Muso scrapbook Soundcloud gets $50m, corporatespeak makeover Soundcloud, a long-time favourite site of musicians and DJs where they can post their doodles, demos and remixes, has raised $50m in venture capital funding. And you know what that means: it’s now obliged to talk new media marketing gibberish with a straight face. The website announced revised payment plans for musicians …
A large portion of UK start ups all seem to be to do with music. As someone who doesn't care about music at all, I wish them all the best, but I really don't get it.
Recently looked back here http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/16/the_top_25_uk_web_startups/ at some old startups from 6 years back. (About half the links are broken - it's like an elephant's graveyard of startups) and a lot of them, including Last.fm, are all to do with music.
"MySpace is still with us in name, of course – but many years ago it had a quite different spirit - offering artists a rich set of tools with which to manage their gig itineries and communications."
Does this really sound like MySpace....? Once Murdoch and Fox got hold of it they skewed it into AD driven bloated mess... It could take half an hour for an artists page to load for Christ sake!
From wikipedia :-
"A former Myspace executive suggested that the US $900 million three-year advertisement deal with Google, while being a short-term cash windfall, was a handicap in the long run. That deal required Myspace to place even more ads on its already heavily advertised space, which made the site slow, more difficult to use, and less flexible. Myspace could not experiment with its own site without forfeiting revenue, while rival Facebook was rolling out a new clean site design.[49][50]"
To be fair to the Dirty Digger, Myspace was already a slow-loading, horrible mess of a site when he bought it. Not that he made it any better.
Part of the problem is that if users are allowed to fill their pages with hideous flashing graphics, auto-playing crappy songs and nasty, slow-loading widgets they will do so with enthusiasm. Like magpies with attention deficit disorder.
It's good in a sucky sort of way. I think they could be doing more with it as like that article says, its vulnerable to someone else coming along and doing a better job of it or it falling out of fashion like MySpace.
I will look forward to more wanky new media speak from them in the near future! *sigh*
Paris because she has been known to look up at the clouds while enjoying someone's latest release herself!
Soundcloud can fuck right off with their recent overhaul, where they ignored outcry of the faithful paid users who got them to where they are now. Autoplay that you can't turn off is bad enough, but it insists on playing utter shite you have only the most tenuous connection with. Presumably an attempt at stat padding views/plays for when they start selling ads.
As a muso, SoundCloud is a platform that works from community good will and is great if you want to colab or host original music. I get plays from all over the world, have no marketing cost, and enjoy membership to a community of artists. All for free or a little extra. Add social media connectivity, DRM and CC licensing and you get an amazing platform.
Hard to beat that, but they seem to be trying to and heading down a possibly dubious path.
I just hope they dont ruin it for the average punter.
Soundcloud's annoying player doesn't let you fast forward or jump past the dull sugary bits of its mostly identikit content. For this alone, they should be fed nitroglycerine and pushed into a live volcano.
In terms of evolution, not much has happened in the last 4-5 years, apart from space restrictions and premium account requirements for the more interesting, previously free, services. The fact that they bleed the content creators, rather than the joyful throng of eager consumers, is an all too frequent bleat among the former.
The business model relies on a ratio of a few thousand talentless twats to each next-big-thing. The talentless twats use it because it's cheaper and easier than creating and publicising their own site, and well...you know, they're always in the rehearsal studio, bruv.
The talented few, meanwhile drench Youtube with their lower bitrate stuff for free, and rinse the living daylights out of socmedia with linkage to bump up the hits. Sooner or later, their likes, page hits, and actual paid-for downloads from Spotify, Amazon, Beatport, and iTunes will have enough momentum to generate an actual living breathing fanbase, rather than a bored coterie of browbeaten acquaintances who click "like", but never bother to follow the link.. Quality content has a viral life of its own. If you have the wit and wisdom to monetise it yourself, you'll only have to spend a couple of years being rather good at music before you can afford three meals a day. If you're hopeless, you'll be wasting space on Soundcloud, or it's bedroom dj sister site, Mixcloud, until the the septic tank finally explodes.
If you want to do some simple market research. post the same piece of original music on Soundcloud and Youtube, then spam your social networks once a day with a link to each. Do this for ten days, so you get nice round metrics. The Youtube hits will outnumber the soundcloud hits by at least ten to one, because everyone knows where it is and what it does. Even if you put a weedy low bandwidth version on youtube, it'll still bury the soundcloud version for listens, likes, and downloads. (NB: I'm not for a moment suggesting that anyone download free content from Google subsidiaries using freely available tools...*ahem*)
YouTube may get more hits but I'm not going to go there to listen to an hour-long mixtape. Soundcloud has been great for somebody with my tastes, who isn't really into albums or follows pop/indie/MOR artists but wants to hear a whole bunch of anonymous tracks my favourite DJs are playing. Plus they often have a handy Download link right above the waveforms. There's no videos to speak of with this music, so why go to YouTube?
Plus I think you'll connect with possible income streams (fans and lovers of music) more on Soundcloud than the inane harebrained people you'll get watching an album cover on YouTube judging by the comments on both sites, even if you do get 10x the visitors.
I use soundcloud for public demos/sketches (sharing rehearsal recordings and 'private' stuff is done using dropbox) but for actual sales, I go straight to bandcamp.com which is set up for this express purpose. Plenty of stuff on there, much of it free or pay-what-you-want...
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