SoundCloud is About to Make It’s Worst Mistake Ever
This may sound like a clickbait title but I truly believe that on August 22nd, SoundCloud will no longer be the go-to service for showing off your musical talent. This is the email I received regarding the situation:
Hey [removed],
We’re constantly looking for ways to make it easier for creators to share their work and connect with new fans. As well as adding new features and updates, we review existing features to see if they’re still beneficial to the community.
As we dug into the best ways for curators to connect with artists and fans, we found that Groups aren’t working as well as reposts, and curated playlists.
With that in mind, we’ve decided to phase out Groups on Monday, August 22nd to make room for future updates.
Until then, you can collect, like or repost the content you would like to save, and connect with your fellow Group members.
As a Group moderator, we understand the following you’ve built by moderating submissions to your Groups — we suggest to keep that following going by creating a profile to curate. You can use Reposts and Playlists to share suitable tracks, and accept submissions via Messages.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on how we can continue to improve your experience on SoundCloud. Send your ideas and feedback by replying directly to this email.
Many of the justifications SoundCloud uses to terminate groups are quite poor and many have questioned their true motives for the change.
SoundCloud claims that groups are ineffective in growing an audience
On the contrary, groups are one of the few remaining ways to grow an audience if the music you create isn’t mainstream. I can personally confirm this, as my audience growth has been almost exclusively through groups, rather than curated playlists, reposts or other methods. I have tried these, but there simply isn’t an audience large enough for these methods to work.
There is no other way to find new music and small artists than through groups. Doing a simple search for any form of music will reveal the most played tracks, commonly not even in the style searched for. By phasing out groups, SoundCloud will effectively phase out small artists, the platform it built itself upon.
Alternative proposed solutions are terrible
Let me quote one more time what SoundCloud recommended I, as a group moderator, do:
As a Group moderator, we understand the following you’ve built by moderating submissions to your Groups — we suggest to keep that following going by creating a profile to curate. You can use Reposts and Playlists to share suitable tracks, and accept submissions via Messages.
What they have proposed, is to create a second user profile to be used as a type of moderated groups. The only problem being that a group user profile is almost indistinguishable from an actual user profile. They suggest saturating the user base with profiles that simply repost other people’s work. They are literally (in the most literal sense) suggesting that we create bot accounts. These are accounts with a sole purpose to repost as many works as quickly as possible in order to gain followers. They are actively encouraging users to do something that copies spam and bot accounts, while at the same time working very hard to stamp them out.
SoundCloud knows how much outrage this will cause
I cannot prove this empirically, but all behaviour seems to suggest either the anticipated outrage or astronomical stupidity. SoundCloud has an blog section where they routinely announce new features and updates to their platform. This update was issued as a mass email to only group moderators. They did not provide any official platform for users to voice their concerns and this update will come as a huge, unexpected surprise to the vast majority of it’s userbase. I’ll let you, the reader, make a decision on why this was the case.
Official defence of the decision is weak
Once this thread got enough traction, an official response was issued, as quoted below:
Hey, this is Jami from SoundCloud. I work on the Creators team.
This was a tough decision for us. We tried a few times to improve Groups, but struggled with the way it was originally built, and often had to prioritize other features over Groups (we’re still quite a small team!).
In all honesty, Groups don’t perform well as we’ve not been able to invest in them. They were designed at a time when SoundCloud was much smaller, but now that the platform is used by more people they’re straining under the load, and often cause platform-wide instability.
Over the last few years, we’ve invested in enabling listeners and curators to share the music that they discover and love, and recommendation tools that help unearth music from both established and lesser-known creators — all of which have helped amplify creators further — but there is a clear gap for artists who are getting started, and are trying to get their music out there. We’re aware of this gap, and are exploring ways to help creators find their community and share their tracks, without listeners and curators becoming overwhelmed with incoming tracks.
Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to fill this gap fast enough, and maintaining Groups in their current state is making it harder for us to invest in new tools better suited to SoundCloud today.
We’ve seen some success with creators sharing their tracks to people they think will like them via messages, but know that the lack of messages on mobile also limits this.
It’s hard to stop working on something in order to avoid spreading ourselves too thinly, especially when a lot of people really like this feature. I hope this provides a bit more background to the decision, and doesn’t hurt your ability to connect with like-minded musicians and share your tracks too much.
We’re taking all your feedback into account, and I hope we can find a way to improve upon things soon.
If it is true that groups are causing instability, there are many ways to reduce the load without terminating the feature completely. For those unaware, a user can post their work to a maximum of 75 groups at one time, reducing this could significantly reduce load as the team works on better ways to gain exposure to smaller artists. As one user described it, “Groups’ is like an index, you don’t throw away an index.”
Users on soundcloudcommunity, reddit and many other platforms have stated that with the termination of this feature, they will terminate their SoundCloud Pro accounts, opting instead for the free version with less features. SoundCloud is not doing well financially, and this decision it seems will just make things worse.
SoundCloud is trying to become something it’s not
The introduction and termination of many features suggest that SoundCloud is trying to compete with Spotify and Apple Music. The problem is Spotify and Apple Music already exist, and are dominating the market to an extent that makes the barriers of entry extremely high, even to a popular service like SoundCloud. Perhaps this will benefit them financially in the future, but for the moment it seems they have not found a solution to their woes and eliminating groups is just a temporary fix to a much bigger systematic issue.
Meanwhile there are other services that are quickly becoming popular with small artists, imitating SoundCloud and improving on it’s core features. hearthis.at seems to be getting it right and many long time SoundCloud users, including myself, are seeing this service as a strong alternative. Only the future will reveal the fate of SoundCloud as we know it.
I make music and will continue to do so. Where it can be heard may change.
