![]() ![]() Unfortunately, when your target customer is a young, independent musician, the pricing could be a significant barrier to entry. Less compelling content means fewer people who want to listen to it. On the creator side, SoundCloud offers hosting plans that range from free (three hours of hosted audio) to $15 a month (unlimited). It’s not that SoundCloud didn’t try to make money. Not just wild, but sometimes legally dicey: Hip-hop samples and DJ remixes pose copyright problems for the music industry, which is already famously convoluted when it comes to licensing and copyright. ![]() Supporting often wild platforms with ad sales doesn’t seem to cut it. Creativity can often breed a kind of forbidding insularity that stunts growth. The platforms that have often been the most effective at generating lasting digital culture - images, ideas, videos, memes - have often struggled to find a sustainable business model. We’ve written before about how difficult it can be to create sustainable business models off of creative platforms. You might wonder why a hugely popular, culturally important service is failing, but like everything, it comes down to money: SoundCloud has never really figured out how to extract money from its users, both creators and consumers. It’s for anyone, with a lower barrier to entering, uploading, sharing, and commenting than any other music service. In important ways, the service is the uncontested most popular music platform, in a very literal sense of popular. But without SoundCloud, it’s unclear what would happen to SoundCloud rap, which has taken advantage of the platform’s bare-bones ease of use and free hand. SoundCloud rap has gotten important enough for the New York Times to call it “the most vital and disruptive new movement in hip-hop” in a report just last month. Just as importantly, the website’s demise would mean the end of a scene: SoundCloud is the birthplace of its own genre and musical community, a DIY branch of hip-hop so closely identified with the website that most people call it SoundCloud rap. ![]() But SoundCloud hosts music, and its disappearance would mean the simultaneous disappearance of hundreds of thousands of hours of audio - music, podcasts, radio shows, random gobbledygook, all stored on SoundCloud’s no-doubt expensive servers. It’s one thing if the end of SoundCloud simply meant the discontinuation of one way to listen to music - there are plenty of other ways to stream audio online, including YouTube itself. (SoundCloud disputed the figure, telling the site it was “fully funded into Q4” and speaking with investors.) Yesterday, TechCrunch reported that in an all-hands meeting this month concerning layoffs that affected 40 percent of the company’s staff, management revealed that the site only had enough runway left to get them to Q4 of this year. SoundCloud - the popular music-and-podcast service that is the closest thing on the internet to a YouTube for audio - appears to be in dire straits. Photo: Saner Gulsoken/Getty Images/iStockphoto ![]()
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