Soundcloud looses $44 million, perhaps the community should consider a new home for their audio?

na4a4a

Outwardly Opinionated and Harshly Critical
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Defender of Defoko
Not exactly Utau discussion directly but nonetheless I feel as though people on the forum could maybe talk about it?

This is going to have some (a lot of) opinion in it. But this is a forum after all, a place for discussion and it's gotta start somewhere ;-) ...

So as we all know, SoundCloud is a MASSIVE gathering place for the Utau community. It provides as (arguably) "free" place for most of us to post covered AND short audio snippets and tests that are otherwise seen as unfitting to post to a service; such as the ever so popular YouTube.

Well in recent-ish news Soundcloud has been reporting a loss in revenue in over 44 million dollars. This puts the future of SoundCloud (given it's short and unstable existence) under question. They simply don't make money and who knows how long it will persist as a service in it's current state.
It was probably obvious, given the recent influx of advertisements in an attempt to offset the enormous number of free users.

I see one of two things happening:
a, SoundCloud dies, poof, that's it.
or b, SoundCloud makes a final move to save itself and ultimately ends up changing it's ideology. Perhaps shifting from a public streaming service to something akin to Spotify.

Either way, both of those pictures could spell a small disaster to the Utau Community (actually, the whole vocal synth community) as a whole.

So...what are our options?
I have looked into many different services one way or another and as it currently stands, to my knowledge there is absolutely nothing quite like SoundCloud. It's a very strange (and unhealthy) mix of social and audio that makes it so easy to observe and discover like-content. You want to find Utau content? It basically will give you it.
At some point MixCloud was possibly an option but recently it's more for producers and not for the causal schmo who wants to upload some random audio.
EDIT: correction, they don't do individual tracks at all. only things like radio shows, DJ mixes, track lists, and podcasts.
But we do have Clyp as a possibility. It was originally just Tags in search and that was it, most of the community is vaguely acquainted with it. As of recent Clyp.it now supports public profiles which allow users to explore an individual's content all at once (while still allowing for private profiles like originally) and also has basic commenting. If content is properly tagged then it should be easy to find too.

What are your thoughts on SoundCloud's state? Thinking that maybe it could be a potential thing to talk about.
From how I see it, SoundCloud seems to be doing a horrible job managing itself within it's own means. According to my backwards, sleep deprived, napkin math they have something around 200 employees for a streaming service which can be considered quite high.
In my opinion, if Souncloud does go, Clyp would be a good place to look. Perhaps it could be for the better, to help potentially break up the social disparity and make people look around rather than stick into small groups. How it would stand, the community would no longer be able to live on the site hosting the audio. Instead maybe the community would use the audio site to host the content and end up discussing it elsewhere. Using that "elsewhere" to find more content.
 
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JVウタウ

Ruko's Ruffians
Defender of Defoko
SoundCloud has been a useful platform to me, and I'm sure it is very important to countless other UTAU users. If SoundCloud's demise eventually comes, it's true that the community would need to find a good place to store audio content.

But, to me, while it's true that SoundCloud is a mix of social and audio content that might distract... that is also part of SoundCloud's draw. It's not only an audio platform but also an audio social platform, and because of SoundCloud's discovery features UTAU users and fans can find new originals, covers, and even memes. Reposting and tags, plus SoundCloud's social atmosphere, gets works circulating and listeners able to interact with the content creator. Part of SoundCloud's purpose is being an audio community, not requiring another for the discussion of audio content. You could say that it is what sets YouTube apart from uploading video on a play-only server, or Instagram and tinypic.

I would hate to see a change in ideology, though. It might even be happening already, as evidenced by recent listener-focused (or, as some would say, producer-ignoring) developments such as the SoundCloud app overhaul. (Speaking of that, there is the relatively new SoundCloud Pulse app that allows account owners to check statistics and comments, though currently it has no upload function.) Discovery is SoundCloud's strength, but the people who create the content to be shared need to be paid attention to.

In case a disaster does happen to SoundCloud, I second Clyp being a viable alternative platform, with the tag system and, as you mentioned, public profiles now being available. It is true that a lot of people use Clyp for small WIPs and clips currently, but at least you can also say that the community, to an extent, has been acquainted with Clyp for some time, and therefore would recognize it.

The current financial state does not seem good on the outside. SoundCloud does insist that this "reflect(s)... a company in a strong growth stage," though without a better source of revenue it would, as you say, either have to die or change somewhere, and I hope it doesn't have to be that case.
 

cubialpha

Ruko's Ruffians
Defender of Defoko
So here's my prediction. We may not think about it, but SoundCloud is HUGE outside just the Vocaloid community, and many many big musicians have official pages there. I'm thinking it will be bought up by someone big, and the whole system will change drastically (very heavy copyright enforcement and ads). I absolutely see it taking the route of YouTube since its purchase by Google.

What happens after that, well... We can only hope it goes smoothly. I would really hope they learn from YouTube's mistakes.
 

JVウタウ

Ruko's Ruffians
Defender of Defoko
So here's my prediction. We may not think about it, but SoundCloud is HUGE outside just the Vocaloid community, and many many big musicians have official pages there. I'm thinking it will be bought up by someone big, and the whole system will change drastically (very heavy copyright enforcement and ads). I absolutely see it taking the route of YouTube since its purchase by Google.

What happens after that, well... We can only hope it goes smoothly. I would really hope they learn from YouTube's mistakes.

Same. YouTube is pretty successful but there still are people who complain about the changes.
 

Hentai

Technical Admin
Administrator
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Defender of Defoko
I could always make a platform, probably something BuddyPress & RTmedia powered (demo). Base plugin is free but the supplemental addons are murder. Something akin to the old UTAUOnline except I would probably want to open it up to Vocaloid, Sinsy, alter//ego, and other synths. Would also be murder on my server but I think I have the capacity to handle it after our most recent upgrades. Would probably wait until the final RIP of Soundcloud is confirmed before launching anything however. SC is pretty nice as it is.
 

na4a4a

Outwardly Opinionated and Harshly Critical
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gonna necro this because reasons.

Even if Hentai does do that and resurrect utauonline, it'd probably be best for the community to have options so we should still consider looking for other options. Since a single option would be kind of forced.
https://hearthis.at/ is one thing to look at.
I made an account to test it out and it's very much like soundcloud. The only restriction is that after 10,000 plays you are required to get a subscription. That being $33 a year.
And to be honest, that's pretty fair...The reason a lot of services like this die is because they make absolutely no money due to the free users. So something like a yearly subscription or advertisements is expected.

So what there is so far:
Clyp.it
HearThis.at
 
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cubialpha

Ruko's Ruffians
Defender of Defoko
Soundcloud must be feeling the pressure right now, they have started advertising and pushing for "Soundcloud Pro" more and more. Now it's on the top banner, the side bars, all over the iOS app, etc. I'm sure you all have noticed it, too.

This can't be a good sign.
 

pickko

Teto's Territory
Losing $44 million may be normal for SoundCloud considering its huge number of user. Take for example Spotify, which posted a net loss of US$59 million in 2011 due to the increase in staff costs and licensing fees and royalties to record companies. What's more, SoundCloud has way more users than Spotify. SoundCloud has 175 million monthly listeners while Spotify only has 75 million active users.

SoundCloud has recently been making deals with major labels like Sony and Universal and this may explain the reason why the operating cost for SoundCloud increases as it has to pay royalties. So what SoundCloud is going through now may be similar to what Spotify had faced in the past which is being pressured by major record label to make more money.

So SoundCloud, having to pay royalties to those major labels, will have to find new ways of making more money than what it is already doing. So far SoundCloud has two way making money:
  • First, charge its creator to be able to upload songs with additional benefits than its normal uploader
  • Second, the use of ads

So in order to have enough money to pay the royalties to major record label, SoundCloud needs to have a new way of making money. It will do so by having a subscription based model to target its end user. This subscription based model will allow end user to get access to songs from popular artists, ad-free streaming, and offline sync.

It seem unlikely that SoundCloud will go down anytime too. The game has just started for SoundCloud.
 

na4a4a

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So SoundCloud will probably live, just with many more advertisements.

The options mentioned thus far are Clyp, Tumblr, Hearthis*, and Chirbit.

A 10MB file limit should not be a huge issue as long as you upload with:
192kb/s mp3
160kb/s m4a/aac
Quality 4-5 ogg vorbis
80-128kb/s+ opus
--Do not use Audacity to encode or you will encounter a low quality output
--Uploading these instead of wav to places like tumblr can help avoid upload caps.
--If there is no upload cap then you should upload wav files as most services will transcoded anyways.

*Hearthis has a small yearly subscription once you bit a listens cap
 

bio

VocalSynth Enthusiast
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Defender of Defoko
I would stick with Clyp.it, its easier to use imo, you don't even have to create an account to use (well I can see how that's a bad thing), less ads, and you don't have a restriction on minutes.
 

na4a4a

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The one issue is how searching is tag based and not title based. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Which means users will need to make use of good tagging practices to get their content found.

But at the same time there are already more (Utau) users on Clyp which makes it a very strong contender.
 
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