back to article SoundCloud gets US$50m for sonic growth

Berlin based social media audio sharing site SoundCloud has raised up to as rumoured US$50 million in funding led by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The site, which is gaining ground in music production industry and artist circles, confirmed the closing of the funding round but would not …

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  1. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Happy

    Not the best quality for streaming but lets artists enable downloads (if they want to) and does have a good range of controls and links without any of the stupid eye-candy that, umm, *other* sites have.

    Oh, and you can upload in all the common formats, not just mp3.

  2. ...zenpyramid...
    Devil

    '...damned cloud lords, raking it in...' ATD

    ...i know a renown yet struggling (for finance, not talent) artist musician who can't afford to pay the annual £700 required for him to give his considerable back catalogue away for free. Will the massive investment help him and other musicians in similar circumstances distribute their material by removing the financial firewall, and therefore by default favour us the consumer with a wider and more eclectic selection to chose from?

    Or will we still be waiting for that concept to evolve above the parapet, whilst soundcloud execs gleefully embrace the old school music industry business model, and rush to 'invest' the money in many acres of personal meh?

    Old school, mmmmm....

    1. Ru

      Bandwidth aint free, and these guys aint a charity

      I'm sure there are other means to distribute files cheaply, if one could be bothered to find out. Soundcloud is hardly a monopoly, after all.

      A cynic might also feel that giving away a big back catalogue for free is unlikely to help with short term financial issues. The old school got to eat, you know.

      1. ...zenpyramid...
        Pint

        ....there's always p2p of course, that's as free as it gets, but you get absolutely bugger all feedback as an artist, obviously!

        And as a business model, 'giving away' your back catalogue actually then becomes 'embedding it on your site' where you can get traffic, sell t-shirts and cd's and high bitrate copies, whatever you need to do to pay the rent, buy food, and all the non bling stuff most artists actually need. You wanna buy bling, go jump into bed with a major label, they always need fresh meat for the grinder.

        And then there's the point about non content providers hosting lots of content that someone else has spent a lifetime slaving over, and generating revenue from hosting said content via web site traffic, who then turn around and have the audacity to charge £700 a year to rent out a few tens of gigs at most on a server somewhere to allow said artist to post said material on said non-content providers content providing website! Call me a cynic if you will, you wouldn't be the first, but i smell a big fat rat here.

        Beer, 'cos it's more Old School than food...

        1. Will Godfrey Silver badge
          Happy

          Hi cynic.

          Actually, if all that bothers you, just use the Internet Archive. Unlimited free hosting of your music, but with limited commenting available, and not as well linked.

          P.S.

          Soundcloud does allow a fairly generous free hosting space, and there is nothing to stop you deleting older tracks when you want to add new ones.

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