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.
