When I was a truck driver, Satellite Radio was practically a necessity. Sure I loaded up my ipod with music, but the selection was too damn limited and I would tire of hearing the same songs over & over again.<p>The best case scenario for FM radio (when you would finally find something that you could tolerate) was 1 hour. 1 hour of variety to stave off bordem and try to save your sanity. The effective range of the FM signal bubble was around 75 miles/120km. If you were unlucky 'Seek/Scan' button would be broken on the radio. Most radios in company supplied trucks were very shitty.<p>MY favorite times would be at night and manually adjusting the AM reception and picking up stations from all over the world. Trying to discern their location based on the commercials.<p>Sat. radio offered me consistency. It was wholly replaced once I discovered that audiobooks could be downloaded (and not cumbersome audio-cassettes).<p>Then as the years passed the variety on the stations offered diminished to the point that it seemed like they were playing the same 5-6 over & over again.<p>Mergers happened. Personal audio players got better.
I could download enough books to keep me entertained for a month AND have music playlists that saved my sanity.<p>So I cancelled.<p>I STILL miss 'Spa Radio' channel73(?) when I am driving in hectic or tense traffic. That always enhanced my calm.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
Wait, what?<p>I’m already surprised SiriusXM is still somehow around, let alone that they have $75 million to invest in another company and not that they’re taking $75 million to stay afloat...
Yes! Soundcloud, to me, <i>is</i> meritocracy in music today. Are they, will they, be as evil as everyone else in sneakily selling personal data? Sure, that's beside the point; a society-wide problem. Soundcloud provides a direct connection between fully independent music creators and an audience, large or small. If my music were <i>that</i> good, I would blow up on Soundcloud, at some scale. Disagree? Ask Billie Eilish what she thinks of Soundcloud.
And they still haven't fixed the bug that doesn't let you drag and drop to rearrange the songs in your 'Spotlight' list on your profile in Chrome. I reported it about 6 years ago, and repeatedly re-report it at least every 12 months. Hopefully some of this $75M goes towards a competent javascript programmer for their frontend.
I just listen to the streams of the radio stations I love:<p>WWOZ - New Orleans gold mine, especially 2 week audio archive<p>KCRW - live + curated streams<p>Cultura Brasil - a curated, updated stream of Brazilian music<p>BR Heimat - odd, but I find corny alpine brass bands a great working soundtrack<p>WKHR - a high school radio station in Cleveland where old people play 78rpm records
I stopped liking soundcloud when I realized that 99.999999% of my followers are bots. I dont need a bunch of followers that mean nothing. I would rather have 0 than 100 fake followers.<p>I also realized that at my production rate, its cheaper to just use Distrokid and throw things out on iTunes than to hope for discovery on soundcloud. Now I just use sound cloud to distribute examples of hardware mods or how a piece of gear sounds. no more music...
Soundcloud is the only music service I happily pay for even though I really don't need to. There aren't enough ads to justify giving them money, so it's really just because if they went away I'd lose access to all the best music
Soundcloud should have been the Patreon for indie musicians. You get artists making money on it and they will double down. They need exponential growth, and for a consumer facing company that means community led growth.<p>They can still do it. There isn't much competition there, Bandcamp and Gumroad aren't dominating.
Tangentially related. I hadn't heard of SiriusXM before so checked out their website. The homepage is a bit confusing and I'm not 100% sure what it is or why I need to pay separately if I listen inside or outside of a car? I get that it's a music streaming service of sorts just not sure what their angle is exactly. Spotify for instance doesn't care where I listen to the music I'm just paying to stream it wherever I want.
Maybe they can finally open up their app registration to 3rd party developers now. It has been down for like 3 years.<p><a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfNxc82RJuzC0DnISat7n4H-G7IsPQIdaMpe202iiHZEoso9w/closedform" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfNxc82RJuzC0DnISat...</a>
There's a lot of up and coming artists on SoundCloud. I could totally see them selling a service that replaces record labels for artists starting out. Stuff like helping with mixing and sound quality, basic advertising and branding, maybe booking a few shows. If SoundCloud became like an incubator or accelerator for artists, they could get some top artists early. Billie Eilish for instance started on SoundCloud. Imagine if SoundCloud, having access to all their streaming data, noticed the song Ocean Eyes blowing up and offered 14 year old Billie Eilish a contract. They'd have made millions by now.<p>Plus it's not like you need to invest a shitton into up and coming artists. Most of them need a band, some recording studio hours, and some marketing. The marketing is probably the most expensive one, but SoundCloud has easy, free marketing: put the artist on the front page. If SC did this for maybe 25-50 artists a year, they could easily get a Billie Eilish or a mumble rapper or two. It's not like there's many other places to post music as a young artist.<p>Edit: Or even if SoundCloud can't act as a record label for fear of stepping on actual record labels, they can still build a solid referral relationship. They have the ultimate first look deal.
SiriusXM has deals with a whole bunch of dealerships. A new car comes with SiriusXM. Even rental cars have deals. I remember heartz had a dark pattern of including SiriusXM and charging almost as much as GPS for $10/day unless customer explicitly asked to cancel it.<p>SiriusXM use every tactic in their book to convert and retain customers. In the age of Spotify and Apple Music, their charges don’t quite make sense.<p>I cancelled mine because satellite reception was poorer than FM and I just didn’t see the point. They spammed me pretty hard for 6 months and gave me all sorts of offers. The product isn’t worth it.
I once totaled a car that had SiriusXM and didn't realize until 1-2 years later that I was still getting charged (annually) for the subscription.<p>I think they reversed some of the charges when I finally noticed and called to explain the situation. It was <i>very easy</i> to overlook when you've just had a car accident and had to deal with insurance and buying a new car and all of that.
#2020YearOfAudio<p>The year of Luigi returns. First Spotify, now the satellite radio company.<p>Makes sense though. Easy way to get access to new music.
I feel like sentiment around soundcloud is a little mixed these days, but I'm glad to see that they're still financially viable enough to attract capital. Would be pretty bummed to lose all my playlists and likes if they went under.
Maybe they'll be able to re-open their API program which has been closed to new applications for years now due to a "high amount of requests" ;-)
This can only be good news. SoundCloud is one of the last few experimental-artist platforms, kind of like the myspace music scene before myspace got big.
Not sure what to think of this. SoundCloud has run its course and should just die, leaving space for a new player. There are some around but they can't gain critical traction due to the stickiness of SoundCloud despite having a product which has increasingly gotten worse over time.<p>For an audio platform, the audio quality is subpar. Terrible discovery. Too many bots & marketing-spammers. No direct monetization scheme for artists. Terrible mobile app (at least on iOS). etc.
someone say a little prayer for 8tracks<p>one of the nails in their coffin was when SoundCloud cut them off<p><a href="https://blog.8tracks.com/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.8tracks.com/</a>