Wavesurfer Hello, SoundCloud Goodbye.
rudigermeyer.com/words/wavesurfing
.@SoundCloud WTF! What’s with the ugly banner blocking off the waveform like a crime scene?
SoundCloud – Part Three: Exit Strategies
I recently wrote about (slowly) making the transition to hosting all my audio on my own site. That’s in principle simple enough – there aren’t any great technical hurdles. It’s more a question of getting round to doing it.
One thing I will miss though, is the social aspect. SoundCloud remains a good way of keeping track of some of the people creating the far-from-mainstream music that I’m interested in. I’m not so much looking for an alternative SoundCloud as a way of keeping those contacts alive.
The trouble with SoundCloud:
And then:
- SoundCloud Signs With Sony, Now Has Deals With Big Three
- Soundcloud Signs Deal W/ Sony. Will Charge Users $10 a Month to Use the Platform
And where does that leave us?
SoundCloud started as a service by musicians, for musicians. As such it served a valuable role. It also took on a social aspect – it was a place for communities. Now, with everything ending up as a streaming service, the composers and musicians with Pro accounts find themselves in a strange position. As Dave Wiskus of the band Airplane Mode explains: “So not only are you getting our music for free and paying us nothing, we’re actually paying you to take it.”
With SoundCloud stretching so far from its roots, many are beginning to consider exit strategies – but perhaps that’s for another post.
I first considered no longer making use of SoundCloud almost two years ago. At the time I shifted to using self-hosted stats for my website (with Piwik), and it bothered me that as soon as I embedded something from SoundCloud (or Vimeo for that matter), a whole lot of tracking came along to the party. I began to see the charm of simply using the HTML5 audio element.*
I haven’t completely made that transition yet. I still have about ten hours of audio up there – a lot of it is material used to share with musicians when preparing pieces, or sound-files needed for performance purposes. I also have two web things that make use the SoundCloud API, but they could potentially be realised in other ways.
The reason I mention all of this is the recent rumblings of trouble on the SoundCloud horizon – but perhaps that’s for another post.
* Not quite as radical as those Brutalist websites, but perhaps a small step in that direction.