Investors decide today whether the plug is out of Soundcloud
Shareholders asked to invest 170 million more
6 hours ago, by editors 3for12
Soundcloud does not work well. The company has been in vain for years to become profitable, yet another 40% of its staff had to be dismissed a month ago and seems to be on the threshold again today.
News site Axios reports a leaked memo, inviting investors to invest another $ 170 million in the streaming service. The reserves would be dried up and the money needed to pay off debts and keep the company operational. If the investors do not drive it, it could mean that Soundcloud finally topples and all previous investments in smoke go on.
Soundcloud became known and successful as a free music service, which includes many DJ sets. But by copyright claims, that open model came under pressure. For that reason, Soundcloud attempted to make a transition to a paid service, but that tranformation does not seem to hit the users. Rather, it was reported that Spotify giant Spotify wanted to take over their distressing competitor, but Sweden finally saw it.
Wouldnāt be the worst thing- for me, anyway- I canāt piece together albums anymore because I canāt control myself but to share track after track.
I hadnāt released an album of unheard music since 2011 and itās been SoundCloud since then.
Havenāt listened to SoundCloud in ages. Always on YouTube, Spotify and Bandcamp. SoundCloud became a āpreview tracksā place, which I found boring.
Traffic take time. Thereās no proper and reliable Traffic as a service you can buy, thereās always drawbacks and issues coming with a non targeted audience to match exactly what you doing. Instead, the best is to invest yourself to created it on the long term with a lot of small to medium budgeted actions.
Nowadays i think thereās two ways and both are hard to embrace :
1/ to āsell āāhis music directly to the listener without intermediariesā on your own built network/fans and you maximise how much you think your music as a VALUE and it will take times to get something literally.
2/ You embrace the āMusic is somehow practically freeā But you grow and capitalize on your āNameā as something to Sale and the more Your Name is bankable the more you get money on Live Act (Live performance, Djing Performance or āWhatever you can do Liveā
Maybe it can change at some point (in the future) the underground music business model (if it existing today anymoreā¦) but i guess dematerialization is the results of that (and few things on top of that)
The popular music model as also evolved that way so ā¦ But less pain, due to the amount of people reached with the classic way of doing it. As itās everywhere, the more people are somehow forced to like and buy it. Other people choose what they eat and for the best people they pay streaming for the other one It is the bulimia of computer hacking and direct download (and to change that Only internet operators by selling their customers to the states on abnormal monthly amount of download thereās no other way to stop or reduce that)
(but thereās also good music inside popular and shit in underground, popular and underground are no quality measurement word)
soundcloud was great while the groups were around. i got a lot of exposure through them and met some cool people. once that got axed (still donāt know why) it started to seem like artists that werenāt so indie (lil wayneā¦although maybe he is indie idk) kept showing up on my home page, and other āwe pay more than you doā artists. At that point I moved over to bandcamp for distributing music and merch, then the typical youtube, IG and facebook for social interaction.
Iām not wishing ill for soundcloud but it did kind of seem like they werenāt listening to the community that built their popularity, but most establishments end up only caring about the people that pay their mortgages.
I like SC a lot, even pay the subscription to support. I really hope that it doesnāt die. But the first thing they should fix is the horrendous ios app, itās so bad it hurts.
I use soundcloud quite alot for discovering new music. This is the sole reason I hope it stays around. Not into their business model nor the sound quality tho. Also, I wish people would stop repost spamming in hopes of more playsā¦
Besides the momentary upheaval, coding wise, of something else becoming the standard. Who cares?
I never found SoundCloud rewarding as a community-based service and apparently what it did have in that regard died with the deletion of groups. As an artist tool I never found it useful for anything but a free place place to store streamable music that worked acorss most platforms.
First of all they need to remove those spam bots and make something like previous groups with more tagging and filtering options.
Edit:
When I post long hardware set and use #techno#minimal and #liveset tags, my music is mixed with gasilions of djsets and short techno clips. Completely unusable.
Groups for me were mostly beatmakers leaving a comment like ādopeā and leaving a link to their crappy music, no artistical feedback what so ever. And they donāt even check the music, theyāll randomly listen to 10 seconds and think theyāve defined you. I did a beat challenge and my mission was to try to make Techno, so I submitted to soundcloud for streaming. I do not do Techno, Iām Hip Hop blooded so that was the challenge. One dude just commented on a few Hip Hop Beat s (!!!) āNice Techno check my stuff; link.ā It was ridiculous already with groups.
Also, Soundcloud used to ban my tracks, meanwhile dudes rapping about their schlongs get 10,000 listens and gold membership.