I hope SoundCloud manages to hang on somehow. I've found it much better for music discovery then I have Spotify, mainly because I've really diligent in curating my list of who I follow and as a result, each day when I open my stream, I'll get a a few hours of new and unusual electronica sets to listen to.
Without SoundCloud I never would have found genres like 170 Drum'n'Bass or Dark Disco. With Spotify, I'll just get... the Red Hot Chilli Peppers or Foo Fighters. Both bands that are somehow in the centre of the Venn diagram of musical taste.
The only thing that's come close to this is YouTube's recommendations. Somehow the YouTube algorithm has decided that I need to be shown weird and wonderful full length albums of Japanese funk and jazz from the 80s. When I read the comments on the videos, they're inevitably from other people that are equally bewildered about why they got recommended the album too.
> With Spotify, I'll just get... the Red Hot Chilli Peppers or Foo Fighters
Are you sure you made good use of it? When I first got on, I’d go on the indie music playlists and get excellent stuff. After about 4 months, the “good stuff” tapped out and now I get very gen Z sounding indie. Or if I look for 90s indie I get……..the breeders sigh.
I was being facetious haha. Spotify will sometimes throw up some good recommendations but the engine seems firmly in the camp of giving me more music that sounds the same as what I'm listening to.
A good example is I might listen to some Depeche Mode. Now, because I listen to Depeche Mode, that doesn't mean I want to listen to more stuff like it from the 80s. However, Spotify will quite happily throw up Erasure, The Cure etc as follow ups.
What I want is stuff with a vibe that's like Depeche Mode but can be in totally different genres. From that era I'd say Sisters of Mercy were closer in vibe but the music isn't as electronica based. Or if I wanted something modern in the same vein, Curses would be similar fit.
I guess Spotify is paying attention to this, but rather than using what is in the same playlist as a signal for shared taste, pay attention to what song someone intentionally plays after the song they're on.
Not surprised given the climate and considering how mediocre of a platform SoundCloud is. I showed my friends back in 2011, we all thought it was a really cool way to share music. We played in a band together so it was a nice way to share rough tracks, still is.
But Streaming is now dominant for music playback. It’s easier than ever for artists to publish themselves on Spotify and let’s not forget the 10 other SoundCloud-like platforms.
What does the SoundCloud dev team even do, db administration, Recommendation ML, making sure iOS SoundCloud syncs with the webApp? These services are all getting outsourced.
SoundCloud belongs to the 2000s era of start up trends. “Let’s share things with other people online and connect with each other” Whatever the latter meant.
I read someone talk about how Facebook belongs to the old school of relational graph based social networking whereas TikTok has this ML user driven approach. SoundCloud feels like a graph, people don’t traverse anymore.
Not arguing the lack of progress on the platform, but I think usage varies depending on type of music. I use SoundCloud daily still, their stream function where I’m checking latest posts from artists and labels I follow. I listen to a lot of electronic music, and I listen to dj sets on sound cloud that aren’t posted elsewhere. I rely on it for new dj sets, and they’re still the best for that IMO.
I guess it doesn’t help my perspective that I’m heavily into 90s indie rock.
Cloud rap wasn’t coined because the platform was a failure that’s for sure. I think the future of SoundCloud looks more focused on hip hop, EDM, and types of music that are often produced more consistently than one album at a time. But albums are an archaic concept, maybe all music will move towards more frequent syndication.
I just hope they don’t end up like MySpace, whatever it is that they do.
Spotify can not and will not ever offer DJ sets. SoundCloud is amazing for DJ sets.
Some artists offer their live sets on YouTube, and some artists stream on twitch, but nearly every set gets put on SoundCloud. The only other similar offering I can think of is MixCloud which never got off the ground in a similar way.
SoundCloud also similarly excels in allowing remixes without the red tape. I never had any goals of becoming a famous artist, but I did enjoy making some songs back in college. I even got good enough to have a few songs played in clubs. But they were all remixes of very famous songs that I never would have gotten clearance for or would have been impossible expensive for a student.
Huge artists like Jay-Z have talked about amazing songs they've had to leave unreleased due to in ability to get sample clearance. I attribute not really knowing or liking The Beatles very much because their music is avoided like the plague because they almost never get clearance to sample their music.
Without SoundCloud I never would have found genres like 170 Drum'n'Bass or Dark Disco. With Spotify, I'll just get... the Red Hot Chilli Peppers or Foo Fighters. Both bands that are somehow in the centre of the Venn diagram of musical taste.
The only thing that's come close to this is YouTube's recommendations. Somehow the YouTube algorithm has decided that I need to be shown weird and wonderful full length albums of Japanese funk and jazz from the 80s. When I read the comments on the videos, they're inevitably from other people that are equally bewildered about why they got recommended the album too.