Case study: what’s wrong with Soundcloud and what opportunity it misses on
I’ve been a Soundcloud user for more than 10 years now and I’ve been thinking about writing this for a while so here it goes.
To refresh your mind, Soundcloud was created in 2006 and Spotify in 2008.
Spotify has been experiencing crazy growth and turned into a Behemoth which armed Soundcloud, well the old version of Soundcloud that was sharing the same positioning: a platform for music and podcast streaming.
Soundcloud even nearly went bankrupt in 2017 before being saved by a 170 Million injection from investors and the hire of ex Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor which inflected a strategical turnaround investing in the tools for creators.
Kerry Trainor has recalled what Soundcloud is about: the first community of independent music creators and that has been a success to take the company back on track.
But on a listener perspective, I think Soundcloud’s product has many caveats and opportunities its missing on.
The essence of Soundcloud
A lot of people seem to compare Soundcloud to Spotify but they are fundamentally different. Soundcloud was made to enable anyone to publish their waiting-to-be-discovered audio content on the platform which explains why Soundcloud is mainly full of bedroom DJs, independent artists and why you can’t find all the famous artists you see on TV and listen to on the radio.
Being into electronic music, one particularity I experience is that Soundcloud is the home of a very large DJ community because they are able to publish their mixes which is not possible on Spotify. Soundcloud has even some special products like Soundcloud Pro.
Spotify on their side aims to become the worlds biggest music library in the world and therefore is more focused on mainstream content and relies on record labels catalogues. Their product is focused on being a music player and doesn’t have all the social features that Soundcloud has.
The categorization of content and users is wrong
First, the content. The particularity of Soundcloud compared to other platforms is that you can find different types of content: tracks, playlists but also mixes and podcast. The last two don’t have a dedicated layout so it’s really hard to distinguish what is what and the feed feels really messy.
Sometimes you start playing tracks in your feed to see what your favourites artists have released but you end up on a podcast or mix but you’re actually not in a mood at all for a mix, especially if it’s been recorded in a club or festival.
Soundcloud is a wonderful place where music listeners meet producers, DJs, labels, curators and magazines.
But Soundcloud users don’t have any specificity regarding their page and functionality while they are contributing to Soundcloud in a very different manner.
For example, I’m a simple consumer of content and I don’t produce any music but my personal page and features available are just the same than someone who’s producing music.
And if I one day decide to start producing music then I should be able to create my “artist” page and be able to manage my page independently from my listener page.
I believe every different user should have a special layout with special features: listeners, producers/DJs, magazines, curators and labels.
We could even have special pages for venues so that venues can be tagged in DJ mixes and we could see all mixes that have been recorded in a specific venue.
Same goes with events…producers/artists/DJs could be added to events so that their upcoming gigs are displayed and accessible from their page. Goodbye Gigatools….
All put together here is how the different pages tabs could look like :
Listeners: Reposts, Favorites Tracks, Favorites Mixes and Playlists.
Producers/DJs: Popular, Tracks, Mixes, Albums, Playlists, Reposts and Next gigs.
Magazines/Curators: Premieres, Playlists, Reposts and maybe “Latest posts” that could drive traffic to their posts on their websites.
Record labels: Reposts, Releases, Artists, Next gigs.
Venues: Next events, Mixes (recorded there), Artists (who played there and residents), Story, Location.
This will enhance the discovery of new artists from labels and venues pages.
If we merge this idea of different content and different users, tracks could have different meta-data like a record label to appear in a label page automatically. And using the same system than Medium, a track could specify a magazine/curator page to be premiered on when it’s uploaded!
Also, regarding mixes, we could specify the venue and event where it’s been recorded if applicable.
Disclaimer: I’ve taken this idea of better categorization very far and reading this you have to keep in mind that I have a usage of Soundcloud highly related to electronic music and how things work in that community. The usage I have of it might not be the norm and I’m only seeing the platform from my reality. It’s not excluded it could work for other genres like Rock music for example but for genres that don’t happen be mixed or have much events and venues, it doesn’t make that much sense.
The post-Facebook era
I might not have many fans here but here’s my feeling about how social networks are evolving and how it changed us.
When Facebook became available outside universities in 2006, it has progressively changed our online behaviours forever.
We are now wired to share everything about our lives, family holidays, what we are eating, watching, listening, thinking…
Facebook has now become a one-size-fits-all product and counts an enormous amount of features and we roughly use 10% of them.
Do you know what happens to products that try to satisfy everybody? They please nobody.
Initially, Facebook was meant to get friends closer online but we’ve seen algorithms pushing more and more ads, hiding content from friends we have abroad or from high school. We now only see content from people we interact with the most and they happen to be…the people you see the most IRL.
So what happens when I post the last gem of a track I found on Soundcloud on my feed? Nobody cares!
Why? Because Facebook shows it to a small number of your friends and if there are not enough reactions it doesn’t show it anymore. Knowing that only a small percentage of my friends on Facebook have the same music taste than me and only a small percentage of those are in conditions to listen to music when they see one my post, it’s not a surprise.
To overcome that problem I created a secret Facebook group called “Pandora” so my friends and I can share our latest crushs!
But this doesn’t solve the problem that we not always in conditions to listen to music when we are on Facebook.
Same goes with people who share their runs, hiking etc with Runtastic, Runkeeper or Strava, who cares?
How about people sharing their last DIY creation? Nobody cares.
So what’s my point here?
Well now that Facebook has changed our behaviours online, I believe people are looking to connect with people that share their passions and hobbies with a highly tailored experience, not a one-size-fits-all experience.
For example, Relive is an app for outdoor lovers, they count 6 million users. The product lets you track your tours when you go out hiking, skiing, cycling, running and creates a 3D video that you can share on social networks and with people that follow you in Relive: your friends that share the same passion.
Depop is a Vinted competitor with social features that lets you follow people that share a passion for second-hand clothing. They count 18 million users.
Must is a “Social network for movie hunters”, it lets you create collections of movies and TV shows. There’s a feed where you see what your friends new collections, what they want to watch or are watching.
I strongly believe this is becoming a trend and we’ll see more of those kinds of products that aim to bring communities that share the same passion and interests together.
It’s a huge opportunity that Soundcloud is somehow missing out.
Don’t get me wrong, social features have been the roots of the Soundcloud product and a precursor in a certain way.
But what happens when my friend Tony reposts a track on Soundcloud?
I never see it. Because it’s drawn into other tracks posted and reposted by artists, labels, curators, magazines which happen to post way more often.
To me, the feed is kind of broken and fails to connect friends on what tracks they discovered lately and enabling them to discover new stuff. That’s why I believe Soundcloud should differentiate producers from listeners and have different feeds.
In the same way, I think the feature that lets you send content to another Soundcloud user should be pushed forward (Dang Nguyen has written a great post that talks about this) and even improved to match the UX I’ve been proposing for Spotify in a different post.
In the next post, I will explain and propose new designs to overcome those problems.
A word on the Business Model
As discussed above, I think Kerry Trainor has done a wonderful job by providing the tools for creators to build their audience and career.
Even if I think marketing-wise, those offers could be explained more clearly and the UI/UX of the marketing/checkout website is not homogenous at all between Pro and Repost products.
But on a listener perspective, I don’t get the purpose of the Soundcloud Go+ product. It lets you access to top hits that you can’t listen to with a Go subscription.
What’s the point of having top hits on the Soundcloud platform?
Soundcloud is about getting creators closer to their audience. If I want to listen to top hits and mainstream content, I would make a better choice of getting a Spotify subscription where the catalogue is way bigger. To me, this is already a lost war and a waste of resources and energy.
I’d rather merge the two offers with : Offline mode, ad-free listening and high quality audio.
What could be the new opportunities?
Well, I think there’s a huge opportunity in catching value from events and ticketing.
By finding next events from a DJ page or a venue page, Soundcloud could either sign a partnership with ticketing service and get a commission or even build their own ticketing service: an all-in-one service for promoters, venue and festivals to market their events.
In the same way, they might be opportunities to monetize regarding magazine editors because they will be interested to convert people from that community to subscribers of their digital/paper magazine.
What’s next?
To sum up I believe there’s a path for Soundcloud to become a nice blend between a streaming platform and a social network to bring music fanatics of a genre together both online and offline.
As a disclaimer, I’d like to precise that I don’t work at Soundcloud and I don’t have all the data they have. My point of view here might be completely out of track from what they have been learning for 14 years now, but I felt this reflection was worth sharing for discussion.
In that way, I would be pleased to discuss your thoughts on that piece so don’t hesitate to comment or shoot me a message on Linkedin.
As said above, in a next post I will explore how these changes would look like in a UX perspective so hit the follow button to be notified!
