16 ms·

SoundCloud could be forced to close after $44m losses

620 points by neokya 11y ago

petercooper 11y ago
I hope this is just an alarmist headline. SoundCloud is pretty essential in its space, it's one of the few services that lets you natively get audio on to Twitter, the main place musicians share snapshots of their work and remixes, and a key part of numerous podcasts and ways to embed easily shared audio on the Web. This is one startup I absolutely don't want to see go down the pan.
- hathym 11y ago
  have you ever paid a cent to soundcloud?
  - bbgm 11y ago
    I don't know about OP but I have been a paying customer for years. No soundcloud would be a huge loss.
  - nbzklr 11y ago
    It's the content creators who pay soundcloud. I would totally pay them "a cent", but there are no premium plans for consumers/listeners.
  - cellover 11y ago
    As a music producer I pay 79 EUR / year since 2011 because I enjoy having a practically unlimited storage space for my own productions, may it be a complete song or stems (individual instruments) that I share with musicians I collaborate with. 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...
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      Do you have backups of your tracks into case Soundcloud goes away? EDIT: Its on my to do list to write a pipeline for Soundcloud for Archive Team this weekend. Just in case. That doesn't pickup private tracks though. Backup your stuff!!
      - jeffbr13 11y ago
        At my company we have a bunch of content that's only archived on SoundCloud. The main barrier I've had to backing up original uploads (only available through the web interface) is the terrible reliability of all the AJAX calls. Even with browser automation, it requires a LOT of error-handling just to navigate between resources successfully. It seems that all these microservices[1] are there for the sake of blogging about using microservices[2] as there haven't been any new significant new features delivered in years, and the whole application now seems to be delivered through AJAX calls. [1]: https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/building-products-at-soundcloud-part-3-microservices-in-scala-and-finagle https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/building-products-at-... [2]: http://philcalcado.com/2015/09/08/how_we_ended_up_with_microservices.html http://philcalcado.com/2015/09/08/how_we_ended_up_with_micro...
        toomuchtodo 11y ago
        Have you tried using youtube-dl? It extracts the relevant data from Soundcloud's JSON API to perform the download: https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ I know you mentioned originals are only accessible through the web interface, but I was not sure if you were aware of the JSON API.
        zimpenfish 11y ago
        Oh, I didn't know that. I ended up writing my own SoundcloudSync.py to keep a backup. Not very sophisticated but easy enough to run by hand whenever I upload something new.
        zimpenfish 11y ago
  - petercooper 11y ago
    Not yet but nothing they charge for has been relevant to me yet as a consumer. I am launching a couple of podcasts in the next month though and want to embed audio on Twitter so will be doing so soon which is one reason I'm concerned at this news as nothing else is suitable IMHO. (I pay for lots of online services, but not if there's no product targeted at my use case.)
  - delgaudm 11y ago
    I'm a voice actor, and soundcloud has been vital to me. I've been a paying customer for years.
    - bitJericho 11y ago
      One reason businesses fail is the lack of the business to be able to cope with a service disruption. I hope you have other avenues!
    - ec109685 11y ago
      Just curious whether YouTube could fill the void if Soundcloud wasn't around.
  - _xander 11y ago
    As a heavy user (but not uploader) I remain almost entirely unmonetised (for better and for worse). I'm fed almost no ads either on the web or app, and there is no premium plan for listening.
- bg46z 11y ago
  The trouble is there is no real alternative. There's Vocaroo, but it serves a different niche than SoundCloud.
  - cheshire_cat 11y ago
    Have you looked at https://hearthis.at https://hearthis.at already?
- camillomiller 11y ago
  I still don't think it will happen. Worst case scenario, someone's gonna make a very nice deal when buying them. What alarms me is the amount of Teslas, Mercedes-AMG M models and other kind of extremely expensive cars parked in their parking lots and in the area surrounding their HQ here in Berlin. In the last one and a half year I've witnessed such a crescendo of the car show-off level that's I'm worried about their paychecks politics. An average salary of ~80k/y, as reported in the linked piece, explains a lot.
  - distances 11y ago
    Is that the actual paycheck, or the company expenses on salaries? I'm not an expert on German finances, but I would expect the actual paycheck to be only about 50% of total employer expenses. 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.
  - gryzzly 11y ago
    You can't even consider buying a car like that with 80k in Berlin, after tax and insurances it becomes ~40k and if you got an expat family and possibly kids that’s enough for owning a bicycle and an OK flat and feeding your family. The offices are rented from an incubator with ties to the gov that has space in the building (and come to have meetings there with their expensive cars).
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - derwildemomo 11y ago
      german here. a net income of 40k will put you somewhere in the top 20% of german households [1], . berlin is generally a really cheap city (see this [2] article from 2014.. cost of living/rents below german average), so saying "that's enough for owning a bicycle" is just not true. [1] (https://www.bundesbank.de/Redaktion/EN/Downloads/Publications/Monthly_Report_Articles/2013/2013_06_household.pdf?__blob=publicationFile https://www.bundesbank.de/Redaktion/EN/Downloads/Publication...)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- raesene4 11y ago
  from http://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/ouch-soundcloud-losses-show-a-broken-business-model-in-desperate-need-of-a-fix/ http://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/ouch-soundcloud-losses... definitely not profitable at the time of those accounts
- spyspy 11y ago
  Almost every city is calling themselves the next Silicon Valley.
djt 11y ago
All my production buddies hate it. They pay full price, your the world and yet Soundcloud take down the tracks that they OWN. With no recourse or apology. Their system has been broken for 5 years at least for the power users in the community.
- runn1ng 11y ago
  Another anecdote: I have played with their JavaScript API about 2 or 3 years ago and it was constantly broken, with no way to report those bugs. 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 https://developers.soundcloud.com/support
Theodores 11y ago
Soundcloud has not done 'peak mySpace' yet: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=soundcloud&geo=US 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.
- Majestic121 11y ago
  It seems it has reached a peak, or at least has not been really growing in 2015, if you check worldwide https://www.google.com/trends/explore#geo&q=soundcloud https://www.google.com/trends/explore#geo&q=soundcloud
  - Theodores 11y ago
    Weird how Pakistan seems to be Soundcloud central! I suspect that the advertising sales team at Soundcloud only care about the Western markets, hence I posted the US 'trend'.
    - matheweis 11y ago
      Soundcloud may have good reasons for that... Anecdotally I see 10x conversion rates in western countries, despite having higher active user counts outside of there.
  - staticelf 11y ago
    You mean the US isn't the same as worldwide? 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.
Zigurd 11y ago
This is a badly written article. Impossible to tell if the headline is accurate or if the writer made an alarmist guess.
- kyleknighted 11y ago
  When the first sentence has "but the its" in it, I gave up on even trying to read the article.
rgbrenner 11y ago
Article is bs. 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".
- raesene4 11y ago
  I'm not sure I'd agree there's no other facts. links from the article include excerpts from their financial accounts which don't look good (losing 39M on a 17M turnover is not healthy). 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.
  - rgbrenner 11y ago
    one excerpt of their P&L does not equal "excerpts from their financial accounts" (plural). And again, it's from 2014. 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.
    - raesene4 11y ago
      there are two excerpts from their financial accounts in there if that makes you any happier (and justifies my use of the plural :) one from the P&L and one from the staffing section The article is working on what's publicly available (there's a surprise), as they can hardly work on what Soundcloud hasn't released! My guess would be that if Soundcloud had managed to get into profitability that quickly then soundcloud would've got a press release out to say that. edit - didn't realise they were a UK company. So the full accounts and company filing history are https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/06343600/filing-history https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/06343600/filing-h... definitely their cash position at the end of 2014 was not of the best...
pavlov 11y ago
They raised $77M USD last year. The auditor's statement is just standard boilerplate for a company that's losing money. Given the involvement of big investors, it seems extremely unlikely that SoundCloud would shut down rather than raise another round or get acquired.
- joeblau 11y ago
  The sensationalized title tricked me.
aw3c2 11y ago
Anyone know how big it is in terms of available files and total file size?
strgrd 11y ago
I've been a daily soundcloud user for almost 6 years. At some point they gave up on trying to change or improve the user experience. Soundcloud has done nothing to facilitate the growth of users who focus on reposting/finding/sharing/curating content, vs. content creators who upload their own music. There is no way to gain a following or reputation as someone who reposts content on soundcloud -- and even if you have that following, there's no way to communicate to your audience. 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.
- diezge 11y ago
  And the annoying bug on the native mobile app where it randomly stops playing, which has been a problem for so long and still hasn't been fixed despite the companies worth...
- Touche 11y ago
  > I've been a daily soundcloud user for almost 6 years. At some point they gave up on trying to change or improve the user experience. 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.
  - detaro 11y ago
    How do developers focus on "staying alive" if not by making the product better (or leaving)? I'd expect that the architecture issues of growing larger have mostly been solved by now.
    - Touche 11y ago
      They probably work on things that help bring in more paying customers. UI tweaks isn't among those things. I'm betting they have a whole analytics team, for example.
- 11y ago
kidsil 11y ago
Youtube is not making any profit either, I suppose streaming based websites are very difficult to make profitable. Must be the constant growing expenses for servers.
- throwaway2048 11y ago
  All the sites that have predicted youtube as unprofitable assume google is paying standard bandwidth rates, with the peering arrangements they have with ISPs of virtually any size, they pay next to nothing to reach 95% of end users.
- rileymat2 11y ago
  I am not sure of the exact details, but "free" video always had a long way to go. I remember one of my favorite sites pre-2000 was adcritic.com, they were essentially only showing ads, and failed.
kidsil 11y ago
Youtube is not making any profit either, I suppose streaming based websites are very difficult to make profitable. Must be the constant growing expenses for servers.
prateekdayal 11y ago
Having run a music site for 7 years or so I am not surprised. We started before Soundcloud and created a very engaged community for musicians that many paid for. 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://www.muziboo.com
anotheryou 11y ago
What do 200 people do in such a company? (serious question, I just wonder how the workforce is usually distributed for a single online product of that size)
- camillomiller 11y ago
  The way a startup can become a bloated corporation-like structure here in Europe is a surprisingly fast process.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    Aren't startups usually corporations ab initio?
    - camillomiller 11y ago
      Well, they shouldn't gain the bloated-ness of a 40yo bureaucratic corporation that fast, though? At least, that's what all the theories about the way startups should operate are about...
      - mercer 11y ago
        Perhaps it's a variation on Parkinson's Law [1]? "The amount of bloat/bureacracy expands so as to fill the budget available to the company?" [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
  - ryandrake 11y ago
    But that doesn't answer the question of what all these people do! I wouldn't have thought they'd be more than 20 people max. Surely they don't have many developers, or we wouldn't see all these remarks here about how they have not updated their site in years. So what's everyone in such a "bloated corporation-like structure" doing? Filling out TPS reports and sending them to each other to get stamped? 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.
Mizza 11y ago
"Forced to close" is a really, really big stretch here. 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.
monkeywork 11y ago
What would you consider to be a viable alternative?
- throwawayaway 11y ago
  bandcamp and mixcloud
_ak 11y ago
> While SoundCloud brought in €17.35m ($15.37m) in 2014, it lost a total of €39.14m ($44.19m). Employee wages during that period also increased 42.5% to €17.9m, meaning that the average wage per employee for that year totalled €79,980. Wow, that is ridiculously high, especially so for Berlin.
- distances 11y ago
  Perhaps this was the total employee cost for the company, and not the actual pay check the employee herself sees? Then this would be about within expectations.
- passiveincomelg 11y ago
  Why do you think that is ridiculously high? Isn't everyone complaining how impossible it is to hire people? As mentioned elsewhere, this number probably includes employee overhead. But even if it didn't, I'd consider that about the minimum for accepting a salaried job. Maybe that's why I'm still contracting... edit: grammar
- roel_v 11y ago
  How is that 'ridiculously high'? That's say e4000/month after taxes (if total tax pressure is 40%). These costs also include e.g. the director's salaries, which I presume are more than 80k/year for a 10 year old company with 200 employees.
  - distances 11y ago
    For developer positions in Berlin 4000 € after taxes would be a considerably high salary.
    - roel_v 11y ago
      Glassdoor says 50-65k before tax for run of the mill 'software dev' in Berlin, with soundcloud being on the upper end of that range; and it seems I underestimated tax pressure with 40%. Considering that 80k is the average (including directors, mgmt, legal, ...), I wouldn't say that those salaries are 'outrageous'.
ptha 11y ago
While SoundCloud brought in €17.35m ($15.37m) in 2014, it lost a total of €39.14m ($44.19m). Employee wages during that period also increased 42.5% to €17.9m, meaning that the average wage per employee for that year totalled €79,980 Seems like a pretty generous wage increase for a company in the red.
- camillomiller 11y ago
  Especially given that good talent here in Berlin is much much cheaper. 80k/year scores you some superstar devs, while that's probably the peanuts some out-of-school pre-puberal intern would earn at a Valley startup. 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.
  - rb2k_ 11y ago
    80k/year probably includes the 28-ish% "Lohnnebenkosten" (incidental wage costs) 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.
    - uberger 11y ago
      No, it is around 70k/year pre-tax. Note that social sec payments are capped and Arbeitgeberanteil is smaller. http://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gehaltsrechner-arbeitgeber.php http://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gehaltsrechner-a...
  - uberger 11y ago
    Yes, but the Soundcloud devs are average and as such overpaid. I think it is a combination of non-merit in hiring and a culture that is toxic for good development (favoring coolness to getting things done i.e. effectivity/doing the things that earns money).
krisdol 11y ago
I thought it was supposed to be worth more than Spotify a few weeks ago? [1] 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10965558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10965558
unixhero 11y ago
I have a strong belief in heartis.at as the new soundcloud and baboom.com as the real marketplace (which disrupts the industry).
- patrickbolle 11y ago
  I love hearthis.at, it's like soundcloud properly done. never heard of baboom, is it essentially bandcamp? bandcamp seems to do everything right imo
adinew 11y ago
Considering techcrunch article was published less than a month ago it is safe to ignore the article. http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/24/why-soundcloud-will-be-worth-more-than-spotify/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/24/why-soundcloud-will-be-wort...
freddref 11y ago
It's difficult to discover new music on SC outside of what's currently popular. Maybe it's there somewhere but I find the UI frustrating.
javery 11y ago
Terrible article and sensational headline - the problem with all the YC guys being asleep right now.
EGreg 11y ago
I don't say this about many start ups, but sound cloud has created an amazing experience and interface for publishing sound. I don't know how defendable it is, but they are one of those start ups that definitely needs more capital before they build out their revenue streams. And I think they are going to get it.
gtirloni 11y ago
The report makes it clear that while the company had “adequate resources to continue in operational existence for the forseeable future,” SoundCloud was heavily reliant on “further capital investment” to continue operating in 2015. What's the difference between "operational existence" and "continue operating" here?
chrisblackwell 11y ago
How many of these services will have to shut down before it's user's will start supporting them? Please give me the option of paying money, and making sure you will be in business for the next few years.
- kpennell 11y ago
  BandCamp seems to have figured out a good model for this
mtalantikite 11y ago
Not being able to save tracks for offline use on mobile has been bothering me for a while. Maybe I'm an edge case, but I do a lot of listening while commuting, which means no Internet on the subway here in NYC. That means SoundCloud isn't even an option for me unless I'm at my desk. 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.
- ngcazz 11y ago
  They "broke" that in the mobile app. It used to be that it would cache the stuff you had listened to (very useful in London where there is no network signal in the tube), but now it seems you always have to be online to listen.
- killa_kyle 11y ago
  -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. You can use playlists to save collections of tracks
  - mtalantikite 11y ago
    Sure, but that's a workaround not a feature. I personally don't consume music in playlist format (on Spotify or wherever else). It forces me to still remember "oh yeah, playlist A has those few tracks from XYZ artist". I'd prefer to have a screen that can sort my saved tracks in a meaningful way.
- mechanized 11y ago
  Not having download capability in iOS is almost entirely at the whim of the iTunes reviewers. Source: I work at competitor, and iTunes blocked the Download functionality from our app - until we made a few changes.
- 11y ago
bborud 11y ago
They lost me as a paying customer when they decided to allow Universal Music Group to remove content directly. Overnight I just stopped caring about Soundcloud. They might have done more such things to piss off users since then, but I wouldn't know. I, at least, decided it would not be worth investing my time in the site after that. Apart from that; yeah, it is the Flickr of music -- promising at first, but then a whole lot of non-evolution of the site.
imartin2k 11y ago
A few days early this news already circulated on multiple sites - and I had to blog about how the media was covering these "news": http://meshedsociety.com/how-the-media-reports-about-soundclouds-financials/ http://meshedsociety.com/how-the-media-reports-about-soundcl...
brudgers 11y ago
Article at Financial Times, SoundCloud to seek more funding in 2016: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fcb06850-c66e-11e5-808f-8231cd71622e.html#axzz3zsBbAXyy 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.
circa 11y ago
That is a bummer. I love SoundCloud and use it frequently.
cmyr 11y ago
Soundcloud is absolutely ubiquitous in the electronic music community. I was talking about this with a friend recently who is a programmer and a (relatively) well known composer, and she made the point that soundcloud actually represents a very important cultural document; there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and 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.
- pmarreck 11y ago
  > Soundcloud is absolutely ubiquitous in the electronic music community 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-remix https://soundcloud.com/moonchild/04-love-birds-vengeance-rem...
  - logikblok 11y ago
    Could you recommend more music? That track made my day.
    - voltagex_ 11y ago
      Interesting, the above track is classified as house but doesn't sound like any house music I've heard. The cut up samples sound similar to Madeon - you might also like him.
- tudorizer 11y ago
  Are any of your friends paying for SoundCloud?
  - cmyr 11y ago
    Yes, the majority of people I know who are 'professional' electronic musicians/DJs have a pro account.
leroy_masochist 11y ago
While I understand the appeal for Soundcloud as a platform for people to get their music "out there" (especially with EDM), I personally don't like the UX at all. The big gripe I have is that the categories are often jacked up. I'm a big metal fan and almost half of the songs in the "Metal" category do not remotely meet that description.....as in, dubstep remixes of Taylor Swift songs and crap like that.
asabjorn 11y ago
As a music consumer I personally want to pay for soundcloud instead of getting ads, which could bring more revenue than ads and be more flexible in prizing, but when I asked soundcloud support for the option they said they had no immediate plans for one. In the end money is king and I don't understand why they haven't explored more revenue options. Edit: typo
romaniv 11y ago
I would be happy to pay something to Soundcloud as long as it's not per-song. It's a good service. Really easy to use as a musician and great for finding new music as a consumer. 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.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
elcct 11y ago
I remember few years ago there was something like forum (or groups) on Soundcloud. It was really nice way to collaborate with other musicians, but they decided to kill it. I lost interest in SoundCloud since... I still have an account, but I am not using it that often. Also how they present tracks is very annoying, so I stopped sharing soundcloud stuff with friends. It actually got me into creating my own service.
y04nn 11y ago
I didn't expected that, Soundcloud is such a nice plateforme. I thought that they were still growing, there is so much potential, with artists promotion and so on. I also wonder why they never became a selling platform. Is there any company that would buy the service ?
speby 11y ago
This is unfortunate news... I remember seeing this video ( years ago) introducing SoundCloud: https://vimeo.com/1857085 https://vimeo.com/1857085 Nostalgic, now.
amelius 11y ago
Can we have some more data? 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?
greggman 11y ago
Soundcloud seems like the only service that allows other sites to use the music data. By that I mean the ability to use actually use the track's sample data for creative coding audio reactive projects like http://vertexshaderart.com http://vertexshaderart.com 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.
- pmarreck 11y ago
  TIL about vertexshaderart.com. Amazing and right up my alley and making me feel like I was under a rock!
ogezi 11y ago
it's a great service, they just need to monetise properly.
crabasa 11y ago
Obligatory link to HN story from 16 days ago about SoundCloud being worth more than Spotify: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10965558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10965558
ogezi 11y ago
it's a great service, they just need to monetise properly.
andistuder 11y ago
Don't think FACT interpret the funcials of this Startup very well. A FT article responinding to the same release seems more to the point: https://next.ft.com/content/fcb06850-c66e-11e5-808f-8231cd71622e https://next.ft.com/content/fcb06850-c66e-11e5-808f-8231cd71...
jacquesm 11y ago
Does anybody remember the name of the indie music website that was very popular around 2000 or so? For the life of me I can't remember it.
- cgrinds 11y ago
  emusic by chance?
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    No, that wasn't it but thank you.
- markplindsay 11y ago
  Insound?
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    Another blast from the past, but no, that wasn't it either :( grrr. Now I really have to figure this out.
harel 11y ago
I will be very sad if they go, as I have my music (from another life) on that service. However, I doubt that will happen. At worst they will scale down their operations and cut costs.
shams93 11y ago
This is why archive.org with your own netlabel is a better choice, theyre not for profit so the bar is lower fir their survival. The more we donate to them the better they get too!
- degenerate 11y ago
  Thanks for sharing - first time I've heard of their Netlabels (weird name imo): https://archive.org/details/netlabels https://archive.org/details/netlabels
kolmogorov 11y ago
80k average salary is crazy for a Berlin based company. They have a reputation of poaching engineers and granting them crazy salary increases. They then also let them do kind of whatever they feel like with whatever tech stack which may work if you have a money printing service but is questionable for the stage they are in.
dreamdu5t 11y ago
The worst part: we all knew this day was coming from many years back. Because we all know but don't want to accept that advertising is the only viable business model on the web.
downandout 11y ago
Am I missing something? This report is from 2014. Despite the fact that "SoundCloud was heavily reliant on further capital investment to continue operating in 2015."....it did indeed raise money, made it through 2015, and is still operating in 2016. 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.
pbreit 11y ago
That looks like sloppy reporting or at least a misleading headline. Although I guess anything "could" happen.
ajsharp 11y ago
Unfortunately, none of this is surprising. Soundcloud has no real revenue model due to a seemingly inability to court rights-holders, and the product is mediocre at best. Soundcloud provided an outlet for the indie and electronic music communities to share and consume music early on, and that has more or less remained their bread and butter to this day. Even if they were charging end-users for access, the viability of it is as a competitor to Spotify and Apple music, at the prevailing market price-point ($10 / month) is slim. Ultimately Soundcloud is a niche product competing against broad market products with no real path to revenue other than somehow bringing mainstream music onboard. And it seems pretty clear that mainstream music isn't interested in collaborating with Soundcloud.
mark242 11y ago
My obligatory show HN link: https://octave.is https://octave.is is the Vimeo to Soundcloud's Youtube. No crap comments, no ads, no garbage on your artist page.
- u320 11y ago
  That's exactly what I wished Soundcloud would be. Thanks for the tip!
- alias240 11y ago
  It looks nice. Good luck with it. As with all audio hosting services, after a moderate amount of success you will surely find yourself on the radar of the anti-piracy agencies. I hope you are well prepared and can overcome this challenge.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
exabrial 11y ago
This blows my mind! SoundCloud is ubiquitous
jfoster 11y ago
Is this article based on anything substantial? 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. http://www.factmag.com/tag/soundcloud/ http://www.factmag.com/tag/soundcloud/
sakopov 11y ago
I used to produce tech/progressive trance back in the day as a hobby (you can checkout snippets from some of my tracks from SC link below) and remember when SoundCloud first came into the picture. It was a great platform to connect with others who dabble in music production and share tips. It has since become the breeding ground for up and coming EDM producers. A really cool place on the web and it'd be a shame if they closed down shop. https://soundcloud.com/sergei-a https://soundcloud.com/sergei-a
jafingi 11y ago
Reminds me of the danish site MyMusic.dk that was founded in 1998, and became the go-to site of danish underground artists. In 2010 it just disappeared from the web, and 12 years of music from 16.000 danish artists were just _gone_. 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.
kyrre 11y ago
soundcloud charges musicians around $150 for an annual pro subscription and then sends the consumers to bandcamp to buy the music and merch. doesn't sound like the right monetization approach
mful 11y ago
I use Soundcloud for hours every day, and would GLADLY pay a Spotify type premium for it. As others have noted, it has an incredible amount of music that exists nowhere else (including a lot of non-EDM), but it is a great listening platform for many other reasons. The biggest, for me, is that SoundCloud has far and away the best discovery mechanisms. The 'play related tracks' feature is the most effective radio I've found (better than Pandora, light years better than Spotify) and my feed is always full of new songs that I enjoy. 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).
- tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
  you can pay a spotify-type premium for it, if you want to support them just upload to a pro account (even if you don't upload any music). I am going to do that myself as I just realized pretty much 90+% of the listening I do at work while coding is on soundcloud (I also have a subscription to google music, but don't use it as much for EDM)
blairanderson 11y ago
GO BACK TO BUZZFEED YOU FEARMONGER
Futurebot 11y ago
I really hope this isn't true. I've hosted my own music there for years (and am a paying customers), and almost all of the interesting new music I find is from there. 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.
doener 11y ago
Just add "could be" to your headline and you can write anything. 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.
sebringj 11y ago
SoundCloud is a grassroots thing really necessary for creativity coming out of no where exposing music on an even playing field compared with other services. I love them. 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.
eruditely 11y ago
I'll purchase a subscription service immediately.
beatpanda 11y ago
I seriously don't understand how this is possible. I was the multimedia editor of a college newspaper in about 2008 and we needed a place to host podcasts. We were looking around for a solution that could serve as infrastructure for audio files, and soundcloud was the only game in town. 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?
yueq 11y ago
Loss of 44m dollars is nothing in internet industry. As long as that loss contributes to growth!
jegutman 11y ago
Maybe Google or other bigco could buy out of bankruptcy? Is there too much tail liability from some copyright infringement??
gnrlbzik 11y ago
I do not upload any music on to sound cloud, but never the less, it is one of my primary ways of discovery. I would happily pay $2-4 a month to so called get rid of "ADs" and support them.
pindropm 11y ago
There is a great cultural and emotional content that these services contains. Shutting these services will cause a big damage to this heritage. We are trying to solve some of the biggest problems of music industry with PindropMusic https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/pindropmusic/id1042553162?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/pindropmusic/id1042553162?mt...
pindropm 11y ago
There is a great cultural and emotional content that these services contains. Shutting these services will cause a big damage to this heritage. We are trying to solve some of the biggest problems of music industry with PindropMusic https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/pindropmusic/id1042553162?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/pindropmusic/id1042553162?mt...
DanFeldman 11y ago
Losing soundcloud would be terrible. Half of my music discovery is through soundcloud; Though I find myself listening 80% of the time on Spotify instead, moving over once I find an artist through soundcloud. Soundcloud's mobile app is terrible though, randomly freezing and crashing. Wonder if poor engagement through the app contributed to the this loss posting.
scosman 11y ago
KPMG's statement is pretty standard in any GAAP financial statement. If your company is losing money, it pretty much has to be included. Not many startups wouldn't have it.
techthumb 11y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11083954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11083954
ryan-allen 11y ago
How much data does soundcloud host? 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.
slackstation 11y ago
What we need is something that isn't centralized. The problem that needs to be solved is how to pay for the things that you care about but, keep enough in a common pot to not only share the service but, to make systems for discovery. 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.
norea-armozel 11y ago
I think it would be a shame if SoundCloud disappeared considering how many of my music discoveries come from there. If it wasn't for SoundCloud I wouldn't have known Pilotpriest, Dance with the dead, Droid Bishop, and other synthwave artists even existed. Bandcamp is okay but I find it hard to find new synthwave and related genre artists on their search. If SoundCloud dies someone over at Bandcamp needs to beef up the search and tagging system over there (I buy much of my music now through BandCamp).
aiw1nters 11y ago
factmag talking financials is like Trump talking politics

620 points by neokya 11y ago

I hope this is just an alarmist headline. SoundCloud is pretty essential in its space, it's one of the few services that lets you natively get audio on to Twitter, the main place musicians share snapshots of their work and remixes, and a key part of numerous podcasts and ways to embed easily shared audio on the Web. This is one startup I absolutely don't want to see go down the pan.

hathym 11y ago
have you ever paid a cent to soundcloud?
- bbgm 11y ago
  I don't know about OP but I have been a paying customer for years. No soundcloud would be a huge loss.
- nbzklr 11y ago
  It's the content creators who pay soundcloud. I would totally pay them "a cent", but there are no premium plans for consumers/listeners.
- cellover 11y ago
  As a music producer I pay 79 EUR / year since 2011 because I enjoy having a practically unlimited storage space for my own productions, may it be a complete song or stems (individual instruments) that I share with musicians I collaborate with. 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...
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Do you have backups of your tracks into case Soundcloud goes away? EDIT: Its on my to do list to write a pipeline for Soundcloud for Archive Team this weekend. Just in case. That doesn't pickup private tracks though. Backup your stuff!!
    - jeffbr13 11y ago
      At my company we have a bunch of content that's only archived on SoundCloud. The main barrier I've had to backing up original uploads (only available through the web interface) is the terrible reliability of all the AJAX calls. Even with browser automation, it requires a LOT of error-handling just to navigate between resources successfully. It seems that all these microservices[1] are there for the sake of blogging about using microservices[2] as there haven't been any new significant new features delivered in years, and the whole application now seems to be delivered through AJAX calls. [1]: https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/building-products-at-soundcloud-part-3-microservices-in-scala-and-finagle https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/building-products-at-... [2]: http://philcalcado.com/2015/09/08/how_we_ended_up_with_microservices.html http://philcalcado.com/2015/09/08/how_we_ended_up_with_micro...
      - toomuchtodo 11y ago
        Have you tried using youtube-dl? It extracts the relevant data from Soundcloud's JSON API to perform the download: https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ I know you mentioned originals are only accessible through the web interface, but I was not sure if you were aware of the JSON API.
        zimpenfish 11y ago
        Oh, I didn't know that. I ended up writing my own SoundcloudSync.py to keep a backup. Not very sophisticated but easy enough to run by hand whenever I upload something new.
      - zimpenfish 11y ago
- petercooper 11y ago
  Not yet but nothing they charge for has been relevant to me yet as a consumer. I am launching a couple of podcasts in the next month though and want to embed audio on Twitter so will be doing so soon which is one reason I'm concerned at this news as nothing else is suitable IMHO. (I pay for lots of online services, but not if there's no product targeted at my use case.)
- delgaudm 11y ago
  I'm a voice actor, and soundcloud has been vital to me. I've been a paying customer for years.
  - bitJericho 11y ago
    One reason businesses fail is the lack of the business to be able to cope with a service disruption. I hope you have other avenues!
  - ec109685 11y ago
    Just curious whether YouTube could fill the void if Soundcloud wasn't around.
- _xander 11y ago
  As a heavy user (but not uploader) I remain almost entirely unmonetised (for better and for worse). I'm fed almost no ads either on the web or app, and there is no premium plan for listening.
bg46z 11y ago
The trouble is there is no real alternative. There's Vocaroo, but it serves a different niche than SoundCloud.
- cheshire_cat 11y ago
  Have you looked at https://hearthis.at https://hearthis.at already?
camillomiller 11y ago
I still don't think it will happen. Worst case scenario, someone's gonna make a very nice deal when buying them. What alarms me is the amount of Teslas, Mercedes-AMG M models and other kind of extremely expensive cars parked in their parking lots and in the area surrounding their HQ here in Berlin. In the last one and a half year I've witnessed such a crescendo of the car show-off level that's I'm worried about their paychecks politics. An average salary of ~80k/y, as reported in the linked piece, explains a lot.
- distances 11y ago
  Is that the actual paycheck, or the company expenses on salaries? I'm not an expert on German finances, but I would expect the actual paycheck to be only about 50% of total employer expenses. 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.
- gryzzly 11y ago
  You can't even consider buying a car like that with 80k in Berlin, after tax and insurances it becomes ~40k and if you got an expat family and possibly kids that’s enough for owning a bicycle and an OK flat and feeding your family. The offices are rented from an incubator with ties to the gov that has space in the building (and come to have meetings there with their expensive cars).
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - derwildemomo 11y ago
    german here. a net income of 40k will put you somewhere in the top 20% of german households [1], . berlin is generally a really cheap city (see this [2] article from 2014.. cost of living/rents below german average), so saying "that's enough for owning a bicycle" is just not true. [1] (https://www.bundesbank.de/Redaktion/EN/Downloads/Publications/Monthly_Report_Articles/2013/2013_06_household.pdf?__blob=publicationFile https://www.bundesbank.de/Redaktion/EN/Downloads/Publication...)

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

raesene4 11y ago
from http://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/ouch-soundcloud-losses-show-a-broken-business-model-in-desperate-need-of-a-fix/ http://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/ouch-soundcloud-losses... definitely not profitable at the time of those accounts
spyspy 11y ago
Almost every city is calling themselves the next Silicon Valley.

djt 11y ago

All my production buddies hate it. They pay full price, your the world and yet Soundcloud take down the tracks that they OWN. With no recourse or apology. Their system has been broken for 5 years at least for the power users in the community.

runn1ng 11y ago
Another anecdote: I have played with their JavaScript API about 2 or 3 years ago and it was constantly broken, with no way to report those bugs. 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 https://developers.soundcloud.com/support

Theodores 11y ago

Soundcloud has not done 'peak mySpace' yet: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=soundcloud&geo=US 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.

Majestic121 11y ago
It seems it has reached a peak, or at least has not been really growing in 2015, if you check worldwide https://www.google.com/trends/explore#geo&q=soundcloud https://www.google.com/trends/explore#geo&q=soundcloud
- Theodores 11y ago
  Weird how Pakistan seems to be Soundcloud central! I suspect that the advertising sales team at Soundcloud only care about the Western markets, hence I posted the US 'trend'.
  - matheweis 11y ago
    Soundcloud may have good reasons for that... Anecdotally I see 10x conversion rates in western countries, despite having higher active user counts outside of there.
- staticelf 11y ago
  You mean the US isn't the same as worldwide? 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.

Zigurd 11y ago

This is a badly written article. Impossible to tell if the headline is accurate or if the writer made an alarmist guess.

kyleknighted 11y ago
When the first sentence has "but the its" in it, I gave up on even trying to read the article.

rgbrenner 11y ago

Article is bs. 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".

raesene4 11y ago
I'm not sure I'd agree there's no other facts. links from the article include excerpts from their financial accounts which don't look good (losing 39M on a 17M turnover is not healthy). 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.
- rgbrenner 11y ago
  one excerpt of their P&L does not equal "excerpts from their financial accounts" (plural). And again, it's from 2014. 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.
  - raesene4 11y ago
    there are two excerpts from their financial accounts in there if that makes you any happier (and justifies my use of the plural :) one from the P&L and one from the staffing section The article is working on what's publicly available (there's a surprise), as they can hardly work on what Soundcloud hasn't released! My guess would be that if Soundcloud had managed to get into profitability that quickly then soundcloud would've got a press release out to say that. edit - didn't realise they were a UK company. So the full accounts and company filing history are https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/06343600/filing-history https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/06343600/filing-h... definitely their cash position at the end of 2014 was not of the best...

pavlov 11y ago

They raised $77M USD last year. The auditor's statement is just standard boilerplate for a company that's losing money. Given the involvement of big investors, it seems extremely unlikely that SoundCloud would shut down rather than raise another round or get acquired.

joeblau 11y ago
The sensationalized title tricked me.

aw3c2 11y ago

Anyone know how big it is in terms of available files and total file size?

strgrd 11y ago

I've been a daily soundcloud user for almost 6 years. At some point they gave up on trying to change or improve the user experience. Soundcloud has done nothing to facilitate the growth of users who focus on reposting/finding/sharing/curating content, vs. content creators who upload their own music. There is no way to gain a following or reputation as someone who reposts content on soundcloud -- and even if you have that following, there's no way to communicate to your audience. 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.

diezge 11y ago
And the annoying bug on the native mobile app where it randomly stops playing, which has been a problem for so long and still hasn't been fixed despite the companies worth...
Touche 11y ago
> I've been a daily soundcloud user for almost 6 years. At some point they gave up on trying to change or improve the user experience. 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.
- detaro 11y ago
  How do developers focus on "staying alive" if not by making the product better (or leaving)? I'd expect that the architecture issues of growing larger have mostly been solved by now.
  - Touche 11y ago
    They probably work on things that help bring in more paying customers. UI tweaks isn't among those things. I'm betting they have a whole analytics team, for example.
11y ago

kidsil 11y ago

Youtube is not making any profit either, I suppose streaming based websites are very difficult to make profitable. Must be the constant growing expenses for servers.

throwaway2048 11y ago
All the sites that have predicted youtube as unprofitable assume google is paying standard bandwidth rates, with the peering arrangements they have with ISPs of virtually any size, they pay next to nothing to reach 95% of end users.
rileymat2 11y ago
I am not sure of the exact details, but "free" video always had a long way to go. I remember one of my favorite sites pre-2000 was adcritic.com, they were essentially only showing ads, and failed.

kidsil 11y ago

Youtube is not making any profit either, I suppose streaming based websites are very difficult to make profitable. Must be the constant growing expenses for servers.

prateekdayal 11y ago

Having run a music site for 7 years or so I am not surprised. We started before Soundcloud and created a very engaged community for musicians that many paid for. 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://www.muziboo.com

anotheryou 11y ago

What do 200 people do in such a company? (serious question, I just wonder how the workforce is usually distributed for a single online product of that size)

camillomiller 11y ago
The way a startup can become a bloated corporation-like structure here in Europe is a surprisingly fast process.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  Aren't startups usually corporations ab initio?
  - camillomiller 11y ago
    Well, they shouldn't gain the bloated-ness of a 40yo bureaucratic corporation that fast, though? At least, that's what all the theories about the way startups should operate are about...
    - mercer 11y ago
      Perhaps it's a variation on Parkinson's Law [1]? "The amount of bloat/bureacracy expands so as to fill the budget available to the company?" [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
- ryandrake 11y ago
  But that doesn't answer the question of what all these people do! I wouldn't have thought they'd be more than 20 people max. Surely they don't have many developers, or we wouldn't see all these remarks here about how they have not updated their site in years. So what's everyone in such a "bloated corporation-like structure" doing? Filling out TPS reports and sending them to each other to get stamped? 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.

Mizza 11y ago

"Forced to close" is a really, really big stretch here. 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.

monkeywork 11y ago

What would you consider to be a viable alternative?

throwawayaway 11y ago
bandcamp and mixcloud

_ak 11y ago

> While SoundCloud brought in €17.35m ($15.37m) in 2014, it lost a total of €39.14m ($44.19m). Employee wages during that period also increased 42.5% to €17.9m, meaning that the average wage per employee for that year totalled €79,980. Wow, that is ridiculously high, especially so for Berlin.

distances 11y ago
Perhaps this was the total employee cost for the company, and not the actual pay check the employee herself sees? Then this would be about within expectations.
passiveincomelg 11y ago
Why do you think that is ridiculously high? Isn't everyone complaining how impossible it is to hire people? As mentioned elsewhere, this number probably includes employee overhead. But even if it didn't, I'd consider that about the minimum for accepting a salaried job. Maybe that's why I'm still contracting... edit: grammar
roel_v 11y ago
How is that 'ridiculously high'? That's say e4000/month after taxes (if total tax pressure is 40%). These costs also include e.g. the director's salaries, which I presume are more than 80k/year for a 10 year old company with 200 employees.
- distances 11y ago
  For developer positions in Berlin 4000 € after taxes would be a considerably high salary.
  - roel_v 11y ago
    Glassdoor says 50-65k before tax for run of the mill 'software dev' in Berlin, with soundcloud being on the upper end of that range; and it seems I underestimated tax pressure with 40%. Considering that 80k is the average (including directors, mgmt, legal, ...), I wouldn't say that those salaries are 'outrageous'.

ptha 11y ago

While SoundCloud brought in €17.35m ($15.37m) in 2014, it lost a total of €39.14m ($44.19m). Employee wages during that period also increased 42.5% to €17.9m, meaning that the average wage per employee for that year totalled €79,980 Seems like a pretty generous wage increase for a company in the red.

camillomiller 11y ago
Especially given that good talent here in Berlin is much much cheaper. 80k/year scores you some superstar devs, while that's probably the peanuts some out-of-school pre-puberal intern would earn at a Valley startup. 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.
- rb2k_ 11y ago
  80k/year probably includes the 28-ish% "Lohnnebenkosten" (incidental wage costs) 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.
  - uberger 11y ago
    No, it is around 70k/year pre-tax. Note that social sec payments are capped and Arbeitgeberanteil is smaller. http://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gehaltsrechner-arbeitgeber.php http://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gehaltsrechner-a...
- uberger 11y ago
  Yes, but the Soundcloud devs are average and as such overpaid. I think it is a combination of non-merit in hiring and a culture that is toxic for good development (favoring coolness to getting things done i.e. effectivity/doing the things that earns money).

krisdol 11y ago

I thought it was supposed to be worth more than Spotify a few weeks ago? [1] 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10965558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10965558

unixhero 11y ago

I have a strong belief in heartis.at as the new soundcloud and baboom.com as the real marketplace (which disrupts the industry).

patrickbolle 11y ago
I love hearthis.at, it's like soundcloud properly done. never heard of baboom, is it essentially bandcamp? bandcamp seems to do everything right imo

adinew 11y ago

Considering techcrunch article was published less than a month ago it is safe to ignore the article. http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/24/why-soundcloud-will-be-worth-more-than-spotify/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/24/why-soundcloud-will-be-wort...

freddref 11y ago

It's difficult to discover new music on SC outside of what's currently popular. Maybe it's there somewhere but I find the UI frustrating.

javery 11y ago

Terrible article and sensational headline - the problem with all the YC guys being asleep right now.

EGreg 11y ago

I don't say this about many start ups, but sound cloud has created an amazing experience and interface for publishing sound. I don't know how defendable it is, but they are one of those start ups that definitely needs more capital before they build out their revenue streams. And I think they are going to get it.

gtirloni 11y ago

The report makes it clear that while the company had “adequate resources to continue in operational existence for the forseeable future,” SoundCloud was heavily reliant on “further capital investment” to continue operating in 2015. What's the difference between "operational existence" and "continue operating" here?

chrisblackwell 11y ago

How many of these services will have to shut down before it's user's will start supporting them? Please give me the option of paying money, and making sure you will be in business for the next few years.

kpennell 11y ago
BandCamp seems to have figured out a good model for this

mtalantikite 11y ago

Not being able to save tracks for offline use on mobile has been bothering me for a while. Maybe I'm an edge case, but I do a lot of listening while commuting, which means no Internet on the subway here in NYC. That means SoundCloud isn't even an option for me unless I'm at my desk. 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.

ngcazz 11y ago
They "broke" that in the mobile app. It used to be that it would cache the stuff you had listened to (very useful in London where there is no network signal in the tube), but now it seems you always have to be online to listen.
killa_kyle 11y ago
-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. You can use playlists to save collections of tracks
- mtalantikite 11y ago
  Sure, but that's a workaround not a feature. I personally don't consume music in playlist format (on Spotify or wherever else). It forces me to still remember "oh yeah, playlist A has those few tracks from XYZ artist". I'd prefer to have a screen that can sort my saved tracks in a meaningful way.
mechanized 11y ago
Not having download capability in iOS is almost entirely at the whim of the iTunes reviewers. Source: I work at competitor, and iTunes blocked the Download functionality from our app - until we made a few changes.
11y ago

bborud 11y ago

They lost me as a paying customer when they decided to allow Universal Music Group to remove content directly. Overnight I just stopped caring about Soundcloud. They might have done more such things to piss off users since then, but I wouldn't know. I, at least, decided it would not be worth investing my time in the site after that. Apart from that; yeah, it is the Flickr of music -- promising at first, but then a whole lot of non-evolution of the site.

imartin2k 11y ago

A few days early this news already circulated on multiple sites - and I had to blog about how the media was covering these "news": http://meshedsociety.com/how-the-media-reports-about-soundclouds-financials/ http://meshedsociety.com/how-the-media-reports-about-soundcl...

brudgers 11y ago

Article at Financial Times, SoundCloud to seek more funding in 2016: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fcb06850-c66e-11e5-808f-8231cd71622e.html#axzz3zsBbAXyy 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.

circa 11y ago

That is a bummer. I love SoundCloud and use it frequently.

cmyr 11y ago

Soundcloud is absolutely ubiquitous in the electronic music community. I was talking about this with a friend recently who is a programmer and a (relatively) well known composer, and she made the point that soundcloud actually represents a very important cultural document; there is tons of music that has been created in the past 5+ years that exists exclusively there, and 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.

pmarreck 11y ago
> Soundcloud is absolutely ubiquitous in the electronic music community 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-remix https://soundcloud.com/moonchild/04-love-birds-vengeance-rem...
- logikblok 11y ago
  Could you recommend more music? That track made my day.
  - voltagex_ 11y ago
    Interesting, the above track is classified as house but doesn't sound like any house music I've heard. The cut up samples sound similar to Madeon - you might also like him.
tudorizer 11y ago
Are any of your friends paying for SoundCloud?
- cmyr 11y ago
  Yes, the majority of people I know who are 'professional' electronic musicians/DJs have a pro account.

leroy_masochist 11y ago

While I understand the appeal for Soundcloud as a platform for people to get their music "out there" (especially with EDM), I personally don't like the UX at all. The big gripe I have is that the categories are often jacked up. I'm a big metal fan and almost half of the songs in the "Metal" category do not remotely meet that description.....as in, dubstep remixes of Taylor Swift songs and crap like that.

asabjorn 11y ago

As a music consumer I personally want to pay for soundcloud instead of getting ads, which could bring more revenue than ads and be more flexible in prizing, but when I asked soundcloud support for the option they said they had no immediate plans for one. In the end money is king and I don't understand why they haven't explored more revenue options. Edit: typo

romaniv 11y ago

I would be happy to pay something to Soundcloud as long as it's not per-song. It's a good service. Really easy to use as a musician and great for finding new music as a consumer. 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.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

elcct 11y ago

I remember few years ago there was something like forum (or groups) on Soundcloud. It was really nice way to collaborate with other musicians, but they decided to kill it. I lost interest in SoundCloud since... I still have an account, but I am not using it that often. Also how they present tracks is very annoying, so I stopped sharing soundcloud stuff with friends. It actually got me into creating my own service.

y04nn 11y ago

I didn't expected that, Soundcloud is such a nice plateforme. I thought that they were still growing, there is so much potential, with artists promotion and so on. I also wonder why they never became a selling platform. Is there any company that would buy the service ?

speby 11y ago

This is unfortunate news... I remember seeing this video ( years ago) introducing SoundCloud: https://vimeo.com/1857085 https://vimeo.com/1857085 Nostalgic, now.

amelius 11y ago

Can we have some more data? 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?

greggman 11y ago

Soundcloud seems like the only service that allows other sites to use the music data. By that I mean the ability to use actually use the track's sample data for creative coding audio reactive projects like http://vertexshaderart.com http://vertexshaderart.com 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.

pmarreck 11y ago
TIL about vertexshaderart.com. Amazing and right up my alley and making me feel like I was under a rock!

ogezi 11y ago

it's a great service, they just need to monetise properly.

crabasa 11y ago

Obligatory link to HN story from 16 days ago about SoundCloud being worth more than Spotify: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10965558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10965558

ogezi 11y ago

it's a great service, they just need to monetise properly.

andistuder 11y ago

Don't think FACT interpret the funcials of this Startup very well. A FT article responinding to the same release seems more to the point: https://next.ft.com/content/fcb06850-c66e-11e5-808f-8231cd71622e https://next.ft.com/content/fcb06850-c66e-11e5-808f-8231cd71...

jacquesm 11y ago

Does anybody remember the name of the indie music website that was very popular around 2000 or so? For the life of me I can't remember it.

cgrinds 11y ago
emusic by chance?
- jacquesm 11y ago
  No, that wasn't it but thank you.
markplindsay 11y ago
Insound?
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Another blast from the past, but no, that wasn't it either :( grrr. Now I really have to figure this out.

harel 11y ago

I will be very sad if they go, as I have my music (from another life) on that service. However, I doubt that will happen. At worst they will scale down their operations and cut costs.

shams93 11y ago

This is why archive.org with your own netlabel is a better choice, theyre not for profit so the bar is lower fir their survival. The more we donate to them the better they get too!

degenerate 11y ago
Thanks for sharing - first time I've heard of their Netlabels (weird name imo): https://archive.org/details/netlabels https://archive.org/details/netlabels

kolmogorov 11y ago

80k average salary is crazy for a Berlin based company. They have a reputation of poaching engineers and granting them crazy salary increases. They then also let them do kind of whatever they feel like with whatever tech stack which may work if you have a money printing service but is questionable for the stage they are in.

dreamdu5t 11y ago

The worst part: we all knew this day was coming from many years back. Because we all know but don't want to accept that advertising is the only viable business model on the web.

downandout 11y ago

Am I missing something? This report is from 2014. Despite the fact that "SoundCloud was heavily reliant on further capital investment to continue operating in 2015."....it did indeed raise money, made it through 2015, and is still operating in 2016. 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.

pbreit 11y ago

That looks like sloppy reporting or at least a misleading headline. Although I guess anything "could" happen.

ajsharp 11y ago

Unfortunately, none of this is surprising. Soundcloud has no real revenue model due to a seemingly inability to court rights-holders, and the product is mediocre at best. Soundcloud provided an outlet for the indie and electronic music communities to share and consume music early on, and that has more or less remained their bread and butter to this day. Even if they were charging end-users for access, the viability of it is as a competitor to Spotify and Apple music, at the prevailing market price-point ($10 / month) is slim. Ultimately Soundcloud is a niche product competing against broad market products with no real path to revenue other than somehow bringing mainstream music onboard. And it seems pretty clear that mainstream music isn't interested in collaborating with Soundcloud.

mark242 11y ago

My obligatory show HN link: https://octave.is https://octave.is is the Vimeo to Soundcloud's Youtube. No crap comments, no ads, no garbage on your artist page.

u320 11y ago
That's exactly what I wished Soundcloud would be. Thanks for the tip!
alias240 11y ago
It looks nice. Good luck with it. As with all audio hosting services, after a moderate amount of success you will surely find yourself on the radar of the anti-piracy agencies. I hope you are well prepared and can overcome this challenge.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

exabrial 11y ago

This blows my mind! SoundCloud is ubiquitous

jfoster 11y ago

Is this article based on anything substantial? 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. http://www.factmag.com/tag/soundcloud/ http://www.factmag.com/tag/soundcloud/

sakopov 11y ago

I used to produce tech/progressive trance back in the day as a hobby (you can checkout snippets from some of my tracks from SC link below) and remember when SoundCloud first came into the picture. It was a great platform to connect with others who dabble in music production and share tips. It has since become the breeding ground for up and coming EDM producers. A really cool place on the web and it'd be a shame if they closed down shop. https://soundcloud.com/sergei-a https://soundcloud.com/sergei-a

jafingi 11y ago

Reminds me of the danish site MyMusic.dk that was founded in 1998, and became the go-to site of danish underground artists. In 2010 it just disappeared from the web, and 12 years of music from 16.000 danish artists were just _gone_. 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.

kyrre 11y ago

soundcloud charges musicians around $150 for an annual pro subscription and then sends the consumers to bandcamp to buy the music and merch. doesn't sound like the right monetization approach

mful 11y ago

I use Soundcloud for hours every day, and would GLADLY pay a Spotify type premium for it. As others have noted, it has an incredible amount of music that exists nowhere else (including a lot of non-EDM), but it is a great listening platform for many other reasons. The biggest, for me, is that SoundCloud has far and away the best discovery mechanisms. The 'play related tracks' feature is the most effective radio I've found (better than Pandora, light years better than Spotify) and my feed is always full of new songs that I enjoy. 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).

tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
you can pay a spotify-type premium for it, if you want to support them just upload to a pro account (even if you don't upload any music). I am going to do that myself as I just realized pretty much 90+% of the listening I do at work while coding is on soundcloud (I also have a subscription to google music, but don't use it as much for EDM)

blairanderson 11y ago

GO BACK TO BUZZFEED YOU FEARMONGER

Futurebot 11y ago

I really hope this isn't true. I've hosted my own music there for years (and am a paying customers), and almost all of the interesting new music I find is from there. 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.

doener 11y ago

Just add "could be" to your headline and you can write anything. 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.

sebringj 11y ago

SoundCloud is a grassroots thing really necessary for creativity coming out of no where exposing music on an even playing field compared with other services. I love them. 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.

eruditely 11y ago

I'll purchase a subscription service immediately.

beatpanda 11y ago

I seriously don't understand how this is possible. I was the multimedia editor of a college newspaper in about 2008 and we needed a place to host podcasts. We were looking around for a solution that could serve as infrastructure for audio files, and soundcloud was the only game in town. 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?

yueq 11y ago

Loss of 44m dollars is nothing in internet industry. As long as that loss contributes to growth!

jegutman 11y ago

Maybe Google or other bigco could buy out of bankruptcy? Is there too much tail liability from some copyright infringement??

gnrlbzik 11y ago

I do not upload any music on to sound cloud, but never the less, it is one of my primary ways of discovery. I would happily pay $2-4 a month to so called get rid of "ADs" and support them.

pindropm 11y ago

There is a great cultural and emotional content that these services contains. Shutting these services will cause a big damage to this heritage. We are trying to solve some of the biggest problems of music industry with PindropMusic https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/pindropmusic/id1042553162?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/pindropmusic/id1042553162?mt...

pindropm 11y ago

DanFeldman 11y ago

Losing soundcloud would be terrible. Half of my music discovery is through soundcloud; Though I find myself listening 80% of the time on Spotify instead, moving over once I find an artist through soundcloud. Soundcloud's mobile app is terrible though, randomly freezing and crashing. Wonder if poor engagement through the app contributed to the this loss posting.

scosman 11y ago

KPMG's statement is pretty standard in any GAAP financial statement. If your company is losing money, it pretty much has to be included. Not many startups wouldn't have it.

techthumb 11y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11083954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11083954

ryan-allen 11y ago

How much data does soundcloud host? 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.

slackstation 11y ago

What we need is something that isn't centralized. The problem that needs to be solved is how to pay for the things that you care about but, keep enough in a common pot to not only share the service but, to make systems for discovery. 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.

norea-armozel 11y ago

I think it would be a shame if SoundCloud disappeared considering how many of my music discoveries come from there. If it wasn't for SoundCloud I wouldn't have known Pilotpriest, Dance with the dead, Droid Bishop, and other synthwave artists even existed. Bandcamp is okay but I find it hard to find new synthwave and related genre artists on their search. If SoundCloud dies someone over at Bandcamp needs to beef up the search and tagging system over there (I buy much of my music now through BandCamp).

aiw1nters 11y ago

factmag talking financials is like Trump talking politics