Soundcloud is a website that was built by small time creators. It rose in popularity as an avenue for producers and musicians to share their art in an accessible environment. If you’ve heard of a small time musician, chances are they got some of their start on Soundcloud.
Which is why is heartbreaking that they’ve made the decision to kill off the majority of their users
starting December 9th, our free upload limit will change from 3 hours of audio, to 3 hours or 15 tracks.
15 tracks…
This essentially means even if you were nowhere near the original upper limit of 3 hours of upload time, then your account will be frozen. Virtually every creator/producer that has been with the site for any considerable amount of time is either well, well above 15 tracks (many only under 3 minutes each) or right on the cusp of hitting 15 tracks.
The only option to circumvent this crippling new limitation is to pay for their “Pro Unlimited” program, costing $12-$16 a month
Thats ~ $150 - $190 a year
I would have no problem paying for the service if it wasn’t so insultingly costly with virtually no benefit to the Artist, beyond now being the only way to use the site if youre a creator
If this new implementation goes through on December 9th, then Soundcloud will become a shell of what it used to be; users will leave for other platforms in droves and everyone will be worse for it. How many starving artists do you know that have $150 to dish out every year for a service that can easily be replaced by Youtube and Bandcamp in tangent.
“Why do we have free users who don’t pay?” -> “it’s good for our…uhhh… image?” -> “Who cares?” -> “our PR team?” -> “Didn’t we already let them go because we thought all PR is good PR?” -> “Uhr, right…” -> “So who cares again?” -> “Our non-paying users!” -> everybody ROFLing around
TBH, assuming they run this off of AWS like any normal human person, their costs for just plain data storage (which is all they’re really being asked to do, store our shit in a central, accessible repository and make it easy and nice for others to access) should be next to nothing on a per-user basis. Which means that if they didn’t have something fundamentally wrong with the way they’re running the company, then a few ads and paying pro users (or a reasonably priced more widely-adopted plan) should be enough to sustain the company. The fact that none of this is apparently true tells me someone dun goofed and now I get to be a youtuber.
Ahh, the annual RIP SOUNCLOUD event. I agree their pro plans suck but the truth is nothing will happen. Soundcloud won’t dissapear over night, it’s a huge brand name and if they go bankrupt (again) someone else will buy it. Honestly, 3 hours or 15 tracks is still alright for a free service. There’s still loads of traffic going in because there are not much of better alternatives, imo, and it’s still go-to upload music directly to web to lots of people. Reached upload limit? Delete older stuff, that’s how it was always done. I don’t see a point keeping lots of shit on there anyway. For me SC was never for a final/finished stuff anyway. That stuff goes to bandcamp. Sure SC gone to shit over years (remember when they removed groups?) but it still isn’t limited to premium services only yet. I dunno, I’ll sit and wait instead rather than storm Soundcloud HQ.
Hm yeah, I totally expected SC to go downhill in terms of indy artists after deleting all groups, but that didn’t really happen to the extent I expected… let’s wait and see…
I’m not sure why you’d think AWS is so cheap. CDNs aren’t new or interesting, but they are expensive to build at scale on someone else’s infrastructure. This isn’t “for the price of a cup of coffee, you can feed a starving mumble rapper” - Soundcloud has a crazy amount of monthly opex tied up in bandwidth, storage, and most notably compute. The amount of per-instance transcoding they have to do every time someone uploads or plays is through the roof compared to static media. They also apparently have several several PB of data stored now, which isn’t a lot compared to Youtube or Amazon, it’s not nothing. That’s not to mention databasing and SEO and all the back end it takes to run. All this based on a business model that doesn’t generate significant offset revenue.
But I agree that it becomes a value proposition, because they’re not the only player in the market. Soundcloud provides a lot of tools that you don’t get everywhere - APIs, widgets, DRM, etc. But I think what you’re really getting with SC nowadays is the brand - people recognize and trust the platform as both artists and listeners, whether or not people actually like it (sort of like I don’t enjoy McDonald’s, but I can trust them not to poison me on most days). Like @_ms said, people still use it because it’s better than the alternatives. If it was really that bad, people would have jumped ship before now, regardless of price. Whether it’s worth what they’re charging to enough people to keep them afloat, we’ll see. I didn’t use it when it was free, so I’m not the guy to ask.
I think what’s really happening here is that their investors said “it’s time to bring home the bacon, or we’re pulling out”. SC’s biggest issues right now are 1) revenue - you have an established platform that millions of people use, it’s time to charge for it, and 2) scale - there’s a fuckton of dumb, shitty scratch tracks that nobody listens to clogging up their servers, so they’re going to limit the amount of stuff you put up there. I think that’s smart, because making people pick and choose their best stuff instead of being the midden heap for everyone’s audio diarrhea actually raises their brand (if people continue to use it), by hopefully increasing the overall quality of content there.
At the end of the day, it’s probably this or close their doors. I don’t blame them for giving it a try as a last gasp. Who knows, it might just work.
Straight facts. there’s so much shit music in general out there and everyone all the suddenly feels like soundclog owns them something. Purge needs to happen. They make you delete your own shitty music? That’s a subtle way of saying GIT GUD
Given the opinion of many, it did. That was what, 7 years ago+ now?
Ever since groups died, it’s never been the same. It’s just a big marketing machine and the content has gone down super hard. I mean FFS, the Pulse app doesn’t even have a messaging system for other artists. They did nothing to replace the artist connectivity after groups, so it’s just weird islands of b-sides and junk.
There still isn’t anything that has quite taken its place in full, and I have no idea why. Ihearthis IMO is shit also.
HearThis is not that bad imho, the groups work fine, it’s just a bit laggy and still not extremely active… Audiomack is another one, and there are more, just found a link to https://www.orfium.com/ today - or maybe rediscovered, have to check if I have an account there lol - imho it’s not really that much about features, I think most people will not use a service much smaller than what they are already using since they think they will not be discovered there and have even less plays than before. That does not have to be the case. I’m mostly using SC for private WIPs these days, but when I uploaded stuff on both SC and hearthis a while ago, I partly had as many plays on hearthis as on SC when I used groups on HT.
honestly i though the sc groups were meh… my breakcore idm glitch group got dominated with bass music…
no complaints as that was the trendy thing but imo…it had its time…
I honestly don’t care. When I used to use SC, I paid for it. Since they removed groups I don’t use it any more though I didn’t bother to take stuff down. If they disable or take it down, no fucks given.
Yeah, true, I even remember posting something in one of my groups like “please, anybody help me with modersting all this BS” ^^ But still, I really liked the groups and used groups to share tracks all the time years ago.
FWIW I read that totally differently Nos, it was 3 hrs, but a minimum of 15 tracks, even if that goes over 3 hrs. I didn’t pay it a lot of mind either way at the time but if you are right that indeed sucks.