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Soundcloud Cuts 40% of Staff - 173 of 420 Employees
Who knew so many people worked at SoundCloud?
Comments
Soundcloud is rubbish anyway. Orfium is the future, maybe.
https://orfium.com/
The we are doing it because we are so true to our core is rubbish.
I think it is time to break up the monsters like Google, Facebook, and Twitter with AntiTrust/Monopoly Statutes in the US.
They are choking off growth of independent sites, ideas, and using their information to scare bureaucrats to do their bidding.
Just me though.
I subscribed to their GO+ deal and there are many artist's (The Who, Sting, Radiohead, etc) you would only expect to see on a big streaming service (iTunes Music, Amazon, etc,). So their (misguided in my view) bid for parity as a big league streaming service is somewhat accomplished.
But it's cost the company so much not only financially but also in how musicians and artists view them. If they didn't have to do the stereotypical American Capitalism shaft of making more than the previous year & growth above all else they could've remained a respected company who fostered new musical talent by focusing on independent artists.
They could've been a beacon of net neutrality by becoming the de facto Wikipedia of audio by welcoming all manner of posters and content creators (audio books, historical recordings, etc). They could've even started a subscription model based on increased storage for artists music, tools for promotion & networking.
But instead they had to make some ill advised attempt at jumping into an already crowded field of streaming services where they now look like the red headed bastard of the lot. They could've invented their own paradigm of an creative collective for independent artists and made a profit. But they had to be greedy and now they've ended up looking like the flea market/pawn shop of streaming services...
I did a month's temp job for a big American acquisition/cost stripping style corporation a while ago and in their internal memo I stumbled on the words "right-sizing" among with other assorted meaningless words. I almost choked on the stink of horseshit.
Rings bells.
Product aside, 173 people just lost their jobs.
Folks, companies are not charity organizations. They are there to make money. If they are publically traded, (not sure if Soundcloud is,) they are required by law to do their damnedest to make money, to protect the shareholders interest. They are not some altruitistic charity for musicians.
We all want cheap (read free) hosting, with millions of ears. That model doesn't make money. As to "monopolies", give me a break. They thrive because people use them. There is no end of other attempts to be the social media king. We made these things the way they are, because they do the things we want them to do.
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And I hope they find better ones, very soon. Also, get a nice chunk of redundancy payout.
Orfium is a business, not a charity. Hopefully, they will not make the mistakes of Soundcloud.
They will attempt to grow their business. That's all SoundCloud has done. And it certainly sucks to be an employee caught in changes like that; I've been through it, though I was always one of the lucky ones who got to stay on. The market for good techs is really strong right now.
During the waning years of a mega media corporation where I worked for nearly 20 years, as we were watching the “digital revolution” begin to do to print media what it had in just a few years earlier done to record companies and the music industry, and how the “freemium” business model of “give away today monetize later “ was empty calorie economics destined to fail, one of my colleagues, a creative director, came up with this quote that I think perfectly sums up what we have seen time and time again during this era:
“Nothing is more costly than something given away for free.”
-- Jerome Sala
Maybe at first but once they're in the position Google, Amazon etc. are in, they can control the market completely. If someone comes up with a brilliant idea, they'll either buy it or copy it and use their enormous amounts of money to make sure they win
I have to say your notion of monopolies being that simply because they do the things we want is very naive when there have been so many cases where they have abused their position in order to prevent competitors launching better products or restricting worker mobility and ability to negotiate better pay etc.
Monopolies are always bad for the consumers and should be prevented
Great quote, @Lady_App_titude. Unfortunately, most don't realize that Google and Facebook are not "free".
As someone who's worked in the industry for over 20 years, I'd say the problem is most web companies want to be (and think they can be), the next Google or Facebook. Rather than concentrating on building a steady income to keep within their means, the focus is on rapid growth, unrealistic goals and exit strategies.
It's bollocks. Unsustainable and an insult to customers.
I predict (and hope) the future will see a more level playing field, with more competition from smaller, independent companies as the megacorps die in a screaming pile of their own blue sky thinking.
In cases such as phone companies, banks yes. But social media? How exactly do you split up something that's free for use?
Free to use as in you're the product
As for how to handle an antitrust case against FB, i'd rather leave that up to capable lawyers than speculate based on things i pull out of my ass but i imagine you could distinguish between the core service and all the extra stuff they've bought throughout the years and force them into separate companies or at the very least open up access for competitors
Facebook and Google have way too much power to sway public opinion and information as it is and they're not neutral or benevolent enteties, they're companies with a political agenda. That's dangerous in my opinion and that's on top of the shady business they do. They need to be under much stricter regulations than what they are now
Growing and growing to please your shareholders can end this way.
It´s sad for the people who loose their job but from a egoist customer side i just must say that soundcloud was so good but they totally destroyed the thing that i hate it and will not miss it.
It´s still the platform to post demos but there are better ones already which are not (yet) so big, with better streaming quality, better sever, better support etc. etc.
Otherwise i prefer these days to explore music via other not so famous platforms anyway or well known like you-tube.
Soundcloud is dead, sorry.
You would be amazed to know how few developers are usually employed in these type of companies. I'm working in a similar industry, and the amount of overhead, pr, hr, cs, marketing, sales departments, each with their own layers of producers, managers and directors is staggering. And sadly, the people that produce actual work are at the bottom of the food chain.
Very interesting discussion and good points by everyone. @MonzoPro is spot on with the appraisal of the "internet insta-success" business model. It's like none of them remember the dot.com bubble bursting or ever took an economics class.
The difference from other huge industry meltdowns is that the internet was just so pervasive that even a major collapse didn't "kill it" as any other industry may have suffered. That & the mega-web monoliths like Alphabet/Google, Facebook even Apple are so successful it gives anyone with a half decent idea & some venture capital delusions of grandeur.
I don't think the subscription model or seeking profit is a bad thing at all. People will pay for a service that's implemented well & works- Netflix, Hulu , streaming music's growth all attest to that.
SoundCloud could've kept doing what made them great, catering to their independent artist/muti-use audio platform, offer a few more additional services and charge a subscription and they would've thrived. Would they be the next Facebook? No. But they certainly wouldn't of reached this stage, killing off half their employees.
But the executives of SoundCloud got greedy, ignored the landscape that was before them and pissed away a unique and sustainable business. It's classic corporate bullshit.
CFO: "Well, we made 20 million in profit last year but this year we only made 18 million."
CEO: "Wha?!! Well get rid of some bodies, restructure, do something!!"
Like they didn't still make 18 MILLION in PROFIT. People can say that's American Capitalism, thats just the way it is, but it's fucked. And the movie always ends the same way. Save for the one or two at the top who benefited most from the unhinged greed, the rest: employees, share holders, the customer base lose big-time, and those who syphoned off the most from the carcass move on to the next unsustainable venture where quick gains matter and the unemployed, decimated sectors and angry consumer base don't.
They weren't profitable. This cut will help them live long enough to hopefully become an independent, profitable company.
It's doubtful that the guys running the company are the ones with the money. Most folks like this have venture capital behind them - it takes a lot of money to hire that many people, and pay the hosting costs. The guys who started it had an idea, and sold that. That's what they are, sales guys. So, even if they are not publicly traded, there are folks who paid for all this behind them, who are pressuring them to make money, lots of money. Because if you're not profitable, and I doubt they were, if the venture guys won't fund the next round, it's close the doors time.
Yes, we were specifically talking about Google and FB and the data-mining/crypto marketing model at the time.
It makes me wonder what they've spent their money on. The website is nothing special - I could knock up a custom version of what they're providing in a couple of weeks. The content is all from users. Apart from hosting costs, web maintenance and a bit of user management (which they could pass on to trusted moderators in return for a free pro account) I can't see how they can be 50 million in the red this year. If they chucked a few ads on the site and managed their resources better they could turn things around.
They killed the great app and replaced it for that crap.
They killed the better old desktop version.
Then they killed the groups and it's also full of spam and scam.
Soundcrap!
was v surprised to hear they have had that many ppl working for them.
my user experience from years of soundclouding:
cons
pros
I spent a year and a half working seven days a week building a web business. I lost a lot of money. Took me a long time to recover. It was called SpeedCine. It was a search engine for finding legal movies online, on services like Netflix, iTunes, and dozens of smaller sites.
After I closed it, numerous companies sprouted up doing exactly what I was doing, only less well. One of them had even offered to "buy" me hahaha. A friend of mine (who now is a top film exec at Amazon) sent me an email titled "your children" listing all these other sites.
Rightly or wrongly, the lesson I learned from the catastrophe is that most people don't go into an internet business trying to create a sustainable business, something they'd like to work at for the rest of their lives.
They create the business to sell it to a bigger company for a lot of cash. They create something that looks good--not necessarily something that is good.
That's why you need to raise so much money through venture capital. Actually creating something something that is useful, people love, and works like a charm--costs very little beyond time and imagination. Creating an illusion costs millions Because you need to spend money to do that on the internet. With money, you can make ANY site appear like one of the most popular sites on the web, even if nobody gives a shit.
Something like Soundcloud never needs to do anything but hemorrhage money. It could still be very useful as one added reason for people to sign up for a larger digital entity like Facebook or Amazon Prime. Maybe the creators of Soundcloud really want to make Soundcloud work for its own sake. Or maybe they don't understand the way most people play the game.
I'll catch up with the rest of the thread later when I have some time. However, I knew it was a matter of time before Soundcloud ended up in some sort of pickle. Ever since they took away our groups and everything else that made SC great and instead tried to bury us independent musicians underneath the commercial rubble, they lost revenue. Probably because people stopped paying for premium. Soundcloud was great back in the day.
Groups were great, I discovered a lot of good music that way.
Same here. Followed trends that were separate from where commecial trends were heading.
I didn't say SoundCloud was profitable now. If they didn't over reach and gave the business model more appropriate to what brought them to the dance that I described they very well could have been.
The examples speaking of profit were in service to the comments about the current all growth or bust capitalism we're a part of. Sorry if I wasn't clearer.
oh god yes, had forgotten them!