SoundCloud is an amazing platform for sharing and listening to music – especially a perfect place for musicians on a tight budget and independent musicians looking for a place to host their tracks or share them with the world. Many bands, solo-artists, talkradio, local radiostations and so on share their audio on SoundCloud. This has come to grinding halt.
UPDATE – SOUNDCLOUD HAS GOTTEN A LOT OF FEEDBACK ON THIS DECISION AND WILL NOT IMPLEMENT IT.
What happened? SoundCloud notified it’s users they would need to pay for the services SoundCloud is offering as soon as they post more than 15 tracks or 3 hours of audio. Of course there is a simple way around this: put your albums in one huge mp3 per album.. so you can post 15 albums. But that’s not very useful. Especially for all these artist websites, studios, bands and so on that embedded their songs in their websites. Or, even worse, other websites that embedded their tracks, .. you would need to remove the tracks and upload new ones. Or, .. do nothing. Since, if you don’t upload new tracks, the old ones will stay at their service. The effect of this will be your account will be ‘frozen’. If you want to stay with the free service and remove tracks to post new ones there will be many ‘dead links’ to your songs.
For podcasts or radiostations, 3 hours and 15 files will probably enough to have their 15 most recent shows online. But still, the archive of shows will need to go if they have any.
PAY OR DIE
So, is there no other way around it? Yes, of course there is.. as I’ve mentioned: if you’re willing to pay. If you pay some money you get unlimited upload. You can keep using the service as you were used to. Currently they offer a discounted version, for around €75 for the first year. That’s still a lot of money for many people. So people will abandon ship or remove songs to post new ones.
I mean, really, do they want this to happen at SoundCloud? 404-errors all over? Dead links? I think it hasn’t occurred to them this will not only kill their website traffic but also their Google SEO-ranking… 🙁
THE END OF SOUNDCLOUD AS WE KNOW IT
This would be the end of SoundCloud as we know it and as we loved it. A 15-song limit is way to small. Especially if you have been around long, you might have build up a nice catalogue of songs as a band or solo-artist. And as soon as you want to upload you have the choice: pay or loose a (large) part of your library, effectively killing all embeds and ‘deeplinks’ to your music. This is, imho, blackmailing people to pay. It’s no problem for us to put the money on the table, it is, however, against our will. We’re being forced to pay .. and we don’t like that at all..!
The tracks by Solid Rock Blues Band and others recorded at the LoftStudio (Zolderstudio) can be found here:
https://soundcloud.com/barkingaunts
