27 ms·

SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

462 points by janober 9y ago

janober 9y ago
Very sorry to hear! Apparently additionally also the engineers in New York: https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882977097232338947 https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882977097232338947
untog 9y ago
Awful news. But I'm glad to see that it's part of an attempt to stay independent - I hope Soundcloud sticks around, in control of its own destiny, for a long time.
- strictnein 9y ago
  Well, I mean, they're independent because no one was willing to buy them. Spotify and Google passed. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/google-mulling-soundcloud-buyout-say-whispers-sony-universals-stakes-revealed/ https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/google-mulling-soundc...
  - jaclaz 9y ago
    Yes, from the content of the article it seems more like an attempt to just stay alive.
mintplant 9y ago
> Some rough news today for SoundCloud, the audio streaming site whose content is largely based around uploads from its 175 million users in 190 countries. Does SoundCloud see itself as an audio streaming service now, as opposed to an audio hosting service? That seems like a focus shift away from where they started, and puts them up against behemoths like Spotify. Maybe that's related to why they're struggling. Tangentially: does anyone have any idea of how Bandcamp is doing?
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  File hosting is just not a profitable enterprise. This pattern should be familiar by now: gain prominence by giving away tons of stuff to draw in users, and then clamp down when the bill comes due, resulting in a hard pivot that alienates the users. The truth is that users are not loyal. If you are offering something for free, they will be happy to take it, and they will have no qualms about moving on when you stop giving them the free stuff that they came for. Selling eyeballs is a very tough business. People who want a realistic chance to make money should have plans besides "sell ads".
  - jonbarker 9y ago
    Isn't facebook basically file hosting with a bunch of links?
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      Yes, though it's 1) the largest such service with 2) some very sticky features. (Not that I use it.) Realise that the flipside of such services is their real customers -- the adverts side. For online advertising, the two largest agencies claim over 60% of the market, and are named "Google" and "Facebook". Everyone else is an also-ran. Which for any ads purchaser means "a lot more work for a lot less reach".
    - cookiecaper 9y ago
      Facebook is infrastructure. It provides the connections out to your personal network. Facebook's staying power comes from its ability to say "This is the best way to communicate with your personal network at any time". "File hosting" is just one subelement of that, because one of the things that you may want to share is a file. Couldn't the whole internet be generalized as "file hosting with a bunch of links"? A "file host" is a company whose primary purpose is for you to upload a file and give the link to someone else; they're a middleman that exists only because a more convenient/direct means of distribution to the intended network isn't available. This does not make the company nearly loud enough to establish its own identity/user base. Facebook has always been its own repository of people intelligence. It was never just an "upload your photos here". Such platforms, like Photobucket or Imgur, sometimes prosper for a while, until the communication channels that reach the intended audience directly offer something easier. (imgur is going down now as reddit introduced its own image host last year)
doublerebel 9y ago
It's been a downhill trend ever since trending likes were replaced by reposts. Trending likes actually showed which tunes my friends found most interesting. Reposts allowed a single user to spam a feed with their personal taste. Then repost bots were allowed to require repost to unlock a free download and now discovery on SoundCloud is almost dead. My friends who are successful producers but refuse to play the bot and pay-for-repost game are completely drowned in the noise. My bet is that since trending likes are a Graph DB problem, SoundCloud just chose not to solve it once it became too hard on their database. They famously had issues with early Mongo adoption so this would fit right in. Their most recent frontend HTML5 rewrite always winds up my CPU and hasn't changed in a couple years. SoundCloud to me has always been a great idea with some great design that got ruined by some poor engineering choices from the top. And at the end by a desperate grab for stats and cash. I think producers would have paid more, better subsidizing free plans, if discovery hadn't gone downhill. I ran the numbers once on how CDbaby and Bandcamp became successful (based on stats trickled out over the years) while SoundCloud could never turn a profit. There's still plenty of room for someone to do this right.
- draw_down 9y ago
  I haven't been using it long enough to have an opinion, but I did notice that the hosts of podcasts I enjoy would repost when they guested on another podcast, which I otherwise would not have noticed, and did appreciate. I only use it for podcasts though, never music.
  - doublerebel 9y ago
    Trending likes solved this, because even an upvote brigade required the user to have multiple friends in the brigade. All I had to do was follow a few key influencers on a topic and the post would show in my feed.
- legohead 9y ago
  I used to go to SC every day. When reposts started becoming a thing I loved it, since the people I followed would repost stuff I would have never found. But I guess I quit in time, as I never saw bots or what you are describing. That's too bad :(
tyingq 9y ago
Other sources say total employees are 420, so it's roughly a 40% cut. Ouch.
- cmrdporcupine 9y ago
  420 still seems like a rather unreasonably large number (to me) for something that is basically a file hosting service with a couple barely maintained mobile apps and a web site. Quite a few artists I follow are on Soundcloud primarily for new material. I would happily pay for Soundcloud if they'd bother to update their app for Android Auto and Android TV.
  - kayoone 9y ago
    420 is total employee count, only a fraction of that (i believe substantially below 100) are devs, which for a site of that size is adequate i guess. They also have quite a few engineers working with the data instead of product development.
    - Theodores 9y ago
      What is the max dev (+ engineer) to other office worker ratio? Even in tech companies with no physical product to get out the door it is easy to get a 1:10 ratio. You just need an army of sales, press, marketing, social media managing, customer service, HR, management, legal, design, print design, accounting, finance, office management and other random people with important jobs to do. How about a 1:75 ratio?!? With three offices you are going to need nine receptionists at a bare minimum if you are to cover reception for an hour either side of when everyone turns up. At a minimum the IT guys that plug people in and get them setup on 'Exchange' are of a similar number if all the offices are to be covered. So there must be a 'dev to total headcount' ratio, a maximum sustainable upper number, any higher and the company is doomed to 'miss the web' and get totally stuck in 1990's ways of working. I have seen a 1:75 ratio 'tech company' and saw great opportunity in changing it, although a long way off the desired 1:10 or lower. There must be companies where the ratio is the other way around. A programming concern with little of the normal sales/marketing requirements could be a 3:1 company.
pmoriarty 9y ago
For me as a music producer and consumer, one of the most frustrating changes recently made my Soundcloud has been their cancellation of groups, which used to be a decent means of discovering new music related to kinds of music you already like. Once groups were cancelled, the listens on the songs I post to Soundcloud plummeted to virtually nothing, and I really don't bother to upload my music there anymore, nor to go to Soundcloud to discover new music.
- avenoir 9y ago
  I'm not a SoundCloud user, but as someone who just started using groups on Flickr i noticed that the views on my uploaded photos went from barely anything to at least a thousand per image (and with just a handful of groups). I can definitely see how this can break your audience. Seems like an incredibly dumb move on SC's part.
- gorkonsine 9y ago
  This shows why the modern trend of not buying music and just subscribing to streaming services is so short-sighted. The companies are all basically fly-by-night, and can change their product in a heartbeat, leaving you with something substantially different from what you're used to.
  - josteink 9y ago
    I use streaming services all the time, but this is why I buy albums from artists I like and keep a self-hosted plex library. Should anything I like ever be taken down, I can still listen to it. The good thing about music is that it is ultra portable so mixing music from many sources, services and providers is hardly a problem. And you can clearly see that in how the market for online music works. Unlike video, which is so dysfunctional I'd be hard pressed to even say there is a market. End result: despite streaming services I still spend $100s of dollars on music every year. 0 on video.
    - gorkonsine 9y ago
      I think it's great you have a two-pronged approach (buying stuff you really like, so you're not out of luck if the streaming provider folds like this), but I have to question your assertion about online video: Netflix is clearly a success story I think. Maybe the only real standout, but still it exists. Lots of people are signed up for it. There's also Amazon video; I don't know how successful it is, but people do rent videos on there.
drinchev 9y ago
That is so sad for Berlin as well. SoundCloud is one of the companies that made the startup scene an actual scene. I know that SoundCloud's interview process is tough, so I guess it's a good day for companies looking for talent around Berlin.
- brazillianboy2 9y ago
  very true. However, most of the layoffs seem to be in the US, for now...
phreeza 9y ago
Their Github org seems to have gone from 45 to 37 members. Not sure what that means, do they only have 37 devs? https://github.com/orgs/soundcloud/people https://github.com/orgs/soundcloud/people https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Lo9slfH-9XcJ:https://github.com/soundcloud+&cd=1&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=de https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Lo9slf... edit: now it's at 35... ouch
- beckler 9y ago
  those are just the people who publically show they're part of that org.
  - brazillianboy2 9y ago
    yeah. You have to chose to be publicly visible as part of an org. I can assure you they have more than 35 devs.
    - tw352852 9y ago
      It was never more than 100 at a time tho. With these layoffs, I'm guessing it's hovering around 60
- lukashed 9y ago
  I wonder why they decided to remove them from GitHub already [1] when they were given a 90 days notice [2]. [1] https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882983954059595776 https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882983954059595776 [2] https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882981765064871937 https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882981765064871937
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
    Maybe to limit the damage notified (and thus possibly upset) employees can cause.
jinder 9y ago
Soundcloud started dying when they decided to be more like Spotify and less like the independent music discovery service they started out as. Now they have an app and experience that is not particularly good at either.
- amyjess 9y ago
  Oddly enough, when I first heard of SoundCloud, it was in a completely different context from either. I first saw it used as a pastebin for voice recordings. Specifically, members of some online transgender communities use it to solicit community feedback on their voices. They'll record themselves talking, post it to SoundCloud, and ask the community for input on what they could do better. I don't think there's enough of a market for "pastebin for voice recordings" to be a successful business though.
  - Nadya 9y ago
    Pastebin for voice recordings is basically what vocaroo.com is, and I discovered that in the same context you discovered SoundCloud. And also because popular use by 4chan. When I first heard of SoundCloud it was mostly used by self-releasing EDM artists as a place to upload their music, before YouTube was a popular alternative. Nowadays I see a lot of artists buying visualizer templates and uploading their music with that - or sending it to an aggregator on YouTube who displays a certain style of music (many of these aggregators don't seek artist permission and just upload popular songs and such, but many of the ones I follow get things sent to them by indie artists because a channel with 60,000+ subs will beat their own personal channel for recognition).
- Randgalt 9y ago
  Exactly - I'm a hobbyist musician and have all my music there. But, the last year or so they've been focusing on podcasting, etc. and, as you say, it's not good at any of that. For people like me, they haven't offered any new features in a long time.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  I've worked at a few places that died this way. CEO: "We're #1 in $NICHE. But growth is the only way, so we need to compete in $BIG_MARKET." [months of de-focus later] CEO: "We're only #10 in $BIG_MARKET and now we totally lost $NICHE!!" Resume writing ensues...
niftich 9y ago
I don't know how SoundCloud is managed and what their balance sheet looks like, but it's deeply unfortunate that a site that caters largely to up-and-coming musicians has so much trouble getting out of the red. Presumably they're hurt by the presence of platforms such as Youtube or the 2010s' rebooted Myspace, where musicians can reach a larger audience and where both sides of the equation are subsidized by ads. Meanwhile, more focused sites like Beatport appeared to have a successful recipe by selling actual tracks for download despite essentially offering unlimited streaming, yet even they ran into some trouble with their latest pivot. It's a tough space to make money in, despite seemingly meeting a popular need.
- raesene6 9y ago
  As soundcloud are a UK registered company you can actually see all their accounts/filings here https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/06343600/filing-history https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/06343600/filing-h... looking at their accounts to Dec 2015 (latest available), they don't make great reading. The balance sheet value went from £8m to -£34m in one year...
  - komodo 9y ago
    I wonder what their terms were when they signed up with the labels to be yet another Spotify clone. If it was any sort of upfront payment that would hit them hard since I don't think they have many subscribers to their SoundCloud plus (or whatever it's called)
aaronlevin 9y ago
SoundCloud employee here. If you are hiring, please reach out to people from SoundCloud. The decisions of who to let go were not based on performance. A lot of amazing people, both attitude and technically.
- saimiam 9y ago
  Kudos for posting under your full name (presumably.)
- stefanatfrg 9y ago
  We (Fraugster Gmbh) are hiring Go developers and devops in Berlin. We've always held a great amount of respect for soundcloud given all that you guys have done for the golang community in Berlin. If any of you are not based here we can offer relocation/visa support, check my previous comments on whoishiring for more details or contact me directly stefan <at> fraugster <dot> com
- mitchellshow 9y ago
  If you're passionate about independent music, we are actively hiring multiple roles at ReverbNation. http://corporate.reverbnation.com/careers/ http://corporate.reverbnation.com/careers/
- danpalmer 9y ago
  We're hiring at Thread in London – https://www.thread.com/jobs https://www.thread.com/jobs
- aembleton 9y ago
  We're currently hiring for the following roles at Rentalcars in London: - Mobile Engineering Lead - http://grnh.se/0sikan1 http://grnh.se/0sikan1 - Senior UX Designer - http://grnh.se/4hd0ix1 http://grnh.se/4hd0ix1 - Software Engineering Manager - http://grnh.se/8qix6m1 http://grnh.se/8qix6m1 - Senior Product Owner - http://grnh.se/qdkir31 http://grnh.se/qdkir31
- clhodapp 9y ago
  On that note, my team (I am the technical lead) at Rocket Lawyer is hiring engineers in San Francisco to work on Scala/Finagle/Finch services within our legal services platform. Rocket Lawyer is replacing a distributed monolith with a proper API-oriented application designed to run on Kubernetes and this team is at the center of that effort. Feel free to contact me by email (chodapp at rocketlawyer dot com). Edit: My company is also hiring backend devs for another team in London.
dustinmoris 9y ago
They also laid off the entire New York team and at least some individuals in Berlin: https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882977097232338947 https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882977097232338947 https://twitter.com/katalunia_/status/882992899893460993 https://twitter.com/katalunia_/status/882992899893460993 > Well, SoundCloud just laid off all of its New York engineering > Literally the entire payments and subscriptions team, ads-eng, monetization engineering, everybody > Not really clear to me how the execs think this company will be able to make money from now on
- Shivetya 9y ago
  have someone lined up to buy them and removing duplicated jobs to make themselves more appealing?
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    Normally such layoffs are made when an acquisition closes.
    - rhizome 9y ago
      They're done in preparation as well, in order to juke the burn rate numbers by reducing overhead. Make no mistake, an acquisition would likely result in further cuts (acq is always bad for the little guy) if not a complete wind-down, but cutting staff historically does make a company more attractive to acquirers.
- smrtinsert 9y ago
  That says a lot. German labor laws protect their citizens strongly. I'm pretty sure they would always choose to get rid of other country staff first.
  - cagataygurturk 9y ago
    Not only citizens, laws protect all workers
cturitzin 9y ago
I use SoundCloud daily for music I can't find anywhere else. I'm amazed they haven't tried harder to make people like me pay for the service. I would pay if I hit a paywall at some point of usage.
- brink 9y ago
  There are ads like every 3 songs on mobile. That would make someone like me either pay for their $4.99 service, (which I didn't even realize existed until recently because they only seem to advertise their $9.99 service) or use something else.
  - doublerebel 9y ago
    The ads are mostly regionally targeted/restricted so users might not see them if they have the right IP. E.g. in Canada and France I can't recall hearing an ad but they spammed me in the US until I finally paid.
  - dougherty 9y ago
    I don't think they have ads in all countries. I live in Norway and have not heard a single ad. When I was in the UK a couple of months ago, I received ads.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- komodo 9y ago
  There is a paywall, but only for the kind of music you can find everywhere else.
- problems 9y ago
  The problem is that they couldn't get away with it. Most of the stuff I listen to on SoundCloud is available on other platforms which are free and run by companies that can afford to take a loss (YouTube) or on services I already pay for (Spotify, DI.fm). I'm also greatly disappointed that they seem to have settled on 128kbit MP3 as the peak of quality.
kayoone 9y ago
SoundCloud is one of Berlin's prime examples when it comes to it's startup credentials, so them stumbling is really hard to see for someone working in the city.
- nodesocket 9y ago
  Also signals the difficulty in building large companies in the European market. I've been to Berlin a handful of times, and even tried to raise money from Berlin investors... Needless to say it was a very frustrating process. They are very conservative and risk adverse. Additionally the bureaucracy and "red-tape" hampers business.
  - Udo_Schmitz 9y ago
    >Additionally the bureaucracy and "red-tape" hampers business. Would love to hear details.
    - robk 9y ago
      One word : notaries. Ridiculous and anachronistic.
nodesocket 9y ago
As somebody who listens to SoundCloud almost daily I really hope they can turn things around. They should completely ditch the free plan, and just have a $2.99 or $3.99 plan. I am actually signing up for SoundCloud Go+ (offline listening) now.
expertentipp 9y ago
The wonder child of Berlin's startup scene is deceasing. Says a lot about the scene unfortunately.
- vr46 9y ago
  Do elaborate, please - I have often considered moving but various things people have said keep putting me off, such as a mildly racist culture.
  - justanton 9y ago
    If you're deliberately looking for it — you will definitely find/experience it at some point. In my personal experience, Berlin is very foreigner-friendly.
    - vr46 9y ago
      I'm told both things, actually, in equal measure. That there's ample casual racism compared to London and yet it's incredibly foreigner friendly. I'm married to a German so I have spent a lot of time in Germany, just not Berlin yet. No idea why my question was downvoted, I was quite interested to hear what the poster had to say about the scene.
      - brazillianboy2 9y ago
        Berlin can be quite different from the rest of Germany. I haven't seen any sign of racism here at all, especially in the start-up scene.
- hocuspocus 9y ago
  That is silly. Big tech hubs are bound to see startups fail, especially leaking ships that never turn a profit. Berlin isn't perfect but whatever happens to SoundCloud doesn't really say anything about its tech scene. Were SoundCloud be London/NYC/SF based, it would have gone under much, much quicker.
pyronite 9y ago
19 days ago an employee of SoundCloud posted an Ask HN about deferred salary reviews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14575627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14575627
- j_s 9y ago
  It's on the list! Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14653564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14653564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14653741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14653741 Other indicators: delayed salary reviews
skylark 9y ago
This is a perfect example of how strong software engineering from competitors can result in you getting completely left in the dust. YouTube and Spotify have great algorithms for suggesting new songs - I feel like when my current song is done, I have a really high chance of hearing another song that I've never heard, but will enjoy. This is not the case on SoundCloud, where I'm almost always jolted back to reality when the next song comes on.
- phreeza 9y ago
  Exactly this point came up in a conversation with non-technical friends recently, everyone agreed. The nice thing soundcloud has is the ability to host mixes, which can last hours.
  - thirdsun 9y ago
    And that‘s exactly what they should have focused on. I never saw them as a service for listening to tracks and albums or storing my collection. It‘s not a Spotify or Apple Music competitor. It’s a great place for DJ mixes, sets and live recording, though I think Mixcloud is the better product - unfortunately I see way less engagement over there. That might change when Soundcloud goes down.
    - matclayton 9y ago
      Mixcloud founder here, thanks for the vote of confidence. One key difference is we internally measure success or engagement in terms of minutes listened not play counts, and actively optimise for this. So often the visible play metrics don't actually respresent true human engagement. It's something we're thinking about a lot internally right now, and we might start exposing it shortly. I suspect most people will be very surprised for the better when we do.
      - thirdsun 9y ago
        Nice to see you here. Don’t get me wrong - I agree that minutes played is a much better metric than play count - in fact I always wondered why Soundcloud wouldn‘t go a few steps further and not only show minutes listened, but also where those minutes were spent within your mix, like a heatmap over your upload‘s waveform to see which sections were most popular or where listeners stopped listening. However, regardless of the fact that you use different metrics, for me it feels much harder to find an audience at Mixcloud. It‘s not that I‘m very popular at Soundcloud, but the small circle of like-minded followers I found there doesn‘t seem to translate very well to Mixcloud. Again, that may change with Soundcloud‘s demise.
kevinmannix 9y ago
SoundCloud is my go-to for music while programming. I've spent countless hours curating my likes, playlists, follows, etc. I'd be quite upset if the service shuts down, 1) for the artists that have gained large followings through the service and 2) for all the personal time spent that will in the end mean nothing. I think I'm reiterating what has been said before, but the reposting is horrendous. It's made the listening experience quite poor from just using the activity stream. I've also been really unimpressed with the lack of track uniqueness - if 2 artists repost the same song, it'll show up in my stream twice. Even more frustrating was the lack of uniqueness between tracks & playlists, where one could conceivably listen to the same song multiple times in a row because artists would post the track and then a single-track playlist with that track inside it. The UI is also lacking for quickly adding to playlists, etc. The simplicity was a feature, not a bug, and the power of SoundCloud has been their artist community.
- mrleinad 9y ago
  If your playlists are public, please share :)
  - fapjacks 9y ago
    Carbon-Based Lifeforms, Solar Fields, Aes Dana, Miktek, HUVA Network (this is actually Solar Fields and Aes Dana), Sync24 (a side project of Daniel from CBL)... I could go on, but there's a good start!
  - 2xlbuds 9y ago
    Here's a dump of a bunch of artists if you like melodic house for programming :) https://soundcloud.com/miloh-fliger https://soundcloud.com/miloh-fliger https://soundcloud.com/wilddark https://soundcloud.com/wilddark https://soundcloud.com/bedouin-official https://soundcloud.com/bedouin-official https://soundcloud.com/hishamzahran https://soundcloud.com/hishamzahran https://soundcloud.com/theokottis https://soundcloud.com/theokottis https://soundcloud.com/hraach https://soundcloud.com/hraach https://soundcloud.com/ldsroom https://soundcloud.com/ldsroom https://soundcloud.com/zeroparty https://soundcloud.com/zeroparty https://soundcloud.com/foxloveeeeee https://soundcloud.com/foxloveeeeee
buster 9y ago
I'm from Berlin and happen to have found an awesome employer, who is constantly looking for talent, so if someone from Soundcloud needs a hint for a job in Germany, message me. Not that it would be hard to get a job in our industry, but well.. :)
alydenardo 9y ago
Come work with us at Atrium in SF (Portero) and disrupt the legal industry. Cofounders: Justin Kan, Bebe Chueh, Augie Rakow, Chris Smoak. Atrium is hiring for Senior Full-Stack Engineers, Senior Backend Engineers, Frontend Engineers + more. See postings here! We want you! https://www.atriumlts.com/ https://www.atriumlts.com/
pinaceae 9y ago
Well, I guess wonder.fm is getting screwed too. They've been futzing around a bit too, they started as WeAreHunted, then got acquired by Twitter to become Twitter Music, then shut down, then restarted as Wonder.fm. Making money in music is HARD.
pducks32 9y ago
I liked the idea of SoundCloud but it was horribly designed. The app was just so so clunky. I know some producers and they were early adopters on SoundCloud. The community was begging for this and jumped on early. They had the demand, they just failed to execute.
awkward 9y ago
One thing that they did right was their use of HTLM5 to keep what you're listening to playing while you browse the site. Especially for long running podcasts it's nice not to feel like you would drop the thing you were listening to if you weren't careful.
richardknop 9y ago
Oh. I remember a post on HN from SC employee couple weeks ago asking if he/she should stay given that salary reviews have been postponed. In retrospect it seems he/she should have left.
- twunde 9y ago
  Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14575627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14575627 I was actually thinking the same thing. My general advice after being at a company that went through multiple rounds of layoffs within 4 years: Get your resume together and start networking when you have any of the following scenarios: new management, new consultants, in acquisition talks, in a cash crunch.
norea-armozel 9y ago
I'm not surprised. It seems to me that they lost their way when they thought their competition was Spotify when it really was Bandcamp. At least Bandcamp is still growing especially when it comes to independent musicians and niche genres like synthwave. I really wish them the best of luck to get back on their feet because I think there's still plenty of room for competition in music hosting and sales.
timeforanewSC 9y ago
I'm not sure if this is appropriate here (which is why I made a new account) but some friends and I have started developing a site which we hope captures the main benefits Soundcloud used to have for independent labels, DJs and artists. We can see many ways we think it could be sustainable as a business that benefits the creators and owners of the music as well as the listeners. So if anyone out there is interested in fixing this space and has the time and the inclination it would be great if you would make contact via DM. We've so far been developing in our spare time. We are getting close to Beta. No thought or plan as yet to raise investment.
- saaaaaam 9y ago
  Delivering music online is hard. Not technically hard but legally hard. The reason for that is that there are two copyrights in a recorded song: the recording itself and then the song which is contained within that recording - the actual written words and melody. You may well know all of this already, but a lot of people don't - or haven't fully appreciated the complexity, so I apologise if I'm telling you something you already know! Butnwhat this means is that even if you have the agreement of the person who owns the recording to be allowed to use that recording in a stream, as soon as you make that recording available to stream you need the agreement of whoever wrote the music. The complicated bit here is this - even if the artist owns the rights to the recording AND they wrote the song they may not actually be able to assign you the rights because quite often they have assigned the representation of their rights in the songwriting copyright to an organisation like PRS/MCPS (in the U.K. for example) - who are then required to pursue for a royalty payment anyone using the songwriting element (which is contained within the recording). The reason they assign these rights is that it makes certain things around songwriting royalty collection easier. Songwriters are paid for the use of their copyright - for example if their song is played by a DJ in a club - but the payments are often small and they cannot possibly grant a license to every single DJ who wants to play their song and they also can't admin the collection of that payment. This causes a headache for people who want to provide streams of songs - because they need to negotiate a licence and associated payment with the organisations to which songwriters have assigned this element of their copyright. And it means that - in essence - unless you've done that deal, at some point when you get big enough, one of those organisations is going to come knocking with a back dated request for payment.
myth_buster 9y ago
On a tangent, I now hope that A16Z podcast will be available on google play et al. That was the only reason for me to use Soundcloud and it frustrated me when I used it because it severely lacked features something as trivial as sorting by podcast date.
- rrdharan 9y ago
  The a16z podcast is available via the iTunes podcasts feed: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z/id842818711?mt=2 https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z/id842818711?mt=2 Which means you can also add it in Overcast, or the Pocket Casts player and play it via the web: https://play.pocketcasts.com/web/podcasts/index#/podcasts/show/20a7ca40-9128-0131-8b7f-723c91aeae46 https://play.pocketcasts.com/web/podcasts/index#/podcasts/sh... https://overcast.fm/itunes842818711/a16z https://overcast.fm/itunes842818711/a16z
jasonsync 9y ago
I love SoundCloud, but the premium plan options are surprisingly confusing: $4.99 - SoundCloud Go $9.99 - SoundCloud Go+ According to the SoundCloud Blog circa 2016 (and most external reviews), "SoundCloud Go" is the plan with the expanded catalogue: https://blog.soundcloud.com/2016/03/29/introducing-soundcloud-go/ https://blog.soundcloud.com/2016/03/29/introducing-soundclou... However, according to the SoundCloud Blog circa 2017, "SoundCloud Go+" is now the plan with the expanded catalogue: https://blog.soundcloud.com/2017/02/28/introducing-new-soundcloud-go/ https://blog.soundcloud.com/2017/02/28/introducing-new-sound... Is there some sort of "bait and switch" going on here? I can only think that SoundCloud purposely shuffled the product names around to make us think that the $4.99 plan includes the expanded catalogue, comparable to Apple Music / Spotify. Or am I mistaken, and the $4.99 plan does include a catalogue comparable to Apple Music / Spotify? Furthermore, both plans advertise more tracks (120M+ tracks) compared to Apple Music or Spotify (30M tracks), making it even more difficult to reconcile what you're getting. And the $4.99 price point is further complicated by Apple Music, which also offers a $4.99 price point (for students). The product branding, pricing and positioning here is bonkers for anyone comparison shopping, reading external reviews or simply trying to understand what you get. It's easier to do nothing, and simply continue using the free service (and switch to Spotify from time to time to fill in the blanks).
gregjw 9y ago
The question isn't 'Will SoundCloud close?' but instead 'When will SoundCloud close?'. Just a very steady decline over the past two years. Their talented team will easily land of their feet anywhere else, it's a shame that someone's so previously unique is fading away due to trying to compete with Spotify. Removing Likes & Groups have really pissed off their community.
- brazillianboy2 9y ago
  I don't think it will cease to exist. It might be acquired at a ridiculously low price even if it's just for the users and the content.
JohnnyConatus 9y ago
ITT no one admitting that the problem with the recorded music industry is now the fans who expect bits that make sound to be free while other bits are paid. Spotify, Pandora, and Soundcloud fixed just about everything that people said was wrong with the industry from the consumer point of view. And don't give me that line about the labels screwing artists because thanks to fans who won't even pay for a premium subscription, Spotify literally can't afford to pay artists more without going under entirely. TL;DR - music doesn't want to be free. Selfish people want it to be free.
- tomjen3 9y ago
  I have no idea how you got that notion, but as a previous paying spotify customer I quit because they consistently screwed up their UI, made pointless changes and kept forcing "social" into something that shouldn't be social in the first place. I now use google music. It is still no way near as good as groveshark was (especially when it comes to having all the music and a simple interface) but it works pretty okay. And of course they can afford to pay the artists: I get to pay way more to the music industry now, than I ever did before.
  - theWheez 9y ago
    I use Google Music to listen to music, and when I find an album I like I buy it on Vinyl, and also attend concerts when they are nearby. More than I have spent on music than ever before.
  - pm90 9y ago
    I love google music because their "Radio" feature is incredibly useful. So if I like a song, there is a "radio" option that plays similar songs, which has worked surprisingly well (imo). Maybe their AI is just better or something, but I'm a very happy customer so far. The only thing I fear is that they will shut the service one day for no good reason (because they have done this before). But since its a core part of their android offering I'm hoping it won't happen. Also any Google iOS devs reading this: PLEASE ADD WATCH INTEGRATION. I love to listen to music while running, but currently there is no watch integration, so all I can do is play the next/previous song through my watch. Definitely more control would help :).
justanton 9y ago
I wonder what made them to open offices in some of the most expensive cities in the world in the first place? Was it in order to find the right talent? There are great people in other, less expensive cities.
- jayess 9y ago
  No only most expensive, but most business unfriendly.
batmansmk 9y ago
Are they preparing to sell the company? There was rumors that they wanted to sell to Deezer recently.
brudgers 9y ago
As a cost cutting strategy, offices in San Francisco and London are plausible candidates. Particularly for a company based in the EU those cities are likely to hinder flexibility regarding colocating teams and staff due to increasing regulatory hurdles regarding work visas.
socrates1998 9y ago
Do any of the most popular music streaming services make money?
thowaway999 9y ago
I was a director of an engineering department for SoundCloud for a time and left several years ago. Frankly none of this should be surprising: nobody there could figure out a product definition nor a monetization plan. What is more: the engineering organization at SoundCloud at large was completely fractured and suffered from in-fighting. Nobody trusted anyone across organizations. There was no shortage of bullying even. Taking that in mind, SoundCloud's downfall was to be expected. Because of caustic environment even before the financial crunch, they couldn't execute. Blame the incestuous Brazilian boys club there for it (I'm male, by the way); they bullied just about everyone. As for Berlin, I am sorry to say: I had high-hopes for the tech culture there, but to call it Mickey Mouse would be a charitable statement. It was laden with confused hipsters who couldn't differentiate between language du jour and its monads and delivering a product. When I applied, the warning signs were strong. Nevertheless I ignored them — to my own peril. Needless to say, I won't make those mistakes again! Right before I resigned, it was revealed in a private leads meeting that 18 percent of the engineering force had resigned in that given quarter. Was I surprised? Not in the slightest. That knowledge gave me resolve to get out, which I hadn't yet announced.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- thowaway9999 9y ago
  follow the money: http://philcalcado.com/2017/06/26/on_leaving_digitalocean.html http://philcalcado.com/2017/06/26/on_leaving_digitalocean.ht...
  - thowaway99999 9y ago
    As they say in the German, der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf her (a fish rots from the head down). This man bears a tremendous amount of responsibility for everything described above.
    - pingpongpung 9y ago
      I'm really curious to understand why a single person was responsible for a big failure. That sounded a bit personal.
deleted 9y ago
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maga_man_69 9y ago
I wrote an AWS Lambda thing that automatically pirates soundcloud tracks you like: https://github.com/josephecombs/automated_soundcloud_downloading https://github.com/josephecombs/automated_soundcloud_downloa... EDIT: I think it's broken right now for some reason but this should give you an idea of what to do.
alistproducer2 9y ago
SC had a unique product and at one point I really enjoyed discovering music. In fact, I had a music blog where I reviewed indie and folk music I found there. I found some incredible talents. For example, this dude Packwood from Australia. I ended up buying his albums on Bandcamp, but never would've found him without SC. Looking back it's surprising that SC never tried to get into selling music. I would've bought download for lots of the indie music I found; if for no other reason than I wanted to be able to listen to it in the event that SC folded. I switched to Amazon music, which I pay ~ $6/mo. I couldn't be happier. I'm actually happy to pay money to have access to almost anything I ever want to listen to. they even have obscure Drum n bass albums (which surprised me). As great as AM is, it doesn't fully replace SC for me. No podcasts or indie music by random Australian dude without record deals.
samcat116 9y ago
Things I hate about Soundcloud: 1. They haven't updated their iOS app seemingly in years. It lacks basic controls and makes it impossible to listen to more than a single song at a time. 2. The really shitty "artist engagement" sites that force you to follow 20 other social media accounts in order to get a download. I know this isn't Soundcloud directly, but they're the ones letting artists link off to these basically spam services through a button that promises a direct download. They could have easily required you to follow the artist before downloading directly to solve at least part of this problem. 3. Music discovery is absolute trash. Discovery on a platform like SC is even more important than a place like Spotify because there is so much underground talent that should be listened to. This was the entire point of SC and they largely failed at that. 4. I have seen countless artists on twitter calling out SC for taking down their own songs from their own accounts for copyright strikes. It also seems like their ability to work with artists in general is just utter garbage.
- recursive 9y ago
  Why would you want to listen to multiple songs simultaneously?
  - fredsted 9y ago
    Queueing?
  - PascLeRasc 9y ago
    I think OP means that there's no "queue" like Spotify has.
- kogepathic 9y ago
  > Things I hate about Soundcloud I actually liked SoundCloud a lot, before they introduced SoundCloud Go. It wasn't perfect, but since it was free I didn't have an issue to live with the flaws. But they really burned all the goodwill they had with me and others when they introduced SoundCloud Go. Here's a list of the "features" of SoundCloud Go [0] and why it's difficult to accept them as a user: 1. Access the world’s largest music streaming catalog, a constantly expanding mix from established and emerging artists It's not clear to me that any of this monthly subscription is going to the artists I like (e.g. like Patreon). So, I'm paying 10 Euros per month for you to run some servers while having a much smaller library than other streaming services? I do not work in the legal or music industry, but it's my understanding that since most content on SoundCloud is indie remixes, they shouldn't have to pay royalties to the record labels because the content is not copyrighted by the record labels (legally remixes would fall under fair use). So unless I'm very wrong in this impression, SoundCloud bent over to the record labels because they didn't want to be sued out of existence like Grooveshark? 2. Full access to all 150M+ tracks Versus 120M on a free account. I highly doubt this number, since after introducing SoundCloud Go, a lot of tracks from artists I listened to became "Previews" of 20-30 seconds long and you had to subscribe to SoundCloud Go to listen to the full song. It was pitched as a subscription to access additional/premium content, but this is not what it felt like as a user, seeing songs go from free to pay walled. 3. Offline listening You updated the Android app to remove the caching option, where previously you could select 100% and have the app entirely cache the song offline, assuming you had listened to it at least once before. I used this feature to cache gigabytes of music on my phone so that once it was listened to on WiFi, I could go out and not consume my 3G data while listening to the playlist. That was a huge "fuck you" to users. 4. No ads Install an ad blocker in your browser and never hear ads anyway. 5. Millions of premium SoundCloud Go+ tracks Here's how Engadget covered the announcement: "the subscription plan costs $10 a month and includes a library of additional content as well as the usual remixes, emerging artists and podcasts." [1] Given what I've said in #2, this was not the user experience. --- I'm sorry to the talented people who lost their jobs today, but I don't feel any sadness for SoundCloud. This hurt is entirely self inflicted. For any PM's reading, here's how to burn your reputation with users in 3 easy steps: 1. Introduce an expensive subscription service at the same price as your competitors, but don't offer as much content, and don't publicize that any of the money is going toward your content creators 2. Hobble your existing free product to force people to the paid service 3. Don't push any meaningful new features or notable bugfixes to your website or app in years (e.g. needing Flash to play a song, HTML5 which eats up 100% CPU so you can display... something) Now I use Mixcloud. Not better for individual songs, but great for music discovery given all the podcasts/shows available. Their app is a bit meh, but there aren't any ads, and their website doesn't require Flash and doesn't use lots of CPU. Best of all: they've yet to screw over users by introducing a paid option. --- [0] https://soundcloud.com/go https://soundcloud.com/go [1] https://www.engadget.com/2016/03/29/soundcloud-go-hands-on/ https://www.engadget.com/2016/03/29/soundcloud-go-hands-on/
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
fergie 9y ago
Odd that a service which relies the newest tech and coolest music is cutting offices in SF and London.
Johankarlsson 9y ago
"Go Find It. Barcelona, Spain. We are looking for front-end devs with React/Redux experience, backend engineers, and iOS and Android devs. Shoot me an e-mail at johan@gofindit.com"
flgr 9y ago
To the many able people who worked for SoundCloud in Berlin: Twitch Berlin is hiring. We're looking for data scientists and distributed systems engineers working on one of the largest live video CDNs in the world at a huge scale that makes things interesting: * Data Scientist, Fraud/Video: https://jobs.lever.co/twitch/17b5882c-6be0-41cd-a6ac-45b948e5d300 https://jobs.lever.co/twitch/17b5882c-6be0-41cd-a6ac-45b948e... * Distributed Systems Engineer - Live Video CDN: https://jobs.lever.co/twitch/8929e219-138d-473c-8acd-4fcc3e01fc0a https://jobs.lever.co/twitch/8929e219-138d-473c-8acd-4fcc3e0... * Senior Software Engineer - Live Video CDN: https://jobs.lever.co/twitch/2fae3239-fe4d-4582-bfdf-7d43727853d3 https://jobs.lever.co/twitch/2fae3239-fe4d-4582-bfdf-7d43727... Primary language is Golang so DSEs from SoundCloud are likely to be a great fit! The latter two positions say "San Francisco", but we have a growing engineering office in Berlin with people working on the live video CDN and fraud detection. These positions can be filled in Berlin and we'd be very happy to do so (helps us grow the Berlin office). Happy to answer any questions you might have. Hope this will help some of the folks affected by the lay off.
- Geralt_Encore 9y ago
  Any chances for Android positions in Berlin office or whole mobile development team is SF based?
  - cagataygurturk 9y ago
    We are hiring Android devs at eBay Berlin!
- telendt 9y ago
  > The latter two positions say "San Francisco", but we have a growing engineering office in Berlin with people working on the live video CDN and fraud detection. These positions can be filled in Berlin and we'd be very happy to do so (helps us grow the Berlin office). Ex-SoundClouder and Berliner here. I'm sad you haven't mentioned that in your previous comments in "Who is hiring?" threads. I once found a dead link in your comment and when I looked at job ads on your site I couldn't find any openings for Berlin.
- 9y ago
StreamBright 9y ago
Lets start with how awkward their API registration is: SoundCloud Application Registration https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfNxc82RJuzC0DnISat7n4H-G7IsPQIdaMpe202iiHZEoso9w/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfNxc82RJuzC0DnISat... Of course they turn you down for requesting access to implement a legitimate feature (listing the top most listened tracks from an artist).
tarikozket 9y ago
They have enough traffic to generate around $750k per day only from Adsense. I'm not a musician and have no intention to get their "Pro" for 7 dollars a month. I wouldn't mind seeing an Adsense ad instead of seeing an ad about their "Pro Plan".
davidhariri 9y ago
I used to listen to mixes on SoundCloud but I started getting spammed and the site kept crashing. I switched to Mixcloud and haven't looked back for a year at least.
cranjice 9y ago
Soundcloud has it's issues, and personally I find the mobile interface annoying, but what are the alternatives for music creators (and discovery)? Asking out of curiosity. Would love to find a good alternative.
adamstober 9y ago
Tough news. And it's great to see posts from people who are in hiring in SF, offering to take a look at affected employees. We built http://www.layoff-aid.com/ http://www.layoff-aid.com/ specifically to help candidates and companies find each other, with the main goal of helping candidates find new homes quickly. More on HN last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14647365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14647365
michaelChall 9y ago
Herval, cala-te
- herval 9y ago
  heh didn't expect to see my name on a post about a company I left aeons ago, but there you are - someone proving OP's point perfectly (ps I wasn't a director and I'm not OP, but obviously still one of many in the aforementioned mafia's hitlist)
  - michaelChall 9y ago
    Coitadinho
- throwaway52342 9y ago
  Hehe, Herval was one of the good ones, cynical but funny and a good engineer :)
  - foobaw 9y ago
    Cole, the senior PM is excellent and I feel like he could work elsewhere.
    - colemercer 9y ago
      I don't know who you are but thanks! :)
- sctb 9y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14713074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14713074 and marked it off-topic.
foobaw 9y ago
Just look at Spotify and see how beautiful it is and how much it has grown over the years. SoundCloud barely improved but I'm forced to use SoundCloud because of the user-base and it's the only way I can promote my music.
shams93 9y ago
For artists compared to using say distrokid to reach spotify and apple music with soundcloud they expect you to pay to give your work away for free.
eknight15 9y ago
Is there a Soundcloud alternative (that allows for user uploads)? 8tracks and SoundCloud have been my home for years, sad to see them both struggling.
cyberferret 9y ago
Sad to hear - I have been on SoundCloud since their very early days, and concur that they seem to have lost their way somewhat. When I first joined, it was a great place to share my music creations, and I enjoyed discovering other new artists who created the same sort of music I did too. There was always a lot of interaction and positive comments and I actually made some SC 'friend' in that time that I kept in contact with. However, of late, I feel like I am throwing my music into a deep, dark hole in the ground. There are still the odd comments and interactions, but nowhere on the level that it was about 4 or 5 years ago. You can actually see this from the stats on my channel [0], when you look at stuff I uploaded 3 or 4 years ago as compared to what I have uploaded in the past few months. It will be sad to see SoundCloud go. For me, my channel still is a kind of roadmap of how my amateur music career has progressed in the past 10 years or so and I will never be able to recreate that on another platform... [0] - https://soundcloud.com/cyberferret https://soundcloud.com/cyberferret
dyim 9y ago
Couldn't find out from the article or the linked blog post - what were the responsibilities of the 173 laid-off employees? How many employees does SoundCloud have, and what roles do they have? Clearly they're not all devs - do they work in artist relations? customer support? content creation? marketing? etc.
paulbjensen 9y ago
For those in the London office, I'm sorry to hear about the office closure, I've been in the sane position at 2 startups very early on in my career. The company where I work (Starcount) is looking for people to work in data engineering (Hadoop and Spark), frontend (React), backend (Node) and Salesforce admin. If anyone is interested, my email is paul.jensen@starcount.com, and I'm @paulbjensen on Twitter.
LyalinDotCom 9y ago
I'm not surprised they are not doing well. I dont wish them bad things dont get me wrong but if you are an active user of their service (like I am) and a developer then you're bound to ask the question once in a while "so what is their dev team doing exactly?" because it doesn't seem like much at all. They really need to invest into building a more compelling product, there are some amazing scenarios they can tackle here but they seem to have no interest in it or maybe funding to pull it off.
noobermin 9y ago
I think the end of the article is key. SC still has a massive userbase, and continues to be where I find my particular niche for music. The only issue is it seems the people at the helm have no idea how to maintain the community they have.
mockindignant 9y ago
Time to close my account before all my information is sold to someone or other when they have their fire sale.
- glasz 9y ago
  your account won't vanish from their backups. at least not soon enough.
lyime 9y ago
Sad to hear about the layoffs at SC. I am a huge SC fan and It would be a tragedy if service wasn't around given the amazing community behind it. For those that have been affected at SC: I am one of the co-founders of Terminal 49 and we are making global trade cheaper and more efficient for businesses. We are automating the first/last mile container trucking. We are looking to bring on our first 2 engineers to join our founding team (in SF/Oakland). Would love to chat if you are interested, drop me a line at akshay [at] terminal49.com
ckorhonen 9y ago
Minibar is hiring. React, React Native, Ruby, Data. In NYC. Ping me - chris@minibardelivery.com
glasz 9y ago
i remember being damn impressed by their html5/js-based embedable player. around 2011. even thought about applying. now i'm out of the fancy shithole that startup land is. prefer working with a few ex-collegues from my hammock. if you're in need for freelance work and don't bother writing ruby and sometimes php, get in touch. if you're into elixir get in touch right now. no erlang project yet but that can be changed.
grumblestumble 9y ago
Interesting stuff out of this thread.. I really love Soundcloud, especially for discovery, but I guess I'm an absolute edge case. I primarily listen to electronic DJ sets (RA, Dekmantel, etc) and the community track ID comments on these are great for discovering new music. I rarely even look at the feed.

462 points by janober 9y ago

Very sorry to hear! Apparently additionally also the engineers in New York: https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882977097232338947 https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882977097232338947

untog 9y ago

Awful news. But I'm glad to see that it's part of an attempt to stay independent - I hope Soundcloud sticks around, in control of its own destiny, for a long time.

strictnein 9y ago
Well, I mean, they're independent because no one was willing to buy them. Spotify and Google passed. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/google-mulling-soundcloud-buyout-say-whispers-sony-universals-stakes-revealed/ https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/google-mulling-soundc...
- jaclaz 9y ago
  Yes, from the content of the article it seems more like an attempt to just stay alive.

mintplant 9y ago

> Some rough news today for SoundCloud, the audio streaming site whose content is largely based around uploads from its 175 million users in 190 countries. Does SoundCloud see itself as an audio streaming service now, as opposed to an audio hosting service? That seems like a focus shift away from where they started, and puts them up against behemoths like Spotify. Maybe that's related to why they're struggling. Tangentially: does anyone have any idea of how Bandcamp is doing?

cookiecaper 9y ago
File hosting is just not a profitable enterprise. This pattern should be familiar by now: gain prominence by giving away tons of stuff to draw in users, and then clamp down when the bill comes due, resulting in a hard pivot that alienates the users. The truth is that users are not loyal. If you are offering something for free, they will be happy to take it, and they will have no qualms about moving on when you stop giving them the free stuff that they came for. Selling eyeballs is a very tough business. People who want a realistic chance to make money should have plans besides "sell ads".
- jonbarker 9y ago
  Isn't facebook basically file hosting with a bunch of links?
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Yes, though it's 1) the largest such service with 2) some very sticky features. (Not that I use it.) Realise that the flipside of such services is their real customers -- the adverts side. For online advertising, the two largest agencies claim over 60% of the market, and are named "Google" and "Facebook". Everyone else is an also-ran. Which for any ads purchaser means "a lot more work for a lot less reach".
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    Facebook is infrastructure. It provides the connections out to your personal network. Facebook's staying power comes from its ability to say "This is the best way to communicate with your personal network at any time". "File hosting" is just one subelement of that, because one of the things that you may want to share is a file. Couldn't the whole internet be generalized as "file hosting with a bunch of links"? A "file host" is a company whose primary purpose is for you to upload a file and give the link to someone else; they're a middleman that exists only because a more convenient/direct means of distribution to the intended network isn't available. This does not make the company nearly loud enough to establish its own identity/user base. Facebook has always been its own repository of people intelligence. It was never just an "upload your photos here". Such platforms, like Photobucket or Imgur, sometimes prosper for a while, until the communication channels that reach the intended audience directly offer something easier. (imgur is going down now as reddit introduced its own image host last year)

doublerebel 9y ago

It's been a downhill trend ever since trending likes were replaced by reposts. Trending likes actually showed which tunes my friends found most interesting. Reposts allowed a single user to spam a feed with their personal taste. Then repost bots were allowed to require repost to unlock a free download and now discovery on SoundCloud is almost dead. My friends who are successful producers but refuse to play the bot and pay-for-repost game are completely drowned in the noise. My bet is that since trending likes are a Graph DB problem, SoundCloud just chose not to solve it once it became too hard on their database. They famously had issues with early Mongo adoption so this would fit right in. Their most recent frontend HTML5 rewrite always winds up my CPU and hasn't changed in a couple years. SoundCloud to me has always been a great idea with some great design that got ruined by some poor engineering choices from the top. And at the end by a desperate grab for stats and cash. I think producers would have paid more, better subsidizing free plans, if discovery hadn't gone downhill. I ran the numbers once on how CDbaby and Bandcamp became successful (based on stats trickled out over the years) while SoundCloud could never turn a profit. There's still plenty of room for someone to do this right.

draw_down 9y ago
I haven't been using it long enough to have an opinion, but I did notice that the hosts of podcasts I enjoy would repost when they guested on another podcast, which I otherwise would not have noticed, and did appreciate. I only use it for podcasts though, never music.
- doublerebel 9y ago
  Trending likes solved this, because even an upvote brigade required the user to have multiple friends in the brigade. All I had to do was follow a few key influencers on a topic and the post would show in my feed.
legohead 9y ago
I used to go to SC every day. When reposts started becoming a thing I loved it, since the people I followed would repost stuff I would have never found. But I guess I quit in time, as I never saw bots or what you are describing. That's too bad :(

tyingq 9y ago

Other sources say total employees are 420, so it's roughly a 40% cut. Ouch.

cmrdporcupine 9y ago
420 still seems like a rather unreasonably large number (to me) for something that is basically a file hosting service with a couple barely maintained mobile apps and a web site. Quite a few artists I follow are on Soundcloud primarily for new material. I would happily pay for Soundcloud if they'd bother to update their app for Android Auto and Android TV.
- kayoone 9y ago
  420 is total employee count, only a fraction of that (i believe substantially below 100) are devs, which for a site of that size is adequate i guess. They also have quite a few engineers working with the data instead of product development.
  - Theodores 9y ago
    What is the max dev (+ engineer) to other office worker ratio? Even in tech companies with no physical product to get out the door it is easy to get a 1:10 ratio. You just need an army of sales, press, marketing, social media managing, customer service, HR, management, legal, design, print design, accounting, finance, office management and other random people with important jobs to do. How about a 1:75 ratio?!? With three offices you are going to need nine receptionists at a bare minimum if you are to cover reception for an hour either side of when everyone turns up. At a minimum the IT guys that plug people in and get them setup on 'Exchange' are of a similar number if all the offices are to be covered. So there must be a 'dev to total headcount' ratio, a maximum sustainable upper number, any higher and the company is doomed to 'miss the web' and get totally stuck in 1990's ways of working. I have seen a 1:75 ratio 'tech company' and saw great opportunity in changing it, although a long way off the desired 1:10 or lower. There must be companies where the ratio is the other way around. A programming concern with little of the normal sales/marketing requirements could be a 3:1 company.

pmoriarty 9y ago

For me as a music producer and consumer, one of the most frustrating changes recently made my Soundcloud has been their cancellation of groups, which used to be a decent means of discovering new music related to kinds of music you already like. Once groups were cancelled, the listens on the songs I post to Soundcloud plummeted to virtually nothing, and I really don't bother to upload my music there anymore, nor to go to Soundcloud to discover new music.

avenoir 9y ago
I'm not a SoundCloud user, but as someone who just started using groups on Flickr i noticed that the views on my uploaded photos went from barely anything to at least a thousand per image (and with just a handful of groups). I can definitely see how this can break your audience. Seems like an incredibly dumb move on SC's part.
gorkonsine 9y ago
This shows why the modern trend of not buying music and just subscribing to streaming services is so short-sighted. The companies are all basically fly-by-night, and can change their product in a heartbeat, leaving you with something substantially different from what you're used to.
- josteink 9y ago
  I use streaming services all the time, but this is why I buy albums from artists I like and keep a self-hosted plex library. Should anything I like ever be taken down, I can still listen to it. The good thing about music is that it is ultra portable so mixing music from many sources, services and providers is hardly a problem. And you can clearly see that in how the market for online music works. Unlike video, which is so dysfunctional I'd be hard pressed to even say there is a market. End result: despite streaming services I still spend $100s of dollars on music every year. 0 on video.
  - gorkonsine 9y ago
    I think it's great you have a two-pronged approach (buying stuff you really like, so you're not out of luck if the streaming provider folds like this), but I have to question your assertion about online video: Netflix is clearly a success story I think. Maybe the only real standout, but still it exists. Lots of people are signed up for it. There's also Amazon video; I don't know how successful it is, but people do rent videos on there.

drinchev 9y ago

That is so sad for Berlin as well. SoundCloud is one of the companies that made the startup scene an actual scene. I know that SoundCloud's interview process is tough, so I guess it's a good day for companies looking for talent around Berlin.

brazillianboy2 9y ago
very true. However, most of the layoffs seem to be in the US, for now...

phreeza 9y ago

Their Github org seems to have gone from 45 to 37 members. Not sure what that means, do they only have 37 devs? https://github.com/orgs/soundcloud/people https://github.com/orgs/soundcloud/people https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Lo9slfH-9XcJ:https://github.com/soundcloud+&cd=1&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=de https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Lo9slf... edit: now it's at 35... ouch

beckler 9y ago
those are just the people who publically show they're part of that org.
- brazillianboy2 9y ago
  yeah. You have to chose to be publicly visible as part of an org. I can assure you they have more than 35 devs.
  - tw352852 9y ago
    It was never more than 100 at a time tho. With these layoffs, I'm guessing it's hovering around 60
lukashed 9y ago
I wonder why they decided to remove them from GitHub already [1] when they were given a 90 days notice [2]. [1] https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882983954059595776 https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882983954059595776 [2] https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882981765064871937 https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882981765064871937
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
  Maybe to limit the damage notified (and thus possibly upset) employees can cause.

jinder 9y ago

Soundcloud started dying when they decided to be more like Spotify and less like the independent music discovery service they started out as. Now they have an app and experience that is not particularly good at either.

amyjess 9y ago
Oddly enough, when I first heard of SoundCloud, it was in a completely different context from either. I first saw it used as a pastebin for voice recordings. Specifically, members of some online transgender communities use it to solicit community feedback on their voices. They'll record themselves talking, post it to SoundCloud, and ask the community for input on what they could do better. I don't think there's enough of a market for "pastebin for voice recordings" to be a successful business though.
- Nadya 9y ago
  Pastebin for voice recordings is basically what vocaroo.com is, and I discovered that in the same context you discovered SoundCloud. And also because popular use by 4chan. When I first heard of SoundCloud it was mostly used by self-releasing EDM artists as a place to upload their music, before YouTube was a popular alternative. Nowadays I see a lot of artists buying visualizer templates and uploading their music with that - or sending it to an aggregator on YouTube who displays a certain style of music (many of these aggregators don't seek artist permission and just upload popular songs and such, but many of the ones I follow get things sent to them by indie artists because a channel with 60,000+ subs will beat their own personal channel for recognition).
Randgalt 9y ago
Exactly - I'm a hobbyist musician and have all my music there. But, the last year or so they've been focusing on podcasting, etc. and, as you say, it's not good at any of that. For people like me, they haven't offered any new features in a long time.
ryandrake 9y ago
I've worked at a few places that died this way. CEO: "We're #1 in $NICHE. But growth is the only way, so we need to compete in $BIG_MARKET." [months of de-focus later] CEO: "We're only #10 in $BIG_MARKET and now we totally lost $NICHE!!" Resume writing ensues...

niftich 9y ago

I don't know how SoundCloud is managed and what their balance sheet looks like, but it's deeply unfortunate that a site that caters largely to up-and-coming musicians has so much trouble getting out of the red. Presumably they're hurt by the presence of platforms such as Youtube or the 2010s' rebooted Myspace, where musicians can reach a larger audience and where both sides of the equation are subsidized by ads. Meanwhile, more focused sites like Beatport appeared to have a successful recipe by selling actual tracks for download despite essentially offering unlimited streaming, yet even they ran into some trouble with their latest pivot. It's a tough space to make money in, despite seemingly meeting a popular need.

raesene6 9y ago
As soundcloud are a UK registered company you can actually see all their accounts/filings here https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/06343600/filing-history https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/06343600/filing-h... looking at their accounts to Dec 2015 (latest available), they don't make great reading. The balance sheet value went from £8m to -£34m in one year...
- komodo 9y ago
  I wonder what their terms were when they signed up with the labels to be yet another Spotify clone. If it was any sort of upfront payment that would hit them hard since I don't think they have many subscribers to their SoundCloud plus (or whatever it's called)

aaronlevin 9y ago

SoundCloud employee here. If you are hiring, please reach out to people from SoundCloud. The decisions of who to let go were not based on performance. A lot of amazing people, both attitude and technically.

saimiam 9y ago
Kudos for posting under your full name (presumably.)
stefanatfrg 9y ago
We (Fraugster Gmbh) are hiring Go developers and devops in Berlin. We've always held a great amount of respect for soundcloud given all that you guys have done for the golang community in Berlin. If any of you are not based here we can offer relocation/visa support, check my previous comments on whoishiring for more details or contact me directly stefan <at> fraugster <dot> com
mitchellshow 9y ago
If you're passionate about independent music, we are actively hiring multiple roles at ReverbNation. http://corporate.reverbnation.com/careers/ http://corporate.reverbnation.com/careers/
danpalmer 9y ago
We're hiring at Thread in London – https://www.thread.com/jobs https://www.thread.com/jobs
aembleton 9y ago
We're currently hiring for the following roles at Rentalcars in London: - Mobile Engineering Lead - http://grnh.se/0sikan1 http://grnh.se/0sikan1 - Senior UX Designer - http://grnh.se/4hd0ix1 http://grnh.se/4hd0ix1 - Software Engineering Manager - http://grnh.se/8qix6m1 http://grnh.se/8qix6m1 - Senior Product Owner - http://grnh.se/qdkir31 http://grnh.se/qdkir31
clhodapp 9y ago
On that note, my team (I am the technical lead) at Rocket Lawyer is hiring engineers in San Francisco to work on Scala/Finagle/Finch services within our legal services platform. Rocket Lawyer is replacing a distributed monolith with a proper API-oriented application designed to run on Kubernetes and this team is at the center of that effort. Feel free to contact me by email (chodapp at rocketlawyer dot com). Edit: My company is also hiring backend devs for another team in London.

dustinmoris 9y ago

They also laid off the entire New York team and at least some individuals in Berlin: https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882977097232338947 https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882977097232338947 https://twitter.com/katalunia_/status/882992899893460993 https://twitter.com/katalunia_/status/882992899893460993 > Well, SoundCloud just laid off all of its New York engineering > Literally the entire payments and subscriptions team, ads-eng, monetization engineering, everybody > Not really clear to me how the execs think this company will be able to make money from now on

Shivetya 9y ago
have someone lined up to buy them and removing duplicated jobs to make themselves more appealing?
- greglindahl 9y ago
  Normally such layoffs are made when an acquisition closes.
  - rhizome 9y ago
    They're done in preparation as well, in order to juke the burn rate numbers by reducing overhead. Make no mistake, an acquisition would likely result in further cuts (acq is always bad for the little guy) if not a complete wind-down, but cutting staff historically does make a company more attractive to acquirers.
smrtinsert 9y ago
That says a lot. German labor laws protect their citizens strongly. I'm pretty sure they would always choose to get rid of other country staff first.
- cagataygurturk 9y ago
  Not only citizens, laws protect all workers

cturitzin 9y ago

I use SoundCloud daily for music I can't find anywhere else. I'm amazed they haven't tried harder to make people like me pay for the service. I would pay if I hit a paywall at some point of usage.

brink 9y ago
There are ads like every 3 songs on mobile. That would make someone like me either pay for their $4.99 service, (which I didn't even realize existed until recently because they only seem to advertise their $9.99 service) or use something else.
- doublerebel 9y ago
  The ads are mostly regionally targeted/restricted so users might not see them if they have the right IP. E.g. in Canada and France I can't recall hearing an ad but they spammed me in the US until I finally paid.
- dougherty 9y ago
  I don't think they have ads in all countries. I live in Norway and have not heard a single ad. When I was in the UK a couple of months ago, I received ads.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
komodo 9y ago
There is a paywall, but only for the kind of music you can find everywhere else.
problems 9y ago
The problem is that they couldn't get away with it. Most of the stuff I listen to on SoundCloud is available on other platforms which are free and run by companies that can afford to take a loss (YouTube) or on services I already pay for (Spotify, DI.fm). I'm also greatly disappointed that they seem to have settled on 128kbit MP3 as the peak of quality.

kayoone 9y ago

SoundCloud is one of Berlin's prime examples when it comes to it's startup credentials, so them stumbling is really hard to see for someone working in the city.

nodesocket 9y ago
Also signals the difficulty in building large companies in the European market. I've been to Berlin a handful of times, and even tried to raise money from Berlin investors... Needless to say it was a very frustrating process. They are very conservative and risk adverse. Additionally the bureaucracy and "red-tape" hampers business.
- Udo_Schmitz 9y ago
  >Additionally the bureaucracy and "red-tape" hampers business. Would love to hear details.
  - robk 9y ago
    One word : notaries. Ridiculous and anachronistic.

nodesocket 9y ago

As somebody who listens to SoundCloud almost daily I really hope they can turn things around. They should completely ditch the free plan, and just have a $2.99 or $3.99 plan. I am actually signing up for SoundCloud Go+ (offline listening) now.

expertentipp 9y ago

The wonder child of Berlin's startup scene is deceasing. Says a lot about the scene unfortunately.

vr46 9y ago
Do elaborate, please - I have often considered moving but various things people have said keep putting me off, such as a mildly racist culture.
- justanton 9y ago
  If you're deliberately looking for it — you will definitely find/experience it at some point. In my personal experience, Berlin is very foreigner-friendly.
  - vr46 9y ago
    I'm told both things, actually, in equal measure. That there's ample casual racism compared to London and yet it's incredibly foreigner friendly. I'm married to a German so I have spent a lot of time in Germany, just not Berlin yet. No idea why my question was downvoted, I was quite interested to hear what the poster had to say about the scene.
    - brazillianboy2 9y ago
      Berlin can be quite different from the rest of Germany. I haven't seen any sign of racism here at all, especially in the start-up scene.
hocuspocus 9y ago
That is silly. Big tech hubs are bound to see startups fail, especially leaking ships that never turn a profit. Berlin isn't perfect but whatever happens to SoundCloud doesn't really say anything about its tech scene. Were SoundCloud be London/NYC/SF based, it would have gone under much, much quicker.

pyronite 9y ago

19 days ago an employee of SoundCloud posted an Ask HN about deferred salary reviews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14575627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14575627

j_s 9y ago
It's on the list! Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14653564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14653564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14653741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14653741 Other indicators: delayed salary reviews

skylark 9y ago

This is a perfect example of how strong software engineering from competitors can result in you getting completely left in the dust. YouTube and Spotify have great algorithms for suggesting new songs - I feel like when my current song is done, I have a really high chance of hearing another song that I've never heard, but will enjoy. This is not the case on SoundCloud, where I'm almost always jolted back to reality when the next song comes on.

phreeza 9y ago
Exactly this point came up in a conversation with non-technical friends recently, everyone agreed. The nice thing soundcloud has is the ability to host mixes, which can last hours.
- thirdsun 9y ago
  And that‘s exactly what they should have focused on. I never saw them as a service for listening to tracks and albums or storing my collection. It‘s not a Spotify or Apple Music competitor. It’s a great place for DJ mixes, sets and live recording, though I think Mixcloud is the better product - unfortunately I see way less engagement over there. That might change when Soundcloud goes down.
  - matclayton 9y ago
    Mixcloud founder here, thanks for the vote of confidence. One key difference is we internally measure success or engagement in terms of minutes listened not play counts, and actively optimise for this. So often the visible play metrics don't actually respresent true human engagement. It's something we're thinking about a lot internally right now, and we might start exposing it shortly. I suspect most people will be very surprised for the better when we do.
    - thirdsun 9y ago
      Nice to see you here. Don’t get me wrong - I agree that minutes played is a much better metric than play count - in fact I always wondered why Soundcloud wouldn‘t go a few steps further and not only show minutes listened, but also where those minutes were spent within your mix, like a heatmap over your upload‘s waveform to see which sections were most popular or where listeners stopped listening. However, regardless of the fact that you use different metrics, for me it feels much harder to find an audience at Mixcloud. It‘s not that I‘m very popular at Soundcloud, but the small circle of like-minded followers I found there doesn‘t seem to translate very well to Mixcloud. Again, that may change with Soundcloud‘s demise.

kevinmannix 9y ago

SoundCloud is my go-to for music while programming. I've spent countless hours curating my likes, playlists, follows, etc. I'd be quite upset if the service shuts down, 1) for the artists that have gained large followings through the service and 2) for all the personal time spent that will in the end mean nothing. I think I'm reiterating what has been said before, but the reposting is horrendous. It's made the listening experience quite poor from just using the activity stream. I've also been really unimpressed with the lack of track uniqueness - if 2 artists repost the same song, it'll show up in my stream twice. Even more frustrating was the lack of uniqueness between tracks & playlists, where one could conceivably listen to the same song multiple times in a row because artists would post the track and then a single-track playlist with that track inside it. The UI is also lacking for quickly adding to playlists, etc. The simplicity was a feature, not a bug, and the power of SoundCloud has been their artist community.

mrleinad 9y ago
If your playlists are public, please share :)
- fapjacks 9y ago
  Carbon-Based Lifeforms, Solar Fields, Aes Dana, Miktek, HUVA Network (this is actually Solar Fields and Aes Dana), Sync24 (a side project of Daniel from CBL)... I could go on, but there's a good start!
- 2xlbuds 9y ago
  Here's a dump of a bunch of artists if you like melodic house for programming :) https://soundcloud.com/miloh-fliger https://soundcloud.com/miloh-fliger https://soundcloud.com/wilddark https://soundcloud.com/wilddark https://soundcloud.com/bedouin-official https://soundcloud.com/bedouin-official https://soundcloud.com/hishamzahran https://soundcloud.com/hishamzahran https://soundcloud.com/theokottis https://soundcloud.com/theokottis https://soundcloud.com/hraach https://soundcloud.com/hraach https://soundcloud.com/ldsroom https://soundcloud.com/ldsroom https://soundcloud.com/zeroparty https://soundcloud.com/zeroparty https://soundcloud.com/foxloveeeeee https://soundcloud.com/foxloveeeeee

buster 9y ago

I'm from Berlin and happen to have found an awesome employer, who is constantly looking for talent, so if someone from Soundcloud needs a hint for a job in Germany, message me. Not that it would be hard to get a job in our industry, but well.. :)

alydenardo 9y ago

Come work with us at Atrium in SF (Portero) and disrupt the legal industry. Cofounders: Justin Kan, Bebe Chueh, Augie Rakow, Chris Smoak. Atrium is hiring for Senior Full-Stack Engineers, Senior Backend Engineers, Frontend Engineers + more. See postings here! We want you! https://www.atriumlts.com/ https://www.atriumlts.com/

pinaceae 9y ago

Well, I guess wonder.fm is getting screwed too. They've been futzing around a bit too, they started as WeAreHunted, then got acquired by Twitter to become Twitter Music, then shut down, then restarted as Wonder.fm. Making money in music is HARD.

pducks32 9y ago

I liked the idea of SoundCloud but it was horribly designed. The app was just so so clunky. I know some producers and they were early adopters on SoundCloud. The community was begging for this and jumped on early. They had the demand, they just failed to execute.

awkward 9y ago

One thing that they did right was their use of HTLM5 to keep what you're listening to playing while you browse the site. Especially for long running podcasts it's nice not to feel like you would drop the thing you were listening to if you weren't careful.

richardknop 9y ago

Oh. I remember a post on HN from SC employee couple weeks ago asking if he/she should stay given that salary reviews have been postponed. In retrospect it seems he/she should have left.

twunde 9y ago
Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14575627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14575627 I was actually thinking the same thing. My general advice after being at a company that went through multiple rounds of layoffs within 4 years: Get your resume together and start networking when you have any of the following scenarios: new management, new consultants, in acquisition talks, in a cash crunch.

norea-armozel 9y ago

I'm not surprised. It seems to me that they lost their way when they thought their competition was Spotify when it really was Bandcamp. At least Bandcamp is still growing especially when it comes to independent musicians and niche genres like synthwave. I really wish them the best of luck to get back on their feet because I think there's still plenty of room for competition in music hosting and sales.

timeforanewSC 9y ago

I'm not sure if this is appropriate here (which is why I made a new account) but some friends and I have started developing a site which we hope captures the main benefits Soundcloud used to have for independent labels, DJs and artists. We can see many ways we think it could be sustainable as a business that benefits the creators and owners of the music as well as the listeners. So if anyone out there is interested in fixing this space and has the time and the inclination it would be great if you would make contact via DM. We've so far been developing in our spare time. We are getting close to Beta. No thought or plan as yet to raise investment.

saaaaaam 9y ago
Delivering music online is hard. Not technically hard but legally hard. The reason for that is that there are two copyrights in a recorded song: the recording itself and then the song which is contained within that recording - the actual written words and melody. You may well know all of this already, but a lot of people don't - or haven't fully appreciated the complexity, so I apologise if I'm telling you something you already know! Butnwhat this means is that even if you have the agreement of the person who owns the recording to be allowed to use that recording in a stream, as soon as you make that recording available to stream you need the agreement of whoever wrote the music. The complicated bit here is this - even if the artist owns the rights to the recording AND they wrote the song they may not actually be able to assign you the rights because quite often they have assigned the representation of their rights in the songwriting copyright to an organisation like PRS/MCPS (in the U.K. for example) - who are then required to pursue for a royalty payment anyone using the songwriting element (which is contained within the recording). The reason they assign these rights is that it makes certain things around songwriting royalty collection easier. Songwriters are paid for the use of their copyright - for example if their song is played by a DJ in a club - but the payments are often small and they cannot possibly grant a license to every single DJ who wants to play their song and they also can't admin the collection of that payment. This causes a headache for people who want to provide streams of songs - because they need to negotiate a licence and associated payment with the organisations to which songwriters have assigned this element of their copyright. And it means that - in essence - unless you've done that deal, at some point when you get big enough, one of those organisations is going to come knocking with a back dated request for payment.

myth_buster 9y ago

On a tangent, I now hope that A16Z podcast will be available on google play et al. That was the only reason for me to use Soundcloud and it frustrated me when I used it because it severely lacked features something as trivial as sorting by podcast date.

rrdharan 9y ago
The a16z podcast is available via the iTunes podcasts feed: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z/id842818711?mt=2 https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z/id842818711?mt=2 Which means you can also add it in Overcast, or the Pocket Casts player and play it via the web: https://play.pocketcasts.com/web/podcasts/index#/podcasts/show/20a7ca40-9128-0131-8b7f-723c91aeae46 https://play.pocketcasts.com/web/podcasts/index#/podcasts/sh... https://overcast.fm/itunes842818711/a16z https://overcast.fm/itunes842818711/a16z

jasonsync 9y ago

I love SoundCloud, but the premium plan options are surprisingly confusing: $4.99 - SoundCloud Go $9.99 - SoundCloud Go+ According to the SoundCloud Blog circa 2016 (and most external reviews), "SoundCloud Go" is the plan with the expanded catalogue: https://blog.soundcloud.com/2016/03/29/introducing-soundcloud-go/ https://blog.soundcloud.com/2016/03/29/introducing-soundclou... However, according to the SoundCloud Blog circa 2017, "SoundCloud Go+" is now the plan with the expanded catalogue: https://blog.soundcloud.com/2017/02/28/introducing-new-soundcloud-go/ https://blog.soundcloud.com/2017/02/28/introducing-new-sound... Is there some sort of "bait and switch" going on here? I can only think that SoundCloud purposely shuffled the product names around to make us think that the $4.99 plan includes the expanded catalogue, comparable to Apple Music / Spotify. Or am I mistaken, and the $4.99 plan does include a catalogue comparable to Apple Music / Spotify? Furthermore, both plans advertise more tracks (120M+ tracks) compared to Apple Music or Spotify (30M tracks), making it even more difficult to reconcile what you're getting. And the $4.99 price point is further complicated by Apple Music, which also offers a $4.99 price point (for students). The product branding, pricing and positioning here is bonkers for anyone comparison shopping, reading external reviews or simply trying to understand what you get. It's easier to do nothing, and simply continue using the free service (and switch to Spotify from time to time to fill in the blanks).

gregjw 9y ago

The question isn't 'Will SoundCloud close?' but instead 'When will SoundCloud close?'. Just a very steady decline over the past two years. Their talented team will easily land of their feet anywhere else, it's a shame that someone's so previously unique is fading away due to trying to compete with Spotify. Removing Likes & Groups have really pissed off their community.

brazillianboy2 9y ago
I don't think it will cease to exist. It might be acquired at a ridiculously low price even if it's just for the users and the content.

JohnnyConatus 9y ago

ITT no one admitting that the problem with the recorded music industry is now the fans who expect bits that make sound to be free while other bits are paid. Spotify, Pandora, and Soundcloud fixed just about everything that people said was wrong with the industry from the consumer point of view. And don't give me that line about the labels screwing artists because thanks to fans who won't even pay for a premium subscription, Spotify literally can't afford to pay artists more without going under entirely. TL;DR - music doesn't want to be free. Selfish people want it to be free.

tomjen3 9y ago
I have no idea how you got that notion, but as a previous paying spotify customer I quit because they consistently screwed up their UI, made pointless changes and kept forcing "social" into something that shouldn't be social in the first place. I now use google music. It is still no way near as good as groveshark was (especially when it comes to having all the music and a simple interface) but it works pretty okay. And of course they can afford to pay the artists: I get to pay way more to the music industry now, than I ever did before.
- theWheez 9y ago
  I use Google Music to listen to music, and when I find an album I like I buy it on Vinyl, and also attend concerts when they are nearby. More than I have spent on music than ever before.
- pm90 9y ago
  I love google music because their "Radio" feature is incredibly useful. So if I like a song, there is a "radio" option that plays similar songs, which has worked surprisingly well (imo). Maybe their AI is just better or something, but I'm a very happy customer so far. The only thing I fear is that they will shut the service one day for no good reason (because they have done this before). But since its a core part of their android offering I'm hoping it won't happen. Also any Google iOS devs reading this: PLEASE ADD WATCH INTEGRATION. I love to listen to music while running, but currently there is no watch integration, so all I can do is play the next/previous song through my watch. Definitely more control would help :).

justanton 9y ago

I wonder what made them to open offices in some of the most expensive cities in the world in the first place? Was it in order to find the right talent? There are great people in other, less expensive cities.

jayess 9y ago
No only most expensive, but most business unfriendly.

batmansmk 9y ago

Are they preparing to sell the company? There was rumors that they wanted to sell to Deezer recently.

brudgers 9y ago

As a cost cutting strategy, offices in San Francisco and London are plausible candidates. Particularly for a company based in the EU those cities are likely to hinder flexibility regarding colocating teams and staff due to increasing regulatory hurdles regarding work visas.

socrates1998 9y ago

Do any of the most popular music streaming services make money?

thowaway999 9y ago

I was a director of an engineering department for SoundCloud for a time and left several years ago. Frankly none of this should be surprising: nobody there could figure out a product definition nor a monetization plan. What is more: the engineering organization at SoundCloud at large was completely fractured and suffered from in-fighting. Nobody trusted anyone across organizations. There was no shortage of bullying even. Taking that in mind, SoundCloud's downfall was to be expected. Because of caustic environment even before the financial crunch, they couldn't execute. Blame the incestuous Brazilian boys club there for it (I'm male, by the way); they bullied just about everyone. As for Berlin, I am sorry to say: I had high-hopes for the tech culture there, but to call it Mickey Mouse would be a charitable statement. It was laden with confused hipsters who couldn't differentiate between language du jour and its monads and delivering a product. When I applied, the warning signs were strong. Nevertheless I ignored them — to my own peril. Needless to say, I won't make those mistakes again! Right before I resigned, it was revealed in a private leads meeting that 18 percent of the engineering force had resigned in that given quarter. Was I surprised? Not in the slightest. That knowledge gave me resolve to get out, which I hadn't yet announced.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
thowaway9999 9y ago
follow the money: http://philcalcado.com/2017/06/26/on_leaving_digitalocean.html http://philcalcado.com/2017/06/26/on_leaving_digitalocean.ht...
- thowaway99999 9y ago
  As they say in the German, der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf her (a fish rots from the head down). This man bears a tremendous amount of responsibility for everything described above.
  - pingpongpung 9y ago
    I'm really curious to understand why a single person was responsible for a big failure. That sounded a bit personal.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

maga_man_69 9y ago

I wrote an AWS Lambda thing that automatically pirates soundcloud tracks you like: https://github.com/josephecombs/automated_soundcloud_downloading https://github.com/josephecombs/automated_soundcloud_downloa... EDIT: I think it's broken right now for some reason but this should give you an idea of what to do.

alistproducer2 9y ago

SC had a unique product and at one point I really enjoyed discovering music. In fact, I had a music blog where I reviewed indie and folk music I found there. I found some incredible talents. For example, this dude Packwood from Australia. I ended up buying his albums on Bandcamp, but never would've found him without SC. Looking back it's surprising that SC never tried to get into selling music. I would've bought download for lots of the indie music I found; if for no other reason than I wanted to be able to listen to it in the event that SC folded. I switched to Amazon music, which I pay ~ $6/mo. I couldn't be happier. I'm actually happy to pay money to have access to almost anything I ever want to listen to. they even have obscure Drum n bass albums (which surprised me). As great as AM is, it doesn't fully replace SC for me. No podcasts or indie music by random Australian dude without record deals.

samcat116 9y ago

Things I hate about Soundcloud: 1. They haven't updated their iOS app seemingly in years. It lacks basic controls and makes it impossible to listen to more than a single song at a time. 2. The really shitty "artist engagement" sites that force you to follow 20 other social media accounts in order to get a download. I know this isn't Soundcloud directly, but they're the ones letting artists link off to these basically spam services through a button that promises a direct download. They could have easily required you to follow the artist before downloading directly to solve at least part of this problem. 3. Music discovery is absolute trash. Discovery on a platform like SC is even more important than a place like Spotify because there is so much underground talent that should be listened to. This was the entire point of SC and they largely failed at that. 4. I have seen countless artists on twitter calling out SC for taking down their own songs from their own accounts for copyright strikes. It also seems like their ability to work with artists in general is just utter garbage.

recursive 9y ago
Why would you want to listen to multiple songs simultaneously?
- fredsted 9y ago
  Queueing?
- PascLeRasc 9y ago
  I think OP means that there's no "queue" like Spotify has.
kogepathic 9y ago
> Things I hate about Soundcloud I actually liked SoundCloud a lot, before they introduced SoundCloud Go. It wasn't perfect, but since it was free I didn't have an issue to live with the flaws. But they really burned all the goodwill they had with me and others when they introduced SoundCloud Go. Here's a list of the "features" of SoundCloud Go [0] and why it's difficult to accept them as a user: 1. Access the world’s largest music streaming catalog, a constantly expanding mix from established and emerging artists It's not clear to me that any of this monthly subscription is going to the artists I like (e.g. like Patreon). So, I'm paying 10 Euros per month for you to run some servers while having a much smaller library than other streaming services? I do not work in the legal or music industry, but it's my understanding that since most content on SoundCloud is indie remixes, they shouldn't have to pay royalties to the record labels because the content is not copyrighted by the record labels (legally remixes would fall under fair use). So unless I'm very wrong in this impression, SoundCloud bent over to the record labels because they didn't want to be sued out of existence like Grooveshark? 2. Full access to all 150M+ tracks Versus 120M on a free account. I highly doubt this number, since after introducing SoundCloud Go, a lot of tracks from artists I listened to became "Previews" of 20-30 seconds long and you had to subscribe to SoundCloud Go to listen to the full song. It was pitched as a subscription to access additional/premium content, but this is not what it felt like as a user, seeing songs go from free to pay walled. 3. Offline listening You updated the Android app to remove the caching option, where previously you could select 100% and have the app entirely cache the song offline, assuming you had listened to it at least once before. I used this feature to cache gigabytes of music on my phone so that once it was listened to on WiFi, I could go out and not consume my 3G data while listening to the playlist. That was a huge "fuck you" to users. 4. No ads Install an ad blocker in your browser and never hear ads anyway. 5. Millions of premium SoundCloud Go+ tracks Here's how Engadget covered the announcement: "the subscription plan costs $10 a month and includes a library of additional content as well as the usual remixes, emerging artists and podcasts." [1] Given what I've said in #2, this was not the user experience. --- I'm sorry to the talented people who lost their jobs today, but I don't feel any sadness for SoundCloud. This hurt is entirely self inflicted. For any PM's reading, here's how to burn your reputation with users in 3 easy steps: 1. Introduce an expensive subscription service at the same price as your competitors, but don't offer as much content, and don't publicize that any of the money is going toward your content creators 2. Hobble your existing free product to force people to the paid service 3. Don't push any meaningful new features or notable bugfixes to your website or app in years (e.g. needing Flash to play a song, HTML5 which eats up 100% CPU so you can display... something) Now I use Mixcloud. Not better for individual songs, but great for music discovery given all the podcasts/shows available. Their app is a bit meh, but there aren't any ads, and their website doesn't require Flash and doesn't use lots of CPU. Best of all: they've yet to screw over users by introducing a paid option. --- [0] https://soundcloud.com/go https://soundcloud.com/go [1] https://www.engadget.com/2016/03/29/soundcloud-go-hands-on/ https://www.engadget.com/2016/03/29/soundcloud-go-hands-on/

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

fergie 9y ago

Odd that a service which relies the newest tech and coolest music is cutting offices in SF and London.

Johankarlsson 9y ago

"Go Find It. Barcelona, Spain. We are looking for front-end devs with React/Redux experience, backend engineers, and iOS and Android devs. Shoot me an e-mail at johan@gofindit.com"

flgr 9y ago

To the many able people who worked for SoundCloud in Berlin: Twitch Berlin is hiring. We're looking for data scientists and distributed systems engineers working on one of the largest live video CDNs in the world at a huge scale that makes things interesting: * Data Scientist, Fraud/Video: https://jobs.lever.co/twitch/17b5882c-6be0-41cd-a6ac-45b948e5d300 https://jobs.lever.co/twitch/17b5882c-6be0-41cd-a6ac-45b948e... * Distributed Systems Engineer - Live Video CDN: https://jobs.lever.co/twitch/8929e219-138d-473c-8acd-4fcc3e01fc0a https://jobs.lever.co/twitch/8929e219-138d-473c-8acd-4fcc3e0... * Senior Software Engineer - Live Video CDN: https://jobs.lever.co/twitch/2fae3239-fe4d-4582-bfdf-7d43727853d3 https://jobs.lever.co/twitch/2fae3239-fe4d-4582-bfdf-7d43727... Primary language is Golang so DSEs from SoundCloud are likely to be a great fit! The latter two positions say "San Francisco", but we have a growing engineering office in Berlin with people working on the live video CDN and fraud detection. These positions can be filled in Berlin and we'd be very happy to do so (helps us grow the Berlin office). Happy to answer any questions you might have. Hope this will help some of the folks affected by the lay off.

Geralt_Encore 9y ago
Any chances for Android positions in Berlin office or whole mobile development team is SF based?
- cagataygurturk 9y ago
  We are hiring Android devs at eBay Berlin!
telendt 9y ago
> The latter two positions say "San Francisco", but we have a growing engineering office in Berlin with people working on the live video CDN and fraud detection. These positions can be filled in Berlin and we'd be very happy to do so (helps us grow the Berlin office). Ex-SoundClouder and Berliner here. I'm sad you haven't mentioned that in your previous comments in "Who is hiring?" threads. I once found a dead link in your comment and when I looked at job ads on your site I couldn't find any openings for Berlin.
9y ago

StreamBright 9y ago

Lets start with how awkward their API registration is: SoundCloud Application Registration https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfNxc82RJuzC0DnISat7n4H-G7IsPQIdaMpe202iiHZEoso9w/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfNxc82RJuzC0DnISat... Of course they turn you down for requesting access to implement a legitimate feature (listing the top most listened tracks from an artist).

tarikozket 9y ago

They have enough traffic to generate around $750k per day only from Adsense. I'm not a musician and have no intention to get their "Pro" for 7 dollars a month. I wouldn't mind seeing an Adsense ad instead of seeing an ad about their "Pro Plan".

davidhariri 9y ago

I used to listen to mixes on SoundCloud but I started getting spammed and the site kept crashing. I switched to Mixcloud and haven't looked back for a year at least.

cranjice 9y ago

Soundcloud has it's issues, and personally I find the mobile interface annoying, but what are the alternatives for music creators (and discovery)? Asking out of curiosity. Would love to find a good alternative.

adamstober 9y ago

Tough news. And it's great to see posts from people who are in hiring in SF, offering to take a look at affected employees. We built http://www.layoff-aid.com/ http://www.layoff-aid.com/ specifically to help candidates and companies find each other, with the main goal of helping candidates find new homes quickly. More on HN last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14647365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14647365

michaelChall 9y ago

Herval, cala-te

herval 9y ago
heh didn't expect to see my name on a post about a company I left aeons ago, but there you are - someone proving OP's point perfectly (ps I wasn't a director and I'm not OP, but obviously still one of many in the aforementioned mafia's hitlist)
- michaelChall 9y ago
  Coitadinho
throwaway52342 9y ago
Hehe, Herval was one of the good ones, cynical but funny and a good engineer :)
- foobaw 9y ago
  Cole, the senior PM is excellent and I feel like he could work elsewhere.
  - colemercer 9y ago
    I don't know who you are but thanks! :)
sctb 9y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14713074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14713074 and marked it off-topic.

foobaw 9y ago

Just look at Spotify and see how beautiful it is and how much it has grown over the years. SoundCloud barely improved but I'm forced to use SoundCloud because of the user-base and it's the only way I can promote my music.

shams93 9y ago

For artists compared to using say distrokid to reach spotify and apple music with soundcloud they expect you to pay to give your work away for free.

eknight15 9y ago

Is there a Soundcloud alternative (that allows for user uploads)? 8tracks and SoundCloud have been my home for years, sad to see them both struggling.

cyberferret 9y ago

Sad to hear - I have been on SoundCloud since their very early days, and concur that they seem to have lost their way somewhat. When I first joined, it was a great place to share my music creations, and I enjoyed discovering other new artists who created the same sort of music I did too. There was always a lot of interaction and positive comments and I actually made some SC 'friend' in that time that I kept in contact with. However, of late, I feel like I am throwing my music into a deep, dark hole in the ground. There are still the odd comments and interactions, but nowhere on the level that it was about 4 or 5 years ago. You can actually see this from the stats on my channel [0], when you look at stuff I uploaded 3 or 4 years ago as compared to what I have uploaded in the past few months. It will be sad to see SoundCloud go. For me, my channel still is a kind of roadmap of how my amateur music career has progressed in the past 10 years or so and I will never be able to recreate that on another platform... [0] - https://soundcloud.com/cyberferret https://soundcloud.com/cyberferret

dyim 9y ago

Couldn't find out from the article or the linked blog post - what were the responsibilities of the 173 laid-off employees? How many employees does SoundCloud have, and what roles do they have? Clearly they're not all devs - do they work in artist relations? customer support? content creation? marketing? etc.

paulbjensen 9y ago

For those in the London office, I'm sorry to hear about the office closure, I've been in the sane position at 2 startups very early on in my career. The company where I work (Starcount) is looking for people to work in data engineering (Hadoop and Spark), frontend (React), backend (Node) and Salesforce admin. If anyone is interested, my email is paul.jensen@starcount.com, and I'm @paulbjensen on Twitter.

LyalinDotCom 9y ago

I'm not surprised they are not doing well. I dont wish them bad things dont get me wrong but if you are an active user of their service (like I am) and a developer then you're bound to ask the question once in a while "so what is their dev team doing exactly?" because it doesn't seem like much at all. They really need to invest into building a more compelling product, there are some amazing scenarios they can tackle here but they seem to have no interest in it or maybe funding to pull it off.

noobermin 9y ago

I think the end of the article is key. SC still has a massive userbase, and continues to be where I find my particular niche for music. The only issue is it seems the people at the helm have no idea how to maintain the community they have.

mockindignant 9y ago

Time to close my account before all my information is sold to someone or other when they have their fire sale.

glasz 9y ago
your account won't vanish from their backups. at least not soon enough.

lyime 9y ago

Sad to hear about the layoffs at SC. I am a huge SC fan and It would be a tragedy if service wasn't around given the amazing community behind it. For those that have been affected at SC: I am one of the co-founders of Terminal 49 and we are making global trade cheaper and more efficient for businesses. We are automating the first/last mile container trucking. We are looking to bring on our first 2 engineers to join our founding team (in SF/Oakland). Would love to chat if you are interested, drop me a line at akshay [at] terminal49.com

ckorhonen 9y ago

Minibar is hiring. React, React Native, Ruby, Data. In NYC. Ping me - chris@minibardelivery.com

glasz 9y ago

i remember being damn impressed by their html5/js-based embedable player. around 2011. even thought about applying. now i'm out of the fancy shithole that startup land is. prefer working with a few ex-collegues from my hammock. if you're in need for freelance work and don't bother writing ruby and sometimes php, get in touch. if you're into elixir get in touch right now. no erlang project yet but that can be changed.

grumblestumble 9y ago

Interesting stuff out of this thread.. I really love Soundcloud, especially for discovery, but I guess I'm an absolute edge case. I primarily listen to electronic DJ sets (RA, Dekmantel, etc) and the community track ID comments on these are great for discovering new music. I rarely even look at the feed.