SC had everything. But it lost its mind, then money and now the service will die. Let\u2019s face it, it died a while ago.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s something that just doesn\u2019t add up: startups need a return on investment immediately while music is a very, very long term game. SC didn\u2019t execute well even though timing was perfect. For its successors, here\u2019s a few points:<\/p>\n
– Don\u2019t make it about streaming<\/strong><\/p>\n Bandcamp has been fantastic about this. Don\u2019t make it about consuming music like switching channels on a TV or running water at the faucet. Make it like it\u2019s better to download and listen, because it is. Buy an album, download it and listen to it. In the beginning I had way more downloads on SC than streams. It changed so rapidly \u2013like within a month, everyone switched to streaming- that I always was suspicious about it. Streaming sucks, listening on phone speakers suck, don\u2019t do that. People will stream, no need to push them.<\/p>\n – Don\u2019t invite major artists and\/or labels<\/strong><\/p>\n They take all the oxygen of artists like us who pay for your service. And those invite major labels to put pressure on you. That might make you feel good, make you feel legit but it\u2019s not good at all in the end.<\/p>\n – Don\u2019t do anything social<\/strong><\/p>\n All the social tools destroyed SC. People immediately abuse those tools to spam every channel they can and discovery goes down. Just make it about music and big cover art. Sharing is done everywhere else with a link. Be the audio backbone of the future and stay this way.<\/p>\n – Don\u2019t do meaningless stats<\/strong><\/p>\n Advanced statistics are bad. They are a rabbit hole and unhealthy. How many times someone listened to my song doesn\u2019t matter, what matters is if that listener stays around, spreads the word and buys my shit. That\u2019s all that matters.<\/p>\n – Have the best embed player of all time<\/strong><\/p>\n Make it ultra fast. The web sucks, FB sucks, Twitter sucks. They all have so many scripts and bullshit stuff going on, the embed player needs to load at the speed of light. No need for fancy waveform or spectrogram no one cares about that. Copy Bandcamp\u2019s and add a volume slider, you\u2019ll thank me later.<\/p>\n Instaud.io<\/a> and Octave.is<\/a> are alternative worth exploring. RIP SoundCloud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" SC had everything. But it lost its mind, then money and now the service will die. Let\u2019s face it, it died a while ago. There\u2019s something that just doesn\u2019t add up: startups need a return on investment immediately while music is a very, very long term game. SC didn\u2019t execute well even though timing was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2372"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2372"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2373,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2372\/revisions\/2373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}