I feel like I'm in the minority of those who love SoundCloud. It's one the very few places for indie music makers and DJs to showcase their work that otherwise may not necessarily be published via the official publishing channels. That includes e.g. long running DJ mixes, not exactly the type of material for the official release bureaucracy and associated costs.
The only problem with SoundCloud is that instead of following the Spotify model, i.e. get listeners to pay for listening, they could have done it the other way around: get makers pay some nominal fee for hosting. Which they kind of did in the beginning but gradually drifted towards the listener-subscription model. As a paid music hosting service they'd at least provide an alternative for specific class of artists, i.e. those who make music for the love of it and want to be heard via unofficial channels.
SC failed to become one. They've had some back and forth and experimentation with pricing and subscription models over the years but never settled at anything targeted clearly and unambiguously. The current offerings are confusing and inconvenient for all classes of users. There's now an all-time upload limit for non-paying makers, and ads for non-paying users. What's the point of this? Getting both makers and listeners pay you? Sounds like a poor plan to me, that leads to nowehere.
If you're an indie producer, you don't necessarily have the money to keep paying for hosting indefinitely. Instead you want to upload your work somewhere where it will always be available, for free. Vimeo charges producers instead of consumers and they are struggling — if you have a commercial website that has to serve content from somewhere, then sure, it's a great deal, but not if you're a hobbyist.
By charging producers such services are basically shooting themselves in the foot — because if you don't attract producers, you won't get an audience either. Plus the ongoing costs (bandwidth and processing capacity) are generated by visitors and not producers.
This partially explains YouTube's success — as a producer you can just upload to YouTube, it doesn't cost you anything and YouTube brings you the audience ;-)
> If you're an indie producer, you don't necessarily have the money to keep paying for hosting indefinitely
You don't have to pay for SoundCloud just "for storage". You can throw some MP3s up on S3 and call it a day. Paying the nominal $12/month for SoundCloud pro is storage, distribution, collections, analytics, embedding... on and on.
> This partially explains the success behind YouTube
I thought the success of YouTube was largely due to their low bars for quality of content. Put simply, they allow all kinds of crap as long as it generates views.
Vimeo's model is quality content from indie producers, actually they are similar to SoundCloud in some ways.
Think about this: for example NASA has plenty of quality audio and video materials, where should they upload it? SoundCloud and Vimeo would be the best choice and it's what they do. It's quality content not exactly "publishable" via music labels or television, and yet it's pretty good.
Not everyone wants to be on the Internet's sewage system that's YouTube, and not everyone wants to go the costly publishing route. There has to be a niche for this type of media. I'm sure monetization can be figured out when there's clearly a market for it.
I think YouTube's success is mainly that they were first, there were always free to use so there was no reason for anybody to look elsewhere. It's hard to compete against free and established services. You basically have to find a killer feature (and hope that the established service will be slow to copy it) or pay people to do the switch.
>Not everyone wants to be on the Internet's sewage system that's YouTube.
Yet basically everyone is. Content producers want to reach their audience, viewers want to find the content they care about.
Their "The Upload" playlist is consistently the source of some of my favorite music on the internet, it almost never has a song I don't like. Whichever engineers worked on it deserve a raise.
Interesting, though I don’t personally find that useful. I’d rather use a service that finds music I may like based on what I listen to - regardless of origin - than one where I am the curator and must actively search/browse for new artists.
It’s refreshing to hear non-musicians actually use SoundCloud to listen to music, though.
Mixcloud is great however the people in charge seem to be intent on killing the platform with bad ideas. I say this as a huge fan and a paying customer (premium user).
The android app is horrible. They used to have 10-30 minutes of cache time, now they have 0. You go under a tunnel, on the tube, whatever, and your stream cuts out. Also lots of UI bugs. This might have gotten better but I wouldn't know as I am on an older version of the app and refuse to upgrade due to no more caching.
You have to pay to rewind stuff apparently (I do pay so have never been impacted here)
Search is horrible, even now.
Web has some major bugs like randomly reloading half the page when you scroll down your feed and click listen to something. Old app has some ridiculous UI bugs, can't comment on the newer ones though.
Mixcloud select may have been done with the best intentions, but it's just a bunk idea. Half of my feed is now "select" stuff I can't listen to. The idea is you pay the individual artist and get premium features. But the select costs a fair bit of money, a lot more than id be willing to pay. Effectively, even as a paying user I'm now being paywalled. They should have kept the stuff free and heavily integrated with patreon or done a tipping style platform.
Sorry for the long rant but I figure this is a chance to actually have someone from team mixcloud potentially read some actual feedback that they're probably sheltered from normally.
This is true. It is also the worst piece of hostile-UX I've ever seen. I'd love to have seen the Product Designer and Product Manager tie this one back to revenue forecasts. Who knows, maybe its a huge converter?
It just seems overly hostile to me, as if thats the only way they could think to increase revenue - instead of, you know, working on their core value proposition.
When I discovered mixcloud, this was described as a "feature" that essentially turned them into radio which allowed them to have much more generous licensing terms with the labels. It allowed small DJs to essentially upload mixes containing none of their own music. At the time it made sense and may still be true to an extent, but SoundCloud is far more popular and seems to have become much more lax in their policy of long form audio.
I've only lost one mix in my favorites in the past few years and that was the rare good mix I found consisting solely of popular rap.
Pretty much everything else I listen to on there is EDM and most of the time they are DJs uploading sets they played for money at huge festivals. I only lose those when the artist removes music to force people to listen to their new stuff. In those situations it makes an easy filter for who to unfollow since if the new stuff was any good they wouldn't need to remove the old stuff.
> When I discovered mixcloud, this was described as a "feature" that essentially turned them into radio which allowed them to have much more generous licensing terms with the labels
Fairly sure that was only applied to some locations.
Mixcloud is pretty unreliable in my experience. It does one thing better than soundcloud: a stream can consists of multiple tracks, which is excellent for mix-sets.
But the only reason I use it more than soundcloud is because their app supports CarPlay. Soundcloud doesn't do that, which makes listening to it in my car much more difficult, even if the mixcloud app is pretty crap on-the-go.
> I feel like I'm in the minority of those who love SoundCloud. It's one the very few places for indie music makers and DJs to showcase their work that otherwise may not necessarily be published via the official publishing channels. That includes e.g. long running DJ mixes, not exactly the type of material for the official release bureaucracy and associated costs.
Soundcloud is indeed great for mixes and sets. They have valuable and unique content, yet the product remains very barebones and lackluster. Poor audio quality (still 128 kbps MP3 I think?), no concept of tracklists/timestamps and most importantly your playback position and queue isn't persistent. This is crucial for a medium used to listen to hours long mixes - as a user I expect to be able to pause and pick up my currently playing set later, on any device.
The lack of this feature basically forces me to manage my playback queue in a different tool, like a note taking or todo app. I estimate that I have countless unfinished sets in my history that I simply forget to finish since once you close your browser window/app the content is basically off my radar. Imagine Netflix not saving your viewing progress - it's absurd.
I think Mixcloud is the much better product - it just lacks the vast amount of content (they are gettign there) and numbers of listeners unfortunately. They also have a sound business/pricing model - although that may indeed be a barrier to listener growth.
Paid SoundCloud listener here. I value the service they provide and I am happy to pay for it. They could improve discovery options, so greater collaboration with Pandora would be a very good thing.
The other issue with Spotify is that they had no answer for Dropbox, clyp.it or more recently, Bandlab.
Back in the day if you wanted to collab with another producer, vocalist, rapper, whatever, SoundCloud was the quick and dirty way of sharing audio ideas and files in the browser. For larger projects you used Dropbox.
Shame they tried to be internet radio and not a place and tool for content creators, like YouTube. They could have been the YouTube for audio, like podcasting.
The other issue with Spotify is that they had no answer for Dropbox, clyp.it or more recently, Bandlab.
Um, those things are not an issue for Spotify; Spotify's product is not meant to be used by creators like Soundcloud and definitely not even in the same ballpark as Dropbox.
I really like Bandcamp as a “music publishing platform for independent artists”.
It lets people listen for free, makes it easy to collect payments.
I feel like they’ve taken the “slow but pure” approach to product development. Not growing super fast, or chasing revenue, but just making sure the core feature works for artists who are truly independent, and carefully expanding from there.
Bandcamp has an awfully out of date UI, no recommendation engine of any kind, overall ridiculously simplistic, plus their monetization model is closer to an indie label one. This is altoegther a different model and a different niche compared to SoundCloud.
Wait - is this not still a large part of the SoundCloud model? I host a bunch of my 8bit tracks up there and give them away for free, but I have to pay $150 annually to do it (and yes I self host as well, but the soundcloud ecosystem drives a good deal of traffic my way, and I appreciate the service they provide.
The only problem with SoundCloud is that instead of following the Spotify model, i.e. get listeners to pay for listening, they could have done it the other way around: get makers pay some nominal fee for hosting. Which they kind of did in the beginning but gradually drifted towards the listener-subscription model. As a paid music hosting service they'd at least provide an alternative for specific class of artists, i.e. those who make music for the love of it and want to be heard via unofficial channels.
SC failed to become one. They've had some back and forth and experimentation with pricing and subscription models over the years but never settled at anything targeted clearly and unambiguously. The current offerings are confusing and inconvenient for all classes of users. There's now an all-time upload limit for non-paying makers, and ads for non-paying users. What's the point of this? Getting both makers and listeners pay you? Sounds like a poor plan to me, that leads to nowehere.