When SoundCloud Almost Died

I found out SoundCloud was running out of money the way you find out about most things these days—through a news article you didn’t know you needed. Fifty days of cash left, maybe less. The company had just fired 173 people, about 40 percent of the staff. Alex Ljung, the founder, was apparently trying to sell the whole thing to whoever would take it, maybe Deezer, before the whole place collapsed.

London and San Francisco offices were closed. Nothing felt inevitable anymore.

It was surreal because SoundCloud was one of those platforms that seemed permanent in the way things you use often do. Not like Spotify, which had the money and structure. Just… there. I had music saved there. You’d click around at weird hours and find remixes nobody was paying attention to, demos from people uploading without much hope of an audience. There was something open about it, something that didn’t feel like a machine.

The problem was how many artists actually depended on it. A woman I know who works in music said the reach you could get on SoundCloud didn’t exist on any comparable platform—the algorithm would surface your stuff to people who actually wanted to hear it. For a lot of musicians, it was the first place you put something to see if it meant anything. If it worked there, you had something to build from.

I had to think about all the music I’d saved, the tracks that only lived there, the remixes that would just disappear if the platform died. The smart move was to back everything up to Bandcamp or somewhere else. Practical stuff. But there was something bleak about it—you were doing triage on your own archive because the company you’d trusted was rotting from the inside.

It survived. Someone found a way to keep it going. But the fear already killed it for most people, and they stopped uploading. The platform didn’t die, but it never quite recovered what it had been.