I hope SoundCloud manages to hang on somehow. I've found it much better for music discovery then I have Spotify, mainly because I've really diligent in curating my list of who I follow and as a result, each day when I open my stream, I'll get a a few hours of new and unusual electronica sets to listen to.<p>Without SoundCloud I never would have found genres like 170 Drum'n'Bass or Dark Disco. With Spotify, I'll just get... the Red Hot Chilli Peppers or Foo Fighters. Both bands that are somehow in the centre of the Venn diagram of musical taste.<p>The only thing that's come close to this is YouTube's recommendations. Somehow the YouTube algorithm has decided that I need to be shown weird and wonderful full length albums of Japanese funk and jazz from the 80s. When I read the comments on the videos, they're inevitably from other people that are equally bewildered about why they got recommended the album too.
Not surprised given the climate and considering how mediocre of a platform SoundCloud is. I showed my friends back in 2011, we all thought it was a really cool way to share music. We played in a band together so it was a nice way to share rough tracks, still is.<p>But Streaming is now dominant for music playback. It’s easier than ever for artists to publish themselves on Spotify and let’s not forget the 10 other SoundCloud-like platforms.<p>What does the SoundCloud dev team even do, db administration, Recommendation ML, making sure iOS SoundCloud syncs with the webApp? These services are all getting outsourced.<p>SoundCloud belongs to the 2000s era of start up trends. “Let’s share things with other people online and connect with each other” Whatever the latter meant.<p>I read someone talk about how Facebook belongs to the old school of relational graph based social networking whereas TikTok has this ML user driven approach. SoundCloud feels like a graph, people don’t traverse anymore.