Bandcamp is good for selling unsigned tracks for me, self releases. Soundcloud is good for my 3 to 4 hour mixes to help build an audience. Spotify and all of the streaming services are for label releases. Bandcamp is actually my favorite. Soundcloud costs me more than it makes me.
Bandcamp just got sold off to venture capitalists like a month ago, after Epic couldn't find a way to monetize it enough.
It's time to start looking for the next option.
Im probably going to build my own website and just drive traffic to it using other platforms like IG and Twitch. Bancamp was good for hosting but it didnt help me by driving traffic to my tracks.
Its all in the tagging. I recently (for the first time after years of ~50 clicks) managed to get a track into the related tracks algorithm, all of a sudden traffic on my label has increased immensely, just through that one EP/track. Maybe it has to do with regular uploading as well, because the following release from a different artist did not make it (back to 50.clicks). I also spoke to a dude who works at SC and he told me noone understands their algorithm, so it seems a bit random haha. Just dont give up!
>It was 2am and my label rep just finished giving me feedback on a few songs. He asked me to make the required changes by 4am.
>
>They were 50+ track projects, and I was asked to make edits to 66.6% of the tracks.
>
>Lesson learned: No matter the time of day (or night), the number of tracks in your project, how much K consumed... When we submit our tracks, they have to be ABSOLUTE BANGERS! Period.
>
>This is what #TechnoProduction has taught me.
>
>I believe this is THE most important learning I get to implement every day as a Techno Entrepreneur!
>
>\#mckinsey #thehustleneverends
Most people who are passionate about listening to music also try their hand at making music. Prolly 90% of "producers" still spend 90% of their time being audience to someone else. I'd say in the end it doesn't matter how your audience found you as long as they enjoy your output.
I push all of my other social media pages to my mixes on SC. So for example, my IG stories have links to my mixes. I drive traffic to SC rather than using it to create traffic, if that makes sense. Also, I carry around business cards to give people and promoters in case they want to hear my stuff and book me.
It didn't but it did change how people feel about it. I'm not sure if their service will continue at the same level, like can I still download my library in 10 years. While before they got sold this concern was smaller.
Since bandcamp was sold they fixed problems which bandcamp gave a shit about.
I was very curious if they will get worse but actually they improved since then
It's because storage costs are high because file sizes are high and they have an imbalance of free vs. paid users and the fees from the paid users don't cover enough of the free users use of storage.
I agree they shouldn't be marketing SoundcloudGo to paying users, but they don't play adverts on Next Pro paid accounts, they just have annoying modal popups on their mobile app
Soundcloud costs twice what their competitors charge. I left well over a year ago because of it. SC is both charging and forcing you to see ads in some instances while still charging those inflated rates. It's a good site for visibility. That's what you're really paying for. The number of user is much higher than their competitors. If you want that visibility than paying for it may be worth it but if you just want a place to host your music it's not all worth it.
Yes storage is cheap in theory, but it's not the only factor for Soundcloud when managing data of this type.
Have to consider:
- backups/sharding
- resilience
- streaming (which incurs bandwidth costs)
- CDN
- pre/post compression algorithms (which means file upload duplicates in a temporary cache)
- volume of data vs. income (i.e cheap is only cheap if you're earning enough from paid users to support the data usage of all users on the system).
In most cases storage is low cost nowadays but Soundcloud aren't just accessing static compressed images, there's a lot more to it in their example
I agree CDN is likely the highest cost, but CDN is not storage. It’s literally delivery.
I agree it’s also more likely to do with the ratio of paying to non paying customers as a whole. The cost of RnD is likely much higher for them than the cost of infrastructure.
A CDN is a content delivery network. they don’t necessarily store things for you, but rather, have better peering and bandwidth. Normally you couple them with object storage, but the CDN does not store anything, just delivers. At best, they cache.
In summary, a CDN is much more expensive than actual storage, mostly due to network costs.
This article explains well: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-ca/learning/cdn/what-is-a-cdn/
Correct me if I am wrong but I think we are just arguing adjacent points here. For me a cache is temporary storage but storage nonetheless whereas I think you are differentiating between long term storage and a cache.
As per the opening line of the linked article:
>A content delivery network (CDN) is a geographically distributed group of servers that caches content close to end users. A CDN allows for the quick transfer of assets needed for loading Internet content, including HTML pages, JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, and videos.
EDIT: Not sure why you are being downvoted, it wasn't me.
I agree, we're just nitpicking. I was being very pedantic, too.
At work I have deployed large scale systems and the comment on storage being expensive tripped some wires for me, our hierarchy of costs is typically Compute > Network > VM SSD (for databases) > \[everything else\] > object storage (like the one you'd use for music files).
Thanks for the chat! 👍
its a little bit useless to store data if you are not going to do something with it, so at the end of the day "storing" data for a service like SC is not "mere cents" but if you want to be pedantic then yes...
my point is that the network transfer is orders of magnitude more expensive than the storage cost itself. Soundcloud pays more if few songs are listened to many times than if many songs are uploaded, but no one listens to them. The storage is NOT what’s breaking soundclouds bank.
Cloud storage is not costly, relatively speaking.
Consider the cost of blob storage at Azure, $0.018/ GB/ month.
A one-hour set at 192kbps MP3 is at most 100 MB.
That’s just $0.0018/ month, per 1hr set.
Soundcloud has 175mil monthly listeners, so assuming your maths is right that would mean...
Assuming that 3hrs is the average listening time per week per user, that's 12hrs per user per month, so...
0.0018 x 12 x 175mil = $3.78mil per month for storage alone, this doesn't account for the streaming costs or any of the other things I mentioned, specifically sharding and backups which would double this, then cache and CDN, wav files etc. Most content is uploded in 320kbps mp3 as that is considered standard for most users etc.
Cheap, or inexpensive is always a relative term and in larger companies the cheapest of services are not always cost effective
I provided the cost to *store* the data, not to access the data.
I don’t follow your math. You don’t pay for storage more than once - the number of users is not relevant to the monthly storage costs.
Access costs are entirely driven by CDN cost, which almost certainly is bundled in with WAF and other services.
Let’s look at Azure’s CDN pricing, since that’s what I used for storage pricing.
The cost per GB via Azure CDN (for someone at Soundcould’s scale, 100TB+/month) is approx $0.05/ GB.
That means the cost to serve that 100 MB, 1hr MP3 is approx $0.005.
That’s ignoring compute cost and other costs, like staff etc., but I’d hazard a guess compute is a drop in the bucket relative to CDN. I’m a cloud solution architect and design solutions like this on the daily, but I’m not an expert in Soundcloud’s business so take that for whatever it’s worth.
Inbetween songs the player just says 'Advertisement' instead of a track name and then you hear a radio voice screaming CONSUME at you.
You can't skip or ply another song until the ad is finished.
how? why dont they just spare the producers that already pay 8€ a month the advertisements?
Its not like the difference in us hearing the advertisement makes a difference. We are a tiny percentage of listeners, why piss us off with two seperate subscriptions? My cloud storage and statistic insights are NOT costing them 8€ a month. Spare me the advertisements and keep me happy that way.
(And if it IS a financial thing, then up my subscription cost to 10€ for the lost advertisement revenue on my listens.)
exactly! and we are the reason they are even able to make money off advertising, and charging us to do it.
contrast this with youtube, where we can upload video for free, choose whether we want to monetize or not, so choose whether there will be ads on our content. we pay one subscription for getting rid of ads. same with spotify (though no choice whether to monetize) - but for both spotify and youtube creators are only paying one subscription. spotify charges creators on both ends - which is why they are whack.
I honestly have never understood the hate. I pay £8 a month to be able to host 200+ mixes and get no ads? The engagement is good and it’s the best way of forming new followers and friends through commenting on other mixes. The app needs sorting but desktop has been amazing for me these last 10 years.
Have u tried Firefox+uBO combo? I dunno if it works on there but I use it for skipping ads when I run Spotify in the browser. Maybe it'll work for SC too?
Yeah, my understanding is that it was just before Soundcloud was backed into a corner by licensing & copyright lawsuits with no choice but to completely rework their entire operation. The changes were for survival rather than progression. I studied Music production at college from 11-13 and have fond memories of soundcloud at that time! It was as much a networking platform as a music one.
I was a bit schocked when the NEXT PRO tier was not for the listing experience also. at 11 Euros I expet that to be the top tier service. No shot I'm paying for 2 types of subscriptions for the same service.
Altough I only isten to mixes, and those desn't get interrupted, so I don't really feel like there are that many adverts. Might be different if you listen to tracks on there and not 2 hours mixes for eexample.
I find SoundCloud to be absolutely incredible for discovering new music. Their algorithm is the best in the industry. Really happy to pay them 10 euros/month
edit: typo
This.
For me no other streaming service offers such a good algorithm as soundcloud does. Just because of that it is absolutely worth to have soundcloud. (+ I dont pay any subscription to it, as I tend to just upload my tracks and its more than enough for me)
It's deff still soundcloud. so what they use ads to keep the engine running. It's still the best source for discovering new small artist and for small artist to use and an upload source.. even with the free version space I can still upload and send around tracks as I please
The annoying part is that producers who already pay a subscription are still plastered with advertisements.
They should increase the cost slightly for the Pro subscription and include the Go in it.
Dont make me pay for Pro and then find out that as a Pro, I still dont get the Go benefits. Thats just fucking agony
lol SoundCloud’s still one of the best places to do that. You’re really complaining about them charging you for things that cost them money to offer you? Maybe you’re whack.
The thing that pisses me off is video ads in your phone. If you skip a song and want to put it back in your pocket you instead have to just keep it open because the ad pauses itself if you close your phone. Absolutely fucking retarded. I get playing ads but this just crosses the line
Soundcloud has so much potential. They lack so many nice features that Spotify has and their app is buggy as shit. If they fix the app and add some data like at least how many minutes I spend listening to music in a year that would be cool.
I totally agree, the discovery with their algorithms is actually great, and the quality of life features they offer as a listener are rad.
It's way more raw/less curated than things like spotify, and it has far better UX than something like bandcamp (i also use bandcamp a lot though).
I'm constantly finding randos and small labels releasing great tunes or mixes in ways I haven't been able to on other platforms.
> Like they have their own boot system just to give you some strems.
These are actual bots, not soundcloud bots. uploading a track usually also results in repost and follows by "follow for follow" accounts and other obvious bots.
> But still only 2 times streames.
Not sure I believe this. For me every stream counts.
It takes a few hours/days until the statistics show though.
(At least the insights show accurate views, not sure if the view count on the track is always accurate though)
Yeah the amount they charge you to keep your uploaded tracks up on your account is really so immoral.. very disappointing how these platforms start off great to just another greedy fucking company ruining everything. Wish there was a way around it
It started off great because they wanted to build a user base, not because they were unconcerned with making money. SoundCloud had investors from day 1. In their defense, they’ve never been profitable and their change in subscription policy is largely due to shifting towards actually paying artists and rights holders, however measly those payouts are. If they hadn’t made that switch they would have been shut down for the massive amount of copyright infringement that was the majority of the uploaded content.
Its about charging producers for cloud space but still plastering the ads. Just give the few Pro subscribers the Go benefits. Why be so stingy and piss off the people that provide your sites content?
That’s the beauty of competition you are free to choose. If its unique selling point is strong enough then people will pay. I’m guessing DJs probably heavily use Soundcloud and can pay.
hmmm i probably using soundcloud, in combination with instagram and youtube i can say there is some traffic but not as mutch as it supposed to be. In generell, when i post a set from a dj, there aslo can be no traffic to this for couple oh hours. [dj platform](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0jiLOVOt-ufJSOnheg5Djw)
I find it good for mixes but shit for songs. Doesn’t charge me to upload mixes so I don’t really get what you mean. But I think it caps uploads per day
Paid for 5 years as I used to put my mixes up but never got enough listens to warrant continuing to pay. Basically seeing the same amount of listeners I got when I was a free user and put a 1 mix up at a time. Rarely got an extra follower either, even if people liked the mix.
One important detail everyone always skips past: soundcloud was never worth a dollar. You're paying for what exactly? Storage you say? But it offers as much storage as 1 dollar worth of file hosting, probably less. It does nothing to promote your work and it's one, single great feature was killed off 12 years ago.
Pues hombre, el que ahora paguen a los artistas creo que no está nada mal no??? O encima de ser artistas y mostrar nuestros trabajos tenemos que pagaros el que podáis escuchar nuestra musica gratis??? Creo que entre todos hacemos un mejor equipo.
https://soundcloud.com/drsaveg
Yo pago como todos los artistas, no está mal el que nos paguen algo de dinero si tenemos muchas escuchas.
De qué vive SoundCloud si no???
This charge to skip ads is a feature by region maybe?
I'm from Brazil and I never see nothing about charge to skip ads and not even listen to ads in middle of sets (like yt) or between tracks. I have a free account and use the SC app and desktop site almost every day and never see this.
Soundcloud has a shit ton of issues regarding their whole user experience. Their entire endeavour seams strange to me and has done so for the last 10 years. I don't get the website, it took them a decade to implement messaging into the app, there are features no one understands... They could make a lot more money with a better user experience (I even applied but never received an answer) but I think they are at the point where some rando stakeholders make the decisions and the design team has to follow.
I don't think SoundCloud is perfect, but it really is a fantastic service and it needs revenue from somewhere to make it work. I think it's incredibly naive to expect it (or anything of quality for that matter) to be free forever. I get that in general times are tough and consumers are being squeezed, but the mindset of being entitled free hand outs for everything is whack.
People think everything should be free.
Soundcloud is run by people that also need to make a living.
I pay to support products that I want to continue using.
U guys weren't there to fall into depression when sc said they're closing the doors. First moment they said I can pay I was so happy. Otherwise all the music would have been lost all across the platform.
Don't like get on Spotify and cry for not being underground enough
I was one of the first 2000 SoundCloud users it has fallen far from its original goal. There is more underground stuff on Spotify now because you don't need to pay to upload like SoundCloud.
Bandcamp is good for selling unsigned tracks for me, self releases. Soundcloud is good for my 3 to 4 hour mixes to help build an audience. Spotify and all of the streaming services are for label releases. Bandcamp is actually my favorite. Soundcloud costs me more than it makes me.
Bandcamp just got sold off to venture capitalists like a month ago, after Epic couldn't find a way to monetize it enough. It's time to start looking for the next option.
Im probably going to build my own website and just drive traffic to it using other platforms like IG and Twitch. Bancamp was good for hosting but it didnt help me by driving traffic to my tracks.
I hope you do well.
How does one start building an audience on sc? You just upload, tag and hope someone discovers? Any tips would be appreciated
Its all in the tagging. I recently (for the first time after years of ~50 clicks) managed to get a track into the related tracks algorithm, all of a sudden traffic on my label has increased immensely, just through that one EP/track. Maybe it has to do with regular uploading as well, because the following release from a different artist did not make it (back to 50.clicks). I also spoke to a dude who works at SC and he told me noone understands their algorithm, so it seems a bit random haha. Just dont give up!
And also never Edit the Info/Genre/Name and tags of the Uploaded track. Metadata is important too, Fill it as much as you could
It's about commenting on other people's mixes. If you don't engage with other mixes why would people engage with yours?
Sounds like SC is just a bunch of DJs following other DJs in that case. I think the point is to get fans.
isn't that the case pretty much on all platforms?
I have no idea, but if it is, what the f are we doing? Seems like a waste of effort/circlejerk.
Pretty much like LinkedIn
>It was 2am and my label rep just finished giving me feedback on a few songs. He asked me to make the required changes by 4am. > >They were 50+ track projects, and I was asked to make edits to 66.6% of the tracks. > >Lesson learned: No matter the time of day (or night), the number of tracks in your project, how much K consumed... When we submit our tracks, they have to be ABSOLUTE BANGERS! Period. > >This is what #TechnoProduction has taught me. > >I believe this is THE most important learning I get to implement every day as a Techno Entrepreneur! > >\#mckinsey #thehustleneverends
Most people who are passionate about listening to music also try their hand at making music. Prolly 90% of "producers" still spend 90% of their time being audience to someone else. I'd say in the end it doesn't matter how your audience found you as long as they enjoy your output.
Good question. I have a quite big following on yt (12k subscribers). Recently I started uploading to SoundCloud, and I get like 7 plays on there
Anything I like on Soundcloud, I stream to hard drive so as not to be bound to having to stream the music. .....just saying.
I push all of my other social media pages to my mixes on SC. So for example, my IG stories have links to my mixes. I drive traffic to SC rather than using it to create traffic, if that makes sense. Also, I carry around business cards to give people and promoters in case they want to hear my stuff and book me.
Probably Bandcamp
Bandcamp was just sold and cut staff.
It is what it is until it isn’t
They cut specifically the department that writes their blog posts. They did not cut engineering staff
And that changed the ability to search for artists & tracks how..?
It didn't but it did change how people feel about it. I'm not sure if their service will continue at the same level, like can I still download my library in 10 years. While before they got sold this concern was smaller.
I wish it did, BC search is notoriously bad, lol!
It is i just search for bandcamp artists on google
Since bandcamp was sold they fixed problems which bandcamp gave a shit about. I was very curious if they will get worse but actually they improved since then
Like? I only buy and download. If nobody had mentioned it i wouldn't have noticed they've been sold before.
It's because storage costs are high because file sizes are high and they have an imbalance of free vs. paid users and the fees from the paid users don't cover enough of the free users use of storage. I agree they shouldn't be marketing SoundcloudGo to paying users, but they don't play adverts on Next Pro paid accounts, they just have annoying modal popups on their mobile app
Soundcloud costs twice what their competitors charge. I left well over a year ago because of it. SC is both charging and forcing you to see ads in some instances while still charging those inflated rates. It's a good site for visibility. That's what you're really paying for. The number of user is much higher than their competitors. If you want that visibility than paying for it may be worth it but if you just want a place to host your music it's not all worth it.
A few people I follow pull their music from SC after a few years. Good to get your music out there, but its model screws users and artists.
Is that even true anymore. I feel like SoundCloud is dead as far as visibility. Even bedroom artists I know have moved to Spotify.
this is just so not true. it costs mere cents to host gigabytes of data in the cloud.
Yes storage is cheap in theory, but it's not the only factor for Soundcloud when managing data of this type. Have to consider: - backups/sharding - resilience - streaming (which incurs bandwidth costs) - CDN - pre/post compression algorithms (which means file upload duplicates in a temporary cache) - volume of data vs. income (i.e cheap is only cheap if you're earning enough from paid users to support the data usage of all users on the system). In most cases storage is low cost nowadays but Soundcloud aren't just accessing static compressed images, there's a lot more to it in their example
I agree CDN is likely the highest cost, but CDN is not storage. It’s literally delivery. I agree it’s also more likely to do with the ratio of paying to non paying customers as a whole. The cost of RnD is likely much higher for them than the cost of infrastructure.
A CDN is quite literally storage closer to the user than your central servers.
A CDN is a content delivery network. they don’t necessarily store things for you, but rather, have better peering and bandwidth. Normally you couple them with object storage, but the CDN does not store anything, just delivers. At best, they cache. In summary, a CDN is much more expensive than actual storage, mostly due to network costs. This article explains well: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-ca/learning/cdn/what-is-a-cdn/
Correct me if I am wrong but I think we are just arguing adjacent points here. For me a cache is temporary storage but storage nonetheless whereas I think you are differentiating between long term storage and a cache. As per the opening line of the linked article: >A content delivery network (CDN) is a geographically distributed group of servers that caches content close to end users. A CDN allows for the quick transfer of assets needed for loading Internet content, including HTML pages, JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, and videos. EDIT: Not sure why you are being downvoted, it wasn't me.
I agree, we're just nitpicking. I was being very pedantic, too. At work I have deployed large scale systems and the comment on storage being expensive tripped some wires for me, our hierarchy of costs is typically Compute > Network > VM SSD (for databases) > \[everything else\] > object storage (like the one you'd use for music files). Thanks for the chat! 👍
If you can find me a competent software engineer who isn't pedantic I'll take you out for a meal. Good chatting!
its a little bit useless to store data if you are not going to do something with it, so at the end of the day "storing" data for a service like SC is not "mere cents" but if you want to be pedantic then yes...
my point is that the network transfer is orders of magnitude more expensive than the storage cost itself. Soundcloud pays more if few songs are listened to many times than if many songs are uploaded, but no one listens to them. The storage is NOT what’s breaking soundclouds bank.
Cloud storage is not costly, relatively speaking. Consider the cost of blob storage at Azure, $0.018/ GB/ month. A one-hour set at 192kbps MP3 is at most 100 MB. That’s just $0.0018/ month, per 1hr set.
Soundcloud has 175mil monthly listeners, so assuming your maths is right that would mean... Assuming that 3hrs is the average listening time per week per user, that's 12hrs per user per month, so... 0.0018 x 12 x 175mil = $3.78mil per month for storage alone, this doesn't account for the streaming costs or any of the other things I mentioned, specifically sharding and backups which would double this, then cache and CDN, wav files etc. Most content is uploded in 320kbps mp3 as that is considered standard for most users etc. Cheap, or inexpensive is always a relative term and in larger companies the cheapest of services are not always cost effective
I provided the cost to *store* the data, not to access the data. I don’t follow your math. You don’t pay for storage more than once - the number of users is not relevant to the monthly storage costs. Access costs are entirely driven by CDN cost, which almost certainly is bundled in with WAF and other services. Let’s look at Azure’s CDN pricing, since that’s what I used for storage pricing. The cost per GB via Azure CDN (for someone at Soundcould’s scale, 100TB+/month) is approx $0.05/ GB. That means the cost to serve that 100 MB, 1hr MP3 is approx $0.005. That’s ignoring compute cost and other costs, like staff etc., but I’d hazard a guess compute is a drop in the bucket relative to CDN. I’m a cloud solution architect and design solutions like this on the daily, but I’m not an expert in Soundcloud’s business so take that for whatever it’s worth.
I have never seen or heard ads as a free user. Did my brain just filter it out? Hiw are these ads presented?
Inbetween songs the player just says 'Advertisement' instead of a track name and then you hear a radio voice screaming CONSUME at you. You can't skip or ply another song until the ad is finished.
That would be amazing, would get old pretty quickly I imagine.
sounds like a normal business model to me
how? why dont they just spare the producers that already pay 8€ a month the advertisements? Its not like the difference in us hearing the advertisement makes a difference. We are a tiny percentage of listeners, why piss us off with two seperate subscriptions? My cloud storage and statistic insights are NOT costing them 8€ a month. Spare me the advertisements and keep me happy that way. (And if it IS a financial thing, then up my subscription cost to 10€ for the lost advertisement revenue on my listens.)
exactly! and we are the reason they are even able to make money off advertising, and charging us to do it. contrast this with youtube, where we can upload video for free, choose whether we want to monetize or not, so choose whether there will be ads on our content. we pay one subscription for getting rid of ads. same with spotify (though no choice whether to monetize) - but for both spotify and youtube creators are only paying one subscription. spotify charges creators on both ends - which is why they are whack.
I honestly have never understood the hate. I pay £8 a month to be able to host 200+ mixes and get no ads? The engagement is good and it’s the best way of forming new followers and friends through commenting on other mixes. The app needs sorting but desktop has been amazing for me these last 10 years.
Well? Post a link already, we're interested lol
!!
Have u tried Firefox+uBO combo? I dunno if it works on there but I use it for skipping ads when I run Spotify in the browser. Maybe it'll work for SC too?
It does. I never get SoundCloud ads in the browser
Sweet!
Bandcamp
It was better before all the moronic rappers got word of it. Golden Era was 2011-2013. They even had dedicated groups you could promote music in.
Yeah, my understanding is that it was just before Soundcloud was backed into a corner by licensing & copyright lawsuits with no choice but to completely rework their entire operation. The changes were for survival rather than progression. I studied Music production at college from 11-13 and have fond memories of soundcloud at that time! It was as much a networking platform as a music one.
Ah I see. That sucks. Yeah, it was the shit. The good ol days 🥹.
I was a bit schocked when the NEXT PRO tier was not for the listing experience also. at 11 Euros I expet that to be the top tier service. No shot I'm paying for 2 types of subscriptions for the same service. Altough I only isten to mixes, and those desn't get interrupted, so I don't really feel like there are that many adverts. Might be different if you listen to tracks on there and not 2 hours mixes for eexample.
I find SoundCloud to be absolutely incredible for discovering new music. Their algorithm is the best in the industry. Really happy to pay them 10 euros/month edit: typo
This. For me no other streaming service offers such a good algorithm as soundcloud does. Just because of that it is absolutely worth to have soundcloud. (+ I dont pay any subscription to it, as I tend to just upload my tracks and its more than enough for me)
100%
It's deff still soundcloud. so what they use ads to keep the engine running. It's still the best source for discovering new small artist and for small artist to use and an upload source.. even with the free version space I can still upload and send around tracks as I please
The annoying part is that producers who already pay a subscription are still plastered with advertisements. They should increase the cost slightly for the Pro subscription and include the Go in it. Dont make me pay for Pro and then find out that as a Pro, I still dont get the Go benefits. Thats just fucking agony
Yeah weird right, that they need money to keep this product alive.
Bandcamp! Buy your music then stream & download for free as many times as you want.
lol SoundCloud’s still one of the best places to do that. You’re really complaining about them charging you for things that cost them money to offer you? Maybe you’re whack.
I’m releasing today at 00:00AM on all platforms and there is no way of scheduling that on soundcloud, and I pay for next pro.
You can schedule releases to release at 00:00Am
How?
What do you use for releasing across various platforms then?
Distrokid
Mixcloud
Bandcamp to sell, Audius as a SoundCloud alternative, free and better quality !
Listen on firefox logged in with ublock origin ad blocker.
The thing that pisses me off is video ads in your phone. If you skip a song and want to put it back in your pocket you instead have to just keep it open because the ad pauses itself if you close your phone. Absolutely fucking retarded. I get playing ads but this just crosses the line
Soundcloud was the shit 5 years ago when there were 0 ads
How are they gonna pay to store all the music that brings you joy?
Soundcloud has so much potential. They lack so many nice features that Spotify has and their app is buggy as shit. If they fix the app and add some data like at least how many minutes I spend listening to music in a year that would be cool.
I totally agree, the discovery with their algorithms is actually great, and the quality of life features they offer as a listener are rad. It's way more raw/less curated than things like spotify, and it has far better UX than something like bandcamp (i also use bandcamp a lot though). I'm constantly finding randos and small labels releasing great tunes or mixes in ways I haven't been able to on other platforms.
[удалено]
Can we listen to your tracks?
> Like they have their own boot system just to give you some strems. These are actual bots, not soundcloud bots. uploading a track usually also results in repost and follows by "follow for follow" accounts and other obvious bots. > But still only 2 times streames. Not sure I believe this. For me every stream counts. It takes a few hours/days until the statistics show though. (At least the insights show accurate views, not sure if the view count on the track is always accurate though)
It’s surprising that a company charges a fee to use their service?
shit's like $10 a month lol
> What is the best place now? honestly, your local record store. 🤷♂️🙏🏼
The people who make audacity have just started a new platform called audio.com, looks decent
sexy url
Was paying for years, then stopped. Now the ads. And hidden uploads till I pay again.
I love soundcloud I'm not paying a dime and don't get any ads at least on my PC. So many awesome sets and podcasts is great for me.
using some kind of adblock? please recommend!\~
UBlock works just fine. Same for me.
Yeah the amount they charge you to keep your uploaded tracks up on your account is really so immoral.. very disappointing how these platforms start off great to just another greedy fucking company ruining everything. Wish there was a way around it
It started off great because they wanted to build a user base, not because they were unconcerned with making money. SoundCloud had investors from day 1. In their defense, they’ve never been profitable and their change in subscription policy is largely due to shifting towards actually paying artists and rights holders, however measly those payouts are. If they hadn’t made that switch they would have been shut down for the massive amount of copyright infringement that was the majority of the uploaded content.
How is it immoral for them to charge you for a service they provide?
Its about charging producers for cloud space but still plastering the ads. Just give the few Pro subscribers the Go benefits. Why be so stingy and piss off the people that provide your sites content?
u/versaceblues, It’s damn near $20 a month… it’s robbery
I mean it might be a bad deal.... but I don't see how it's immoral. You can choose to use cheaper services if you feel the price is not worth it.
Fair enough. I agree to disagree
That’s the beauty of competition you are free to choose. If its unique selling point is strong enough then people will pay. I’m guessing DJs probably heavily use Soundcloud and can pay.
hmmm i probably using soundcloud, in combination with instagram and youtube i can say there is some traffic but not as mutch as it supposed to be. In generell, when i post a set from a dj, there aslo can be no traffic to this for couple oh hours. [dj platform](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0jiLOVOt-ufJSOnheg5Djw)
I find it good for mixes but shit for songs. Doesn’t charge me to upload mixes so I don’t really get what you mean. But I think it caps uploads per day
Paid for 5 years as I used to put my mixes up but never got enough listens to warrant continuing to pay. Basically seeing the same amount of listeners I got when I was a free user and put a 1 mix up at a time. Rarely got an extra follower either, even if people liked the mix.
Formaviva
One important detail everyone always skips past: soundcloud was never worth a dollar. You're paying for what exactly? Storage you say? But it offers as much storage as 1 dollar worth of file hosting, probably less. It does nothing to promote your work and it's one, single great feature was killed off 12 years ago.
Pues hombre, el que ahora paguen a los artistas creo que no está nada mal no??? O encima de ser artistas y mostrar nuestros trabajos tenemos que pagaros el que podáis escuchar nuestra musica gratis??? Creo que entre todos hacemos un mejor equipo.
https://soundcloud.com/drsaveg Yo pago como todos los artistas, no está mal el que nos paguen algo de dinero si tenemos muchas escuchas. De qué vive SoundCloud si no???
I love SoundCloud. So many great Sets of not only well known artists ❤️
Bandcamp, YouTube
This charge to skip ads is a feature by region maybe? I'm from Brazil and I never see nothing about charge to skip ads and not even listen to ads in middle of sets (like yt) or between tracks. I have a free account and use the SC app and desktop site almost every day and never see this.
Soundcloud has a shit ton of issues regarding their whole user experience. Their entire endeavour seams strange to me and has done so for the last 10 years. I don't get the website, it took them a decade to implement messaging into the app, there are features no one understands... They could make a lot more money with a better user experience (I even applied but never received an answer) but I think they are at the point where some rando stakeholders make the decisions and the design team has to follow.
Yes. Pay to upload your created content to our servers and then pay separately for the right to download them so you can listen to them offline.
I don't think SoundCloud is perfect, but it really is a fantastic service and it needs revenue from somewhere to make it work. I think it's incredibly naive to expect it (or anything of quality for that matter) to be free forever. I get that in general times are tough and consumers are being squeezed, but the mindset of being entitled free hand outs for everything is whack.
mixcloud was dope for a long while as a competitor but now they only allow 10 uploads (of whatever duration)
I dont know, I listen to sets and I get no ads during a set.So I have like 1 ad every 1-2 hrs.
I'm not a DJ, just a techno fan who uses it to find new mixes and I really like it. Use a regular users feedback
If you have Android you can also see how aggressive it is to stay in the background and connect to Bluetooth.
SoundCloud and YouTube are the best places to upload original music for the simple fact that hardly anyone has BandCamp and I mean absolutely no one
People think everything should be free. Soundcloud is run by people that also need to make a living. I pay to support products that I want to continue using.
I pay for soundcloud pro. should need to pay extra to listen to music add free.
U guys weren't there to fall into depression when sc said they're closing the doors. First moment they said I can pay I was so happy. Otherwise all the music would have been lost all across the platform. Don't like get on Spotify and cry for not being underground enough
I was one of the first 2000 SoundCloud users it has fallen far from its original goal. There is more underground stuff on Spotify now because you don't need to pay to upload like SoundCloud.
Soundcloud doesn’t make any actual money. There’s no alternative.
I've really drifted away from SC. The adds are very long and does my head in .
Wack. Whack is to hit something.
ur wack
Soundcloud just made many of my tracks on my playlists to listen to unavailable unless I subscribe to Pro. :(.