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SoundCloud raises $75M from SiriusXM
- thiscatis 7y agoThere's a sentence I would never have guessed I would read. Makes sense though.
- gdsdfe 7y agoSoundCloud is getting worse by the day, I just don't understand why they're not doing the obvious to monetize and get better
- HelloFellowDevs 7y agoWhat is the obvious?
- fnord123 7y agoPutting in ads between every $SOME_NUMBER of plays.
- hobofan 7y agoI think the do(/did) that already? Maybe they don't have enough companies buying ads with them? It's been some time since I last used it.
- tin7in 7y agoThey do that, at least in Europe
- fnord123 7y agoI think that's only on mobile apps because when I listen to mixes at work I have never heard an ad.
- chillingeffect 7y agoas a musician with songs on there, I would like a button that says, "sell this song to people for 1$" and to let me put a large graphical "cover" on it for people to see. soundcloud is organized way more as a musician-to-musician site than a musician-to-consumer site. it's no wonder bandcamp is successful while sc struggles.
- gdsdfe 7y agoAct as a marketplace! They already have content creators and content consumers in mass! Why I can't buy the songs from my favorite DJ sets?! Why those DJs can't sell directly to their fans?
- Koremat6666 7y agoThey could fix their search to begin with. It is pretty pathetic.
- cyberferret 7y agoAnd they still haven't fixed the bug that doesn't let you drag and drop to rearrange the songs in your 'Spotlight' list on your profile in Chrome. I reported it about 6 years ago, and repeatedly re-report it at least every 12 months. Hopefully some of this $75M goes towards a competent javascript programmer for their frontend.
- madeofpalk 7y ago> Hopefully some of this $75M goes towards a competent javascript programmer for their frontend hmmm
- foxX 7y agoMaybe they should give their developers a 3rd MacBook. One MacBook for the office, one MacBook for home office and one MacBook for installing Chrome and testing the site there. Just throwing ideas around...
- seppin 7y agoThey should give you a refund.
- cyberferret 7y agoYep - I've been a Pro plan member since almost the beginning (Spotlight is a PRO only feature), so this isn't me simply railing against a +free+ service. BTW this bug totally crashes Chrome - all tabs, not just the tab that SC is open on, so it does cause a massive hit on my productivity whenever it happens.
- S_A_P 7y agoI stopped liking soundcloud when I realized that 99.999999% of my followers are bots. I dont need a bunch of followers that mean nothing. I would rather have 0 than 100 fake followers. I also realized that at my production rate, its cheaper to just use Distrokid and throw things out on iTunes than to hope for discovery on soundcloud. Now I just use sound cloud to distribute examples of hardware mods or how a piece of gear sounds. no more music...
- itake 7y agoWhat is wrong with bot followers? Is it like fb where you would be paying to promote your content to fake users?
- csunbird 7y agoI am interested in what are the benefits of following people, since (by your definition) bots are following random people, there must be an incentive for it.
- RandomBacon 7y agoPeople pay for followers (bots). To make the bots look more organic rather than 10,000 bots only following the same handful of people that paid for followers, the bots will also follow random people.
- choward 7y ago
- huffmsa 7y ago#2020YearOfAudio The year of Luigi returns. First Spotify, now the satellite radio company. Makes sense though. Easy way to get access to new music.
- kevinherron 7y agoWait, what? I’m already surprised SiriusXM is still somehow around, let alone that they have $75 million to invest in another company and not that they’re taking $75 million to stay afloat...
- eric_cc 7y agoSiriusXM has no competition in the satellite radio space as far as I know.
- unixhero 7y agoUS and Canada only.. sigh
- m4rtink 7y agoThis might actually be the one case where this limitation is not entirely artificial. :-) The SiriusXM sattelites are in an inclined eliptical orbit with the highes point being over the norther hemisphere. This is the so called Molniya orbit, named after the first Soviet sattelites using it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molniya_orbit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molniya_orbit (Soviet Union had a lot of territory in higher latitudes where geostationary sattelites do not work well & the Molniya orbit needs less energy to achieve.) So in the SiriusXM case, the sattelite would be much too low to provide useful coverage when over the southern hemisphere. And even when. As for not covering EU/Asia - this could be due to either the highest point of the orbit being always over US (guessing there) or due to ground station coverage when the sattelite is not over US.
- johannes1234321 7y agoAnd in addition population density is higher in Europe than U.S., menajng that the density of FM radio (and modern attempts like DAB/DAB+ etc.) and mobile cell base stations is also higher, thus those provide more competition.
- wcfields 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- adamcccc 7y agoEh? The last I heard was the Soundcloud was going bust and letting all it's employees go? ...I'm so out of the loop
- Minor49er 7y agoIt's another modern tech company that hemorrhages money with no return. All they do is lose cash, but they're popular. Compare this to Bandcamp, which has a great UI, no bots, and generates revenue. Yet it's less popular by comparison. Just take a look at this article from 3 years ago titled "SoundCloud is losing a lot of money — is an acquisition coming soon?": https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/8/14206830/soundcloud-possible-acquisition-streaming-music-google https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/8/14206830/soundcloud-possib... Get big and cash out
- devmunchies 7y agoBandcamp is a great service, but I wouldn't say its a great product. I will get emails saying that an artist released a new album, but when i check my feed it doesn't show up. I have to go to that artist's page directly sometimes. The feed system is buggy, and that's an important part of a music app for discoverability. And the mobile app still doesn't allow me to save offline, last I checked, also important for a music app when streaming on the road.
- moviuro 7y agohttps://outline.com/yhGKb2 https://outline.com/yhGKb2 -- GDPR, and otherwise reader respect.
- black_puppydog 7y agoEver since techcrunch implemented their GDPR "conforming" cookie "banner" I refuse to open their site. Can we have a guideline that says "link will be replaced if target site follows dark patterns and same quality content is available elsewhere"?
- UI_at_80x24 7y agoWhen I was a truck driver, Satellite Radio was practically a necessity. Sure I loaded up my ipod with music, but the selection was too damn limited and I would tire of hearing the same songs over & over again. The best case scenario for FM radio (when you would finally find something that you could tolerate) was 1 hour. 1 hour of variety to stave off bordem and try to save your sanity. The effective range of the FM signal bubble was around 75 miles/120km. If you were unlucky 'Seek/Scan' button would be broken on the radio. Most radios in company supplied trucks were very shitty. MY favorite times would be at night and manually adjusting the AM reception and picking up stations from all over the world. Trying to discern their location based on the commercials. Sat. radio offered me consistency. It was wholly replaced once I discovered that audiobooks could be downloaded (and not cumbersome audio-cassettes). Then as the years passed the variety on the stations offered diminished to the point that it seemed like they were playing the same 5-6 over & over again. Mergers happened. Personal audio players got better. I could download enough books to keep me entertained for a month AND have music playlists that saved my sanity. So I cancelled. I STILL miss 'Spa Radio' channel73(?) when I am driving in hectic or tense traffic. That always enhanced my calm.
- andrewzah 7y agoStuff like soma.fm replaced that for me. There’s nothing like turning on groove salad for a bit. There was a period of time where, after work, some friends and I would get together in one of our university's research labs to solder keyboards. It was always empty by then. We'd put on soma.fm and then get to work. Good times.
- cJ0th 7y agosame here. I am gladly donating every year. Today I find hand picked music more valuable than ever.
- zabana 7y agoStories like this is why I love reading HN comments. Thanks for sharing your experience!
- braindongle 7y agoYes! Soundcloud, to me, is meritocracy in music today. Are they, will they, be as evil as everyone else in sneakily selling personal data? Sure, that's beside the point; a society-wide problem. Soundcloud provides a direct connection between fully independent music creators and an audience, large or small. If my music were that good, I would blow up on Soundcloud, at some scale. Disagree? Ask Billie Eilish what she thinks of Soundcloud.
- mojuba 7y agoSo what does Billie Eilish think of SoundCloud?
- kamikaz1k 7y ago"Soundcloud is the only reason I am anything. 100%. We are in a time where anyone can make music which is so dope and Soundcloud is the only reason we can all do this." https://omr.com/en/billie-eilish-omr-podcast/ https://omr.com/en/billie-eilish-omr-podcast/
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- malthaus 7y agoThat hasn't been the case for a long long time. Especially reposting turned it into yet another spammy service full of promoters. Additionally, discovery is terrible. There used to be cases of people being discovered, im sure. But a lot of it is not quite the rag-to-riches story they make it seem, especially your example of Billie Eilish.
- braindongle 7y agoDo you create music independently? Have you tried to distribute it? If not, from where is your expertise? If so, maybe your music isn't that good? That's the responsibility that I take. I have just over 8,000 listens on Soundcloud. I have good reason to believe that the great majority of those are real. It's quite satisfying. My hobby has perhaps connected with some people, in the magical way that music does. If I were better at it, it wouldn't just be a hobby. :)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- liminal 7y agoSoundcloud is the only music service I happily pay for even though I really don't need to. There aren't enough ads to justify giving them money, so it's really just because if they went away I'd lose access to all the best music
- non-entity 7y agoI paid for Soundcloud for a while. Unfortunately I ended up cancelling for two reasons. For one, with Soundcloud Go+, I'm supposed to be able to listen to albums, artists, songs that arent independent soundcloud artists, but for some reason, albums that were available on just about any other streaming platform from US artists, weren't available in my country. Secondly, there's no volume normalization, which I understand why, but it gets annoying having to re-adjust the volume constantly because I had to turn it all the way up to hear one song while the next will nearly blow my ears on that level.
- mkgolden 7y agoInteresting, my experience is different. I recently canceled my subscription and the amount of ads soundcloud plays drives me up the wall. It makes me want to resubscribe.
- dna_polymerase 7y agoI really wanted them to succeed, and subscribed to their Go+ tier for years. This year I pulled the plug and went back to Spotify. I can't say I it miss too much. Of course, liking EDM I miss the live sets of many talented artists, but overall their service was just not worth it anymore. Their recommendation system is bullshit, since they have tons of duplicates in their database I would often get suggested music I already listen to uploaded by someone else. This gets more frustrating when one duplicate is unavailable in my country when another isn't and I have to curate the song myself. The biggest change to their app in the past few years was introducing darkmode (only a few weeks back). Their last marketing mail was about some new feature for artists, that's when I finally pulled the plug. They lack any direction, they focus on the artist side of things, while their listeners get a mediocre music player.
- subpixel 7y agoI just listen to the streams of the radio stations I love: WWOZ - New Orleans gold mine, especially 2 week audio archive KCRW - live + curated streams Cultura Brasil - a curated, updated stream of Brazilian music BR Heimat - odd, but I find corny alpine brass bands a great working soundtrack WKHR - a high school radio station in Cleveland where old people play 78rpm records
- myself248 7y agoOooh, I might have to check out that WKHR! I get WAHS over the air here, it's likewise a high school with a bunch of music programs throughout the day. No screaming ads, just the occasional PSA, and the DJs genuinely care about the music. It's a breath of fresh air.
- sjakobi 7y agoThanks for mentioning BR Heimat! I didn't know I needed this! :)
- m00dy 7y agolooks like new CEO is doing his job properly.
- m00dy 7y agoBerlin Underground music scene appreciates this.
- parthdesai 7y agoMore like underground electronic music scene, but I get what you're saying. I listen to a lot of sets and they are exclusively available on SoundCloud only.
- m00dy 7y agoIn my case, Berlin means electronic music only.
- mojuba 7y agoI feel like I'm in the minority of those who love SoundCloud. It's one the very few places for indie music makers and DJs to showcase their work that otherwise may not necessarily be published via the official publishing channels. That includes e.g. long running DJ mixes, not exactly the type of material for the official release bureaucracy and associated costs. The only problem with SoundCloud is that instead of following the Spotify model, i.e. get listeners to pay for listening, they could have done it the other way around: get makers pay some nominal fee for hosting. Which they kind of did in the beginning but gradually drifted towards the listener-subscription model. As a paid music hosting service they'd at least provide an alternative for specific class of artists, i.e. those who make music for the love of it and want to be heard via unofficial channels. SC failed to become one. They've had some back and forth and experimentation with pricing and subscription models over the years but never settled at anything targeted clearly and unambiguously. The current offerings are confusing and inconvenient for all classes of users. There's now an all-time upload limit for non-paying makers, and ads for non-paying users. What's the point of this? Getting both makers and listeners pay you? Sounds like a poor plan to me, that leads to nowehere.
- bad_user 7y ago> get makers pay some nominal fee for hosting It doesn't work well and for obvious reasons. If you're an indie producer, you don't necessarily have the money to keep paying for hosting indefinitely. Instead you want to upload your work somewhere where it will always be available, for free. Vimeo charges producers instead of consumers and they are struggling — if you have a commercial website that has to serve content from somewhere, then sure, it's a great deal, but not if you're a hobbyist. By charging producers such services are basically shooting themselves in the foot — because if you don't attract producers, you won't get an audience either. Plus the ongoing costs (bandwidth and processing capacity) are generated by visitors and not producers. This partially explains YouTube's success — as a producer you can just upload to YouTube, it doesn't cost you anything and YouTube brings you the audience ;-)
- mojuba 7y ago> This partially explains the success behind YouTube I thought the success of YouTube was largely due to their low bars for quality of content. Put simply, they allow all kinds of crap as long as it generates views. Vimeo's model is quality content from indie producers, actually they are similar to SoundCloud in some ways. Think about this: for example NASA has plenty of quality audio and video materials, where should they upload it? SoundCloud and Vimeo would be the best choice and it's what they do. It's quality content not exactly "publishable" via music labels or television, and yet it's pretty good. Not everyone wants to be on the Internet's sewage system that's YouTube, and not everyone wants to go the costly publishing route. There has to be a niche for this type of media. I'm sure monetization can be figured out when there's clearly a market for it.
- have_faith 7y agoTangentially related. I hadn't heard of SiriusXM before so checked out their website. The homepage is a bit confusing and I'm not 100% sure what it is or why I need to pay separately if I listen inside or outside of a car? I get that it's a music streaming service of sorts just not sure what their angle is exactly. Spotify for instance doesn't care where I listen to the music I'm just paying to stream it wherever I want.
- commandlinefan 7y agoThey used to charge separately for streaming vs. satellite, but they've recently combined them: one subscription now gets you satellite coverage (in the car) and streaming (on your phone).
- freeone3000 7y agoThey run a constellation of satellites such that satellite receivers, mounted commonly in cars, can receive programming for music. The internet offering is a new thing.
- hermitdev 7y ago> The internet offering is a new thing. It's not a new thing. It's a newer thing. It's been around for years. I used subscribe 4-5 years ago so I could get commentary on soccer games while I was watching in a pub (w/ no audio).
- rconti 7y agoIt's a merger of two satellite radio systems. They have satellites hanging in orbit over North America, so you can get coverage in places where there's no cellular data coverage for streaming. And of course you can stream 24x7 endlessly, no data charges, because it's a broadcast.
- mgerb 7y agoMaybe they can finally open up their app registration to 3rd party developers now. It has been down for like 3 years. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfNxc82RJuzC0DnISat7n4H-G7IsPQIdaMpe202iiHZEoso9w/closedform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfNxc82RJuzC0DnISat...
- k__ 7y agoMost artists I like prefer BandCamp to SoundCloud.
- devmunchies 7y agoThat's only because the make money on it. If soundcloud can figure out how to get listeners to pay more money, then more will go to the artists. I'm leaning towards a patreon model like I mentioned in another comment. I've been paying for the SoundCloud Go+ plan ($9.99/mo) since November 2016, which I match when I buy 1-2 albums on Bandcamp. Its not enough. I would gladly subscribe to some artists and pay $5/mo.
- malthaus 7y agoNot sure what to think of this. SoundCloud has run its course and should just die, leaving space for a new player. There are some around but they can't gain critical traction due to the stickiness of SoundCloud despite having a product which has increasingly gotten worse over time. For an audio platform, the audio quality is subpar. Terrible discovery. Too many bots & marketing-spammers. No direct monetization scheme for artists. Terrible mobile app (at least on iOS). etc.
- nikisweeting 7y agoI completely disagree on almost every point. As a daily SoundCloud user, the discovery is a mile above and beyond every other platform I've tried, including Apple Music and Spotify. SoundClouds weekly "The Upload" playlist has more good music in it than any other automatic playlist I follow, I cant even remember the last time it had a song on it I didn't like. I'm not sure how some people get such a different experience, maybe only long-time users get the good discovery experience because they've provided the algorithms with more data about their preferences? My one gripe is that you can only follow 2,000 people! WTH Soundcloud, why place such an arbitrary maximum? It's clearly not a hard limit because occasionally I can glitch my way up to more followers by clicking the button dozens of times (I'm at 2010 now).
- playing_colours 7y agoA very curious bug, could you make it more than 2001-2002? The limit on follower can be an related to a typical problem with building activity feeds on scale : push vs / with pull.
- nikisweeting 7y agoSo solve it the way Twitter and Reddit have solved it, by choosing a different random subset of 200 of your follows to consider on every pageload.
- petercooper 7y agoMaybe they'll be able to re-open their API program which has been closed to new applications for years now due to a "high amount of requests" ;-)
- devmunchies 7y agoSoundcloud should have been the Patreon for indie musicians. You get artists making money on it and they will double down. They need exponential growth, and for a consumer facing company that means community led growth. They can still do it. There isn't much competition there, Bandcamp and Gumroad aren't dominating.
- xvx 7y agoThe Chill channel on SiriusXM used to stream rare tracks only found on SoundCloud many years ago, before it became more mainstream.
- vonseel 7y agoI once totaled a car that had SiriusXM and didn't realize until 1-2 years later that I was still getting charged (annually) for the subscription. I think they reversed some of the charges when I finally noticed and called to explain the situation. It was very easy to overlook when you've just had a car accident and had to deal with insurance and buying a new car and all of that.
- _hardwaregeek 7y agoThere's a lot of up and coming artists on SoundCloud. I could totally see them selling a service that replaces record labels for artists starting out. Stuff like helping with mixing and sound quality, basic advertising and branding, maybe booking a few shows. If SoundCloud became like an incubator or accelerator for artists, they could get some top artists early. Billie Eilish for instance started on SoundCloud. Imagine if SoundCloud, having access to all their streaming data, noticed the song Ocean Eyes blowing up and offered 14 year old Billie Eilish a contract. They'd have made millions by now. Plus it's not like you need to invest a shitton into up and coming artists. Most of them need a band, some recording studio hours, and some marketing. The marketing is probably the most expensive one, but SoundCloud has easy, free marketing: put the artist on the front page. If SC did this for maybe 25-50 artists a year, they could easily get a Billie Eilish or a mumble rapper or two. It's not like there's many other places to post music as a young artist. Edit: Or even if SoundCloud can't act as a record label for fear of stepping on actual record labels, they can still build a solid referral relationship. They have the ultimate first look deal.
- person_of_color 7y agoArtists like Das Racist have their EPs on SoundCloud but not Spotify. It drives me insane.
- salvagedcircuit 7y agoThis can only be good news. SoundCloud is one of the last few experimental-artist platforms, kind of like the myspace music scene before myspace got big.
- nojvek 7y agoSiriusXM has deals with a whole bunch of dealerships. A new car comes with SiriusXM. Even rental cars have deals. I remember heartz had a dark pattern of including SiriusXM and charging almost as much as GPS for $10/day unless customer explicitly asked to cancel it. SiriusXM use every tactic in their book to convert and retain customers. In the age of Spotify and Apple Music, their charges don’t quite make sense. I cancelled mine because satellite reception was poorer than FM and I just didn’t see the point. They spammed me pretty hard for 6 months and gave me all sorts of offers. The product isn’t worth it.
- justlexi93 7y agoI can't believe that they still exist, I use to have an account on SoundCloud but I don't use it anymore.
- jimmySixDOF 7y agosomeone say a little prayer for 8tracks one of the nails in their coffin was when SoundCloud cut them off https://blog.8tracks.com/ https://blog.8tracks.com/
- elbelcho 7y agoI feel like sentiment around soundcloud is a little mixed these days, but I'm glad to see that they're still financially viable enough to attract capital. Would be pretty bummed to lose all my playlists and likes if they went under.