SoundCloud faces do-or-die vote by investors

[15charlimit]

"Soundcloud is fine and will be around for years, stop backing up all of the music".

Didn't the CEO say something along those lines ~2 weeks ago when they forced the archive.org folks to stop pulling down a backup copy of everything? Funny how quickly that was proven to be BS.

Not that anyone should be surprised by this outcome.

[mathattack]

Reminds me of the financial crisis when banks that were losing billions would claim to be "Awash with liquidity." Once the CEOs admit weakness, the sharks circle tighter.

[HNNoLikey]

Two years ago, folks still said they'd close shop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11079864

[eggpy]

> employees secretly using Spotify.

Well yeah. There's not even competition there. And shouldn't be really, they are fundamentally different platforms.

[rewrew]

And that's the problem -- the CEO wasted a ton of time and resources trying to create a Spotify competitor that just burned resources.

[chedabob]

Probably unaware it exists like everyone else. SoundCloud Go has been so poorly marketed.

Up until a few weeks ago, I only ever saw it mentioned on tracks where I could only listen to a sample. On my feed right now, the only link to it is in the overflow menu on the top navigation. Meanwhile, SoundCloud Pro has a big advert which takes up about 1/6th of the page.

[jbb67]

How can a website that lets people upload music files and comment on them, and play the music POSSIBLY need $170 MILLION to operate? I just don't get what they could possibly need that amount of money for.

[pavlov]

Some random guesses:

* Business development teams for the Nth media company collaboration scheme * App development teams for the Nth iOS app redesign * Back-end and ops teams for the Nth overwrought storage architecture * Front-end teams to explore rewrites in the Nth proposed in-house JS/CSS framework * Operations people to keep the aforementioned people paid and fed

[_pmf_]

Licensing music. As to the reasoning behind considering licensing music, then giving it away for free to your customers to be a wise business decision, I don't quite follow their strategy.

[rusk]

Litigation warchest

[esaym]

> Now it’s asking investors for $169.5 million at a pre-money enterprise valuation of just $150 million

Ouch. I hope they get the money. I really don't want it to go away. I have not found an alternative that has so many 1+ hour long megamixes :(

[caoilte]

I've always got my mixes from mixcloud. Never really saw what differentiated soundcloud.

[dbcooper]

Try https://hearthis.at

[cbhl]

What about the Internet Archive?

[jmfurlott]

Youtube is about it, YT Music app for mobile (all unfortunately)

[reillyse]

What a messed up article. I don't know this CEO but using a picture taken at a festival two years ago as proof of incompetence seems very cheap.

[matt4077]

Indeed–that image caption serves absolutely no purpose except to beat on someone who is at a low point anyway.

And it doesn't even make sense! Taking a vacation every now and then is likely to improve productivity, and for SoundCloud specifically, it seems almost necessary to go to Burning Man and mingle. The criticism is especially rich coming from a guy who looks at least twice as stoned in his official TechCrunch photo than the SC CEO at Burning Man.

Creating SoundCloud is more than 99.x% of people ever achieve, including me, the author, and the editor of this shameless excuse of an article. SoundCloud is obviously beloved by many. If they don't find a way to get those people to pay, they're in good company.

At least they're not selling to AOL.

[mful]

Also full of dramatic, unsubstantiated claims such as:

> Now staff morale is in the toilet, the user experience is a mess, the subscription models are unappealing, competitors are growing rapidly and musicians are fleeing to other upload platform.

I really thought TechCrunch was getting better, but man this is bad journalism. It's like a hit piece in a high school newspaper.

[danso]

edit: Apparently the photo was changed within the hour. According to Google Cache, this is what was in the article:

http://imgur.com/a/N8OR9

http://archive.is/hkmkY

----

What was the original caption/photo? Right now, it says:

http://imgur.com/a/N5EcV

> SoundCloud CEO Alex Ljung would be replaced if the company receives the new funding

FWIW, in other articles, it's been insinuated that Ljung went off to Burning Man at a time when Rome was burning:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/inside-the-storm-at-soundcl...

> By August 2014, it was abundantly clear that the SoundCloud’s advertising program, which would allow artists and labels to collect royalties, would not launch as planned. Despite Toig’s promises, not a single major label had agreed to a deal. The project launched with a eleventh-hour pivot to focus on independent creators, with Toig later apologizing at an all-hands meeting for failing to sign the majors...Ljung assured everyone in attendance that the label arrangements would eventually get done. A few days later, he flew to California and went off the grid. It was time for Burning Man.

Further down in the article:

> ...The stalled deals also affected internal operations at SoundCloud headquarters in Berlin. Though the $150 million round never closed, managers had been instructed to double the size of the company’s 150-person engineering team.Meanwhile, Ljung continued to travel the world. In May 2015, he spoke at a Burning Man–esque festival outside of Las Vegas called Further Future. In June, he showed up in an ad campaign for Italian luxury company Salvatore Ferragamo. When SoundCloud employees from around the world flew to Berlin for an August retreat, he was nowhere to be found.

[mikestew]

Not only am I not surprised that the CEO of a music-based company is at Burning Man, I fully expect him to show up at SXSW as well. Anything less would almost seem like a dereliction of duty.

[sergiotapia]

These press prostitutes know exactly what they're doing. Thank God for services like archive.is because otherwise they just blackhole everything scummy they do.

http://archive.is/j8cns

[welder]

Tweeted to the author:

https://twitter.com/alanhamlett/status/895725907356205056

[Insanity]

I agree. I do not see how going to a festival is such a bad thing to do. It's actually a good thing to be able to still do something in your free time that you like..

[unclebucknasty]

Haven't read TC in years, but is this type of "article" now the norm there?

The tone is converging on unhinged.

[ipsum2]

Shameless plug: if you or your friends have important data on SoundCloud, check out my free service to back it up: https://scupper.io.

[mynewtb]

Or make a true backup by downloading it all with e.g. youtube-dl instead.

[Raphmedia]

"By continuing, you agree that you own the music associated with the account and give us permission to host it."

So, this services simply downloads the files and then add on your server? How is this helping me back it up?

[programLyrique]

It does not seem to save the associated images (404 Not Found on the images on the webpage with the saved soundfiles).

[sarreph]

For all those looking to make a SoundCloud clone: What is HN's opinion on its failings (from a user perspective) — i.e. how would you make SoundCloud better right now?

Also interested to hear those who can balance with commercial viability.

[em3rgent0rdr]

Privacy Badger would have to be disabled whenever I accessed SoundCloud. That was my indicator to avoid it.

I miss the days of RSS podcasting.

[thinbeige]

> If it can’t find funding or a buyer, SoundCloud could vaporize, destroying its massive archive of user-uploaded music, podcasts and other sounds.

Wrong. If Soundcloud goes bankrupt then the state tries to find a buyer for a new SoundCloud with a virgin cap table. So Soundcloud won't disappear whatever happens.

[ThomPete]

Of course we are all thinking (hmm should we do a clone) and believe me I am not going to deny it's tempting, hell I might even be pushing for something like that.

But the reality is most likely that someone is going to buy them for no money and then continue the platform trying to beat the dead horse alive.

The reality is that you don't make any money on streaming services if you don't hold the rights. Netflix and Spotify should be a good inspiration for how to do it and they aren't even doing as well as one might think.

But there is a very simple way to make a good (non funded) business out of soundcloud and that is to turn it into a paid platform for artists who want to push things up there.

[yellowapple]

"Employees told us the company is “a shitshow,” with a lack of product direction, talent leaving and employees secretly using Spotify."

Weird. I never really thought about SoundCloud and Spotify being actual competitors. I've always felt that SoundCloud did a lot better with indie/obscure artists, remixes, and the whole "soundclown" meme genre, whereas Spotify did a lot better with commercial/mainstream artists and albums. I use both frequently.

[ocWavean]

That's part of the problem. They focused all their attention on making a Spotify competitor, when the core principle of what SC unique is the community and a vast underground culture of unknown artists hoping to make it big.

The two are similar in that they're online streaming services, but insofar as everything else, not even close.

[k-mcgrady]

If you haven't seen it checkout Soundcloud GO. Essentially they pivoted to a Spotify competitor a couple of years ago but they still have the old, non-subscription version of Soundcloud available too.

[lousken]

The reason I stopped using soundcloud as soon as I could was the fact that soundcloud uses 128kbps mp3 for most of the songs. If that would be at least 160k or 128k opus that would've been fine. But 128k mp3 is noticeably worse.

[claudfuen]

Being in the music industry, I always had a negative experience using SoundCloud - It's not surprising that by neglecting their user's needs they are systematically imploding.

[bcherny]

Could you elaborate? I was under the impression that SoundCloud is one of the few platforms that treats musicians well, and lets fans discover really small bands/djs.

[forgotmysn]

I feel like they had the opposite problem. They only focused on fan-service, at the expense of profitability. The reason the music industry hates it is because it removes them as gatekeepers. Soundcloud gave a platform to musicians that allowed them to gain exposure to audiences without having to bend the knee to LA or NY.

[jgh]

i really like soundcloud for drum and bass mixes that would otherwise be pretty difficult / impossible to find otherwise. I will miss it if it goes under :(

[alistproducer2]

Same here. The EDM catalog was/is? awesome.

[quuquuquu]

devil's advocate, why not youtube, or reddit, and if downloading is a problem, mega?

[matclayton]

Give us a try, mixcloud.com

[alistproducer2]

I pretty much saw this coming. Posted to a IPFS group last year about using IPFS to make a decentralized soundcloud clone. I was lucky enough to get a response from Juan, the creator of IPFS.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ipfs-users/1Mu2Vh8sh...

[alistproducer2]

I honestly don't understand the hate. If you're going to DV me at least take a sec to read the thread or let me know what your issue is. The thread has some good responses from Juan; that's really the only reason I posted it here. I thought of going decentralized because (at the time) I loved soundcloud. I used it as an artist and also as a listener. I've been around long enough to know that their model was not sustainable and eventually all the great content would disappear. Decentralized makes sense for something like SC. Let the people who find it valuable share in the costs of serving it a la bit torrent.

[xya]

lol, just wondering why there is no soundcloud ico yet, as it seems so easy to set it up https://icobox.io/ - would it be too much data for a blockchain based system? - does anyone need a distributed soundcloud?