Mr. Tunes

How will Soundcloud stay in it for the long haul?

While pondering the future of MySpace, I had briefly gone over some thoughts about Soundcloud. This year the company changed the structure of their service from one which was limited by the number of tracks you’ve uploaded, to one which counts the minutes of music. For example, before I could upload say ten tracks, and now I can upload a few hours of music.

The change is ok, except in the old system I thought it was more worth it to upload DJ mixes rather than tracks. In the new system I have no more free time on the site, and if I want to make anything freed up I have to remove the mixes, which is bad because anywhere i’ve posted them will now have broken links.

I just want to play

If this site wants any hope for surviving in the long term, I recommend they find a way to serve people like myself who don’t care about hosting my music with them, but rather enjoy the waveform player and the activity stream. In other words, they should let us set our own url for tracks for free or at a lower cost plan.

Then, in situations like now when they change their mind about how people should use the service, we can easily set the mixes that will be broken links to be played off our own servers. I would be more willing to contribute to the service as a social network in this manner too.

I can’t see this affecting the bottom line because it only generates more activity on the site, and the people who enjoy the hosting features will continue to use them.

What do you think of Soundcloud’s setup?

Comments are currently ixnay'd while I work on the site.