Hey folks,
The other day, I talked to someone about how things evolve around the web and mentioned Soundcloud,
and the instant response was "now, aren't they broke?".
Well, I've made it a habit to read the wikipedia article on Soundclouds development once a year, and to be honest, knowing the numbers in there a little, I was rather surprised they seemed to openly admit to be broke by now, while the fact that they'd be at some point didn#t really surprise me that much.
To verify if there was some kind of public announcement by Soundcloud out there which may have caused the rumor, I googled around a little and stumbled across the below-linked recent article on a site called "theverge" -
before you click, that is a really long read there, so maybe let me say a few things ahead:
First of all, I didn't find any evidence of Soundcloud itself saying they had reached the end of the line, so these are unconfirmed "fake news".
Still, the article points at several issues that do seem to exist, and the wikipedia entry on their business model (consisting mostly of: taking more investor cash next year) lacks any signs of health... looks like there might be trouble around the corner.
What struck me the most about the way the TheVerge-Article evaluates the situation and seemingly states what "creatives" are after is that they point at three major mistakes made by Soundcloud:
- not paying money to musicians who get many clicks
- allowing people to spam each other with "reposts" of their own tracks, leading to some sort of black-market for tricking statistics and recycling tracks to stay visible
- not having come up with a somehow sustainable working financial concept
I found these three things most interesting, the first made me wonder if Soundcloud ever had at any point promised anyone to pay them for clicks (not that I'd know,do you?), so,to me, this seems like one of those cases of
"If 17-year-old-girls get payed by youtube for having a channel on make-up use, I have a right to get payed for 50.000 listeners elsewhere, too - and if that expectation is not met, I'll say that other site sucks.".
I know these kind of misperceptions fairly well, and I've repeatedly talked about especially YouTube having created wrong expectations and realities all over the place, just because money never really mattered that much for them after having been bought by google.
That is annoying when you notice it in single individuals behaviour (like the so-often quoted "I can get away with breaking copyright on youtube, why can't I on wikiloops?"), but to see something like Soundcloud go down because of the big players twisted realities does give me some goosebumps.
Mind, they offer payed accounts, but if the shizzle hits the fan and the investors roll out, the whole thing might go down including the payed accounts, simply because the company ceases to exist.
Ever lost your online audio archive to something like that? That does hurt.
Then, the "reposting"-issue...
You may imagine I was a bit glad we never introduced any "suggest for remix", "remix request" or other function on wikiloops which would have allowed spamming each others profiles.
Too bad people will end up abusing such functions, and if they didn't foresee that and implement smart filters to prevent that kind of thing, then they really missed a human reality.
Thinking about it, facebook does a phantastic job on limiting such spam posts - they just reduce your reach automaticly if you keep posting irrelevant stuff (not that I'm a fan of FB, but they do social manipulation so beautifully well, Göring would have nodded in approval).
Last, concerning the failure to come up with a working funding concept - well, I can relate to that, you know :)
I loved the user comment below the article which states:
"it was all cool as long as it was all free", and now theres talk of it being possibly completely gone...
I don't know about you people out there, but to me, the whole situation of Soundcloud as described in the article can be blamed on wrong decision taking on Soundclouds end, but it also is the result of the way us small end users value and use such services.
Maybe it comes down to:
If we want to have reliable, well organized, ideally independent online services for a niche product like homerecorded audio content (we're not dealing cat photos, it is a pity), we might as well pay for that right away.
Otherwise, we'll have to live with free (or investment funded) places closing down at some point if there is no return for the investors in sight.
Well, I hope you are aware wikiloops own situation is in many ways different from soundcloud, we neither took a cent from any outside investor but stuck to asking for crowdfunding-support instead, nor did we hire 400 people and opened offices on three continents without an idea how that should be payed in the mid-term.
Still, we act on the same "market" and trade very similar "goods", so the user-expectations are similar, and the outward pressure to comply with copyright legislation / proper infringement handling, plus being compared with services like Spotify or AppleMusic (sorry, that's a completely different ballgame IMO) are things wikiloops and Soundcloud have in common.
I'm wishing the folks at SC the best of luck finding a good way to survive - and I hope for wikiloops that more and more people will start to understand that cool internet deserves financial support.
Following wrong expectations of sudden fame and fortune (+ chicks for free, right?) on a free site obviously has the potential to kill something that might have been a cool place to hang - its a box of pandorra to open, and I'm glad we kept that shut quite well on the loops so far.
Thanks for the read, and looking foreward to any sparking ideas / comments if you like :)
Article: "SOUNDCLOUD'S BROKEN BUSINESS MODEL DROVE ARTISTS AWAY" on TheVerge, July 21st 2017
Link: https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/21/15999172/soundcloud-business-model-future-spotify-streaming
The other day, I talked to someone about how things evolve around the web and mentioned Soundcloud,
and the instant response was "now, aren't they broke?".
Well, I've made it a habit to read the wikipedia article on Soundclouds development once a year, and to be honest, knowing the numbers in there a little, I was rather surprised they seemed to openly admit to be broke by now, while the fact that they'd be at some point didn#t really surprise me that much.
To verify if there was some kind of public announcement by Soundcloud out there which may have caused the rumor, I googled around a little and stumbled across the below-linked recent article on a site called "theverge" -
before you click, that is a really long read there, so maybe let me say a few things ahead:
First of all, I didn't find any evidence of Soundcloud itself saying they had reached the end of the line, so these are unconfirmed "fake news".
Still, the article points at several issues that do seem to exist, and the wikipedia entry on their business model (consisting mostly of: taking more investor cash next year) lacks any signs of health... looks like there might be trouble around the corner.
What struck me the most about the way the TheVerge-Article evaluates the situation and seemingly states what "creatives" are after is that they point at three major mistakes made by Soundcloud:
- not paying money to musicians who get many clicks
- allowing people to spam each other with "reposts" of their own tracks, leading to some sort of black-market for tricking statistics and recycling tracks to stay visible
- not having come up with a somehow sustainable working financial concept
I found these three things most interesting, the first made me wonder if Soundcloud ever had at any point promised anyone to pay them for clicks (not that I'd know,do you?), so,to me, this seems like one of those cases of
"If 17-year-old-girls get payed by youtube for having a channel on make-up use, I have a right to get payed for 50.000 listeners elsewhere, too - and if that expectation is not met, I'll say that other site sucks.".
I know these kind of misperceptions fairly well, and I've repeatedly talked about especially YouTube having created wrong expectations and realities all over the place, just because money never really mattered that much for them after having been bought by google.
That is annoying when you notice it in single individuals behaviour (like the so-often quoted "I can get away with breaking copyright on youtube, why can't I on wikiloops?"), but to see something like Soundcloud go down because of the big players twisted realities does give me some goosebumps.
Mind, they offer payed accounts, but if the shizzle hits the fan and the investors roll out, the whole thing might go down including the payed accounts, simply because the company ceases to exist.
Ever lost your online audio archive to something like that? That does hurt.
Then, the "reposting"-issue...
You may imagine I was a bit glad we never introduced any "suggest for remix", "remix request" or other function on wikiloops which would have allowed spamming each others profiles.
Too bad people will end up abusing such functions, and if they didn't foresee that and implement smart filters to prevent that kind of thing, then they really missed a human reality.
Thinking about it, facebook does a phantastic job on limiting such spam posts - they just reduce your reach automaticly if you keep posting irrelevant stuff (not that I'm a fan of FB, but they do social manipulation so beautifully well, Göring would have nodded in approval).
Last, concerning the failure to come up with a working funding concept - well, I can relate to that, you know :)
I loved the user comment below the article which states:
"it was all cool as long as it was all free", and now theres talk of it being possibly completely gone...
I don't know about you people out there, but to me, the whole situation of Soundcloud as described in the article can be blamed on wrong decision taking on Soundclouds end, but it also is the result of the way us small end users value and use such services.
Maybe it comes down to:
If we want to have reliable, well organized, ideally independent online services for a niche product like homerecorded audio content (we're not dealing cat photos, it is a pity), we might as well pay for that right away.
Otherwise, we'll have to live with free (or investment funded) places closing down at some point if there is no return for the investors in sight.
Well, I hope you are aware wikiloops own situation is in many ways different from soundcloud, we neither took a cent from any outside investor but stuck to asking for crowdfunding-support instead, nor did we hire 400 people and opened offices on three continents without an idea how that should be payed in the mid-term.
Still, we act on the same "market" and trade very similar "goods", so the user-expectations are similar, and the outward pressure to comply with copyright legislation / proper infringement handling, plus being compared with services like Spotify or AppleMusic (sorry, that's a completely different ballgame IMO) are things wikiloops and Soundcloud have in common.
I'm wishing the folks at SC the best of luck finding a good way to survive - and I hope for wikiloops that more and more people will start to understand that cool internet deserves financial support.
Following wrong expectations of sudden fame and fortune (+ chicks for free, right?) on a free site obviously has the potential to kill something that might have been a cool place to hang - its a box of pandorra to open, and I'm glad we kept that shut quite well on the loops so far.
Thanks for the read, and looking foreward to any sparking ideas / comments if you like :)
Article: "SOUNDCLOUD'S BROKEN BUSINESS MODEL DROVE ARTISTS AWAY" on TheVerge, July 21st 2017
Link: https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/21/15999172/soundcloud-business-model-future-spotify-streaming