about soundcloud

i must be using it wrong.

Advertising is not marketing. All things need to market.

okay?

i must be using it wrong.

How many people are you following? Do you trust what they like?

Advertising is not marketing. All things need to market.

soundcloud does this already, no words or links needed

I still don't believe the existing options are quite there yet.

and when it gets to this utopia people will go somewhere less intrusive again

just because you cant see something doesnt meant its not there

Advertising is not marketing. All things need to market.

soundcloud does this already, no words or links needed

I totally agree.

You're agreeing with your own posts Sicko?

Can you tell me about the success you've had marketing your own music without words or links please?

one thing about soundcloud is that it seems there's a real community there for electronic music, but i feel bad for, say, singer-songwriter friends who have a solid following irl but nothing on sc.

Anything I put on soundcloud get played or not played by whoever follows

This Patrick Specke mix is real good by the way, preferred the other mix on there but definitely going to be buying some of the records on there

I never tag

How? The new (well, not so new now) layout demands it. I def prefer not to tag.

Havent uploaded since last year - you cant just tag with some dots?

Why is tagging bad? I tag on tumblr so I can find stuff again -- is it different on soundcloud?

Just a personal preference - nothing wrong with it

Why do you prefer not to tag? Bc of spamming?

tangentially because of spamming...but there is nothing I want to tag it with, there are no tags I want to search for. It seems a quick route to finding bad music

If tomorrow there was a great new tag and all was great under this tag then the day after soundcloud would have 1000x more things with that tag but if you listened to those things you would decide it was time for a day of silence instead

That makes sense. I just use it as a place to upload audio files, but it's not really doing anything for me so I guess I'm just cultivating a group of spam friends who I block immediately after they reach out to me.

soundcloud is actually a garbage site, right? why do ppl like it so much?

is there a better place to post tracks? like i said above, that's the only thing it has been useful for ime. i have made 0 friends via my postings but i didn't really expect to.

post and host, i mean

I use soundcloud to post samples and recordings for projects that aren't super active. it is useful in that you can post long tracks, which is good for the more "avant-classical" stuff I do. But it's function for me is mostly booking and promo. I use bandcamp for the projects that are more "band-like" in terms of having songs and releasing "product"

it's been the most important thing for me as far as connecting with people (except for Twitter i guess), and gathering/presenting a body of work.

also private tracks are pretty great for passing demos back & forth and promos. and i like all the podcasts and radio shows being archived there. i like Soundcloud, ok?

Yeah, in the musical sphere, Soundcloud is probably the closest thing to the dream of what the Internet was supposed to be. What's the issue with it? Not enough ads?

I mainly use soundcloud to follow people I follow in other areas of the internets to see what songs they're liking or sharing. Also, it's great for downloading mp3s (128kbps, sadly) of songs you either can't get elsewhere or don't want to buy—somewhat nefariously.

Sund4r - Usability; the "ordering" of things seems weird to me re: track hierarchy w/in artists' pages. I know a lot of people who have stuff on there and get the hits (for what that's worth... which is likely close to zero) but it doesn't have the immediate monetization option of, say, bandcamp. like, yeah it may be the platonic ideal of music on the web but what's the point of that if you can't live off it?

the "ordering" of things seems weird to me re: track hierarchy w/in artists' pages

you can put whatever you want in the first five tracks to highlight things, after that it's chronological.

i like Bandcamp and its focus on selling/downloading, but it feels more sterile and walled-off than Soundcloud. it feels built for albums, where SC is better for singles.

what's the point of that if you can't live off it?

I hope this isn't the criteria

Yeah, that's judging it as something it was never meant to be. There are other ways to sell things if that's what you want to do.

<i>what's the point of that if you can't live off it?

I hope this isn't the criteria

― ogmor, Wednesday, April 29, 2015 1:38 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink</i>

really poorly worded by me. the thought was more like: bandcamp -- put it up for free or put it up so that you can have it be played but not DL-able. it's the same result in a space where the OPTION of having it go up for $ (or not!) exists rather than SC being a depository for all your free music n shit.

<i>Yeah, that's judging it as something it was never meant to be.

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Wednesday, April 29, 2015 3:12 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink</i>

but if SC is as it's meant to be then what is the point? then it's just a music-based social media platform and we might as well be sending shit back n forth on facebook or whatever rather than have a stand alone site that (i still say...) is pretty clunky?

a friend of mine makes a decent living @ music IRL and has both bandcamps and soundclouds but it would seem to me that even if you were interested in giving away your music you'd want to drive traffic to one site that gives you the option to monetize rather than have a cloud of songs. SC seems more like a "content" site vs one that would be useful to the artist.

am I compleeeeeetely off base and alone on this?

Depends on who you are? There is literally no way for me to even imagine monetizing my musical efforts -- that's not the point. If I can get ppl to listen to it, that's great. If they have something nice to say, better. Beyond that I just want to be allowed to exist. Soundcloud allows me to do that. I think focusing on monetizing is too myopic to include all potential participants.

No way is SC clunkier than FB!

even if you were interested in giving away your music you'd want to drive traffic to one site that gives you the option to monetize rather than have a cloud of songs

that assumes that you already have traffic somewhere else and you can direct it, which is pretty much a requirement with bandcamp. with soundcloud there's at least more of a potential to get some traction through their social mechanisms (likes/followers). and it feels like people are more like to share and click on sc embeds than bandcamp, probably because they're prettier.

we might as well be sending shit back n forth on facebook

facebook doesn't have a method to upload streaming audio that i know of, and also is the devil.

Bandcamp is great but also very old-school music business, almost anti-internet, in some ways. It is more elegant than Soundcloud EXCEPT FOR (as previously noted) when you just want to put up a song here and a song there, where BC forces you to put them into ALBUMS/RELEASES which creates this weird formalization of something that you might just want to throw out there to share and get a reaction. I bet that Bandcamp's core artist base is generally older than that on SC, though that might just be stereotyping how young people consume music.

No way is SC clunkier than FB!

And I mean, it's devoted to music. You're not sorting through people's pictures of their kids, ads, political opinions, birthdays, ads, etc when you want to listen to the artists you follow.

soundcloud has your classic organic rhizome structure of social connections so it's browsable in a way the comparatively officious bandcamp isn't

also dj sets and podcasts and comments

soundcloud has great content. exclusive mixes, unreleased tracks, etc. if you don't find it useful, you probably just have shit taste. And the ui is fine.
Facebook is for losers and advertisers.

But I guess soundcloud is "garbage" because it doesn't charge for things. Eughhhhh..

Is there a way to find out what I listened to on soundcloud yesterday while not logged in? The player moves on to "related tracks" at the end of the track you listen to but they don't get added to browser history and there's no obvious history list on the site for non-logged-in users.

I heard a great track on a mix and went back to the mix I thought I was listening to and the great track isn't there any more so it must have come up after that mix finished, but the list of related tracks has changed too, as have the search results for my original search term, so neither of those is bringing up anything which looks right - mostly single tracks rather than mixes.

I guess some people pine for the old days of auditory "missed connections" in these days of listening to Spotify instead of radio and having the Shazam app in yr pocket at the supermarket etc but hey, seems I found a way to get one via new technology. I'll probably never know what it was except that it was approx 31 minutes into whatever I was listening to which wasn't what I thought I was listening to.

hurrah, found a soundcloud log file in sqlite format in Chrome's "local storage" folder, signed up for the soundcloud API and fed the track IDs in to get titles (possibly not an approved use of the API), was eventually reunited with the mix in question

you may laugh at me for being easily impressed now but the track was Philip Glass - The Geometry of Circles and I should probably have known what it was because I've seen the video before

a successful afternoon at work! (umm)

please continue talking about being recording artists who use soundcloud, sorry for my dorky interruption but this was #1 thread with soundcloud in title

What's going on at the moment?

Seeing lots of posts on FB and Twitter about people having their accounts closed (most of which were pro accounts hosting their own mixes and edits etc)

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/80456/20150831/soundcloud-sued-for-copyright-infringement.htm

and most of the tracks getting pulled are remixes or mixes that contain recordings owned by Sony, correct? i've also heard that there's a 'three strikes' policy as far as shutting down accounts that posted this flagged content (which is super dumb, since apparently it's retroactive and people have had this stuff up for years in some cases).

i know the backlash is real and some people are leaving soundcloud on principle, but i'm not ready to let go. most of what i post & listen to there is original music, not dj mixes or remixes, and i haven't had any issue with my mixes either.

Soundcloud is still good for me too, but i'm finding more things at Mixcloud these days. If Mixcloud would just fix their buggy app, I'd be happy there.

the problem with soundcloud is that they don't pay their PRS fees, which is pretty morally indefensible afaict

http://i57.tinypic.com/x3cw1i.jpg

I was just vibing on the artwork for this funky track when a full screen ad popped up. turn off automatic updating quick!

otm. need to move over to mixcloud soon.

soundcloud engagement is continuously dwindling away but i'm not sure mixcloud is picking up any of the slack.

personally speaking, all the listens i have 'lost' on my label soundcloud have simply transferred to my bandcamp, though of course that is no use for mixes etc.

Mixcloud has it’s own set of problems IMO, not least the inability of rewinding if you don’t have a subscription.

mixcloud and bandcamp do two different jobs, and soundcloud tried unsuccessfully to do both, I have had uploads rejected from mixcloud for being too short, "but that's literally every recording from 1860" I said, they didn't seem to know what to say to that.