Fifty Days
SoundCloud was the platform where things existed before they existed anywhere else. Not the official releases, not the label-approved streams—the demos, the bedroom recordings, the DJ sets uploaded at 3am, the tracks that disappeared two weeks later when someone signed a deal. You found music there that couldn’t be found anywhere else because it hadn’t been officially released, or because it had been officially removed, or because the person who made it was operating entirely outside whatever system issues official releases. That was worth something the company never managed to translate into a sustainable business model.
In the summer of 2017, TechCrunch, Dazed, and The Fader reported in close succession that the platform had roughly fifty days of runway left. Founder Alex Ljung had laid off 173 people—about 40 percent of the company. The international offices in London and San Francisco were shuttered. A potential sale to the French streaming service Deezer was being floated. The platform that claimed 175 million monthly active users—a figure the company hadn’t updated in three years—was apparently running on fumes while everyone who’d built careers on it watched and waited.
What made SoundCloud irreplaceable was exactly what made it impossible to monetize cleanly: it was a commons. Artists, DJs, and podcasters had built their entire distribution infrastructure on it not because it was the most professional platform but because it was permissive and discoverable in ways nothing else managed to be. Barbara Hallama, who had worked at Apple on iTunes and was also a practicing DJ with a SoundCloud presence of her own, said at the time that the reach the platform offered simply couldn’t be replicated elsewhere—that the informal economy of plays, reposts, and follows had built careers that depended on the whole ecosystem staying intact.
Anyone still hosting music or audio there had good reason to start moving things to Bandcamp or Apple Podcasts. The deeper question the crisis exposed was why a platform with that kind of cultural gravity and that many users couldn’t find a sustainable form. The answer, as usual, was that cultural gravity doesn’t pay servers, and the music industry is constitutionally resistant to arrangements that route money toward artists before labels.