Comments on post “The Upload”
Ryan Hoover
@rrhoover · Founder, Product Hunt
Nice find, @chrismessina. I love SoundCloud but find my following feed of questionable quality. Many artists I like repost music from their friends or genres I'm not really into.
Listening to my Upload now. 🎶
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Chris Messina
@chrismessina · 🏆 PH Community Member of the Year!
@rrhoover same with me. It's really hit or miss, and often feels spammy with short "preview" clips and other random stuff. I'm curious how good SoundCloud's algorithm will be though given the huge range in quality of stuff posted to SC compared w/ the highly curated/controlled content that Spotify has.
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Nick Nish
@nickjnish · Developer and Product Lover
@rrhoover @chrismessina I feel exactly the same way. Slowly saw my Soundcloud usage decline in the last year, but they have an unreal community of new artists! Similar to Twitter, because of the reverse-chronology style of their feed, Soundcloud has a huge opportunity to resurface the best content of the day/week/month, etc.
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Kirtane Chiron
@kirtanechiron · ✌️
@rrhoover @chrismessina ditto
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Bas Grasmayer
@basgras · MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE
@chrismessina @rrhoover Has always been quite good for the content on the Discover tab (https://soundcloud.com/discover)
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Adam Marx
@adammarx13 · CEO, Glipple, Inc.
@chrismessina @rrhoover TL;DR: Both of these points refer respectively to 2 important things to still consider in music: serendipity and user generated content.
In the case of the first one, re: Ryan's point, the serendipity comes partly from artists' reposting of their friends/other genres. True, it may not be an artist or someone you're initially interested in listening to, but it also provides the potential for stumbling into something knew that you never knew you might enjoy but really end up enjoying quite a bit. This is part of the power of music and serendipity; our tastes change, so sometimes the best "curation" aspect is one that involves very little curation at all, but gives a chance for us to sink our teeth into something new. That's exactly how bands like Dispatch found their audience.
Regarding the second point that Chris brings up, true there is a ton of garbage on SoundCloud as there is on other sites reliant on user generated content (Bandcamp, etc.). This unfortunately has a misnomer-quality, and gives independently created and distributed music a bad reputation. It promotes a conception that it's by default lower quality than mainstream, major label material. But this is untrue, and has less to do with the content itself than with the streaming systems. What I believe that Chris is getting at here is the need for UGC-reliant systems to impose a set of very reachable, but very direct standards. The material that ends up being uploaded is all of a quality befitting its respective genre, and therefore creates a fabric of serendipitous--but higher quality--content for consumption.
These two points, however, point indirectly to a third: an open system. The fact that Spotify's system is highly controlled and curated works in some aspects of music, but does little to foster true serendipity and invite in creators from the outside who perhaps create new types of music, covers, or mashups. Music eventually finds a way into an open system because the nature of art is to be shared and interact with the world; not contained and interact with only a small percentage of people. It's a very Ian Malcolm-Jurassic Park type of thing.
What SoundCloud has shown here is that music is still very much up for grabs, and the companies which start to explore this new open concept--and pair it with quality and serendipity--will be on the cutting edge of the next big trend in audio media.
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Chris Messina
@chrismessina · 🏆 PH Community Member of the Year!
@adammarx13 @rrhoover good points. Another solution to the problem might be to bake in more reputation or authority attributable to those who share high-quality, good content (good is of course subjective), but what I mean is stuff that's not just 30 sec samples of tracks that you have to go buy somewhere else. I get that the SoundCloud platform can be used for many things, including promotion — but right now SoundCloud Go isn't sufficiently aligned with the creator ecosystem (it seems) to foster the kind of serendipitous discovery of high quality content that you're talking about. This is further exasperated by the way that SoundCloud is focused on "sounds", rather than music, so people also share spoken word content like podcasts, which makes it harder to nail down what kind of content should be included in any kind of discovery experience, if it's to be inclusive of what's actually available on SoundCloud.
Anyways, all that said, my first Upload playlist was pretty good and gave me a reason to come back, just like Discover Weekly and Fresh Finds gets me back to Spotify.
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Adam Marx
@adammarx13 · CEO, Glipple, Inc.
@chrismessina @rrhoover Exactly one of my other thoughts too Chris. The 30-second clip is a major issue for me. I understand that Spotify really has no way around it (it's a licensing requirement based on their deals with the major labels), but it's really a turn-off, especially when the music is accessible on other platforms--one of the main reasons I'm a big proponent of an open system for music.
Re: my aforementioned serendipity: again I agree. Soundcloud seems to have traded priorities in my opinion, moving from prioritizing the creators (independents) to prioritizing the general consumers (many of whom consume mainstream material). But as I see it, that's led to a muddling of a massive amount of information on the site that's very difficult to wade through, especially without any real set of standards. This connects with your point of their focus on "sounds" ironically exasperating their seeming lack of focus. Were they to pull back on focus solely on independently-uploaded material (music, podcasts, etc.), I think it would be more alluring to creators like it was years ago. But that itself poses its own challenges which are for another time.
Interesting viewpoints. DM me sometime and we can discuss this more!
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