

...I'm so out of the loop

~~~
Minor49er
It's another modern tech company that hemorrhages money with no return. All
they do is lose cash, but they're popular. Compare this to Bandcamp, which has
a great UI, no bots, and generates revenue. Yet it's less popular by
comparison.

Just take a look at this article from 3 years ago titled "SoundCloud is losing
a lot of money — is an acquisition coming soon?":
[https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/8/14206830/soundcloud-
possib...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/8/14206830/soundcloud-possible-
acquisition-streaming-music-google)

Get big and cash out

~~~
devmunchies
Bandcamp is a great service, but I wouldn't say its a great product. I will
get emails saying that an artist released a new album, but when i check my
feed it doesn't show up. I have to go to that artist's page directly
sometimes. The feed system is buggy, and that's an important part of a music
app for discoverability. And the mobile app still doesn't allow me to save
offline, last I checked, also important for a music app when streaming on the
road.

------
devmunchies
Soundcloud should have been the Patreon for indie musicians. You get artists
making money on it and they will double down. They need exponential growth,
and for a consumer facing company that means community led growth.

They can still do it. There isn't much competition there, Bandcamp and Gumroad
aren't dominating.

------
have_faith
Tangentially related. I hadn't heard of SiriusXM before so checked out their
website. The homepage is a bit confusing and I'm not 100% sure what it is or
why I need to pay separately if I listen inside or outside of a car? I get
that it's a music streaming service of sorts just not sure what their angle is
exactly. Spotify for instance doesn't care where I listen to the music I'm
just paying to stream it wherever I want.

~~~
freeone3000
They run a constellation of satellites such that satellite receivers, mounted
commonly in cars, can receive programming for music. The internet offering is
a new thing.

~~~
hermitdev
> The internet offering is a new thing.

It's not a new thing. It's a _newer_ thing. It's been around for years. I used
subscribe 4-5 years ago so I could get commentary on soccer games while I was
watching in a pub (w/ no audio).

------
gdsdfe
SoundCloud is getting worse by the day, I just don't understand why they're
not doing the obvious to monetize and get better

~~~
HelloFellowDevs
What is the obvious?

~~~
fnord123
Putting in ads between every $SOME_NUMBER of plays.

~~~
tin7in
They do that, at least in Europe

~~~
fnord123
I think that's only on mobile apps because when I listen to mixes at work I
have never heard an ad.

------
mgerb
Maybe they can finally open up their app registration to 3rd party developers
now. It has been down for like 3 years.

[https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfNxc82RJuzC0DnISat...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfNxc82RJuzC0DnISat7n4H-G7IsPQIdaMpe202iiHZEoso9w/closedform)

------
_hardwaregeek
There's a lot of up and coming artists on SoundCloud. I could totally see them
selling a service that replaces record labels for artists starting out. Stuff
like helping with mixing and sound quality, basic advertising and branding,
maybe booking a few shows. If SoundCloud became like an incubator or
accelerator for artists, they could get some top artists early. Billie Eilish
for instance started on SoundCloud. Imagine if SoundCloud, having access to
all their streaming data, noticed the song Ocean Eyes blowing up and offered
14 year old Billie Eilish a contract. They'd have made millions by now.

Plus it's not like you need to invest a shitton into up and coming artists.
Most of them need a band, some recording studio hours, and some marketing. The
marketing is probably the most expensive one, but SoundCloud has easy, free
marketing: put the artist on the front page. If SC did this for maybe 25-50
artists a year, they could easily get a Billie Eilish or a mumble rapper or
two. It's not like there's many other places to post music as a young artist.

Edit: Or even if SoundCloud can't act as a record label for fear of stepping
on actual record labels, they can still build a solid referral relationship.
They have the ultimate first look deal.

------
m00dy
Berlin Underground music scene appreciates this.

~~~
parthdesai
More like underground electronic music scene, but I get what you're saying. I
listen to a lot of sets and they are exclusively available on SoundCloud only.

~~~
m00dy
In my case, Berlin means electronic music only.

------
nojvek
SiriusXM has deals with a whole bunch of dealerships. A new car comes with
SiriusXM. Even rental cars have deals. I remember heartz had a dark pattern of
including SiriusXM and charging almost as much as GPS for $10/day unless
customer explicitly asked to cancel it.

SiriusXM use every tactic in their book to convert and retain customers. In
the age of Spotify and Apple Music, their charges don’t quite make sense.

I cancelled mine because satellite reception was poorer than FM and I just
didn’t see the point. They spammed me pretty hard for 6 months and gave me all
sorts of offers. The product isn’t worth it.

------
vonseel
I once totaled a car that had SiriusXM and didn't realize until 1-2 years
later that I was still getting charged (annually) for the subscription.

I think they reversed some of the charges when I finally noticed and called to
explain the situation. It was _very easy_ to overlook when you've just had a
car accident and had to deal with insurance and buying a new car and all of
that.

------
huffmsa
#2020YearOfAudio

The year of Luigi returns. First Spotify, now the satellite radio company.

Makes sense though. Easy way to get access to new music.

------
elbelcho
I feel like sentiment around soundcloud is a little mixed these days, but I'm
glad to see that they're still financially viable enough to attract capital.
Would be pretty bummed to lose all my playlists and likes if they went under.

------
person_of_color
Artists like Das Racist have their EPs on SoundCloud but not Spotify.

It drives me insane.

------
petercooper
Maybe they'll be able to re-open their API program which has been closed to
new applications for years now due to a "high amount of requests" ;-)

------
salvagedcircuit
This can only be good news. SoundCloud is one of the last few experimental-
artist platforms, kind of like the myspace music scene before myspace got big.

------
k__
Most artists I like prefer BandCamp to SoundCloud.

~~~
devmunchies
That's only because the make money on it. If soundcloud can figure out how to
get listeners to pay more money, then more will go to the artists. I'm leaning
towards a patreon model like I mentioned in another comment.

I've been paying for the SoundCloud Go+ plan ($9.99/mo) since November 2016,
which I match when I buy 1-2 albums on Bandcamp. Its not enough. I would
gladly subscribe to some artists and pay $5/mo.

------
malthaus
Not sure what to think of this. SoundCloud has run its course and should just
die, leaving space for a new player. There are some around but they can't gain
critical traction due to the stickiness of SoundCloud despite having a product
which has increasingly gotten worse over time.

For an audio platform, the audio quality is subpar. Terrible discovery. Too
many bots & marketing-spammers. No direct monetization scheme for artists.
Terrible mobile app (at least on iOS). etc.

~~~
nikisweeting
I completely disagree on almost every point. As a daily SoundCloud user, the
discovery is a mile above and beyond every other platform I've tried,
including Apple Music and Spotify. SoundClouds weekly "The Upload" playlist
has more good music in it than any other automatic playlist I follow, I cant
even remember the last time it had a song on it I didn't like. I'm not sure
how some people get such a different experience, maybe only long-time users
get the good discovery experience because they've provided the algorithms with
more data about their preferences?

My one gripe is that you can only follow 2,000 people! WTH Soundcloud, why
place such an arbitrary maximum? It's clearly not a hard limit because
occasionally I can glitch my way up to more followers by clicking the button
dozens of times (I'm at 2010 now).

~~~
playing_colours
A very curious bug, could you make it more than 2001-2002?

The limit on follower can be an related to a typical problem with building
activity feeds on scale : push vs / with pull.

~~~
nikisweeting
So solve it the way Twitter and Reddit have solved it, by choosing a different
random subset of 200 of your follows to consider on every pageload.

------
justlexi93
I can't believe that they still exist, I use to have an account on SoundCloud
but I don't use it anymore.

------
thiscatis
There's a sentence I would never have guessed I would read. Makes sense
though.

------
jimmySixDOF
someone say a little prayer for 8tracks

one of the nails in their coffin was when SoundCloud cut them off

[https://blog.8tracks.com/](https://blog.8tracks.com/)

------
m00dy
looks like new CEO is doing his job properly.

------
moviuro
[https://outline.com/yhGKb2](https://outline.com/yhGKb2) \-- GDPR, and
otherwise reader respect.

~~~
black_puppydog
Ever since techcrunch implemented their GDPR "conforming" cookie "banner" I
refuse to open their site. Can we have a guideline that says "link will be
replaced if target site follows dark patterns and same quality content is
available elsewhere"?

