As a music producer I pay 79 EUR / year since 2011 because I enjoy having a practically unlimited storage space for my own productions, may it be a complete song or stems (individual instruments) that I share with musicians I collaborate with.
80% of the tracks on my account are private. I mostly use Soundcloud as a musical post-it system so I can easily listen to my productions in different settings (car, friend's hifi system, earphones etc.), share tracks with label in a "secure" fashion.
I was really saddened to see they introduced ads even for people who actually pay for their service, I felt literally betrayed and angry but fortunately it did not last long. However it leaves traces.
I still find it amazing that they did not introduce basic filters for the stream, like "just grab house mixes at least 45 minutes long"...
Anyway, I am still quite happy with the service even if I could do the same on my own dedicated server, minus the social network thing.
I just wish them good luck but I hope that their longevity will not be due to ads served even to subscribers...
Do you have backups of your tracks into case Soundcloud goes away?
EDIT: Its on my to do list to write a pipeline for Soundcloud for Archive Team this weekend. Just in case. That doesn't pickup private tracks though. Backup your stuff!!
At my company we have a bunch of content that's only archived on SoundCloud. The main barrier I've had to backing up original uploads (only available through the web interface) is the terrible reliability of all the AJAX calls. Even with browser automation, it requires a LOT of error-handling just to navigate between resources successfully.
It seems that all these microservices[1] are there for the sake of blogging about using microservices[2] as there haven't been any new significant new features delivered in years, and the whole application now seems to be delivered through AJAX calls.
Oh, I didn't know that. I ended up writing my own SoundcloudSync.py to keep a backup. Not very sophisticated but easy enough to run by hand whenever I upload something new.
Yes I have all the originals on my music computer, plus do regular backups of all my music projects to my dedicated server.
I'm not afraid to loose what I created. 8 years ago, I lost 200 tracks. When I realized it, I decided consciously to make it a good experience, no grief at all.
I found it to be a formidable opportunity to start fresh, change my process, change my habits and create more!
As a heavy user (but not uploader) I remain almost entirely unmonetised (for better and for worse). I'm fed almost no ads either on the web or app, and there is no premium plan for listening.
Not yet but nothing they charge for has been relevant to me yet as a consumer. I am launching a couple of podcasts in the next month though and want to embed audio on Twitter so will be doing so soon which is one reason I'm concerned at this news as nothing else is suitable IMHO. (I pay for lots of online services, but not if there's no product targeted at my use case.)
