It's amazing how SoundCloud had "everything" and they threw away. They had the unique Indy artists, they had the DJs and music producers, and they opted to move to compete with Spotify on a money loosing bet, without putting the effort to build the Player in at least every single platform supported.
They did even more harm to themselves by blocking open source players that were doing "their work for free".
If there is one big mistake they did early on was to block API access. The other one was to bet on "record labels contract" rather then becoming the source for Originals.
There is nothing in the world that is as good as soundcloud was in 2012. It wasn’t scalable at that time, but it was an incredible melting pot of discoverability. I used to spend a lot of time on a site called CitySounds (it no longer exists) that was a geofenced soundcloud firehose. It allowed me to listen to the latest music from bedroom DJs in Sao Paulo or a live polka band from Vienna or a Russian children’s recital. Most of it was garbage, but it was diverse and interesting garbage, and that made it compelling to me. At the time, I ran a radio show, and being able to connect with a high school kid in Italy who was making cool hip hop beats was a way more meaningful human experience than playing another Pitbull track. And I think our listeners appreciated it too.
It was as close as the world could practically get to copy-left, remix culture, and they threw it away because the founders lacked guts or vision or both, and the company was taken over by people who believe in a homogenized distribution model. It hurts my soul that we don’t have tools like old soundcloud - with the exception of last.fm, which keeps holding on. Last year, I would have said that bandcamp is carrying the torch, but I don’t think that’s true any more… perhaps the fediverse has an opportunity to step in here… perhaps we just need a new crop of founders who believe in a world full of diverse musical culture.
Edit: I'll also add that the world lost an amazing tool when Echonest was bought. It would have been so cool to see that product blossom into a platform for general purpose music production and discovery. But instead, we get access to a nerfed version locked behind Spotify's API
By 2014 it wasn't great though, as too many people were using it as a "link dump" for whatever music they were making, because they all heard that SoundCloud was great for getting discovered.
> There is nothing in the world that is as good as soundcloud was in 2012.
Around 2009-2010 the local scene was thriving with netlabels. Most of those netlabels were just a static HTML page with a list of releases, a ZIP file and an album cover. If you ended up at some event, you'd discover the netlabel and you'd look at their releases on their webpage. Soundcloud came at just the right time for me to become the Web 2.0 equivalent of the indie music scene. You'd discover an artist at some event, or via a netlabel release, and then find out what else they were doing and just keep up with them. If you were a musician it was just too convenient.
> It was as close as the world could practically get to copy-left, remix culture, and they threw it away because the founders lacked guts or vision or both
This is exactly what was happening locally. A few of those netlabels had releases under creative commons licenses, with artists encouraging people to remix their tracks, offering up stems for download and the whole scene thrived on some really neat remixes, which usually ended up on Soundcloud and you ended up discovering that remixer's original work in the process.
I think the tide turned when everyone started to just dump everything on soundcloud. At some point it became so popular that DJ mixes started to dominate feeds, people just started dumping other people's work on there and then not-quite-so-indie labels started using it for promotion. It was a matter of time before the rights holder collection agencies started smelling blood in the water and the first articles of "soundcloud is not paying royalties" appeared.
It's around that time that Soundcloud just became less and less useful to me. The local netlabels and indie scene ended up using Soundcloud less, opting for Twitter and other social media for promotion while releasing on Bandcamp. People who used to be very active there just reposted other people's releases until those fizzled out too. Over the course of a year or two it went from the place to discover exciting new music to the place nobody paid attention to.
> perhaps the fediverse has an opportunity to step in here… perhaps we just need a new crop of founders who believe in a world full of diverse musical culture
I honestly think it was lightning in a bottle, the right thing at the right time. The once diverse radio landscape had been dying for a while, with each station sounding the same and no longer catering to various subcultures, which often weren't very advertiser friendly. The variety of record stores were disappearing in favor of online distribution leaving only the really big chains who rarely bothered with promoting the new and unknown unless it came from a major label. With the record labels railing against online distribution at the time and various well known artists going off and directly releasing their music online, few really wanted to have anything to do with traditional labels.
I think the success of the local netlabels at the time came from all that which in turn at least locally fed into soundcloud being the missing link. I don't think you can really recreate all that, certainly not the momentum the copyleft licenses had. Adding the fediverse to it feels like just adding an extra set of hoops to jump through for discoverability.
With the Bandcamp situation I do feel it's time for something new and exciting, but it will coast on inertia for a while like Soundcloud did before becoming a shadow of its former self.
All these web companies ran on gatekeeping their data to employ frontend teams. They look even more valuable to the financiers seeking to keep the aggregate busy so they don’t have time to focus on the expropriation of their labor and deflation of their buying power.
But it’s a terrible long term strategy as it cuts off the group who would pay for API access only. But also a community of frontend first users who don’t care about APIs but design and functionality that works for them, means frontend first users jump to the next company with a frontend. If there was an API fee and key, and open frontends of various styles, Sooundcloud wins.
There are API only streamers out there but they tend to focus on serving big tech. Apple I know specifies quality levels but actually passes some streaming requests along to wholesaler backends that deal with all the API and licensing crap for them.
They did even more harm to themselves by blocking open source players that were doing "their work for free".
If there is one big mistake they did early on was to block API access. The other one was to bet on "record labels contract" rather then becoming the source for Originals.