>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.
Of course, in all fairness (and modulo archiving by organizations like the Internet Archive), media and writing hosted on a personal web site is at least as likely to just disappear at some point. I agree with your basic point though. Any number of content sites have gone away in a manner where pretty much everything was lost.
>In a 2003 experiment, Fetterly et al. discovered that about one link out of every 200 disappeared each week from the Internet. McCown et al 2005 discovered that half of the URLs cited in D-Lib Magazine articles were no longer accessible 10 years after publication [the irony!], and other studies have shown link rot in academic literature to be even worse... Nelson and Allen... examined link rot in digital libraries and found that about 3% of the objects were no longer accessible after one year.
>Bruce Schneier remarks that one friend experienced 50% linkrot in one of his pages over less than 9 years (not that the situation was any better in 1998), and that his own blog posts link to news articles that go dead in days; Vitorio checks bookmarks from 1997, finding that hand-checking indicates a total link rot of 91% with only half of the dead available in sources like the Internet Archive; the Internet Archive itself has estimated the average lifespan of a Web page at 100 days. A Science study looked at articles in prestigious journals; they didn’t use many Internet links, but when they did, 2 years later ~13% were dead. The French company Linterweb studied external links on the French Wikipedia before setting up their cache of French external links, and found - back in 2008 - already 5% were dead. (The English Wikipedia has seen a 2010-2011 spike from a few thousand dead links to ~110,000 out of ~17.5m live links.) The dismal studies just go on and on and on (and on). Even in a highly stable, funded, curated environment, link rot happens anyway. For example, about 11% of Arab Spring-related tweets were gone within a year (even though Twitter is - currently - still around).
>My specific target date is 2070, 60 years from now... Even at the lowest estimate of 3% annual linkrot, few will survive to 2070. If each link has a 97% chance of surviving each year, then the chance a link will be alive in 2070 is... ≈0.16 (or to put it another way, an 84% chance any given link will die)... If we try to predict using a more reasonable estimate of 50% linkrot, then an average of 0 links will survive... It would be a good idea to simply assume that no link will survive.
Until relatively recently it wasn't expected that everything would stand the test of time.
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNhFJjGcMPqpuYfxL62VVB9528NXqDNMFXiqN5...
Most probably housed spam, but some probably housed at least some work of value.
When Grooveshark died, that set of original music spun by the DJs was essentially lost- which sucked because that was my go-to for "work music". I've only started to find the tracks again, some on soundcloud, YouTube, etc.
Worst part is, the guys responsible for the music station, which was definitely growing, hasn't done much to start again. It's understandable, when you think of how difficult it is to grow a brand from nothing.
He's jumped from platform to platform until he just decided to do it himself.
It was the content that kept me coming back. Mostly the radio shows like WritheM and Electro Chill.
Now a couple of them are developing their own solution. I sorta stopped following them after a while, but you've reminded me to check their progress.
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.
If you choose to centralize distribution on one web server that is your own choice, but the better phrase is "digital distribution is free if you want it to be".
I doubt we will see a return to pay-to-listen models in music. Reality has taken too big of a bite around the copyright extortion ring surrounding sine waves. The future of music is in patronage, merchandising, and live performances - which really, it has always been. Only extremely rare unicorn performers ever have the stars align to be able to monetize their music itself (in the past it was making it big with a label, today last decade it was topping itunes) while we are seeing the rise of music as a viable profession without extraordinary fame as long as you can provide a niche and be good at it, you can attract enough whale fans to support you regardless of if the tracks themselves are free - your real audience is those that not only want what you already made, but want you to continue to make.
Remember, as in all things IP, it is not the actual music file that is scarce or expensive to produce, it is the idea behind the music that took an artist hours or days to hand craft into a digital creation. The first iteration was the expensive one - all other ones are effectively free. It is essential that going forward we culturally recognize the distinction and move to seek sustainable business models around the former rather than the later, which we only invented as an imperfect way to translate ideas into the physical goods market back when they were less distinct than they are now (ie, costs of distribution did exist for paper books, so pigeonholing writing into markets via copyright was a reasonable train of thought when per-unit costs still existed and thus people could not effortlessly propagate the information on an individual basis).
From the article it sounds like their main cost is paying a ton of people a lot of money.
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.
The question is how this income is split between the services (which deservedly should be profitable) and the musicians.
Art has always had a shady connection to commerce in which the gatekeepers tend to profit more than the artists themselves.
Salaries dominate many or most business costs.
There might be a way to monetize sharing digital content using some micropayment system like you say. Though I think that will have to come about after the current players have left or been marginalized as they don't care so much about helping the artists make a living, instead wanting to maintain control so they can get the money.
I'm kind of baffled that SoundCloud isn't already raking in profits. Presumably their stakeholders simply haven't pushed for profitability yet.
You're not understating this. As a lifelong electronic music fan who has discovered some fantastic new remixes on SoundCloud over the years, the disappearance of SoundCloud would be a large cultural loss.
Even if one is not a fan of that sort of music, surely one could empathize.
EXAMPLE: https://soundcloud.com/moonchild/04-love-birds-vengeance-rem...
To put it another way, SoundCloud at its core is a free streaming site, and it also allows free downloads if enabled by the music act. There is no way I know of to set up SoundCloud for paid downloads or streams. Thus, using Bandcamp, Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, Tidal, Google, Deezr (etc) are wise to capture a modest revenue stream and listener data in ways SoundCloud simply doesn't support.
SoundCloud a lot more like Facebook than it is iTunes: socially important, great for sharing, a way for something to go viral - all important angles in modern business, sure. Is it such a monolith that I'm worried about its future? Not really; it'd be sad to watch it crumble (further, in some respects) but that doesn't seem likely for at least a couple more years. Lots can change.
This obviously isn't the _only_ type of artist on SoundCloud, but they're a huge part of what makes SoundCloud culturally significant.
The simple truth of reality is that a lot of music is only available through soundcloud.
Smart? No. But it's how things really are.
While we can't archive all the content, the folk at the Internet Archives* are put heroic efforts in preserving the notable content. If Soundcloud doesn't make it, I hope they at least work with the Internet Archive to preserve the data.
Anyway, who cares. What about the last ten thousand years of content that nobody gives a shit about.
And if something I made only exists on Soundcloud, I either don't really care or I'm a bit stupid.
For most of our history nearly everything we thought, said and did was ephemeral. Not recorded and then gone. We've become pack-rats. We're at the beginning of technology civilization and already we have amassed so much that for any major genre of music there exists more content than a human being could consume in a lifetime.
And the vast majority of it is, at best, unremarkable.
I think we are wired for worrying about losing information because it used to be a disaster. We used to be terrible at recording information. We're not anymore. Oh boy are we not. We'll just make more. Or we'll repeat whatever process brought us there.
And if it can't be repeated you now have the rarest and most unique gift: a cultural experience that only exists in the memory of those present.
Imagine the storage space we as a civilization are going to use for storing worthless shit just in the next 100 years.
While not so straightforward, applying DJBooth.net's money-making viewpoint of non-intrusive angle ads or more creatively publishing short-span addictive games on the website Indie gamers can play while listening to Indie Music should start a path to a defining solution.
And that is why everyone keeps backups of their work on their personal sites, right?
I recently came back upon it and couldn't find it on the internet, so I uploaded it to YouTube for posterity [0].
It's amazing that in something so massive like the internet, a single mp3 file can be almost lost forever. It really shows how important sites like archive.org are.
I don't know. We would obviously loose a fragment of history but if those tracks were so important culturally then they would have been distributed more widely. For instance, pressed on CD or vinyl or utilized in a movie or pirated in some way.
While I do like soundcloud I don't get what's so special about it. My hunch is that it is not so much the website but the fact that the internet is mainstream these days. There were websites where artists could share their music and have a profile before Soundcloud. Just to name a few: Besonic, mp3.com, myownmusic ...
In this way, I think it's also unique vs. other music sharing sites, in that people don't typically post their recording of a Chinese night market on their CDBaby or YouTube channel ...
Soundcloud:sound :: Flickr:photos
> saying that anything of value is released on CD already would be like saying that the personal correspondence of Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, etc is worthless because we already have their published books.
No, not at all. What I meant to imply is that if something is of worth culturally then at least some people would put some effort in keeping it alive. Like I said, it needn't be a CD. A pirated rip that is spread over bit torrent would be just as good.
The bible is still around because people painstakingly copied it not because some single entity kept one copy alive for good.
As far as general sounds are concerned, there are other places like freesound.org or archive.org. Thus I don't think soundlcoud has a monopoly on sound.
That said, a huge number of works that people create have always ended up in the trash, thrown out, or archived only in a few obscure places. What makes it a bit frustrating with digital is that it's relatively practical to save so much more--if perhaps not necessarily everything that's even been posted to a public site--but few really good mechanisms (or funding) to do so.
Would it be really? Most of it wasn't even heard by more than 200 people in the first place.
For something to be a "tremendous cultural loss" it should not just a cultural artifact, it should also have had cultural impact (mass appreciation or influence) to begin with.
Edit: Downvote all you want! Relying on a ubiqutous but unsustainable platform qualifies as oops.
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.
The issues with the UI/UX are obvious and there are clear ways to improve on the situation. A number of people have done unsolicited Soundcloud redesigns, but there was an excellent one in December 2014 that is worth taking a look at:
https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/redesig...
In addition to showcasing a beautiful, thoughtful redesign, this post makes a series of criticisms that are both justified and still in urgent need of rectification. For example, in the stream:
* It’s hard to discern which song is playing.
* Only three to five songs are visible at once.
* The Stream doesn’t automatically scroll.
* The avatars [of commenters] on the waveform are virtually meaningless.
* Reloading the Stream is slow and clunky.
I would really hate to lose Soundcloud, as a long time fan of electronic music (going on 20 years now!) it's been a big part of my life for years now and I love it.
Also, their iOS app doesn't cache songs. The lack of caching on its own has forced me to go back to Spotify for 99% of my music. I'm not about to pay $80/month for data just for Soundcloud.
Recent versions of the app have removed this setting entirely, and from the behaviour I've noticed indicates that no caching is taking place on the phone.
Which honestly is just really stupid from an operations stand point. Why is there any point to transferring hundreds of megabytes of songs on a playlist over and over? Bandwidth isn't free for users, or SoundCloud's CDN.
This is why I have started to download music from SoundCloud more, and consuming it offline with VLC. It's pretty easy to do, even if SoundCloud doesn't offer the download button.
----
Here, start from my own (extremely crude, for personal use, not for public consumption) "Soundcloud User Unpaginator":
Source: https://github.com/gadtfly/Soundcloud-User-Unpaginator/
Running: https://soundcloud-user-unpaginator.herokuapp.com/ (warning: heavy, totally synchronous, server-side blocking, on Heroku free tier)
Could be easily modified to download instead of list, if you want an archive.
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...
Come to think about it, isn't that how most other social feeds handle this problem?
I miss the Friday nights spent working on music in Ableton, rendering a clip and posting to soundcloud, then commenting/giving feedback to friends who had just done the same. I made several friends by searching genre tags I was interested in, and following people who I would also trade feedback with. Soundcloud (or at least the little bubble in which my friends and I used it) used to be much more about the "work in progress" than the finished results.
Now I only post polished mixes of arrangements or melodies I'm proud of. Nothing that I'd like criticism on, because I know some of my family and non-musician friends will see the tracks and say something. I've gone from posting 4 times a day, to once every 4 months. Maybe going back there isn't a good business decision for Soundcloud, but the "magic" is just gone for me with it's current experience.
I see a lot of complaints about stagnation on SoundCloud, and while I'm not a user, I completely understand the frustration that brings.
There's a new kid on the block with these kind of services, clyp.it. I liken them to imgur for audio, focusing around music for the most part.
They've got strong ties to the community and even have some big names using their tool like Eric Clapton.
The community aspects are still being worked out, but I know they're actively looking for feedback to help build that out to be the best it can be.
If you check them out and have suggestions, I know they'd love to hear it (There's a link to their twitter on their site)
The last major attempt at "improving" UI/UX that stands out to me was in 2014 when they launched the redesigned iOS app.
That was when I stopped using soundcloud on my iOS devices. Everything became more difficult for me.
Yeah, probably at the point when they started hemorrhaging money. Why do people expect a company that is dying to focus on UI improvements? Like any other business in the world, their focus is on staying alive.
You mean, stealing content from others, right?
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".
KPMG said in the report that the need for more investment represented “a material uncertainty which may cast significant doubt on the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”
And again, this was in their 2014 report. So clearly they've last more than a year at this point.
From your link: "This accounting principle assumes that, a company will continue to exist long enough to carry out its objectives and commitments and will not liquidate in the foreseeable future."
And the quote from the auditor is significant, auditors don't put that kind of thing in unless they have to as it annoys their customers to be reminded that there's significant concern over their ability to continue operations.
For all we know Soundcloud was profitable last year. Maybe it's not likely.. but the article has no information at all on last year, yet they feel comfortable making this statement.
The auditor statement is standard boilerplate. It applies to every company that is losing money. That's right -- if the company is losing money, they may need to raise money in the future to continue. No kidding.
This is data point #8794390820385 that the bubble has been pricked.
And then the state takes about 40% of the actual paycheck in taxes and social payments. Teslas and Mercedeses are not the car of the file-and-rank employees if that ~80k was the full company expense per employee.
80% of the tracks on my account are private. I mostly use Soundcloud as a musical post-it system so I can easily listen to my productions in different settings (car, friend's hifi system, earphones etc.), share tracks with label in a "secure" fashion.
I was really saddened to see they introduced ads even for people who actually pay for their service, I felt literally betrayed and angry but fortunately it did not last long. However it leaves traces.
I still find it amazing that they did not introduce basic filters for the stream, like "just grab house mixes at least 45 minutes long"...
Anyway, I am still quite happy with the service even if I could do the same on my own dedicated server, minus the social network thing.
I just wish them good luck but I hope that their longevity will not be due to ads served even to subscribers...
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.
However, during commute, the ratio of mobile use I observe is roughly 95:5. Why? Because one of the apps automatically downloads all morning news for offline reading at 6am.
Design is how it works.
You can use playlists to save collections of tracks
I'd prefer to have a screen that can sort my saved tracks in a meaningful way.
Source: I work at competitor, and iTunes blocked the Download functionality from our app - until we made a few changes.
A slide deck about SoundCloud [2] explains that "builders" are the design, engineering and product teams, "operators" are finance, HR and legal, and "pushers" are the platform, community, content and marketing teams.
[1] https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/06343600/filing-h... [2] http://www.slideshare.net/dagrobie/16-months-soundcloud/5-Or...
Those who do not have to account for their productivity (like managers, accountants, and marketers) are probably in excess.
I've worked in a place that built and shipped 3 or 4 product lines: actual physical hardware with software, and did it with fewer than 50 people, most of them on the manufacturing line.
Wow, that is ridiculously high, especially so for Berlin.
edit: grammar
grrr. Now I really have to figure this out.
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.
Joke aside, it is a great place to find free music. I am not surprised that it is more popular in countries I would assume does not have the same availability of streaming services.
Since I'm from Sweden I've been living the life with Spotify and similar services for years but still I've found myself go to SoundCloud to find the music which I cannot find on Spotify.
Seems like a pretty generous wage increase for a company in the red.
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.
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.
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
Given the involvement of big investors, it seems extremely unlikely that SoundCloud would shut down rather than raise another round or get acquired.
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).
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.
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.
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://techcrunch.com/2016/01/24/why-soundcloud-will-be-wort...
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.
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.
Apart from that; yeah, it is the Flickr of music -- promising at first, but then a whole lot of non-evolution of the site.
Edit: typo
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.
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.
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?
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.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fcb06850-c66e-11e5-808f-8231c...
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.
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.
Soundcloud's mobile app is terrible though, randomly freezing and crashing. Wonder if poor engagement through the app contributed to the this loss posting.
What's the difference between "operational existence" and "continue operating" here?
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.
Nostalgic, now.
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.
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?
We are trying to solve some of the biggest problems of music industry with PindropMusic
https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/pindropmusic/id1042553162?mt...
doesn't sound like the right monetization approach
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.
