In the time since this article was written Chance the Rapper tweeted[0]:
Just had a very fruitful call with Alex Ljung. @SoundCloud is here to stay.
About an hour later SoundCloud tweeted[1]:
*airhorn* Spread the word: your music isn’t going anywhere. Neither are we.
So it seems things have changed? I don't know much about Chance the Rappers financials but perhaps he is buying SoundCloud or investing in it? It will be interesting to see what happens.
Of course they are going to downplay this news. If they are having money issues and are seeking additional investment, the last thing they want is for a story like this to be in the headlines.
It gives their potential investors even more leverage, because if they don't have a successful funding round they're done.
It also makes it harder to convince investors to fund them, because no one is interested in funding a service which is losing money and doesn't have good growth numbers.
So these tweets mean nothing. It's completely normal for a company to deny reports of financial difficulty because to do anything else would just worsen the situation.
My rule has always been: look at how the company acts, not how they talk. SoundCloud just abruptly cut two major offices and 40% of staff. Does that sound like a healthy, growing company?
I love Chance, but I can't imagine that he's got the net worth already himself to buy SoundCloud / make a meaningful investment - maybe he has contacts who do or could help an investment group, but I think it might be a bit fanciful to say that Chance by himself can save SoundCloud.
While I realize the two are entirely different platforms, they need to partner with Spotify. To do what, I don't know, but Spotify seems to have figured it out.
I'm an artist (at least on the side); all my friends — artists and fans alike — love SoundCloud. There's no real alternative to it.
The problem they're solving is a hard one. Not technically, but the market. Spotify solved the problem with music piracy (at least, en masse); SoundCloud... I don't know.
Soundcloud is a digital discovery platform mostly. And a centralized free library that artists can release music on. It solves many problems for small-time artists and underground listeners.
Bandcamp found a similar market for physical music collectors and somehow monetized it well. SoundCloud is much more accessible though in terms of UX/UI.
Seems they should try to push for album/track monetization by artists. (Purchases made on SoundCloud / SoundCloud takes 1% fee etc)
I don't understand why anyone would fund SoundCloud for a day. If someone can share what kind of sales pitch they have used to investors, I'd like to see it!
Their income apparatus seems to be "sing up for free". It's hard to charge for extra services, when your core product does almost everything already. Advertising doesn't really work, because their demographic groups are heavily leaned towards adblock usage.
Most of the content is indie music. The increased availability - since 1990s - of cheap music production tools has enabled everyone, and their dog, to make music recordings. The downside to that is that it has got a lot harder to find the quality after the quantity has exploded since. So, for discovery service SoundCloud fails. There should instead be a curated version with 1/1000th of the content left.
Then why many people really go to SoundCloud. They go for commercial pirated music, or "remixes" - whatever. I've seen many albums offered on SoundCloud. Even a small number generates serious amounts of site activity. I have not understood this either, because SoundCloud does not by default offer FLAC downloads, and there are better services for that stuff...
I'm a bit allergic to people doing this, but I'm going to hop into this comment thread because it's too big of a coincidence to not plug a bit here.
I'm building the solution to this, right now. Think a next-gen Soundcloud with Patreon features built-in, powered by a Ethereum-based token that allows fans to instantly and directly support artists from anywhere in the world. There's a number of interesting applications that a "micro-economy" running inside of a music platform can provide: among these are curation/discovery, promotion of music, and preventing infringement and bad actors in the service.
We're currently in the early alpha stage (especially around marketing–the landing page is going up later tonight) and are focusing our time preparing for an ICO–whitepaper coming shortly. If this interests you, join our mailing list (Mailchimp link below)
In another thread posted on Hacker News, someone asked how do you know whether a company is healthy. I said that by definition, if a company is not profitable it isn't healthy.
Of course that message didn't go over too well...
Maybe the software industry will start defining a "successful company" the same way the rest of the world does -- making more money than you spend and have a sustainable business plan.
If you are a remixer, producer or musician check out SKIO Music.
You can enter remix contests, find singers and producers to collab with, and even import your originals from Soundcloud to host them on SKIO. Lastly, you can upload your stems and let other people remix your tracks, all in a copyright respected environment.
Not exactly. I'd argue that "funded until Q4" precisely means "funded until at least some time during Q4". Someone who was being careful to communicate clearly would probably not say "funded until Q4" if they meant anything other than "funded until the beginning of Q4" but that is not what we are dealing with here: We are dealing with a second-hand retelling to TechCrunch by an anonymous source. In fact, further on in the TechCrunch article, it states that when they contacted SoundCloud PR directly, they were told that "[SoundCloud] are fully funded into Q4" (emphasis mine).
[0] https://twitter.com/chancetherapper/status/88592122075935539...
[1] https://twitter.com/SoundCloud/status/885940178292023298