SoundCloud cut about 173 people this week, something like 40% of the whole company, and closed the San Francisco and London offices outright. Just Berlin (where the company actually started, back in 2007) and New York left standing. CEO Alex Ljung put out one of those calm, everything-is-under-control memos about extending the runway into 2018, which is corporate-speak for "we were closer to broke than anyone wanted to say out loud."
I dont think this surprised anyone who's been paying attention. SoundCloud has raised something like $700 million over the years and I dont think its ever turned a profit, not once. Its the classic startup trap: build something people genuinely love, give it away for free to basically everyone, and then spend a decade trying to figure out how the free thing turns into money without making the people who loved it for free furious. They tried a subscription tier, they tried ads on the free tier, and none of it closed the gap fast enough.
Heres the thing though, and this is the part that actually got me more than the layoff numbers did. I went and dug up mixes I uploaded to SoundCloud back in 2011 and 2012. Bad house music edits, a couple of DJ sets recorded off a mixer straight into my laptop mic, one track that's just me and a friend messing around with a drum machine at like 2am. None of it is good. Some of it is genuinely embarrassing to listen to now. But its been sitting there for six years untouched, and it never occurred to me that the whole thing could just not be there one day.
Thats the actual risk with a story like this, and its not really about SoundCloud's balance sheet. Its that SoundCloud, more than Spotify or Apple Music or any of the polished stuff, is where the weird half finished internet music lives. Bootleg remixes nobody cleared the rights for. DJ sets from a basement show in Ohio. A rapper's first three mixtapes before he got signed and pulled them all down anyway. None of that exists on the services that actually make money, because none of it is legal or clean enough to survive there. If SoundCloud goes, a real chunk of that stuff goes with it, and nobody backed any of it up, because why would you, it was just sitting on the internet being free forever.
I'm not saying SoundCloud is dying tomorrow. Cutting 40% of staff is brutal but its also the kind of thing a company does specifically so it doesnt die tomorrow. Ljung's memo was pretty explicit that this buys time, not that the ship is sinking. I just think its worth actually downloading the stuff you care about instead of assuming a free web service is a permanent archive. I learned that lesson from a since-departed blog host back in like 2009 and apparently I still havent fully internalized it.
Unrelated but from the same week: if you were on the internet Wednesday you probably saw the net neutrality banners everywhere, Amazon, Reddit, Netflix, Kickstarter, all putting up those slow-loading-spinner popups to get people calling their reps about the FCC's Title II plans. I put a little bar up on techpad too, mostly because it felt weird not to when basically every site I actually use was doing it. Not sure a banner on a blog with maybe forty regular readers moves any needle in Washington, but it costs me nothing and I'd rather be the annoying guy with the banner than the guy who didnt bother.
Also, apparently Prime Day happened again this week, which I keep forgetting is a real yearly thing now and not just a weird one-off Amazon did once. I didnt buy anything. I never do. I just get the emails and close the tab.
Anyway. Go back and listen to something old you uploaded somewhere years ago, before its not there anymore.