Soundcloud Sinking?

There was a rather large round of layoffs at Soundcloud recently that left 40% of their staff jobless. According to this TechCrunch piece it was a real shitshow, with very little warning from management. There's speculation that the company has funding to last until Q4 of 2017 but maybe not much beyond that. The founders are doing damage control assuring everyone that Soundcloud isn't going anywhere but it does beg the question - what if it did?

I think most people use Soundcloud as a sampling tool. You encounter a song or an embed here and there to introduce yourself to an artist, eventually leading you back to a music streaming platform to hear the whole thing. But there's an enormous world of remixes, DJ sets, podcasts and interesting compositions on there. Personally, I have hours of Liked content that runs a wide gamut of styles and I'd hate to see that go away. If you've not given it a chance, it honestly is a great platform for music discovery.

That being said, they're doubling down on their Go+ subscription offering but I know exactly zero people that partake in it, myself included. I'm not clear on what the solution is there to make it more appealing but it's worth noting that it's part of the struggle.

From the creator perspective, services like DistroKid make it extremely easy (and cheap) to get your music on all of the streaming platforms nearly instantly and you actually get royalty payments. Maybe they are tiny but at least it's money coming in. I have almost every album from the yk Records catalog up on Soundcloud and I've never seen a dime. The flip side to that is that full concerts and bizarre remixes pop up from time to time, giving me fuel for the promotional fire that I would never have otherwise.

I don't have the magic bullet for how Soundcloud can solve their woes but I've heard they have been in trouble for some time. This round of firing just confirms those rumors, even if they do end up sticking around for many years. I find their place in the music landscape a fascinating one and I'm all for waxing on speculation of what's next for them.