Soundcloud could be forced to close after massive losses...

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GeckoYamori wrote:
VitaminD wrote:I miss MP3.com in the late 90s. They had charts for various genres and thus sections for different genres. New songs could be found in their own list. Could create CDs for a % of sale price. Payola program for number of listens (I made almost 11 bucks -- which I subsequently never received by not cashing out apparently). And a featured songs list if you wanted to pay for listing.

One could also design their page to a degree.. it was neat.

I suspect most of that went into bandcamp.com when mp3c died.
I also remember the "golden age" of mp3.com. All of these services inevitably seem to go through the same cycle. Eventually in some misguided pursuit of growth they seem more interested in catering to the traditional record labels, often at the expense of marginalizing the smaller indepenant one who originally came to define the site. And then their brand just slip into total irrelevance as their original userbase abandons them for greener pastures, and the kind of mainstream audience who listens to the artists from the big labels already have other outlets for that kind of consumption, so their service is now just pointless and superfluous.
precisely.

too bad too.. I would really like to see a late 90s/early 2000s site like mp3c come around. The top40 charts were fun, and I found a lot of music I probably wouldn't have normally went for otherwise through the new songs list and just randomly clicking through genre categories.

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chaosWyrM wrote:1. ulpoading isnt a "feature" its a necessary function or the site doesnt work at all. thats like saying an engine and wheels are "features" of a car. when a MAJOR (the main) point of contact for an artist to their fan base is through facebook, removing that point of contact is quite a big issue.
Is it really such a big issue? I checked few of the Facebook pages (now that is painful service to use without logging in) of some of the artists I follow on SC and surprise, they link their new music to Soundcloud. It appears to work for a lot of people but you. Too much work?
chaosWyrM wrote: 2...oh whats the point? you continually state that you dont use the site as an artist but rather a consumer...how then are you supposed to understand? suffice to say that for the past 3 years artists have been bemoaning the changes taking place at soundcloud. as of late (since other services have begun to take the place of sc) artists are bailing on soundcloud like crazy. i guess you think theres no reason for that? if you have no point of reference for the complaints why do you insist they arent valid?
How am I supposed to understand? Because just like I said when I entered this conversation, I disagree with your whole point that it is or at least should be just for artists. The artists would have no audience if it wasn't for music lovers like myself. That's my point of reference. And from what I gather, many of your complaints aren't valid; playlists work, spotlights work (paid only?), people can link to SC from Facebook, comments work. Even the crappy sound quality serves as a reminder to buy the music -- if it is available and interesting enough.

And people leaving Soundcloud en masse? I'm just not convinced. DJs are probably leaving it, since they can't upload their music (mixtapes) there as easily anymore. Though I got an exception for that as well in my own stream, a radioshow uploaded today -- the guy removes them always when the next show comes and moves the old ones to Mixcloud. Not too interested in mixtapes myself.

And as for big name artists, people who are paid for by Sony and UMG etc, to be honest, I don't really even care. Cleaning them out only makes for a less commerce-driven music experience.

From my ever-feeding stream and growing list of people to follow, it just isn't true for me that artists (or labels, promoters) are leaving. But maybe it is indeed genre-specific, or some sort of snobbery from some people (expecting things the service isn't).

chaosWyrM wrote:so long soundcloud, it was nice knowin' ya.
Yea, good riddance then. And good luck convincing your, um, choice consumers, to join yet another service so they can interact with you with six word sentences. And phpBB forum operators to add support for their player, if they provide one.

Looks slick though, that hearthis.at one. Not much momentum for me personally, can't find any artists I know from there. Random mixtapes and downloads of music the uploader most certainly doesn't have the right to upload (not that I tried, would need to register).


For the time being Soundcloud remains best for me as a music listener and it might as well be the place for me to upload stuff when it's time for that again. I hope the news of their demise are greatly exaggerated.

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trimph1 wrote:Has anyone had any experience with Reverbnation?
Yeah, I've had two RN accounts for many years and, while it has some neat features, it's overly complicated IMO. The beauty of Soundcloud IMO was (is still?) its simplicity and interactivity (e.g., commenting, sharing), whereas RN is more like a really bloated version of what MySpace used to be. That said, RN has pretty much stayed true to its paradigm of providing a showcase for indie artists, rather than trying to focus on listeners.
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honestly, mp3 sites for indie artist never last long-- mp3.com, garageband, etc they always get bought out and dumped
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re: the charts, I think this is a new feature at Soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/charts/

A bit too much of Bob Marley in the reggae charts for my taste, though ..

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ras.s wrote:
chaosWyrM wrote:1. ulpoading isnt a "feature" its a necessary function or the site doesnt work at all. thats like saying an engine and wheels are "features" of a car. when a MAJOR (the main) point of contact for an artist to their fan base is through facebook, removing that point of contact is quite a big issue.
Is it really such a big issue? I checked few of the Facebook pages (now that is painful service to use without logging in) of some of the artists I follow on SC and surprise, they link their new music to Soundcloud. It appears to work for a lot of people but you. Too much work?
chaosWyrM wrote: 2...oh whats the point? you continually state that you dont use the site as an artist but rather a consumer...how then are you supposed to understand? suffice to say that for the past 3 years artists have been bemoaning the changes taking place at soundcloud. as of late (since other services have begun to take the place of sc) artists are bailing on soundcloud like crazy. i guess you think theres no reason for that? if you have no point of reference for the complaints why do you insist they arent valid?
How am I supposed to understand? Because just like I said when I entered this conversation, I disagree with your whole point that it is or at least should be just for artists. The artists would have no audience if it wasn't for music lovers like myself. That's my point of reference. And from what I gather, many of your complaints aren't valid; playlists work, spotlights work (paid only?), people can link to SC from Facebook, comments work. Even the crappy sound quality serves as a reminder to buy the music -- if it is available and interesting enough.

And people leaving Soundcloud en masse? I'm just not convinced. DJs are probably leaving it, since they can't upload their music (mixtapes) there as easily anymore. Though I got an exception for that as well in my own stream, a radioshow uploaded today -- the guy removes them always when the next show comes and moves the old ones to Mixcloud. Not too interested in mixtapes myself.

And as for big name artists, people who are paid for by Sony and UMG etc, to be honest, I don't really even care. Cleaning them out only makes for a less commerce-driven music experience.

From my ever-feeding stream and growing list of people to follow, it just isn't true for me that artists (or labels, promoters) are leaving. But maybe it is indeed genre-specific, or some sort of snobbery from some people (expecting things the service isn't).

chaosWyrM wrote:so long soundcloud, it was nice knowin' ya.
Yea, good riddance then. And good luck convincing your, um, choice consumers, to join yet another service so they can interact with you with six word sentences. And phpBB forum operators to add support for their player, if they provide one.

Looks slick though, that hearthis.at one. Not much momentum for me personally, can't find any artists I know from there. Random mixtapes and downloads of music the uploader most certainly doesn't have the right to upload (not that I tried, would need to register).


For the time being Soundcloud remains best for me as a music listener and it might as well be the place for me to upload stuff when it's time for that again. I hope the news of their demise are greatly exaggerated.
yes it is a big issue...and no the artists you checked did not have playable tracks on facebook. that function has been removed...please do show me a sc link in fb that allows you to play INSIDE facebook. maybe you havent been keepin up with current events...but most people are lazy and have the attention spans of nats. they dont like to click through to another website to listen to a track theyve never heard before. my plays on sc and my "people engaged" stats on fb have fallen off the table ever since sc took away the ability to play a track within facebook.

you can disagree all day long. i never said it SHOULD be for artists...what i said was that it used to be for artists and now its not. i then went on to theorize that that is the main reason soundcloud is dying....and it most certainly is dying.

im not trying to convince you of anything. "people" arent leaving soundcloud...in fact their user base is growing. however...ARTISTS are leaving soundcloud...and once theyre gone...all those listeners wont have anything to listen to.

why would i need to "convince" people to join anything? have you not been paying attention to anything ive said? my usage of a service like this (and the original point of soundcloud) is not dependent on anyone else joining it. its so i can post/link to it...without anyone needing to do anything at all. something which has become increasingly more difficult to do on soundcloud.

look man...ive already tried to explain this to you. you dont use sc as an artist...you have no point of reference. considering that sc was an artists platform for a long time...it sucks to see it turn into nothing more than another useless consumer driven vomitorium. my point still stands. soundcloud is going down the shitter, were not even debating that point. all im saying is, i believe that the reason its doing so is because they abandoned their loyal user base of artists to pursue listeners.

im done discussing this with you...youve admitted you dont have enough perspective to intelligently talk about this subject. by your own admission you only see half the picture.

im glad soundcloud is great for you as a listener. enjoy it while there are still people uploading to it.
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About the FB, well that is a bit different and it wasn't clear from your earlier posts it was a player that what was missing. Sure, your .. consumers have short attention spans, I can believe that. Linking still works though, and for the person who is willing to go through the hurdle of clicking a link, s/he gets access to listening to all your tracks while they're at it. You lose some, you win some.

One of the FB artist pages I visited had a post from the artist linking to Spotify and the first comments were from two africans saying they can't use the service, they can't listen to the music. Big hooray for the globalisation.


I'd say that Soundcloud is now for both the artists and the listeners, which surely is better for both -- simply because there isn't one without the other. At least in my humble opinion. I've gotten to know new music, and people I've followed have gained a somewhat keen listener. I'd expect that to be similar with other people who are enthusiastic about music.


And you don't really have to convince me of anything, that wasn't what I meant. I meant I'm not convinced of what you're saying that people, and with people I mean artists, labels and promoters, are leaving Soundcloud. That was what I wrote, read again what you quoted. But the people who follow you there -- do they want to follow you that much that they will switch the service when you do?


And no, it's not entirely true that I don't use it as an artist. I still use it to privately share tracks. There's like twenty people I know from real life in my connections over there and I've shared my music with them. And those private links work even with people who aren't registered there, still they give a easy listening experience. I'm not publicly using it as an artist, 'cause I really don't care about making a name for myself, posting about it on every possible platform. My music is just about my music, some people know it, most don't. I find the service great for sharing my music -- privately.


And it's just condescending of you to say that I don't know what I'm talking about, that I can't intelligently discuss this. You keep hammering on about how people (ARTISTS, LABELS, PROMOTERS - the people posting original music) are leaving the site, while from my perspective, it's the opposite. And I can understand why it is like that, because there are more listeners there, more people know that Soundcloud is a good and simple source for listening to contemporary music. If you want to just share a link to your music, then you can just upload your music on a server, put it up as 24bit WAV for all I care, but simply linking music hasn't ever been what's Soundcloud has been about. There wouldn't be a system of comments, lists of followers and followings, all that jazz, if it was so.

Sure I can understand your POV that you'd like to use it merely as a placeholder for your music, but a placeholder isn't how SC sees themself as. It's supposed to connect you with your followers, not to put you on a pedestal. No doubt it's at a critical point right now which will show it will fare in the even longer run. It has changed from the time you registered there? Is this the first time you're using a Internet service? It's just stupid to mash them down for becoming a bigger player (something that surely benefits the artists).

Consumer driven vomitorium? Really? So far I haven't picked up any vomit in my stream.


Now go enjoy the migration process to the next service that will disappoint you. Hopefully they'll provide you with your FB player so your consumers don't have to leave that playground.

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chaosWyrM wrote: yes it is a big issue...and no the artists you checked did not have playable tracks on facebook. that function has been removed...please do show me a sc link in fb that allows you to play INSIDE facebook. maybe you havent been keepin up with current events...but most people are lazy and have the attention spans of nats. they dont like to click through to another website to listen to a track theyve never heard before. my plays on sc and my "people engaged" stats on fb have fallen off the table ever since sc took away the ability to play a track within facebook.

you can disagree all day long. i never said it SHOULD be for artists...what i said was that it used to be for artists and now its not. i then went on to theorize that that is the main reason soundcloud is dying....and it most certainly is dying.

im not trying to convince you of anything. "people" arent leaving soundcloud...in fact their user base is growing. however...ARTISTS are leaving soundcloud...and once theyre gone...all those listeners wont have anything to listen to....
^^This^^ (especially the part about the FB player having been removed) is the reason why I stopped using SC -- I still have my older songs there, but have been transferring them to HearThis.at and uploading new ones exclusively to HearThis.at, that is very similar to how the old SC used to be AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY, has an FB player that works very much as the old FB player that SC stopped using!
The other alternative for me is of course YouTube, but I don't always have the time to make a proper video to my tracks, and I'd rather avoid one frame "videos", so for audio only that can be streamed directly to FB without needing to open another external page, HearThis.at is the place of choice for me now.
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Axis1~SL61 wrote:
chaosWyrM wrote: yes it is a big issue...and no the artists you checked did not have playable tracks on facebook. that function has been removed...please do show me a sc link in fb that allows you to play INSIDE facebook. maybe you havent been keepin up with current events...but most people are lazy and have the attention spans of nats. they dont like to click through to another website to listen to a track theyve never heard before. my plays on sc and my "people engaged" stats on fb have fallen off the table ever since sc took away the ability to play a track within facebook.

you can disagree all day long. i never said it SHOULD be for artists...what i said was that it used to be for artists and now its not. i then went on to theorize that that is the main reason soundcloud is dying....and it most certainly is dying.

im not trying to convince you of anything. "people" arent leaving soundcloud...in fact their user base is growing. however...ARTISTS are leaving soundcloud...and once theyre gone...all those listeners wont have anything to listen to....
^^This^^ (especially the part about the FB player having been removed) is the reason why I stopped using SC -- I still have my older songs there, but have been transferring them to HearThis.at and uploading new ones exclusively to HearThis.at, that is very similar to how the old SC used to be AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY, has a FB player that works as the old FB player that SC stopped using!
The other alternative for me is of course YouTube, but I don't always have the time to make a proper video to my tracks, and I'd rather avoid one frame "videos", so for audio only that can be streamed directly to FB without needing to open another external page, HearThis.at is the place of choice for me now.
Thanks for that, I have been jumping through hoops to post on FB.

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Was the FB/SC problem related to SoundCloud dropping Flash support last October?

Their HTML5 players seem to embed everywhere else without a problem (Twitter/Ello and various websites). I seem to remember reading somewhere that FB caching may have been a factor.

I have no personal experience of the problem, as I don't use FB.

I've had an account at Hearthis for 20 months. It's certainly rather quiet over there.

SoundCloud is now thought to be getting 5 billion streams per month.

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seismic1 wrote:Was the FB/SC problem related to SoundCloud dropping Flash support last October?

Their HTML5 players seem to embed everywhere else without a problem (Twitter/Ello and various websites). I seem to remember reading somewhere that FB caching may have been a factor.

I have no personal experience of the problem, as I don't use FB.

I've had an account at Hearthis for 20 months. It's certainly rather quiet over there.

SoundCloud is now thought to be getting 5 billion streams per month.
no, it wasnt related to them dropping flash. it was a conscious decision they made to steer traffic to the sc website. ::edit:: i would just like to note...THATS how much that feature was used. it was used so much that they decided to take it way to generate extra site traffic.

as far as the streaming goes...i wouldnt be surprised if those numbers were true. their scheme of attracting listeners seems to have worked out very well for them. its too bad they havent found a way to have that translate to a positive revenue stream.

i dont even quite understand how they thought it would. through ads? through subscriptions? whos going to get a subscription to sc when theres already pandoa and spotify for that?

id like to see the numbers of artists with a paid subscription over the last 3 years. the paid versions offer next to no advantages at all. extra time...and better stat tracking (which is broken anyway)...thats it. i mean look at this....its pathetic. who would give them money for that?
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seismic1 wrote:Was the FB/SC problem related to SoundCloud dropping Flash support last October?

Their HTML5 players seem to embed everywhere else without a problem (Twitter/Ello and various websites). I seem to remember reading somewhere that FB caching may have been a factor.

I have no personal experience of the problem, as I don't use FB.

I've had an account at Hearthis for 20 months. It's certainly rather quiet over there.
I can't speak for anyone else, but, for me, I don't really care about that. My page of uninteresting music is quiet everywhere I post it. I don't really have a facebook following either, but, all of my music friends that know me (as opposed to knowing the ghettosynth persona, not the same thing), expect to find my stuff on facebook. I don't really care about other "networks", I just want to host MP3 files in an easy to use player that works on facebook without having to jump through hoops to do it.

I have to filter too much for soundcloud because they've grown too much and the free acounts are too limited.

I hope that they (hearthis.at) succeed at being profitable, but if they don't, someone else will come along with a slightly different plan and I'll move again. You need numbers to attract investment and that will always have a long tail of freeloaders like me. That's all you're ever going to get from me, so show my listeners some ads or something, because I'm not cracking open my wallet to host my random noodlings.

Incidentally, I don't really like youtube either. I'm not interested in creating videos for everything, even static videos and I'm not going to use the stock ones.
SoundCloud is now thought to be getting 5 billion streams per month.
Someone else mentioned it, but I've also noticed sort of odd likes/follows on soundcloud. Not that I have many to begin with, but I just don't care about self promotion in the same way that artists who are trying to be artists do.

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ras.s wrote:
chaosWyrM wrote:yes they have done major cuts (id call them changes, not cuts) on sc...not the least of which is removing the ability to directly share a track on facebook. probably the single most used feature they had. other "changes" are the removal of the spotlight feature, the god awful change in how comments work...the grouping of playlsists into one long track.

....


if you dont think the removal of one of the (or THE?) most important features...plus the addition of ads and auto take downs...combined with the refusal to improve audio quality isnt detrimental to artists...well i dont know what to tell you. listenership is going strong...but artists are leaving though...thats for sure.

Are you really saying the most used feature on their site was to cross-post on a different site? Surely even basic logic necessitates that the upload has to be more used, for without it there would be no cross-posting to begin with, right?

Now, I don't have a Facebook account, but I do occasionally check one group because they post about events that interest me, and there are Soundcloud links there. I can't imagine it to be so hard to make a post directly there where you are going to make a post to. And even if I had Facebook credentials I'd be wary of giving them away for a purpose like that.

There definitely is a spotlight feature, because I can see it being used. Some posts have "Spotlight" written on them and they are older than some other uploads.

God awful change in comments? How was it different from now, when you just type a comment and it appears at the moment you started typing it?

What's wrong with the playlists? You can pick any track from the playlist just the same.

Ads? Haven't seen or heard any, would be a bugger though. Takedowns? Well I haven't posted anything so I haven't encountered such, but I wouldn't be posting anyone else's music anyway. It is a piracy protection scheme and the basic idea of it -- it's not bad. If it constantly keeps giving false positives, it's not functioning properly and they do know their site not functioning for their content creators is bad for their business.


Audio quality sure could be better, but then on the other hand, it is a promotion site, so just link to wherever you got the good stuff. Or allow downloads, they give the option. I can't imagine them keeping it that way forever though, as people do demand better quality.



chaosWyrM wrote:just what all these listeners will be listening to? i have no idea.
New, innovative and creative music, just as before. Not necessarily big music corporation stuff, but that isn't a big loss in my book. Independent artists.


I kind of get the feeling you're expecting the service (free one at that) to always stay the same? It isn't what it was, so it must be totally bad and entirely useless for all. Yet I get my stream filled every time I go to the site -- and I do hope it stays that way.

I suppose it just doesn't work for you and you're feeling nostalgic for something that's not coming back. It's working for me because I keep hearing new music from artists I'm interested in and even from artists I hadn't heard of.

This is getting tiring, let's just back off.
He is simply telling you what literally millions of older SC musicians have been saying for years. I wrote SC many letters, spelling out the same list we all had. My biggest complaint is the way they changed the comments so that you could no longer view them as a thread within the waveform. Nobody bothers now to make multiple clicks to view the thread, and now you can't easily see where in the timeline the comment is made - so the musical usefulness and social aspect are both undone in one move. They basically undid all the forum-type relations between musicians in one night. It's been a downhill plunge since then. We warned them...they didn't listen. Soundcloud was unique - they undid all the unique features centered on musicians and became like every other site.

After the changes, the posts on my page went from tens of detailed, intimate musical discussions per day, often centered around particular moments in the pieces, to one or two-word throwaway comments per day like "nice!" The SC COMMUNITY was eviscerated by the changes.
Last edited by Gonga on Fri Feb 12, 2016 6:20 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Sampleconstruct wrote:
shroom81 wrote:
Sampleconstruct wrote:But that's old news, not new news, and since that rumor many months ago, nothing happened.
Well there is news stories from today about this so some development has taken place.

http://www.factmag.com/2016/02/11/sound ... 4m-losses/

Are you sure you aren't talking about the lawsuit Sony was threatening them with Sampleconstruct ?
I see, then I was wrong it seems, but still I'm confident SC will survive somehow, this is also wishful thinking as I have about 2.500+ tracks and demos up there and rely on it a lot :nutter:
Well, it is a rehash of old news in the form of a new article.

I don't understand the title of the article and there's nothing to support being "forced to close."

Sounds like a blog desperate to gain viewership which would suggest that perhaps FACTmag may have problems of their own.

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who would give them money for that
Unlimited upload and listener profiling are both important for serious business. I don't see anything wrong with that offer.
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