21 ms·

If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture?

283 points by mcone 9y ago

SurrealSoul 9y ago
After grooveshark died I moved to soundcloud. There will certainly be a bunch of indie / nieche artists floating around. The culture will still exist, but it'll be fun to watch the vacuum get filled by some other service
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
  The thing that scares me is how much music will just be lost for good.
  - 0xCMP 9y ago
    Yea how many people delete source content after they've uploaded. I wouldn't be surprised a lot of people do that. General population doesn't think it's worth to simply buy more space either online or on disk. It can be expensive to do so even for people like me who realize that disk on the whole is cheap compared to losing the data.
    - sitkack 9y ago
      That isn't the point. It is published in spot. The amount of breakage between SC going down and that art being uploaded to a new site ... at most I would think 10% or less would make the transition.
debt 9y ago
Soundcloud has some of the best damn music. It'd be awful if it disappeared. I'm surprised nobody, including Soundcloud themselves, have developed tools to remix, sample, dj, etc. the music library on Soundcloud. They have tons of great stuff to sample/remix etc.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  Would that be legal? What is the music on Soundcloud licensed under?
  - goshdarnheck 9y ago
    When you upload your music, you can set the license for the track. The choices are "All Rights Reserved" or Creative Commons.
- twunde 9y ago
  I'm not terribly surprised. The rights management around that is incredibly expensive and very complex. I also have vague memories of some startup circa 2011/2012 that did live DJing that ended up dying pretty quickly
  - dinedal 9y ago
    It was probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turntable.fm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turntable.fm
  - threetimesthurs 9y ago
    There was turntable.fm. Now there's https://www.jqbx.fm https://www.jqbx.fm which is sort of doing live DJing but with Spotify
    - twunde 9y ago
      Ah thank you. That's what I was thinking of
  - firegrind 9y ago
    It's easy. Artists define a license for each track which explains whether it can be remixed.
    - twunde 9y ago
post_break 9y ago
It moves to bandcamp?
- dyeje 9y ago
  This seems to be the most likely outcome to me. Bandcamp and Soundcloud have always had a huge overlap in functionality. I've always much preferred Bandcamp anyways.
  - k-mcgrady 9y ago
    As a user of both they've always seemed like two completely different services to me. One is streaming, the other a store. One a social sharing based platform, the other mini-sites for each artist with terrible discovery. Bandcamp would need to change a lot to replace SoundCloud's use case. NB: Not shitting on Bandcamp, it's great and I use it.
- stereosteve 9y ago
  I see people sharing WIP mixes here also: https://clyp.it/ https://clyp.it/
janitor61 9y ago
Same thing that happened to mp3.com, probably.
- pinebox 9y ago
  This. People forget so quickly...
Ajedi32 9y ago
Maybe Bandcamp should buy them out. Seems like there's a lot they could gain by having a major music platform like Soundcloud integrated into their marketplace.
- dyeje 9y ago
  Why buy a failing company when most of their userbase will organically come to you when it shuts down?
  - tracker1 9y ago
    seamless acquisition, search engine rankings, targeted users... Give existing artists say 90-days post-aquisition to convert to paid accounts, etc. There's plenty of reason... now said transition could be more costly than the buyout though.
toomuchtodo 9y ago
> Archive Team promises to back up SoundCloud amid worries of a shutdown https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/17/15986952/archive-team-back-up-soundcloud-warrior-project https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/17/15986952/archive-team-bac... Consider donating to the Internet Archive. > Archive Team plans large scale backing up of Soundcloud soon, but seriously, please donate money to the Archive. http://Archive.org/donate http://Archive.org/donate https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/885665255266955264 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/885665255266955264 Edit: my info is dated. Archive Team backed off. Smoke if you've got 'em.
- teraflop 9y ago
  That article is out of date, unfortunately. The Internet Archive and Archive Team have abandoned their backup efforts by SoundCloud's request. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6oi6fd/xpost_rarchiveteam_soundcloud_requests_the/dkhnesn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6oi6fd/xpost_r...
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Someone supposedly grabbed 900TB. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6n1pap/soundcloud_may_only_have_50_days_left_save_your/dk8dyym/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6n1pap/soundcl...
    - fgandiya 9y ago
      That's like $80k worth of data transfer. Also, how can you afford to store all of that unless you have gsuite? Edit: I was mixed up. I was thinking of what it would cost SoundCloud to transfer all that music. I guess storing it would be much cheaper...
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - distantsounds 9y ago
        It's all in gsuite, I believe. For how long, I don't know. I can't imagine Google not taking notice.
philfrasty 9y ago
DJ @deadmau5 has some thoughts on saving SC... [1] http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/dance/7866215/deadmau5-save-soundcloud-twitter http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/dance/7866215/deadmau...
- grillvogel 9y ago
  glad to see hes still up to being completely insufferable
- pwython 9y ago
  > "In summary, sure. I could turn the SoundCloud shitshow around with a decent team. But why fix someone else's fuckup after paying for it?" > "I could turn [it] around... But why..." Looks like he's got everything figured out... except for the business side of things.
rb808 9y ago
> How do you persuade people who have been using your services free to start paying $5 or $10 a month? I've starting paying for stuff like music services, apps and newspapers just to try to keep stuff alive. I realized I would happily pay $500 for a phone but never wanted to pay for a $2 app. There is so much sh*tty content out there I'm actually enjoying having ad free access to a lot of good stuff. I still dont really like paying but if I dont no one will. I think I'll start paying $5/mo for soundcloud too.
- BlackjackCF 9y ago
  I wish Soundcloud would improve its UI. I really want to use Soundcloud when I'm on the go, but it's app is so shitty it's constantly crashing.
  - azinman2 9y ago
    Doesn’t crash for me. I’m on iOS. It does, if I stop playing music, get killed pretty quickly by the OS. I just wish it remembered where it left off.
    - BlackjackCF 9y ago
      Maybe it's just me... but sometimes in the middle of a long mix, it'll start crashing. But definitely agreed on the ability to hold state on the song you're currently listening to.
  - knowaveragejoe 9y ago
    I've never had this issue, and I have to say as someone who listens to longer tracks(mixes on the order of 1hr+) I really enjoy their seeking functionality. It's much more thumbfriendly than any other app I've seen, but then again I haven't really looked at many other apps.
- ThatGeoGuy 9y ago
  As a corollary to your point about paying money for a free service, I recently decided to help fund Riot/Matrix.org development on Patreon (currently $5 a month). Both are currently presented as a free service, and I recall them stating eventually they would have paid-for integrations and bonuses for corporate users, but predominantly most of the users are on the matrix.org instance using the free service. Needless to say though, it's been a damn good app / backend most of the time, and has made my life much better than before, when I would connect to a handful of various services to accomplish the same goal. I think the reason I didn't see contributing money to be as big of an issue, is that the work is 1) open sourced, which is almost as if I can have some part of ownership in it (don't take this too literally) and 2) I pay $5 for a vps to keep my personal website / email up. If I'm willing to part with $5 for email (which some days could be thought of as not helping my life), I might as well do it for another application / ecosystem I use everyday that does help me in many ways. Overall I think that to an extent you can't just expect that most people will pay for something that would otherwise be free, or has been free for a long time. You end up gaining a bunch of users from the "lower pool" that will only be there as long as it's a free ride. But a certain class of users will pay for something if you ask for it, because it has made their life better in some way, and they want to ensure it continues in the future. There's an interesting parallel here to Craigslist / Kijiji, where most seasoned users will put a price on items they just want to get rid of. They do this because a very large portion of troublesome users who troll around for free stuff will outright ignore the posting. This actually makes it easier to get rid of things, because you don't have to deal with fielding fifty calls of people who might pick it up but then never show, or who just call you to ask if you have anything else for free that can go with it (and subsequently waste your time from giving unwanted items to people who will actually, you know, come get them from you). It does make you wonder if the idea of a buffet-style, everything-is-free-forever ends up tainting the user pool, especially with regards to sites / applications that deal with art / multimedia. Sure, there's piracy out there, but companies like soundcloud don't really have the corporate backing behind them to scale infinitely for more users. Maybe from the outset they should have charged a $5 yearly membership or something. They may have had less users, but at least then they'd have something. Or perhaps I just don't understand their business model. Who knows?
lindner 9y ago
I'm hoping that labels and musicians wise up and move to a coop model. I'm liking what I'm seeing so far on http://resonate.is http://resonate.is and am hopeful that those lessons will finally be learned.
- joveian 9y ago
  Their "9 plays to own" model with higher compensation for repeats sounds really interesting, although I wonder if the base level of .2 cents is still high enough that spamming enough can earn some money. On Soundcloud spamming is a major issue even without directly earning any money from it so I imagine this would just make it worse. While I don't know for sure, I suspect that on Soundcloud I listen to part of multiple thousands of songs a month that I dislike and don't want to support. Some of these I don't want to spend money on but for a sufficiently low to me price I wouldn't care and some of which I actively want to not pay any amount for. IMO first play should be free until you indicate that you like the song. There should also be a way to note that you have listened and don't want to play the song again (if there isn't... hopefully they have that already). However that would be easily defeated by the same artist posting the same or very similar content multiple times (and a block artist option wouldn't avoid the same artist posting under multiple accounts, which happens on Soundcloud). I think any manditory payment on the first listen is going to restrict the type of content that can appear on that platform and make it not the same kind of place as Soundcloud. This is a problem in other content areas as well where money goes to those with the most appealing advertising almost independent of content quality. Well, it can be an major issue with anything people pay money for, but it is particularly unnecessary for easily copied content. Also, they should really make sure that you can get a FLAC when you have fully paid not just a mp3. I would not use the service for this reason alone (unless they do actually do that and are just bad at describing it). The Bandcamp model works better for me, I just wish they had better discovery options. I wish Soundcloud had a way for listeners to pay particular artists, first covering the Soundcloud fees and then the vast majority of the rest going to the artist.
- patrickbolle 9y ago
  Haven't heard of this yet, really cool. Seems like a good team too. For sure going to keep my eye on this.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
A decentralized solution like Mastodon/GNUSocial would be the best bet. Would probably be pretty simple, few weekends of work.
- cannonedhamster 9y ago
  I think the difference would be in how much server space each requires. Text and images take up a lot, but still relatively little compared to audio, which is dwarfed by video at the scale that this would take. It's an interesting idea, but someone always has to pay somewhere. Maybe something like integrating Mopidy into Mastodon/GnuSocial might work and could then piggyback off the already created software, but I'd think it would be closer to a reddit clone than a twitter clone.
nodesocket 9y ago
I find it hard to believe if faced with the choice of letting SoundClound shut down or paying $5 a month, that the SoundCloud community would not be willing to pony up $5 a month. If that is true, that is super pathetic.
- 2bitencryption 9y ago
  the "soundcloud community" is really the 2% of users who are heavily active, involved, and attract the other 98% of users who consume the community's output. I'm sure the "community" would happily pay for the service. but the other 98% probably would not, because they just want to consume content with the least friction. payment is friction, even a $0.05 payment. so they follow the path of least friction and go somewhere else, some other site that is currently in the early funding rounds, providing service for free to ramp up as quickly as possible. then, in three years, their investors will demand they monetize... rinse and repeat.
- gamache 9y ago
  The thing is, SoundCloud took so much VC money that making a modest profit is no longer an option. The investors won't back off until they get their 10x payout or SoundCloud dies trying. I hate it when this happens.
overcast 9y ago
People need to stop creating awesome services, for free. That is the issue. You set the precedent, and attract people because it's free, and this is the end result. No one wants to pay for it. Netflix isn't free, look how awesome it is. People will pay for SoundCloud once you lock it down, and put a subscription fee to use it.
- feld 9y ago
  But they won't. The people creating content on it did not have money and just wanted exposure. The consumers did not have money either.
  - myusernameisok 9y ago
    I don't know if that's necessarily true. Youtube is to Netflix what Soundcloud is to Spotify. Netflix and Spotify are successful because they charge a small fee to allow users to consume high quality content. Youtube and Soundcloud are both free and allow users to consume community-generated content. This is a bit of a rhetorical question, but why is Youtube so successful when Soundcloud isn't?
    - JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
      Humans are a very visual-oriented animal would be my best guess. Videos vs. audio on the internet is a very different animal. I've never really used SoundCloud because the ui is confusing and haphazard and it just doesn't feel like Spotify, which I pay for. Spotify makes sure and shows you the album art etc. My recollection of SoundCloud from when I tried it in the past was some sort of waveform you clicked on to listen and visualize the music.
      - ehnto 9y ago
        Soundcloud is a very different platform to Spotify though. I wouldn't pay to subscribe to Soundcloud because not all of the artists I like would be on there. Soundcloud was more of an independent artist platform, and I think Soundcloud might have been able to get artists to pay for some services like sponsored songs, pay to let users download their tracks, artist page perks. But it's hard to know if that would have worked. Especially in retrospect.
ahmedfromtunis 9y ago
I'm wondering how is the morale over there? How is the management responding to all this press exposure? This must very hard on the employees left.
- kakarot 9y ago
  From what I understand, morale has been low for a while. https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/inside-the-storm-at-soundcloud https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/inside-the-storm-at-soundcl...
  - cannonedhamster 9y ago
    Yeah having a tone-deaf CEO who used the company like a piggy bank and gave no direction certainly didn't help. He truly didn't understand what he had.
fiatpandas 9y ago
Glad I've had a script running for the last 6 months that has been polling + backing up my soundcloud favorites. This is stuff that, if SoundCloud went under, I would never be able to find nor listen to again. It really is depressing to think how much music culture disappears with SoundCloud. I'm doing the same with my YouTube stuff, but not because I think it's going anywhere anytime soon.
- haltingthoughts 9y ago
  Is that or s similar script somewhere public? I'd like to do the same.
  - Nightshaxx 9y ago
    Yea, I would love that script. Online services I've used to download my likes kinda suck.
    - colecut 9y ago
      https://github.com/flyingrub/scdl https://github.com/flyingrub/scdl I used this one to download all of my soundcloud likes and some tracks/likes of other users, was pretty fast/painless
  - fiatpandas 9y ago
    Check out YouTube-DL. It supports SoundCloud, and I believe you can point it to playlist URLs for batch downloading.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Yeap. Just pass --batch-file <file with urls> Also, you can give it a SoundCloud user or a playlist, and it'll download it all. And if you use --download-archive, you can re-run it later and it'll only download the new songs. I have a cron with no scripting, just the youtube-dl command, that pulls down new videos from an YouTube channel every week. It's awesome.
  - 9y ago
forkLding 9y ago
This really shows the impact of technology on culture in modern times, you can see different cultures and countries adopting different practices due to their technology (which in retrospect is how technology in history has always worked) such as Wechat in China and its payment practices to how Soundcloud influenced so much of modern day unsigned-label musicians and the Soundcloud Rap/Trap community. Also would not want to see Soundcloud disappear, I had a brief EDM and trap phase with Soundcloud filled with vivid memories
tandav 9y ago
Only One Right answer: move to YouTube
- forkLding 9y ago
  Think the issue with most SoundCloud musicians is that they either dont have the resources to constantly make music videos or dont have enough creativity or want to study how to make viral videos on Youtube but instead need to focus on their music.
  - jononor 9y ago
    People put music up on YouTube with just a cover image and that's just fine for most people.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - forkLding 9y ago
      Thats true but ultimately the people on SoundCloud and Youtube are a different crowd as well, Soundcloud allows annotations and is more specifically built for music, youtube doesnt have the same features
    - type0 9y ago
      So that some big labels would autoclaim copyright on it because they doomed it similar enough, no thanks
fenwick67 9y ago
Are there any existing, good, self-hosted platforms for music? Personally I've been working slowly on an self-hosted Tumblr clone, but that doesn't have the concept of albums.
janwh 9y ago
People™ should learn about how to properly self-host their stuff, apply adequate licenses that allow for remixing, etc. If "this music culture you're a part of" really matters to you, and grows larger than the initial toe-dipping, becoming self-sufficient should be one of the main objectives of your craft. Being part of a culture should also imply caring for its heritage, should it not? Sure, this subculture would have probably never existed without a platform to grow on. But the going-away part is actually a large scale problem, not only regarding SoundCloud. This applies to other ~corporation~ startup backed platforms as well.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  I am not a professional music producer, but I do produce music as a hobby. I'm also a sysadmin, so I know full well how to self-host everything myself. But it's just such a pain it's not worth it for me. So much easier to just upload it to Soundcloud and let them worry about serving it and maintaining it. Now, if a sysadmin like myself won't bother, I really doubt your average musician with relatively weak or non-existant sysadmin skills is going to bother self-hosting. Professional musicians might hire someone to do it for them, but most music producers aren't professional. That said, I stopped uploading my music to Soundcloud ever since they dropped groups. That was the main way I shared my music and discovered new music myself. Soundcloud is not mostly just a static music storage service for me now, and without an easy way to discover new music, it's not even worth the bother for me to upload anything there anymore. I'm now hunting around for a good Soundcloud replacement.
  - bphogan 9y ago
    I made a thing to share an s3 bucket. The files in the dir get listed with temporary download links and I use HTML <audio> tags to get the player to work. The current version makes you authenticate with a username and password or google login as I made this to share some songs with someone who wanted to license them from me. https://github.com/napcs/s3server https://github.com/napcs/s3server I am hacking on a branch this week that will support publicly sharing a directory. If anyone wants to hack on this, I'd love it. It's pretty minimal right now but it's open source and it works, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
dcow 9y ago
What happened to the subscription service? I tried giving them money--multiple times--and it seemed like SC would forget my subscription after a few months each time. I eventually gave up.
joeyspn 9y ago
Sounds like an awesome use case for something like Filecoin [0] (IPFS). Move all the tracks to decentralised storage, stream with something like webtorrent [1] and research some kind of service fees via filecoin's token... [0] https://filecoin.io/ https://filecoin.io/ [1] https://webtorrent.io/ https://webtorrent.io/
- stereosteve 9y ago
  Yeah that would be super cool. But what about the timed commenting + discovery features of SoundCloud?
  - joeyspn 9y ago
    That's the difficult part. :P maybe current comments could be stored in json files and loaded with the song. New comments could update the json on IPFS: https://flyingzumwalt.github.io/ipfs-tutorials/curriculum/files-on-ipfs/modules/update-files/ https://flyingzumwalt.github.io/ipfs-tutorials/curriculum/fi... It's possible but far from efficient. Those are the pain points where decentralisation doesn't really cut it.
    - stereosteve 9y ago
      Haha yeah... I kind of like the world writable comments file. Kind of like the original internet guestbooks with just a Name and Comments field. I'm sure there's some blockchain based commenting thing out there... but the flat file feels so quaint. I might take a stab at this as a way to play around with IPFS.
      - joeyspn 9y ago
        > I'm sure there's some blockchain based commenting thing out there... Now that you name it, I totally forgot that Steem has a pretty good commenting system, and probably they're storing the entries on-chain. So maybe the answer is adding Graphene to the mix (Filecoin + Webtorrent + Graphene 2.0 as Blockchain-based distributed DB): https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/steem-developer-update-graphene-2-0 https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/steem-developer-updat...
nthcolumn 9y ago
So how come we can have Youtube but not Soundcloud?
- sitkack 9y ago
  Mirror every sound cloud track to youtube. Boom.
Raynak 9y ago
I haven't listened to music since Grooveshark shut down.
- thomasvillain 9y ago
  Yes, agreed. If music doesn't have some copyright infringement grunginess to it, it's not for me. Everyone knows that the best music is made by self-taught DJs and garage bands.
Raynak 9y ago
They probably just stop listening to music if it gets too hard. I haven't bothered with anything since Grooveshark died.
quadrangle 9y ago
This already happened (probably many times over). I had success with the original mp3.com 17 years ago. They made certain business decisions that got major labels angry and various details not important, they shut down. What matters is that tons of stuff disappeared. I learned that I can't trust these types of platforms because they are for-profit and may screw us all over or make stupid decisions. I also can't trust non-profit options if they aren't really stable. I trust Wikimedia to stick around, and archive.org and some others (although everyone should donate to keep them strong!), but other, I dunno. Instead of fully embracing SoundCloud, I've basically stayed distrusting and my creative publishing actually suffered a lot (although my concerns are part of what led me into understanding free culture, free software, etc. and why I'm aware of Hacker News now etc)
- visarga 9y ago
  Mp3.com closedown was a disaster. So much valuable music was there.
  - feedbeef 9y ago
    Like the few on here who remember how great mp3.com was, I too lament the loss of its huge array of excellent indy music. Hopefully the archive will be fully restored some day[0,1,2]. Digital antiquities indeed. Take warning: download and archive a copy of every digital asset you care about. I highly recommend the excellent utility youtube-dl[3]. I rely on it daily for copying obscure youtube videos that could disappear at any moment. Fool me twice... [0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/12/03/mp3_com_archive_is_destroyed/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/12/03/mp3_com_archive_is_... [1] https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/04/04/19/2318226/mp3com-archive-not-lost-17-million-songs-saved https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/04/04/19/2318226/mp... [2] https://archive.org/post/1004359/mp3com-archive https://archive.org/post/1004359/mp3com-archive [3] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
- _jtrig 9y ago
  This is why I fully expect the digital dark age to become reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age
tracker1 9y ago
Does it really need to be $10-15/month, per the example though? I mean would $12-15/year be sufficient? I don't know what their staff overhead is though, it sounds like they have a lot or people on staff.
pier25 9y ago
SC wasn't the first audio sharing website and certainly won't be the last. IMO it has become the IMGUR for audio, and users won't pay for uploading images to IMGUR or videos to Youtube. Maybe SC pretends to be a storage/bandwidth reseller, but in that case it's outrageous that it is charging $7 / month for 6 hours of audio which (at the most) are 3.6 GB in uncompressed CD quality audio (44.1Khz/16bit). You could argue about bandwidth costs, infrastructure, etc, but Vimeo is doing great and its smallest plan (cheaper than SC) allows you to upload 5GB per WEEK.
- lavezzi 9y ago
  they still stream in 128kbps, even for premium customers. It's insane.
  - j00lz 9y ago
    Agreed, this is my biggest issue with soundcloud is sub par compression that they use which complete distorts the highs. I feel it maybe better if soundcloud does go so thats it replacement will support better codecs.
- sitkack 9y ago
  afaik Vimeo is still running on VC cash and will in the same position. Start mirroring vimeo.
  - pier25 9y ago
    Any source on that?
bane 9y ago
The demoscene (and by some extension the classic gaming scene) has faced this from time-to-time. What's interesting is how many large volunteer efforts there are to save large chunks of the visual and audio output of that scene. There are places you can go and get literally hundreds of thousands of pieces of music. Every one in a while a site will need to go down and somebody else seems to step in, mirror the content and start their own thing. Outside of the scene, there are sites with literally thousands of post-copyright mp3s from certain genres (classic jazz, 45s, etc.) so there's definitely a kind of appetite on the part of preservationists to catalog music. There's almost no commercial side to the demoscene though, so I wonder if the commercial forces in the rest of the music world seem to prevent this kind of community building.
- Figs 9y ago
  > I wonder if the commercial forces in the rest of the music world seem to prevent this kind of community building. SoundCloud has (for whatever reason) prohibited archivists like archive.org and ArchiveTeam from backing it up. https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/888093838107189249 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/888093838107189249 Jason Scott Wikipedia article, if you don't know who he is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Scott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Scott
- nylonstrung 9y ago
  That's a bit easier with a medium where in which small file sizes are considered part of the art form and most of the content is ~64KB
thanatropism 9y ago
MP3.com anyone? Hell, I had an "album" on MP3.com and even sold three copies. The other day Standing in the Sun's album showed up on Spotify out of nowhere. That was the music of my teenage years and I had fully lost track of it. So many other artists I still miss.
shams93 9y ago
Why not start a web label on archive.org? Not like anyone is making money on soundcloud, there is no upsell to archive.org its a not for profit run by donation, a lot less likely to fall victim than a commercial service.
jmspring 9y ago
Call me cynical, but does "SoundCloud's Musical Culture" actually pertain to a significant portion of audio over the internet? Over the years, I've used Pandora, SomaFM (still do), Spotify and others as well as some iTunes and my own large collection. What is actually lost with "SoundCloud's Musical Culture" and what percentage of the internet audio listeners does it impact?
- quaz3l 9y ago
  Its actually more on the creative side. SoundCloud has such a low barrier to posting and acts more as a sort of Twitter or YouTube than a playlist maker. It allows culture to form around the community of SoundCloud, not just fans that you advertise directly.
  - jmspring 9y ago
    If that was their key differentiator, why did they need so many engineers especially in super expensive SF?
    - quaz3l 9y ago
      I think that was their biggest mistake. They grew too fast and took too much money before they had any clear way to make money. If it was ran as a sustainable business, maybe it would be around for the next 5 years.
- ctw 9y ago
  Probably around 6 or 7 years ago (I think?) when I was in high school, I would go on SoundCloud all the time. I downloaded the free trial version of FL Studio and made electronic music in my basement that I uploaded to SoundCloud. Because it was a trial, you could do everything but save, so I had to make the entire song in one sitting over the span of a whole evening after school. I'm not good at putting this into words, but I felt like I was a part of some thing, even if that sounds silly. There were so many people like me that I could find on SoundCloud and listen to what they made. I found a guy from the university I wanted to go to and messaged him about it and then told him I liked his music. A guy from my mom's work heard from her that I was using SoundCloud and he was on it too playing acoustic guitar. We would listen to each other's stuff when it came out. There were young producers from the UK who put out all sorts of awesome stuff without needing a record label or anything to go through. A few of them have gotten bigger now and I can't even find their old stuff any more, so of course it feels cool knowing that you listened to their stuff when they weren't "big". I wish I had something moving to say at the end of this, but those memories are all I have.
omnimus 9y ago
Maybe this is a chance for some decentralized alternative to pop up? This is one of the reasons why are decentralised apps so appealing. I think most of the artists would be able host it themselfs the problem is the interface that allows you to search it all and connect it. HN brains should think about this.
- flowless 9y ago
  Former Ferment built on top of Scuttlebutt can be considered - https://github.com/LolaShare/LolaShare https://github.com/LolaShare/LolaShare
  - fenwick67 9y ago
    This is awesome, thank you for sharing this.
baalimago 9y ago
Where will everyone go? As a sort of active sc user i didn't even know that sc was dieing. There are alternatives sure, but... I dunno, the "meta culture" of new electronic music is on sc... Killing sc would be like a blow to creativity and upcoming musicians
baalimago 9y ago
The main issues with sc: 1. Different audio levels between songs, there must be some "automastering" function (or, simply listen to mixes, like i prefer to do) 2. The awful "comment at time" system which hasn't been fixed for years 3. The endless spam of shitty songs from people you're following, I can barely follow anyone now a days since the general quality of the stuff they repost isn't very good 4. The lack of premium incentive, also the price (which is too low). I have premium since I'm a producer, but there's not incentive for the average user to pay any money to either sc or the producers Possible solution: 1. Implement some sort of "for a fee, automaster the audiolevels so they're somwhat the same within the genre". This shouldn't be hard at all from a technical standpoint, spotify is doing it, why not sc? Alternatively have a crew of "quality ensurers" which listen to songs and deem if they get the "sc mark of approval" or something like that 2. Implement direct donations to the users, direct payment to buy songs, where a small fee goes to sc themselves (become the beatport for the unsigned, basically)
- austinjp 9y ago
  > Implement direct donations to the users, direct payment to buy songs, where a small fee goes to sc themselves I can't believe this doesn't already happen, even some sort of flatter/tip function.
- noisem4ker 9y ago
  How would you fix the "comment at time" feature? And about that "automastering" thing, it would be sufficient for them to implement ReplayGain loudness leveling. Of course it's a solved problem. http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=ReplayGain http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=ReplayGain
vectorEQ 9y ago
it will go to bandcamp and live happily ever after. music wont get hurt by some buisness derpings because its not about that.
- divenorth 9y ago
  Agreed. Nothing will happen to the music. Musicians will use a different service. No need to back everything up. The musicians already have the files which will be easily uploaded to a different website. And it will most likely be bandcamp.
honestoHeminway 9y ago
Could souncloud reduce it server costs by using p2p-servers of its users..
gaius 9y ago
How do you persuade people who have been using your services free to start paying $5 or $10 a month? User: OMG this service is sooooo important! Company: would you pay one Starbucks per month for it? User: Nah And there you have it in a nutshell. For all the handwringing, noone actually is willing to put their money where their mouth, ermmm, ears are.
- wolfgke 9y ago
  It is a difference to pay some single amount of money vs. paying some recurring sum.
  - gaius 9y ago
    So what? Users of this service can afford laptops, phones + bandwidth, a lifestyle necessitating streaming music etc - but its so valuable to them that they can't afford the equivalent of one latte per month? I call shenanigans.
    - freehunter 9y ago
      Our current Internet lifestyle is unsustainable and will crash sooner rather than later. I say this with no sarcasm: if I had to pay for everything I used online, I would be broke. $5 to HN, $5 to Reddit, $5 to ArsTechnica, $5 for Gmail, $5 for Google Docs, $5 for Google Search, $5 to Github, $5 to Medium, $5 to Wordpress, $5 to StackOverflow, $5 to CNN, $5 to NYT, $5 to Wikipedia, $5 to Weather Channel, $5 to each site I click on from HN or Reddit or Wikipedia, we could be talking hundreds of dollars per month. You could make your argument about anything. "If Reddit is so important to you, why can't you pay them money?" "If HN is so important to you, why can't you pay them money?" "If Google is so important to you, why can't you pay them money?" You'd run out of money quicker than you'd run out of websites to pay, or you'd seriously scale back what websites you visit. It's coming crashing down on us that either you have to pay for something or that something goes away. And we can't pay for everything. Maybe the next Rails or Node can focus on making the cost of hosting infrastructure so inconsequential that sites don't have to make that choice.
xori 9y ago
According to SoundCloud they're aren't going anywhere. https://blog.soundcloud.com/2017/07/14/soundcloud-is-here-to-stay https://blog.soundcloud.com/2017/07/14/soundcloud-is-here-to... how much we believe that will depend on their next finance report.
beepboopbeep 9y ago
Nooooooo! I didn't know about this until now. I love soundcloud :((((
pmarreck 9y ago
SoundCloud was my favorite source of remixes, which I have always been a huge fan of (although I guess that market is smallish). No idea where I'd go next :/ I'd be reasonably happy if I could just download the tracks I've "like"'d
- fragmede 9y ago
  If you're not trying to backup the entire site, you can save individual tracks using youtube-dl[1]. [1] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
  - pmarreck 9y ago
    hmmm. i suppose i have to collect my cookies and give them to youtube-dl... EDIT: Nevermind, I just opened each track individually and ydl'd the URL, there weren't that many.
cJ0th 9y ago
I wonder if myspace could capitalize on soundcloud disappearing. If they learn from the mistakes they and soundcloud made in the past than myspace could have quite a comeback. Can't really imagine this happening, though.

283 points by mcone 9y ago

After grooveshark died I moved to soundcloud. There will certainly be a bunch of indie / nieche artists floating around. The culture will still exist, but it'll be fun to watch the vacuum get filled by some other service

TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
The thing that scares me is how much music will just be lost for good.
- 0xCMP 9y ago
  Yea how many people delete source content after they've uploaded. I wouldn't be surprised a lot of people do that. General population doesn't think it's worth to simply buy more space either online or on disk. It can be expensive to do so even for people like me who realize that disk on the whole is cheap compared to losing the data.
  - sitkack 9y ago
    That isn't the point. It is published in spot. The amount of breakage between SC going down and that art being uploaded to a new site ... at most I would think 10% or less would make the transition.

debt 9y ago

Soundcloud has some of the best damn music. It'd be awful if it disappeared. I'm surprised nobody, including Soundcloud themselves, have developed tools to remix, sample, dj, etc. the music library on Soundcloud. They have tons of great stuff to sample/remix etc.

Ajedi32 9y ago
Would that be legal? What is the music on Soundcloud licensed under?
- goshdarnheck 9y ago
  When you upload your music, you can set the license for the track. The choices are "All Rights Reserved" or Creative Commons.
twunde 9y ago
I'm not terribly surprised. The rights management around that is incredibly expensive and very complex. I also have vague memories of some startup circa 2011/2012 that did live DJing that ended up dying pretty quickly
- dinedal 9y ago
  It was probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turntable.fm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turntable.fm
- threetimesthurs 9y ago
  There was turntable.fm. Now there's https://www.jqbx.fm https://www.jqbx.fm which is sort of doing live DJing but with Spotify
  - twunde 9y ago
    Ah thank you. That's what I was thinking of
- firegrind 9y ago
  It's easy. Artists define a license for each track which explains whether it can be remixed.
  - twunde 9y ago

post_break 9y ago

It moves to bandcamp?

dyeje 9y ago
This seems to be the most likely outcome to me. Bandcamp and Soundcloud have always had a huge overlap in functionality. I've always much preferred Bandcamp anyways.
- k-mcgrady 9y ago
  As a user of both they've always seemed like two completely different services to me. One is streaming, the other a store. One a social sharing based platform, the other mini-sites for each artist with terrible discovery. Bandcamp would need to change a lot to replace SoundCloud's use case. NB: Not shitting on Bandcamp, it's great and I use it.
stereosteve 9y ago
I see people sharing WIP mixes here also: https://clyp.it/ https://clyp.it/

janitor61 9y ago

Same thing that happened to mp3.com, probably.

pinebox 9y ago
This. People forget so quickly...

Ajedi32 9y ago

Maybe Bandcamp should buy them out. Seems like there's a lot they could gain by having a major music platform like Soundcloud integrated into their marketplace.

dyeje 9y ago
Why buy a failing company when most of their userbase will organically come to you when it shuts down?
- tracker1 9y ago
  seamless acquisition, search engine rankings, targeted users... Give existing artists say 90-days post-aquisition to convert to paid accounts, etc. There's plenty of reason... now said transition could be more costly than the buyout though.

toomuchtodo 9y ago

> Archive Team promises to back up SoundCloud amid worries of a shutdown https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/17/15986952/archive-team-back-up-soundcloud-warrior-project https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/17/15986952/archive-team-bac... Consider donating to the Internet Archive. > Archive Team plans large scale backing up of Soundcloud soon, but seriously, please donate money to the Archive. http://Archive.org/donate http://Archive.org/donate https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/885665255266955264 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/885665255266955264 Edit: my info is dated. Archive Team backed off. Smoke if you've got 'em.

teraflop 9y ago
That article is out of date, unfortunately. The Internet Archive and Archive Team have abandoned their backup efforts by SoundCloud's request. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6oi6fd/xpost_rarchiveteam_soundcloud_requests_the/dkhnesn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6oi6fd/xpost_r...
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Someone supposedly grabbed 900TB. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6n1pap/soundcloud_may_only_have_50_days_left_save_your/dk8dyym/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6n1pap/soundcl...
  - fgandiya 9y ago
    That's like $80k worth of data transfer. Also, how can you afford to store all of that unless you have gsuite? Edit: I was mixed up. I was thinking of what it would cost SoundCloud to transfer all that music. I guess storing it would be much cheaper...
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - distantsounds 9y ago
      It's all in gsuite, I believe. For how long, I don't know. I can't imagine Google not taking notice.

philfrasty 9y ago

DJ @deadmau5 has some thoughts on saving SC... [1] http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/dance/7866215/deadmau5-save-soundcloud-twitter http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/dance/7866215/deadmau...

grillvogel 9y ago
glad to see hes still up to being completely insufferable
pwython 9y ago
> "In summary, sure. I could turn the SoundCloud shitshow around with a decent team. But why fix someone else's fuckup after paying for it?" > "I could turn [it] around... But why..." Looks like he's got everything figured out... except for the business side of things.

rb808 9y ago

> How do you persuade people who have been using your services free to start paying $5 or $10 a month? I've starting paying for stuff like music services, apps and newspapers just to try to keep stuff alive. I realized I would happily pay $500 for a phone but never wanted to pay for a $2 app. There is so much sh*tty content out there I'm actually enjoying having ad free access to a lot of good stuff. I still dont really like paying but if I dont no one will. I think I'll start paying $5/mo for soundcloud too.

BlackjackCF 9y ago
I wish Soundcloud would improve its UI. I really want to use Soundcloud when I'm on the go, but it's app is so shitty it's constantly crashing.
- azinman2 9y ago
  Doesn’t crash for me. I’m on iOS. It does, if I stop playing music, get killed pretty quickly by the OS. I just wish it remembered where it left off.
  - BlackjackCF 9y ago
    Maybe it's just me... but sometimes in the middle of a long mix, it'll start crashing. But definitely agreed on the ability to hold state on the song you're currently listening to.
- knowaveragejoe 9y ago
  I've never had this issue, and I have to say as someone who listens to longer tracks(mixes on the order of 1hr+) I really enjoy their seeking functionality. It's much more thumbfriendly than any other app I've seen, but then again I haven't really looked at many other apps.
ThatGeoGuy 9y ago
As a corollary to your point about paying money for a free service, I recently decided to help fund Riot/Matrix.org development on Patreon (currently $5 a month). Both are currently presented as a free service, and I recall them stating eventually they would have paid-for integrations and bonuses for corporate users, but predominantly most of the users are on the matrix.org instance using the free service. Needless to say though, it's been a damn good app / backend most of the time, and has made my life much better than before, when I would connect to a handful of various services to accomplish the same goal. I think the reason I didn't see contributing money to be as big of an issue, is that the work is 1) open sourced, which is almost as if I can have some part of ownership in it (don't take this too literally) and 2) I pay $5 for a vps to keep my personal website / email up. If I'm willing to part with $5 for email (which some days could be thought of as not helping my life), I might as well do it for another application / ecosystem I use everyday that does help me in many ways. Overall I think that to an extent you can't just expect that most people will pay for something that would otherwise be free, or has been free for a long time. You end up gaining a bunch of users from the "lower pool" that will only be there as long as it's a free ride. But a certain class of users will pay for something if you ask for it, because it has made their life better in some way, and they want to ensure it continues in the future. There's an interesting parallel here to Craigslist / Kijiji, where most seasoned users will put a price on items they just want to get rid of. They do this because a very large portion of troublesome users who troll around for free stuff will outright ignore the posting. This actually makes it easier to get rid of things, because you don't have to deal with fielding fifty calls of people who might pick it up but then never show, or who just call you to ask if you have anything else for free that can go with it (and subsequently waste your time from giving unwanted items to people who will actually, you know, come get them from you). It does make you wonder if the idea of a buffet-style, everything-is-free-forever ends up tainting the user pool, especially with regards to sites / applications that deal with art / multimedia. Sure, there's piracy out there, but companies like soundcloud don't really have the corporate backing behind them to scale infinitely for more users. Maybe from the outset they should have charged a $5 yearly membership or something. They may have had less users, but at least then they'd have something. Or perhaps I just don't understand their business model. Who knows?

lindner 9y ago

I'm hoping that labels and musicians wise up and move to a coop model. I'm liking what I'm seeing so far on http://resonate.is http://resonate.is and am hopeful that those lessons will finally be learned.

joveian 9y ago
Their "9 plays to own" model with higher compensation for repeats sounds really interesting, although I wonder if the base level of .2 cents is still high enough that spamming enough can earn some money. On Soundcloud spamming is a major issue even without directly earning any money from it so I imagine this would just make it worse. While I don't know for sure, I suspect that on Soundcloud I listen to part of multiple thousands of songs a month that I dislike and don't want to support. Some of these I don't want to spend money on but for a sufficiently low to me price I wouldn't care and some of which I actively want to not pay any amount for. IMO first play should be free until you indicate that you like the song. There should also be a way to note that you have listened and don't want to play the song again (if there isn't... hopefully they have that already). However that would be easily defeated by the same artist posting the same or very similar content multiple times (and a block artist option wouldn't avoid the same artist posting under multiple accounts, which happens on Soundcloud). I think any manditory payment on the first listen is going to restrict the type of content that can appear on that platform and make it not the same kind of place as Soundcloud. This is a problem in other content areas as well where money goes to those with the most appealing advertising almost independent of content quality. Well, it can be an major issue with anything people pay money for, but it is particularly unnecessary for easily copied content. Also, they should really make sure that you can get a FLAC when you have fully paid not just a mp3. I would not use the service for this reason alone (unless they do actually do that and are just bad at describing it). The Bandcamp model works better for me, I just wish they had better discovery options. I wish Soundcloud had a way for listeners to pay particular artists, first covering the Soundcloud fees and then the vast majority of the rest going to the artist.
patrickbolle 9y ago
Haven't heard of this yet, really cool. Seems like a good team too. For sure going to keep my eye on this.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

A decentralized solution like Mastodon/GNUSocial would be the best bet. Would probably be pretty simple, few weekends of work.

cannonedhamster 9y ago
I think the difference would be in how much server space each requires. Text and images take up a lot, but still relatively little compared to audio, which is dwarfed by video at the scale that this would take. It's an interesting idea, but someone always has to pay somewhere. Maybe something like integrating Mopidy into Mastodon/GnuSocial might work and could then piggyback off the already created software, but I'd think it would be closer to a reddit clone than a twitter clone.

nodesocket 9y ago

I find it hard to believe if faced with the choice of letting SoundClound shut down or paying $5 a month, that the SoundCloud community would not be willing to pony up $5 a month. If that is true, that is super pathetic.

2bitencryption 9y ago
the "soundcloud community" is really the 2% of users who are heavily active, involved, and attract the other 98% of users who consume the community's output. I'm sure the "community" would happily pay for the service. but the other 98% probably would not, because they just want to consume content with the least friction. payment is friction, even a $0.05 payment. so they follow the path of least friction and go somewhere else, some other site that is currently in the early funding rounds, providing service for free to ramp up as quickly as possible. then, in three years, their investors will demand they monetize... rinse and repeat.
gamache 9y ago
The thing is, SoundCloud took so much VC money that making a modest profit is no longer an option. The investors won't back off until they get their 10x payout or SoundCloud dies trying. I hate it when this happens.

overcast 9y ago

People need to stop creating awesome services, for free. That is the issue. You set the precedent, and attract people because it's free, and this is the end result. No one wants to pay for it. Netflix isn't free, look how awesome it is. People will pay for SoundCloud once you lock it down, and put a subscription fee to use it.

feld 9y ago
But they won't. The people creating content on it did not have money and just wanted exposure. The consumers did not have money either.
- myusernameisok 9y ago
  I don't know if that's necessarily true. Youtube is to Netflix what Soundcloud is to Spotify. Netflix and Spotify are successful because they charge a small fee to allow users to consume high quality content. Youtube and Soundcloud are both free and allow users to consume community-generated content. This is a bit of a rhetorical question, but why is Youtube so successful when Soundcloud isn't?
  - JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
    Humans are a very visual-oriented animal would be my best guess. Videos vs. audio on the internet is a very different animal. I've never really used SoundCloud because the ui is confusing and haphazard and it just doesn't feel like Spotify, which I pay for. Spotify makes sure and shows you the album art etc. My recollection of SoundCloud from when I tried it in the past was some sort of waveform you clicked on to listen and visualize the music.
    - ehnto 9y ago
      Soundcloud is a very different platform to Spotify though. I wouldn't pay to subscribe to Soundcloud because not all of the artists I like would be on there. Soundcloud was more of an independent artist platform, and I think Soundcloud might have been able to get artists to pay for some services like sponsored songs, pay to let users download their tracks, artist page perks. But it's hard to know if that would have worked. Especially in retrospect.

ahmedfromtunis 9y ago

I'm wondering how is the morale over there? How is the management responding to all this press exposure? This must very hard on the employees left.

kakarot 9y ago
From what I understand, morale has been low for a while. https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/inside-the-storm-at-soundcloud https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/inside-the-storm-at-soundcl...
- cannonedhamster 9y ago
  Yeah having a tone-deaf CEO who used the company like a piggy bank and gave no direction certainly didn't help. He truly didn't understand what he had.

fiatpandas 9y ago

Glad I've had a script running for the last 6 months that has been polling + backing up my soundcloud favorites. This is stuff that, if SoundCloud went under, I would never be able to find nor listen to again. It really is depressing to think how much music culture disappears with SoundCloud. I'm doing the same with my YouTube stuff, but not because I think it's going anywhere anytime soon.

haltingthoughts 9y ago
Is that or s similar script somewhere public? I'd like to do the same.
- Nightshaxx 9y ago
  Yea, I would love that script. Online services I've used to download my likes kinda suck.
  - colecut 9y ago
    https://github.com/flyingrub/scdl https://github.com/flyingrub/scdl I used this one to download all of my soundcloud likes and some tracks/likes of other users, was pretty fast/painless
- fiatpandas 9y ago
  Check out YouTube-DL. It supports SoundCloud, and I believe you can point it to playlist URLs for batch downloading.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Yeap. Just pass --batch-file <file with urls> Also, you can give it a SoundCloud user or a playlist, and it'll download it all. And if you use --download-archive, you can re-run it later and it'll only download the new songs. I have a cron with no scripting, just the youtube-dl command, that pulls down new videos from an YouTube channel every week. It's awesome.
- 9y ago

forkLding 9y ago

This really shows the impact of technology on culture in modern times, you can see different cultures and countries adopting different practices due to their technology (which in retrospect is how technology in history has always worked) such as Wechat in China and its payment practices to how Soundcloud influenced so much of modern day unsigned-label musicians and the Soundcloud Rap/Trap community. Also would not want to see Soundcloud disappear, I had a brief EDM and trap phase with Soundcloud filled with vivid memories

tandav 9y ago

Only One Right answer: move to YouTube

forkLding 9y ago
Think the issue with most SoundCloud musicians is that they either dont have the resources to constantly make music videos or dont have enough creativity or want to study how to make viral videos on Youtube but instead need to focus on their music.
- jononor 9y ago
  People put music up on YouTube with just a cover image and that's just fine for most people.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - forkLding 9y ago
    Thats true but ultimately the people on SoundCloud and Youtube are a different crowd as well, Soundcloud allows annotations and is more specifically built for music, youtube doesnt have the same features
  - type0 9y ago
    So that some big labels would autoclaim copyright on it because they doomed it similar enough, no thanks

fenwick67 9y ago

Are there any existing, good, self-hosted platforms for music? Personally I've been working slowly on an self-hosted Tumblr clone, but that doesn't have the concept of albums.

janwh 9y ago

People™ should learn about how to properly self-host their stuff, apply adequate licenses that allow for remixing, etc. If "this music culture you're a part of" really matters to you, and grows larger than the initial toe-dipping, becoming self-sufficient should be one of the main objectives of your craft. Being part of a culture should also imply caring for its heritage, should it not? Sure, this subculture would have probably never existed without a platform to grow on. But the going-away part is actually a large scale problem, not only regarding SoundCloud. This applies to other ~corporation~ startup backed platforms as well.

pmoriarty 9y ago
I am not a professional music producer, but I do produce music as a hobby. I'm also a sysadmin, so I know full well how to self-host everything myself. But it's just such a pain it's not worth it for me. So much easier to just upload it to Soundcloud and let them worry about serving it and maintaining it. Now, if a sysadmin like myself won't bother, I really doubt your average musician with relatively weak or non-existant sysadmin skills is going to bother self-hosting. Professional musicians might hire someone to do it for them, but most music producers aren't professional. That said, I stopped uploading my music to Soundcloud ever since they dropped groups. That was the main way I shared my music and discovered new music myself. Soundcloud is not mostly just a static music storage service for me now, and without an easy way to discover new music, it's not even worth the bother for me to upload anything there anymore. I'm now hunting around for a good Soundcloud replacement.
- bphogan 9y ago
  I made a thing to share an s3 bucket. The files in the dir get listed with temporary download links and I use HTML <audio> tags to get the player to work. The current version makes you authenticate with a username and password or google login as I made this to share some songs with someone who wanted to license them from me. https://github.com/napcs/s3server https://github.com/napcs/s3server I am hacking on a branch this week that will support publicly sharing a directory. If anyone wants to hack on this, I'd love it. It's pretty minimal right now but it's open source and it works, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

dcow 9y ago

What happened to the subscription service? I tried giving them money--multiple times--and it seemed like SC would forget my subscription after a few months each time. I eventually gave up.

joeyspn 9y ago

Sounds like an awesome use case for something like Filecoin [0] (IPFS). Move all the tracks to decentralised storage, stream with something like webtorrent [1] and research some kind of service fees via filecoin's token... [0] https://filecoin.io/ https://filecoin.io/ [1] https://webtorrent.io/ https://webtorrent.io/

stereosteve 9y ago
Yeah that would be super cool. But what about the timed commenting + discovery features of SoundCloud?
- joeyspn 9y ago
  That's the difficult part. :P maybe current comments could be stored in json files and loaded with the song. New comments could update the json on IPFS: https://flyingzumwalt.github.io/ipfs-tutorials/curriculum/files-on-ipfs/modules/update-files/ https://flyingzumwalt.github.io/ipfs-tutorials/curriculum/fi... It's possible but far from efficient. Those are the pain points where decentralisation doesn't really cut it.
  - stereosteve 9y ago
    Haha yeah... I kind of like the world writable comments file. Kind of like the original internet guestbooks with just a Name and Comments field. I'm sure there's some blockchain based commenting thing out there... but the flat file feels so quaint. I might take a stab at this as a way to play around with IPFS.
    - joeyspn 9y ago
      > I'm sure there's some blockchain based commenting thing out there... Now that you name it, I totally forgot that Steem has a pretty good commenting system, and probably they're storing the entries on-chain. So maybe the answer is adding Graphene to the mix (Filecoin + Webtorrent + Graphene 2.0 as Blockchain-based distributed DB): https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/steem-developer-update-graphene-2-0 https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/steem-developer-updat...

nthcolumn 9y ago

So how come we can have Youtube but not Soundcloud?

sitkack 9y ago
Mirror every sound cloud track to youtube. Boom.

Raynak 9y ago

I haven't listened to music since Grooveshark shut down.

thomasvillain 9y ago
Yes, agreed. If music doesn't have some copyright infringement grunginess to it, it's not for me. Everyone knows that the best music is made by self-taught DJs and garage bands.

Raynak 9y ago

They probably just stop listening to music if it gets too hard. I haven't bothered with anything since Grooveshark died.

quadrangle 9y ago

This already happened (probably many times over). I had success with the original mp3.com 17 years ago. They made certain business decisions that got major labels angry and various details not important, they shut down. What matters is that tons of stuff disappeared. I learned that I can't trust these types of platforms because they are for-profit and may screw us all over or make stupid decisions. I also can't trust non-profit options if they aren't really stable. I trust Wikimedia to stick around, and archive.org and some others (although everyone should donate to keep them strong!), but other, I dunno. Instead of fully embracing SoundCloud, I've basically stayed distrusting and my creative publishing actually suffered a lot (although my concerns are part of what led me into understanding free culture, free software, etc. and why I'm aware of Hacker News now etc)

visarga 9y ago
Mp3.com closedown was a disaster. So much valuable music was there.
- feedbeef 9y ago
  Like the few on here who remember how great mp3.com was, I too lament the loss of its huge array of excellent indy music. Hopefully the archive will be fully restored some day[0,1,2]. Digital antiquities indeed. Take warning: download and archive a copy of every digital asset you care about. I highly recommend the excellent utility youtube-dl[3]. I rely on it daily for copying obscure youtube videos that could disappear at any moment. Fool me twice... [0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/12/03/mp3_com_archive_is_destroyed/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/12/03/mp3_com_archive_is_... [1] https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/04/04/19/2318226/mp3com-archive-not-lost-17-million-songs-saved https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/04/04/19/2318226/mp... [2] https://archive.org/post/1004359/mp3com-archive https://archive.org/post/1004359/mp3com-archive [3] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
_jtrig 9y ago
This is why I fully expect the digital dark age to become reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age

tracker1 9y ago

Does it really need to be $10-15/month, per the example though? I mean would $12-15/year be sufficient? I don't know what their staff overhead is though, it sounds like they have a lot or people on staff.

pier25 9y ago

SC wasn't the first audio sharing website and certainly won't be the last. IMO it has become the IMGUR for audio, and users won't pay for uploading images to IMGUR or videos to Youtube. Maybe SC pretends to be a storage/bandwidth reseller, but in that case it's outrageous that it is charging $7 / month for 6 hours of audio which (at the most) are 3.6 GB in uncompressed CD quality audio (44.1Khz/16bit). You could argue about bandwidth costs, infrastructure, etc, but Vimeo is doing great and its smallest plan (cheaper than SC) allows you to upload 5GB per WEEK.

lavezzi 9y ago
they still stream in 128kbps, even for premium customers. It's insane.
- j00lz 9y ago
  Agreed, this is my biggest issue with soundcloud is sub par compression that they use which complete distorts the highs. I feel it maybe better if soundcloud does go so thats it replacement will support better codecs.
sitkack 9y ago
afaik Vimeo is still running on VC cash and will in the same position. Start mirroring vimeo.
- pier25 9y ago
  Any source on that?

bane 9y ago

The demoscene (and by some extension the classic gaming scene) has faced this from time-to-time. What's interesting is how many large volunteer efforts there are to save large chunks of the visual and audio output of that scene. There are places you can go and get literally hundreds of thousands of pieces of music. Every one in a while a site will need to go down and somebody else seems to step in, mirror the content and start their own thing. Outside of the scene, there are sites with literally thousands of post-copyright mp3s from certain genres (classic jazz, 45s, etc.) so there's definitely a kind of appetite on the part of preservationists to catalog music. There's almost no commercial side to the demoscene though, so I wonder if the commercial forces in the rest of the music world seem to prevent this kind of community building.

Figs 9y ago
> I wonder if the commercial forces in the rest of the music world seem to prevent this kind of community building. SoundCloud has (for whatever reason) prohibited archivists like archive.org and ArchiveTeam from backing it up. https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/888093838107189249 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/888093838107189249 Jason Scott Wikipedia article, if you don't know who he is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Scott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Scott
nylonstrung 9y ago
That's a bit easier with a medium where in which small file sizes are considered part of the art form and most of the content is ~64KB

thanatropism 9y ago

MP3.com anyone? Hell, I had an "album" on MP3.com and even sold three copies. The other day Standing in the Sun's album showed up on Spotify out of nowhere. That was the music of my teenage years and I had fully lost track of it. So many other artists I still miss.

shams93 9y ago

Why not start a web label on archive.org? Not like anyone is making money on soundcloud, there is no upsell to archive.org its a not for profit run by donation, a lot less likely to fall victim than a commercial service.

jmspring 9y ago

Call me cynical, but does "SoundCloud's Musical Culture" actually pertain to a significant portion of audio over the internet? Over the years, I've used Pandora, SomaFM (still do), Spotify and others as well as some iTunes and my own large collection. What is actually lost with "SoundCloud's Musical Culture" and what percentage of the internet audio listeners does it impact?

quaz3l 9y ago
Its actually more on the creative side. SoundCloud has such a low barrier to posting and acts more as a sort of Twitter or YouTube than a playlist maker. It allows culture to form around the community of SoundCloud, not just fans that you advertise directly.
- jmspring 9y ago
  If that was their key differentiator, why did they need so many engineers especially in super expensive SF?
  - quaz3l 9y ago
    I think that was their biggest mistake. They grew too fast and took too much money before they had any clear way to make money. If it was ran as a sustainable business, maybe it would be around for the next 5 years.
ctw 9y ago
Probably around 6 or 7 years ago (I think?) when I was in high school, I would go on SoundCloud all the time. I downloaded the free trial version of FL Studio and made electronic music in my basement that I uploaded to SoundCloud. Because it was a trial, you could do everything but save, so I had to make the entire song in one sitting over the span of a whole evening after school. I'm not good at putting this into words, but I felt like I was a part of some thing, even if that sounds silly. There were so many people like me that I could find on SoundCloud and listen to what they made. I found a guy from the university I wanted to go to and messaged him about it and then told him I liked his music. A guy from my mom's work heard from her that I was using SoundCloud and he was on it too playing acoustic guitar. We would listen to each other's stuff when it came out. There were young producers from the UK who put out all sorts of awesome stuff without needing a record label or anything to go through. A few of them have gotten bigger now and I can't even find their old stuff any more, so of course it feels cool knowing that you listened to their stuff when they weren't "big". I wish I had something moving to say at the end of this, but those memories are all I have.

omnimus 9y ago

Maybe this is a chance for some decentralized alternative to pop up? This is one of the reasons why are decentralised apps so appealing. I think most of the artists would be able host it themselfs the problem is the interface that allows you to search it all and connect it. HN brains should think about this.

flowless 9y ago
Former Ferment built on top of Scuttlebutt can be considered - https://github.com/LolaShare/LolaShare https://github.com/LolaShare/LolaShare
- fenwick67 9y ago
  This is awesome, thank you for sharing this.

baalimago 9y ago

Where will everyone go? As a sort of active sc user i didn't even know that sc was dieing. There are alternatives sure, but... I dunno, the "meta culture" of new electronic music is on sc... Killing sc would be like a blow to creativity and upcoming musicians

baalimago 9y ago

The main issues with sc: 1. Different audio levels between songs, there must be some "automastering" function (or, simply listen to mixes, like i prefer to do) 2. The awful "comment at time" system which hasn't been fixed for years 3. The endless spam of shitty songs from people you're following, I can barely follow anyone now a days since the general quality of the stuff they repost isn't very good 4. The lack of premium incentive, also the price (which is too low). I have premium since I'm a producer, but there's not incentive for the average user to pay any money to either sc or the producers Possible solution: 1. Implement some sort of "for a fee, automaster the audiolevels so they're somwhat the same within the genre". This shouldn't be hard at all from a technical standpoint, spotify is doing it, why not sc? Alternatively have a crew of "quality ensurers" which listen to songs and deem if they get the "sc mark of approval" or something like that 2. Implement direct donations to the users, direct payment to buy songs, where a small fee goes to sc themselves (become the beatport for the unsigned, basically)

austinjp 9y ago
> Implement direct donations to the users, direct payment to buy songs, where a small fee goes to sc themselves I can't believe this doesn't already happen, even some sort of flatter/tip function.
noisem4ker 9y ago
How would you fix the "comment at time" feature? And about that "automastering" thing, it would be sufficient for them to implement ReplayGain loudness leveling. Of course it's a solved problem. http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=ReplayGain http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=ReplayGain

vectorEQ 9y ago

it will go to bandcamp and live happily ever after. music wont get hurt by some buisness derpings because its not about that.

divenorth 9y ago
Agreed. Nothing will happen to the music. Musicians will use a different service. No need to back everything up. The musicians already have the files which will be easily uploaded to a different website. And it will most likely be bandcamp.

honestoHeminway 9y ago

Could souncloud reduce it server costs by using p2p-servers of its users..

gaius 9y ago

How do you persuade people who have been using your services free to start paying $5 or $10 a month? User: OMG this service is sooooo important! Company: would you pay one Starbucks per month for it? User: Nah And there you have it in a nutshell. For all the handwringing, noone actually is willing to put their money where their mouth, ermmm, ears are.

wolfgke 9y ago
It is a difference to pay some single amount of money vs. paying some recurring sum.
- gaius 9y ago
  So what? Users of this service can afford laptops, phones + bandwidth, a lifestyle necessitating streaming music etc - but its so valuable to them that they can't afford the equivalent of one latte per month? I call shenanigans.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    Our current Internet lifestyle is unsustainable and will crash sooner rather than later. I say this with no sarcasm: if I had to pay for everything I used online, I would be broke. $5 to HN, $5 to Reddit, $5 to ArsTechnica, $5 for Gmail, $5 for Google Docs, $5 for Google Search, $5 to Github, $5 to Medium, $5 to Wordpress, $5 to StackOverflow, $5 to CNN, $5 to NYT, $5 to Wikipedia, $5 to Weather Channel, $5 to each site I click on from HN or Reddit or Wikipedia, we could be talking hundreds of dollars per month. You could make your argument about anything. "If Reddit is so important to you, why can't you pay them money?" "If HN is so important to you, why can't you pay them money?" "If Google is so important to you, why can't you pay them money?" You'd run out of money quicker than you'd run out of websites to pay, or you'd seriously scale back what websites you visit. It's coming crashing down on us that either you have to pay for something or that something goes away. And we can't pay for everything. Maybe the next Rails or Node can focus on making the cost of hosting infrastructure so inconsequential that sites don't have to make that choice.

xori 9y ago

According to SoundCloud they're aren't going anywhere. https://blog.soundcloud.com/2017/07/14/soundcloud-is-here-to-stay https://blog.soundcloud.com/2017/07/14/soundcloud-is-here-to... how much we believe that will depend on their next finance report.

beepboopbeep 9y ago

Nooooooo! I didn't know about this until now. I love soundcloud :((((

pmarreck 9y ago

SoundCloud was my favorite source of remixes, which I have always been a huge fan of (although I guess that market is smallish). No idea where I'd go next :/ I'd be reasonably happy if I could just download the tracks I've "like"'d

fragmede 9y ago
If you're not trying to backup the entire site, you can save individual tracks using youtube-dl[1]. [1] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
- pmarreck 9y ago
  hmmm. i suppose i have to collect my cookies and give them to youtube-dl... EDIT: Nevermind, I just opened each track individually and ydl'd the URL, there weren't that many.

cJ0th 9y ago

I wonder if myspace could capitalize on soundcloud disappearing. If they learn from the mistakes they and soundcloud made in the past than myspace could have quite a comeback. Can't really imagine this happening, though.