

SoundCloud Raises $60 Million at $700 Million Valuation - aritraghosh007
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/25/soundcloud-raises-60-million-at-700-million-valuation/

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thisiswrong
SoundCloud is great. You really get the feeling that you're being empowered as
a content consumer and creator. This is because SoundCloud really doesn't give
a shit about the making people listen to what the copyright monopoly wants
people to listen to (ie J Bieber/M Cyrus). YouTube is the complete opposite.
You log onto Youtube and it feels like MTV all over again.

SoundCloud will become HUGE for this ability to empower its users in a way
that no other streaming platform has done before. But as VC money flows into
SoundCloud it will become crappy like YouTube, Deezer, Skype, Tumblr, and most
other start-ups that end-up loosing the original spirit of their founders.

~~~
blisterpeanuts
Youtube has become very commercialized, true, but you can still use it exactly
like SoundCloud, can you not? Just ignore the ads and recommendations and it's
basically the same experience.

Although, it does seem like SC is a cleaner, more targeted audio platform.

~~~
mcormier
YouTube is good for previewing but the audio quality is horrible. 128 and the
algorithm for compression makes a lot of things sound washed out.

~~~
boyaka
Part of the problem is Google's stinginess over bandwidth. They keep hiding
the stream quality option more and more (referring to Google Play Music as
well as Youtube) and they are literally RUINING the music. I've had to put
HOURS of manual effort into changing stream quality on Google's products.

~~~
e2e8
For YouTube there are great greasemonkey scripts for this. I use "YouTube Auto
Buffer & Auto HD" and "YouTube Player Size Options"

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JonnieCache
My favourite internet company. As soon as it came out, it was clear that it
was going to be a big deal. Pretty much every electronic musician I know
dumped myspace like a hot potato and eagerly started using SC. The punks took
a little longer, but they're there as well now.

All the decisions they've made since then have kept it on the right path. I've
said it here before, I think their strategy of keeping souncloud.com itself
aimed solely at creators, and having consumers come in through other sites via
the API, is genius. If the new VCs try and dissuade them from this, I will be
very sad. At least try and make any new discovery/listening features a
separate app on a separate domain, please? _" content deals with major music
labels"_ sets alarm bells ringing for me.

(Of course the cleverest part was their decision to actually _accept
substantial amounts of money from their users_ :)

EDIT: also can you use some of that money to up the streams from 128 mp3? at
least ogg or something? my tunes (link in profile ;) which I spend so long
mixing sound super-watery on there, which is a shame because that's the main
way people listen to them at this point.

~~~
return0
What i don't understand is why they haven't implemented a "buy song" or at
least "tip the artist" a-la flattr. I don't think it would degrade the
experience and would remove the hassle of setting up a separate
bandcamp/whatever page.

~~~
JonnieCache
They have that. You can fill in any url as the "buy link" and it gets linked
as "buy this track" or whatever, at the bottom of the player, next to the
download link.

Seems like kind of a stopgap, I imagine it was something users really wanted
and this was a way to do it with almost no engineering effort. Maybe an actual
retail section is part of their plans...

~~~
return0
Yes i mean selling _through_ soundcloud.

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rhizome
I'm sure it's in the plans.

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k-mcgrady
I've been using SoundCloud for several years. It's a great service and they
have a decent business model. They're actually charging for useful things
(stats, storage) meaning the don't need to shove ads down our throats. If they
start going down the road of licensing content I'm not sure exactly how that
will change the service. Will they start running ads? I hope not. If they
start licensing large amounts of music they will just become another streaming
service. At the minute they have a good thing going. They are a good place for
artists to upload promos, demos, mixes etc. and I hope that doesn't change.

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CSDude
Off-topic but it is blocked in Turkey as it contains a phone recording of PM
about a corruption. Such a succesful company, is blocked in 4 hours without a
warrant. Anyways, happy to hear the news, I know many friends using it here to
share their songs or productions.

[https://soundcloud.com/haramzadeler](https://soundcloud.com/haramzadeler) (in
Turkish)

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ddorian43
PrimeMinister? So they just block it and everything goes on?

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justincormack
Well no, thats not the only thing they have done to obstruct the corruption
enquiry, they also sacked/redeployed many of the people investigating it,
police etc.

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ddorian43
Cool. In Albania, the vice-primeminister, resigned, went to court and the
video+audio was reported "FAKE" (the court sad we don't need external(offered
by USA) experts, he was also recorded saying he was friends with the judge of
his case). He is now in power again with the party that was in opposition when
he was accused.

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strict9
SoundCloud is on my top 5 sites that I use on a daily basis, there really is
no comparison for someone who listens to electronic music.

The sad thing is that their only focus is on creators (subscribers). Customers
who only listen to music routinely get the shaft via shoddy quality assurance
and lack of discovery features.

Playback, search, browse, and discovery in general routinely fail to load
("Something went wrong. Retry?"). Playing and finding music on their platform
shouldn't be such a buggy experience given how long they've been around.

~~~
mercer
I heard SoundCloud's codebase is quite a mess (on Rails 2, I think). Maybe
they need to do some refactoring/updating...

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Keyframe
Wonderful! Anyone knows how they have tackled possible copyright issues? I
know youtube had serious trouble with it and, if I remember correctly, google
forks over lots of money each year to keep the lawsuits away. How could a
startup which isn't big as google mitigate that?

~~~
jurre
There's much less of a culture of posting other peoples work on soundcloud,
it's much more focused on letting artists share their own work.

~~~
Keyframe
Quick search yielded numerous copyright infringements. Not even remixes, plain
pirate material. So I am wondering how does it work on business side, how do
you defend from it? Same question would be appropriate for imgur too. How can
you shield yourself from it if you're a small startup with no cash? You wait
for legal papers to flow your general direction and hope for a deal?

~~~
return0
There's a copyright infringement form if you are interested. Soundcloud is not
usually used as a free music service, (although most creators allow free
downloads), it's mostly about discovering and collaborating. Even if they
removed all infringing content, my feed would be barely less interesting.

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jordhy
This sounds (no pun intended) as a very reasonable valuation for SoundCloud.
They are doing a great job and deserve every penny of those 60M.

~~~
return0
To be more precise, in the current climate, it's undervalued.

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nathancahill
Interesting. I've been using a more performant/minimalist version of
SoundCloud called SoundRad[1]. It lets you ditch the slow interface and just
listen to music. Hopefully they'll spend some of the $60M on improving
frontend performance.

[1] [http://soundrad.com/](http://soundrad.com/)

~~~
deletes
Their interface has some nice features, like stopping music in a different tab
if you start playing in another. The gui is nice as well. Unfortunately it
loads too slow, and just playing the music maxes out a cpu core and even a
part of my gpu on my modern machine. For example playing video on youtube with
hd and fullscreen, uses about a third of resources soundcloud uses.

~~~
deletes
My comments were completely regarding SoundCloud, which is Very slow.

Haven't yet tried soundrad, I will if get to use SoundCloud enough.

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Freestyler_3
I must say I am one of those listening only users. I like the like system and
the stream it creates. Only downside is since they updated their website it
doesn't seem to work smooth on opera anymore. I use the site a lot less after
that, since I will have to boot up firefox.

I like how the music of today is becoming more eclectic, less taboos on what
genre you can and cant mix. And I get new music from soundcloud, youtube
searching/discovering was never my thing but on soundcloud its easier.

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iusable
Congratulations to Alex, Eric and the team!

Great software, solid team and a really useful service. In the current
climate, this is surprisingly undervalued at $700mn.

One of those 'penalties' for being based out of the States, I guess.

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nodesocket
Love SoundCloud, literally spend 8-10 hours a day on it. Such a gold mine for
electronic dance music.

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sakopov
For the first time in a very long time I can say that this valuation is very
reasonable.

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ulfw
Awesome. Congrats to the wonderful SoundCloud team. Gut für Berlin!

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dyno12345
Most of the engineering positions are in Germany apparently?

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hyperlexic
Cool site, but $700MM?

