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Their platform is just so badly designed once you do pay them as a musician. I signed up for an electronic project I was working on and I found the entire thing

Their platform is just so badly designed once you do pay them as a musician. I signed up for an electronic project I was working on and I found the entire thing incredibly confusing. The design, the naming of things, the way some things connected with other things and not others, it all felt like a mishmash. The last straw for me was when I couldn’t master a track. The plan included IIRC three masters per month. After working on a new track and uploading it, I was unable to find any way to master it. The buttons just weren’t there. The only reason I could come up with was that it had been flagged for a copyright violation, which ostensibly disables mastering. But it wasn’t yet public, and it was entirely original content, and there was no visible explanation. I was left mystified and frustrated and I canceled. Post-cancellation, I thought maybe there’d be some follow up to find out why. A survey or something. Nope. Not a peep. The whole enterprise gives the impression that it’s from ten or fifteen years ago. I still use it everyday. But the fact it’s struggling is not surprising at all.

mjr00 3y ago
The fact that they even have an AI mastering service--which, to be blunt, is an exploitative scam to bilk hobbyist/newbie musicians out of their money--just shows how much shit they've been throwing at the wall, hoping it sticks. Mastering services, distribution services (SoundCloud for Artists, which lets you also post on Spotify), making some tracks eligible for streaming payouts, Next vs Next Pro vs Go vs Go+ vs... They've acted like a company on their last legs for a while. The Insights view is the most frustrating; they half-rolled it out a few years ago, sending out an apology email because it was half-baked and didn't have the same feature set as the old statistics viewer, but now they've removed the old one and the new Insights still sucks. Just smells of a half-completed project that no longer has the engineering or product support it needs to actually be good.
- adriand 3y ago
  Yes, this is exactly what I am talking about! It's all feels very random. And it's all such a series of missed opportunities because they still have so much credibility in the hobbyist, underground and "urban" music scenes... The front-end is another example, the UI has barely changed in years, and yet, there are so many opportunities for improvement there too.

mjr00 3y ago

The fact that they even have an AI mastering service--which, to be blunt, is an exploitative scam to bilk hobbyist/newbie musicians out of their money--just shows how much shit they've been throwing at the wall, hoping it sticks. Mastering services, distribution services (SoundCloud for Artists, which lets you also post on Spotify), making some tracks eligible for streaming payouts, Next vs Next Pro vs Go vs Go+ vs... They've acted like a company on their last legs for a while. The Insights view is the most frustrating; they half-rolled it out a few years ago, sending out an apology email because it was half-baked and didn't have the same feature set as the old statistics viewer, but now they've removed the old one and the new Insights still sucks. Just smells of a half-completed project that no longer has the engineering or product support it needs to actually be good.

adriand 3y ago
Yes, this is exactly what I am talking about! It's all feels very random. And it's all such a series of missed opportunities because they still have so much credibility in the hobbyist, underground and "urban" music scenes... The front-end is another example, the UI has barely changed in years, and yet, there are so many opportunities for improvement there too.