It's amazing how SoundCloud had "everything" and they threw away. They had the unique Indy artists, they had the DJs and music producers, and they opted to move to compete with Spotify on a money loosing bet, without putting the effort to build the Player in at least every single platform supported.<p>They did even more harm to themselves by blocking open source players that were doing "their work for free".<p>If there is one big mistake they did early on was to block API access. The other one was to bet on "record labels contract" rather then becoming the source for Originals.
Longtime soundcloud user here (creator and consumer, pro subscriber). Not excited about this news but also a good time to share about Mixcloud:<p><a href="https://www.mixcloud.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mixcloud.com/</a><p>This site has shockingly few ads (feels like one per week) and lets you stream complete mixes. You won't find single tracks here.<p>For most music consumers though, mixes are probably what you didn't know you needed anyway.
YouTube wouldn't be the worst company to acquire SoundCloud. YouTube is already trying to gain some mind/market-share from Spotify. YouTube is already home to lots of non-label music and remixes and has most (all?) of the social/commenting features that SoundCloud has.
I've been a big fan of them forever and have had the paid version for years. It's one of the few (if any) legit places to get good remixes of songs (I've literally been a fan of remixes since 1982 when I was 10 and heard the "extended" version of "Don't You Want Me" by Human League for the first time, lol... just noticed that someone remixed this song AGAIN just 2 years ago and it's pretty good: <a href="https://soundcloud.com/thehumanleagueofficial/dont-you-want-me-purple-disco" rel="nofollow">https://soundcloud.com/thehumanleagueofficial/dont-you-want-...</a>), and one of the few places I know of to upload your own music and audio attempts in a broadly consumable format.<p>Shameless plug, my guided meditation that I made entirely via AI using Ralph Ineson's voice (he played a bit part in Game of Thrones and is also Lorath's voice in Diablo 4) and which to date is one of the only things that has given me what I'll remotely term a "spiritual experience" <a href="https://soundcloud.com/peter-marreck-fb/simple-meditation-ai-ralph-ineson-oobe-deep-trance-music?in=peter-marreck-fb/sets/meditation" rel="nofollow">https://soundcloud.com/peter-marreck-fb/simple-meditation-ai...</a>
Recent article with more details about the current state of Soundcloud – ("achieved eight consecutive months of profitability"):<p><a href="https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-chasing-annual-profitability-soundclouds-already-there/" rel="nofollow">https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-chasing-annua...</a>
It was great for a time. At least Prometheus lives on!<p><a href="https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/prometheus-monitoring-at-soundcloud" rel="nofollow">https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/prometheus-monitoring...</a>
Just logged into my dormant SoundCloud to check the activity of a bunch of friends and acquaintances.<p>Looks like most user activity (liking tracks, add to playlist, etc) steeply dropped off ~13-11 years ago, and I see virtually no one active after ~7 years ago.<p>Not sure what the cause of that is..
Enshittification is the word of the year 2023. I wonder how enshittifed SoundCloud will become (it pretty much already is, but there's room for more).<p>Who will buy it? Who would?
Technically it's great IMHO.<p>But when someone pays 1 billion currency they will want to extract at least the same amount out of this service.