11 ms·

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) we

by 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.
- koore 11y ago
  I pay for it and I'm not a pro. I really only paid because I wanted the spotlight feature and I also felt that I used the site so much it would be prudent to throw them some funds. Like most I have been thoroughly disappointed with the lack of upgrades to the site but so much good content is there that it's hard to walk away from it.
- werber 11y ago
  I use sound cloud for finding new artists and I don't even know what I could pay for...
- stuart78 11y ago
  Their business model seems backwards. There are a lot more of us consumers than producers, so why not offer packages to us? That model does turn SC into a more traditional service, but because it has a more unique collection than the alternatives, it seems to have distinct value.
- bonniemuffin 11y ago
  I want to pay them, but they didn't seem to have a music-listener-focused subscription level last time I looked. All of their paid features were designed for music producers, not listeners.
aback 11y ago
when people argue that "digital distribution is essentially free," then ask why Soundcloud is losing money, since distributing music is literally their only real cost of doing business. we will continue to endure substantial cultural losses for so long as people continue to believe that content can & should be distributed and consumed for free. ultimately some sort of micropayments + blockchain-like-cloudserving might replace Spotify, Soundcloud, and all other streaming services with a decentralized system in which listeners compensate artists directly. until then the promise of disintermediation is just a fantasy. gatekeepers on the Internet control access to most content, particularly music.
- zanny 11y ago
  If you used something like ipfs, syncthing, or generic torrents you could easily distribute anything you want at large scale at no cost, as long as people were interested in having it. If you choose to centralize distribution on one web server that is your own choice, but the better phrase is "digital distribution is free if you want it to be". I doubt we will see a return to pay-to-listen models in music. Reality has taken too big of a bite around the copyright extortion ring surrounding sine waves. The future of music is in patronage, merchandising, and live performances - which really, it has always been. Only extremely rare unicorn performers ever have the stars align to be able to monetize their music itself (in the past it was making it big with a label, today last decade it was topping itunes) while we are seeing the rise of music as a viable profession without extraordinary fame as long as you can provide a niche and be good at it, you can attract enough whale fans to support you regardless of if the tracks themselves are free - your real audience is those that not only want what you already made, but want you to continue to make. Remember, as in all things IP, it is not the actual music file that is scarce or expensive to produce, it is the idea behind the music that took an artist hours or days to hand craft into a digital creation. The first iteration was the expensive one - all other ones are effectively free. It is essential that going forward we culturally recognize the distinction and move to seek sustainable business models around the former rather than the later, which we only invented as an imperfect way to translate ideas into the physical goods market back when they were less distinct than they are now (ie, costs of distribution did exist for paper books, so pigeonholing writing into markets via copyright was a reasonable train of thought when per-unit costs still existed and thus people could not effortlessly propagate the information on an individual basis).
strgrd 11y ago
We are living in the age of data impermanence. There is no mechanism to archive all of the content we are generating efficiently. Soundcloud represents but one of the many websites whose content will be lost forever to the digital dark ages.
- jonknee 11y ago
  Data has never been more permanent than it is now, but we're also generating much more data than ever.
  - copperx 11y ago
    What are you talking about? Stone, paper, and magnetic tape are more permanent than any hard drive or optical storage medium today.
    - jonknee 11y ago
      Most things never made it to stone, paper and magnetic tape. We're recording more data now than ever before because it's so cheap to do so. Sure we lose some, but more information will be created and stored today than existed in the entire world not that long ago.
- mc32 11y ago
  On the other hand, without them, much of the content wouldn't have been anywhere anyway. So the content is there because they are there. And if the go away, so might some of that content as well as future content which won't have a home.
- sangnoir 11y ago
  > There is no mechanism to archive all of the content we are generating efficiently While we can't archive all the content, the folk at the Internet Archives* are put heroic efforts in preserving the notable content. If Soundcloud doesn't make it, I hope they at least work with the Internet Archive to preserve the data. 1. https://archive.org/ https://archive.org/
6stringmerc 11y ago
As a counter-point though, the role of SoundCloud in a diversified music commerce portfolio is not ideal as a catch-all archive. A professional elsewhere mentioned it is a useful tool for sharing and A/B/C listening tests with tracks set to private, but that's not the end use-case scenario. In principle, SoundCloud should not be the sole - or even main - distribution channel for a music act. To put it another way, SoundCloud at its core is a free streaming site, and it also allows free downloads if enabled by the music act. There is no way I know of to set up SoundCloud for paid downloads or streams. Thus, using Bandcamp, Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, Tidal, Google, Deezr (etc) are wise to capture a modest revenue stream and listener data in ways SoundCloud simply doesn't support. SoundCloud a lot more like Facebook than it is iTunes: socially important, great for sharing, a way for something to go viral - all important angles in modern business, sure. Is it such a monolith that I'm worried about its future? Not really; it'd be sad to watch it crumble (further, in some respects) but that doesn't seem likely for at least a couple more years. Lots can change.
- cmyr 11y ago
  A significant role of the SoundCloud that I'm most familiar with is as a distribution platform for mixes and performances by musicians for whom the _sale_ of their music is not a significant revenue source; these performers (and I'm talking about dance music, in all its varieties) almost exclusively make their living performing live, and release mixes mostly as a sort of marketing. This obviously isn't the _only_ type of artist on SoundCloud, but they're a huge part of what makes SoundCloud culturally significant.
  - 6stringmerc 11y ago
    I'll just go to my crib-sheet response: SoundCloud isn't for "mixes" as in DJ sets. That's what MixCloud is for. That's why DJ mixes get kicked off SoundCloud routinely, and I won't fault them for it. MixCloud is for mixes, SoundCloud is for creators, in my opinion.
    - tobz 11y ago
      Mixes get kicked off of SoundCloud because they have a higher chance of one of the X songs/samples in them being picked up in the copyright detector net. The fact that it doesn't happen, or that it happens less, on MixCloud only goes to show that MixCloud isn't playing ball with copyright holders, or hasn't been approached to do so. They don't have some magical blanket license to let anyone, anywhere, for free, upload a mix with copyrighted material.
ghaff 11y ago
See also the original MP3.com. >it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it were to disappear. This is something I haven't heard a great deal about, and it's something that concerns me about other media platforms like Medium. Of course, in all fairness (and modulo archiving by organizations like the Internet Archive), media and writing hosted on a personal web site is at least as likely to just disappear at some point. I agree with your basic point though. Any number of content sites have gone away in a manner where pretty much everything was lost.
- Houshalter 11y ago
  Link Rot is a serious problem for the internet in general. From Gwern: http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs >In a 2003 experiment, Fetterly et al. discovered that about one link out of every 200 disappeared each week from the Internet. McCown et al 2005 discovered that half of the URLs cited in D-Lib Magazine articles were no longer accessible 10 years after publication [the irony!], and other studies have shown link rot in academic literature to be even worse... Nelson and Allen... examined link rot in digital libraries and found that about 3% of the objects were no longer accessible after one year. >Bruce Schneier remarks that one friend experienced 50% linkrot in one of his pages over less than 9 years (not that the situation was any better in 1998), and that his own blog posts link to news articles that go dead in days; Vitorio checks bookmarks from 1997, finding that hand-checking indicates a total link rot of 91% with only half of the dead available in sources like the Internet Archive; the Internet Archive itself has estimated the average lifespan of a Web page at 100 days. A Science study looked at articles in prestigious journals; they didn’t use many Internet links, but when they did, 2 years later ~13% were dead. The French company Linterweb studied external links on the French Wikipedia before setting up their cache of French external links, and found - back in 2008 - already 5% were dead. (The English Wikipedia has seen a 2010-2011 spike from a few thousand dead links to ~110,000 out of ~17.5m live links.) The dismal studies just go on and on and on (and on). Even in a highly stable, funded, curated environment, link rot happens anyway. For example, about 11% of Arab Spring-related tweets were gone within a year (even though Twitter is - currently - still around). >My specific target date is 2070, 60 years from now... Even at the lowest estimate of 3% annual linkrot, few will survive to 2070. If each link has a 97% chance of surviving each year, then the chance a link will be alive in 2070 is... ≈0.16 (or to put it another way, an 84% chance any given link will die)... If we try to predict using a more reasonable estimate of 50% linkrot, then an average of 0 links will survive... It would be a good idea to simply assume that no link will survive.
forrestthewoods 11y ago
oops Edit: Downvote all you want! Relying on a ubiqutous but unsustainable platform qualifies as oops.
badloginagain 11y ago
When Grooveshark shut down, I lost some fantastic artists. There was a low-distraction music station for programmers [writhem radio] I would listen to, which was gaining some popularity and would have music guests DJ their new stuff. When Grooveshark died, that set of original music spun by the DJs was essentially lost- which sucked because that was my go-to for "work music". I've only started to find the tracks again, some on soundcloud, YouTube, etc. Worst part is, the guys responsible for the music station, which was definitely growing, hasn't done much to start again. It's understandable, when you think of how difficult it is to grow a brand from nothing.
- tshannon 11y ago
  Yeah, I found so much new music from grooveshark broadcasts.
- rubicon33 11y ago
  I had the same experience when Grooveshark shut down. It's weird. I didn't realize just how awesome their service was. On the face of it, the technology wasn't particularly novel. It was the content that kept me coming back. Mostly the radio shows like WritheM and Electro Chill.
- lucasmullens 11y ago
  The guy behind Writhem Radio is building his own service: http://wiki.writhem.com/display/radio/WritheM+Radio+Home http://wiki.writhem.com/display/radio/WritheM+Radio+Home He's jumped from platform to platform until he just decided to do it himself.
- jordanlev 11y ago
  This is certainly not a replacement for what you've lost, and I don't know if it's even the kind of music you're referring to... but you might be interested in: http://musicforprogramming.net/ http://musicforprogramming.net/
- johnny_and1 11y ago
  Search for WritheM on Spotify. I was in the same boat until I got the playlist from their wiki and loaded it into Spotify.
wrecktangle 11y ago
All of my weight behind it. SoundCloud was how Indie Music, the companion of the lonely programmer, took us all into the small bedroom corners of the struggling songwriter. The problem is obviously business model. While not so straightforward, applying DJBooth.net's money-making viewpoint of non-intrusive angle ads or more creatively publishing short-span addictive games on the website Indie gamers can play while listening to Indie Music should start a path to a defining solution.
pmlnr 11y ago
> it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it were to disappear And that is why everyone keeps backups of their work on their personal sites, right? http://indiewebcamp.com/ http://indiewebcamp.com/
- ghaff 11y ago
  Even if they do, people lose interest, stop paying hosting fees, or generally move on. I have a generally unmaintained personal site that was on Comcast Personal Web Pages--which were shut down last year. I do have backups (which many wouldn't have had) and I did rehost the site for now (as many also wouldn't have bothered doing).
cJ0th 11y ago
> 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. I don't know. We would obviously loose a fragment of history but if those tracks were so important culturally then they would have been distributed more widely. For instance, pressed on CD or vinyl or utilized in a movie or pirated in some way. While I do like soundcloud I don't get what's so special about it. My hunch is that it is not so much the website but the fact that the internet is mainstream these days. There were websites where artists could share their music and have a profile before Soundcloud. Just to name a few: Besonic, mp3.com, myownmusic ...
- URSpider94 11y ago
  I think you're taking a rather narrow view. soundcloud has become a storehouse not just for music, but for SOUND -- ambient environments, spoken word, audio diaries, etc. saying that anything of value is released on CD already would be like saying that the personal correspondence of Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, etc is worthless because we already have their published books. In this way, I think it's also unique vs. other music sharing sites, in that people don't typically post their recording of a Chinese night market on their CDBaby or YouTube channel ... Soundcloud:sound :: Flickr:photos
  - cJ0th 11y ago
    I was merely responding to GP who just mentioned music. And I think that most of what is released on soundcloud has no substance but that is fine. > saying that anything of value is released on CD already would be like saying that the personal correspondence of Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, etc is worthless because we already have their published books. No, not at all. What I meant to imply is that if something is of worth culturally then at least some people would put some effort in keeping it alive. Like I said, it needn't be a CD. A pirated rip that is spread over bit torrent would be just as good. The bible is still around because people painstakingly copied it not because some single entity kept one copy alive for good. As far as general sounds are concerned, there are other places like freesound.org or archive.org. Thus I don't think soundlcoud has a monopoly on sound.
leishulang 11y ago
Soundcloud is so important for the programmer community that it is unthinkable that it will just disappear. All those background music I enjoy as I code, all those chip-tunes, livecoding musics etc. I hope they open some donation so that I can help.
- Erwin 11y ago
  Well, they do accept money -- they have a €5/month donation plan available here: https://soundcloud.com/pro https://soundcloud.com/pro
- ry_ry 11y ago
  $44million is an awful lot of donations.
  - umeshunni 11y ago
    ~6500000 monthly donations of EUR5 each.
- brentm 11y ago
  I've never personally gotten into SoundCloud but I fill a similar void using Spotify. They have a constantly evolving set of background music playlist under "Browse" > "Genres & Moods" > "Focus".
tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
agree 100% on EDM and soundcloud, OTOH there also are a LOT of musicians that deal with film scoring, it seems very used for demo / mockup purposes so that would be difficult for them as well if it closed
api 11y ago
Us dorks who have been hacking away on ways to 'decentralize' the net feel vindicated by this kind of thing.
- pmarreck 11y ago
  So where's that decentralized SoundCloud?
kyrre 11y ago
i think you are forgetting youtube
cfcef 11y ago
Your friend might want to look into Archive Team, then. See how well their current tools support a crawl of Soundcloud, that the documentation is up to date, plan out how a pre-closure crawl would go, and do a small test run to check that everything goes as it should.
tripzilch 11y ago
If I really like a track I hear on Soundcloud, I download it with youtube-dl.
- exhilaration 11y ago
  Thanks, I had no idea this was possible.
  - jjn2009 11y ago
    All the files they host are just mp3 hosted in s3 with no encryption or authentication required. Its 128kbps which is disappointing but its no different from how it would sound streaming on the site.
    - tripzilch 11y ago
      They can be better than 128kbps, it depends on the quality you upload. But that's the artists choice and obviously if you want the best quality you should buy it. Also if you don't care about the quality but really like the song you should buy it :)
      - jjn2009 11y ago
        Do you know under what conditions the stream is higher than 128kbps? I've only done a small amount of digging around on their APIs and have not found anything but that.
alexbecker 11y ago
This is why archive.org is so important.
fapjacks 11y ago
I can speak directly to this. I recently started making electronic music of my own, and have been building a small community of fans and listeners. I don't want to give the wrong impression here (it's still friends and family and only a few strangers), but if SoundCloud goes down, it will basically destroy the progress I've made so far. I am a bit freaked out right now with this news. I really hope the torch gets passed and I don't have my community pulled out from underneath me.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
toomanybeersies 11y ago
I have a techno song on my computer that I downloaded at least 5 years ago, I think maybe 2009? I remember downloading the song when I was trying to pirate a copy of Fruity Loops Studio. I recently came back upon it and couldn't find it on the internet, so I uploaded it to YouTube for posterity [0]. It's amazing that in something so massive like the internet, a single mp3 file can be almost lost forever. It really shows how important sites like archive.org are. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1phpSqAjgY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1phpSqAjgY
coldtea 11y ago
>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. Would it be really? Most of it wasn't even heard by more than 200 people in the first place. For something to be a "tremendous cultural loss" it should not just a cultural artifact, it should also have had cultural impact (mass appreciation or influence) to begin with.
bborud 11y ago
I'd like to offer a contrary perspective. I actually like the idea that some of our "stuff" ends up being ephemeral. By accident or design. I'm not really talking about burning the occasional Alexandrian Library, but the stuff that didn't seem important enough for anyone to really care about. And if something I made only exists on Soundcloud, I either don't really care or I'm a bit stupid. For most of our history nearly everything we thought, said and did was ephemeral. Not recorded and then gone. We've become pack-rats. We're at the beginning of technology civilization and already we have amassed so much that for any major genre of music there exists more content than a human being could consume in a lifetime. And the vast majority of it is, at best, unremarkable. I think we are wired for worrying about losing information because it used to be a disaster. We used to be terrible at recording information. We're not anymore. Oh boy are we not. We'll just make more. Or we'll repeat whatever process brought us there. And if it can't be repeated you now have the rarest and most unique gift: a cultural experience that only exists in the memory of those present. Imagine the storage space we as a civilization are going to use for storing worthless shit just in the next 100 years.

by cmyr 11y ago

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.
koore 11y ago
I pay for it and I'm not a pro. I really only paid because I wanted the spotlight feature and I also felt that I used the site so much it would be prudent to throw them some funds. Like most I have been thoroughly disappointed with the lack of upgrades to the site but so much good content is there that it's hard to walk away from it.
werber 11y ago
I use sound cloud for finding new artists and I don't even know what I could pay for...
stuart78 11y ago
Their business model seems backwards. There are a lot more of us consumers than producers, so why not offer packages to us? That model does turn SC into a more traditional service, but because it has a more unique collection than the alternatives, it seems to have distinct value.
bonniemuffin 11y ago
I want to pay them, but they didn't seem to have a music-listener-focused subscription level last time I looked. All of their paid features were designed for music producers, not listeners.

aback 11y ago

when people argue that "digital distribution is essentially free," then ask why Soundcloud is losing money, since distributing music is literally their only real cost of doing business. we will continue to endure substantial cultural losses for so long as people continue to believe that content can & should be distributed and consumed for free. ultimately some sort of micropayments + blockchain-like-cloudserving might replace Spotify, Soundcloud, and all other streaming services with a decentralized system in which listeners compensate artists directly. until then the promise of disintermediation is just a fantasy. gatekeepers on the Internet control access to most content, particularly music.

zanny 11y ago
If you used something like ipfs, syncthing, or generic torrents you could easily distribute anything you want at large scale at no cost, as long as people were interested in having it. If you choose to centralize distribution on one web server that is your own choice, but the better phrase is "digital distribution is free if you want it to be". I doubt we will see a return to pay-to-listen models in music. Reality has taken too big of a bite around the copyright extortion ring surrounding sine waves. The future of music is in patronage, merchandising, and live performances - which really, it has always been. Only extremely rare unicorn performers ever have the stars align to be able to monetize their music itself (in the past it was making it big with a label, today last decade it was topping itunes) while we are seeing the rise of music as a viable profession without extraordinary fame as long as you can provide a niche and be good at it, you can attract enough whale fans to support you regardless of if the tracks themselves are free - your real audience is those that not only want what you already made, but want you to continue to make. Remember, as in all things IP, it is not the actual music file that is scarce or expensive to produce, it is the idea behind the music that took an artist hours or days to hand craft into a digital creation. The first iteration was the expensive one - all other ones are effectively free. It is essential that going forward we culturally recognize the distinction and move to seek sustainable business models around the former rather than the later, which we only invented as an imperfect way to translate ideas into the physical goods market back when they were less distinct than they are now (ie, costs of distribution did exist for paper books, so pigeonholing writing into markets via copyright was a reasonable train of thought when per-unit costs still existed and thus people could not effortlessly propagate the information on an individual basis).

strgrd 11y ago

We are living in the age of data impermanence. There is no mechanism to archive all of the content we are generating efficiently. Soundcloud represents but one of the many websites whose content will be lost forever to the digital dark ages.

jonknee 11y ago
Data has never been more permanent than it is now, but we're also generating much more data than ever.
- copperx 11y ago
  What are you talking about? Stone, paper, and magnetic tape are more permanent than any hard drive or optical storage medium today.
  - jonknee 11y ago
    Most things never made it to stone, paper and magnetic tape. We're recording more data now than ever before because it's so cheap to do so. Sure we lose some, but more information will be created and stored today than existed in the entire world not that long ago.
mc32 11y ago
On the other hand, without them, much of the content wouldn't have been anywhere anyway. So the content is there because they are there. And if the go away, so might some of that content as well as future content which won't have a home.
sangnoir 11y ago
> There is no mechanism to archive all of the content we are generating efficiently While we can't archive all the content, the folk at the Internet Archives* are put heroic efforts in preserving the notable content. If Soundcloud doesn't make it, I hope they at least work with the Internet Archive to preserve the data. 1. https://archive.org/ https://archive.org/

6stringmerc 11y ago

As a counter-point though, the role of SoundCloud in a diversified music commerce portfolio is not ideal as a catch-all archive. A professional elsewhere mentioned it is a useful tool for sharing and A/B/C listening tests with tracks set to private, but that's not the end use-case scenario. In principle, SoundCloud should not be the sole - or even main - distribution channel for a music act. To put it another way, SoundCloud at its core is a free streaming site, and it also allows free downloads if enabled by the music act. There is no way I know of to set up SoundCloud for paid downloads or streams. Thus, using Bandcamp, Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, Tidal, Google, Deezr (etc) are wise to capture a modest revenue stream and listener data in ways SoundCloud simply doesn't support. SoundCloud a lot more like Facebook than it is iTunes: socially important, great for sharing, a way for something to go viral - all important angles in modern business, sure. Is it such a monolith that I'm worried about its future? Not really; it'd be sad to watch it crumble (further, in some respects) but that doesn't seem likely for at least a couple more years. Lots can change.

cmyr 11y ago
A significant role of the SoundCloud that I'm most familiar with is as a distribution platform for mixes and performances by musicians for whom the _sale_ of their music is not a significant revenue source; these performers (and I'm talking about dance music, in all its varieties) almost exclusively make their living performing live, and release mixes mostly as a sort of marketing. This obviously isn't the _only_ type of artist on SoundCloud, but they're a huge part of what makes SoundCloud culturally significant.
- 6stringmerc 11y ago
  I'll just go to my crib-sheet response: SoundCloud isn't for "mixes" as in DJ sets. That's what MixCloud is for. That's why DJ mixes get kicked off SoundCloud routinely, and I won't fault them for it. MixCloud is for mixes, SoundCloud is for creators, in my opinion.
  - tobz 11y ago
    Mixes get kicked off of SoundCloud because they have a higher chance of one of the X songs/samples in them being picked up in the copyright detector net. The fact that it doesn't happen, or that it happens less, on MixCloud only goes to show that MixCloud isn't playing ball with copyright holders, or hasn't been approached to do so. They don't have some magical blanket license to let anyone, anywhere, for free, upload a mix with copyrighted material.

ghaff 11y ago

See also the original MP3.com. >it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it were to disappear. This is something I haven't heard a great deal about, and it's something that concerns me about other media platforms like Medium. Of course, in all fairness (and modulo archiving by organizations like the Internet Archive), media and writing hosted on a personal web site is at least as likely to just disappear at some point. I agree with your basic point though. Any number of content sites have gone away in a manner where pretty much everything was lost.

Houshalter 11y ago
Link Rot is a serious problem for the internet in general. From Gwern: http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs >In a 2003 experiment, Fetterly et al. discovered that about one link out of every 200 disappeared each week from the Internet. McCown et al 2005 discovered that half of the URLs cited in D-Lib Magazine articles were no longer accessible 10 years after publication [the irony!], and other studies have shown link rot in academic literature to be even worse... Nelson and Allen... examined link rot in digital libraries and found that about 3% of the objects were no longer accessible after one year. >Bruce Schneier remarks that one friend experienced 50% linkrot in one of his pages over less than 9 years (not that the situation was any better in 1998), and that his own blog posts link to news articles that go dead in days; Vitorio checks bookmarks from 1997, finding that hand-checking indicates a total link rot of 91% with only half of the dead available in sources like the Internet Archive; the Internet Archive itself has estimated the average lifespan of a Web page at 100 days. A Science study looked at articles in prestigious journals; they didn’t use many Internet links, but when they did, 2 years later ~13% were dead. The French company Linterweb studied external links on the French Wikipedia before setting up their cache of French external links, and found - back in 2008 - already 5% were dead. (The English Wikipedia has seen a 2010-2011 spike from a few thousand dead links to ~110,000 out of ~17.5m live links.) The dismal studies just go on and on and on (and on). Even in a highly stable, funded, curated environment, link rot happens anyway. For example, about 11% of Arab Spring-related tweets were gone within a year (even though Twitter is - currently - still around). >My specific target date is 2070, 60 years from now... Even at the lowest estimate of 3% annual linkrot, few will survive to 2070. If each link has a 97% chance of surviving each year, then the chance a link will be alive in 2070 is... ≈0.16 (or to put it another way, an 84% chance any given link will die)... If we try to predict using a more reasonable estimate of 50% linkrot, then an average of 0 links will survive... It would be a good idea to simply assume that no link will survive.

forrestthewoods 11y ago

oops Edit: Downvote all you want! Relying on a ubiqutous but unsustainable platform qualifies as oops.

badloginagain 11y ago

When Grooveshark shut down, I lost some fantastic artists. There was a low-distraction music station for programmers [writhem radio] I would listen to, which was gaining some popularity and would have music guests DJ their new stuff. When Grooveshark died, that set of original music spun by the DJs was essentially lost- which sucked because that was my go-to for "work music". I've only started to find the tracks again, some on soundcloud, YouTube, etc. Worst part is, the guys responsible for the music station, which was definitely growing, hasn't done much to start again. It's understandable, when you think of how difficult it is to grow a brand from nothing.

tshannon 11y ago
Yeah, I found so much new music from grooveshark broadcasts.
rubicon33 11y ago
I had the same experience when Grooveshark shut down. It's weird. I didn't realize just how awesome their service was. On the face of it, the technology wasn't particularly novel. It was the content that kept me coming back. Mostly the radio shows like WritheM and Electro Chill.
lucasmullens 11y ago
The guy behind Writhem Radio is building his own service: http://wiki.writhem.com/display/radio/WritheM+Radio+Home http://wiki.writhem.com/display/radio/WritheM+Radio+Home He's jumped from platform to platform until he just decided to do it himself.
jordanlev 11y ago
This is certainly not a replacement for what you've lost, and I don't know if it's even the kind of music you're referring to... but you might be interested in: http://musicforprogramming.net/ http://musicforprogramming.net/
johnny_and1 11y ago
Search for WritheM on Spotify. I was in the same boat until I got the playlist from their wiki and loaded it into Spotify.

wrecktangle 11y ago

All of my weight behind it. SoundCloud was how Indie Music, the companion of the lonely programmer, took us all into the small bedroom corners of the struggling songwriter. The problem is obviously business model. While not so straightforward, applying DJBooth.net's money-making viewpoint of non-intrusive angle ads or more creatively publishing short-span addictive games on the website Indie gamers can play while listening to Indie Music should start a path to a defining solution.

pmlnr 11y ago

> it would be a tremendous cultural loss if it were to disappear And that is why everyone keeps backups of their work on their personal sites, right? http://indiewebcamp.com/ http://indiewebcamp.com/

ghaff 11y ago
Even if they do, people lose interest, stop paying hosting fees, or generally move on. I have a generally unmaintained personal site that was on Comcast Personal Web Pages--which were shut down last year. I do have backups (which many wouldn't have had) and I did rehost the site for now (as many also wouldn't have bothered doing).

cJ0th 11y ago

> 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. I don't know. We would obviously loose a fragment of history but if those tracks were so important culturally then they would have been distributed more widely. For instance, pressed on CD or vinyl or utilized in a movie or pirated in some way. While I do like soundcloud I don't get what's so special about it. My hunch is that it is not so much the website but the fact that the internet is mainstream these days. There were websites where artists could share their music and have a profile before Soundcloud. Just to name a few: Besonic, mp3.com, myownmusic ...

URSpider94 11y ago
I think you're taking a rather narrow view. soundcloud has become a storehouse not just for music, but for SOUND -- ambient environments, spoken word, audio diaries, etc. saying that anything of value is released on CD already would be like saying that the personal correspondence of Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, etc is worthless because we already have their published books. In this way, I think it's also unique vs. other music sharing sites, in that people don't typically post their recording of a Chinese night market on their CDBaby or YouTube channel ... Soundcloud:sound :: Flickr:photos
- cJ0th 11y ago
  I was merely responding to GP who just mentioned music. And I think that most of what is released on soundcloud has no substance but that is fine. > saying that anything of value is released on CD already would be like saying that the personal correspondence of Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, etc is worthless because we already have their published books. No, not at all. What I meant to imply is that if something is of worth culturally then at least some people would put some effort in keeping it alive. Like I said, it needn't be a CD. A pirated rip that is spread over bit torrent would be just as good. The bible is still around because people painstakingly copied it not because some single entity kept one copy alive for good. As far as general sounds are concerned, there are other places like freesound.org or archive.org. Thus I don't think soundlcoud has a monopoly on sound.

leishulang 11y ago

Soundcloud is so important for the programmer community that it is unthinkable that it will just disappear. All those background music I enjoy as I code, all those chip-tunes, livecoding musics etc. I hope they open some donation so that I can help.

Erwin 11y ago
Well, they do accept money -- they have a €5/month donation plan available here: https://soundcloud.com/pro https://soundcloud.com/pro
ry_ry 11y ago
$44million is an awful lot of donations.
- umeshunni 11y ago
  ~6500000 monthly donations of EUR5 each.
brentm 11y ago
I've never personally gotten into SoundCloud but I fill a similar void using Spotify. They have a constantly evolving set of background music playlist under "Browse" > "Genres & Moods" > "Focus".

tetraodonpuffer 11y ago

agree 100% on EDM and soundcloud, OTOH there also are a LOT of musicians that deal with film scoring, it seems very used for demo / mockup purposes so that would be difficult for them as well if it closed

api 11y ago

Us dorks who have been hacking away on ways to 'decentralize' the net feel vindicated by this kind of thing.

pmarreck 11y ago
So where's that decentralized SoundCloud?

kyrre 11y ago

i think you are forgetting youtube

cfcef 11y ago

Your friend might want to look into Archive Team, then. See how well their current tools support a crawl of Soundcloud, that the documentation is up to date, plan out how a pre-closure crawl would go, and do a small test run to check that everything goes as it should.

tripzilch 11y ago

If I really like a track I hear on Soundcloud, I download it with youtube-dl.

exhilaration 11y ago
Thanks, I had no idea this was possible.
- jjn2009 11y ago
  All the files they host are just mp3 hosted in s3 with no encryption or authentication required. Its 128kbps which is disappointing but its no different from how it would sound streaming on the site.
  - tripzilch 11y ago
    They can be better than 128kbps, it depends on the quality you upload. But that's the artists choice and obviously if you want the best quality you should buy it. Also if you don't care about the quality but really like the song you should buy it :)
    - jjn2009 11y ago
      Do you know under what conditions the stream is higher than 128kbps? I've only done a small amount of digging around on their APIs and have not found anything but that.

alexbecker 11y ago

This is why archive.org is so important.

fapjacks 11y ago

I can speak directly to this. I recently started making electronic music of my own, and have been building a small community of fans and listeners. I don't want to give the wrong impression here (it's still friends and family and only a few strangers), but if SoundCloud goes down, it will basically destroy the progress I've made so far. I am a bit freaked out right now with this news. I really hope the torch gets passed and I don't have my community pulled out from underneath me.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

toomanybeersies 11y ago

I have a techno song on my computer that I downloaded at least 5 years ago, I think maybe 2009? I remember downloading the song when I was trying to pirate a copy of Fruity Loops Studio. I recently came back upon it and couldn't find it on the internet, so I uploaded it to YouTube for posterity [0]. It's amazing that in something so massive like the internet, a single mp3 file can be almost lost forever. It really shows how important sites like archive.org are. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1phpSqAjgY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1phpSqAjgY

coldtea 11y ago

>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. Would it be really? Most of it wasn't even heard by more than 200 people in the first place. For something to be a "tremendous cultural loss" it should not just a cultural artifact, it should also have had cultural impact (mass appreciation or influence) to begin with.

bborud 11y ago

I'd like to offer a contrary perspective. I actually like the idea that some of our "stuff" ends up being ephemeral. By accident or design. I'm not really talking about burning the occasional Alexandrian Library, but the stuff that didn't seem important enough for anyone to really care about. And if something I made only exists on Soundcloud, I either don't really care or I'm a bit stupid. For most of our history nearly everything we thought, said and did was ephemeral. Not recorded and then gone. We've become pack-rats. We're at the beginning of technology civilization and already we have amassed so much that for any major genre of music there exists more content than a human being could consume in a lifetime. And the vast majority of it is, at best, unremarkable. I think we are wired for worrying about losing information because it used to be a disaster. We used to be terrible at recording information. We're not anymore. Oh boy are we not. We'll just make more. Or we'll repeat whatever process brought us there. And if it can't be repeated you now have the rarest and most unique gift: a cultural experience that only exists in the memory of those present. Imagine the storage space we as a civilization are going to use for storing worthless shit just in the next 100 years.