I hope this is just an alarmist headline. SoundCloud is pretty essential in its space, it's one of the few services that lets you natively get audio on to Twitter, the main place musicians share snapshots of their work and remixes, and a key part of numerous podcasts and ways to embed easily shared audio on the Web. This is one startup I absolutely don't want to see go down the pan.
I still don't think it will happen. Worst case scenario, someone's gonna make a very nice deal when buying them.
What alarms me is the amount of Teslas, Mercedes-AMG M models and other kind of extremely expensive cars parked in their parking lots and in the area surrounding their HQ here in Berlin. In the last one and a half year I've witnessed such a crescendo of the car show-off level that's I'm worried about their paychecks politics. An average salary of ~80k/y, as reported in the linked piece, explains a lot.
You can't even consider buying a car like that with 80k in Berlin, after tax and insurances it becomes ~40k and if you got an expat family and possibly kids that’s enough for owning a bicycle and an OK flat and feeding your family. The offices are rented from an incubator with ties to the gov that has space in the building (and come to have meetings there with their expensive cars).
I don't know where you have those numbers from, but they are very inaccurate. The average household income in Berlin in 2012 was 1650€ net per month [1], so that would be about 20k per year. According to what you wrote, Berlin streets should be essentially free from cars, but I can assure you that this is not the case.
Let me give you some real numbers. I am married and have a small child. I earn 55k gross, which is ~38k after taxes. My wife earns significantly less, providing another 7k per year. I don't know right now how much she earns before taxes, but our gross income combined is well below 80k. So we have about 45k per year and we easily get by. We have a nice flat, eat out several times a week, take ~3 vacations a year, are paying into a private pension plan, and are still saving money. Granted, we don't own a car, but we could if we wanted.
I have no idea if the reported 80k are accurate, but I would be very surprised, as it would be far above the average income for software developers in Berlin (and I think most of their employees are devs).
german here. a net income of 40k will put you somewhere in the top 20% of german households [1], . berlin is generally a really cheap city (see this [2] article from 2014.. cost of living/rents below german average), so saying "that's enough for owning a bicycle" is just not true.
Is that the actual paycheck, or the company expenses on salaries? I'm not an expert on German finances, but I would expect the actual paycheck to be only about 50% of total employer expenses.
And then the state takes about 40% of the actual paycheck in taxes and social payments. Teslas and Mercedeses are not the car of the file-and-rank employees if that ~80k was the full company expense per employee.
I'm absolutely certain those cars don't belong to the employees. Also do take in consideration the average would include salaries from execs and teams in SF and NYC.
Also, the amount you take home from 80k, while good for Berlin standards, is hardly enough to buy a 120k car (depending on your personal priorities, of course)
Of course not, I'm not talking about 200 Teslas parked outside. My reasoning was more or less this: devs, general low level employees, IT technician - they're not paid that much. They would probably be the low end of the pool of salaries. To rise the average so much it would take some good amount of overpayment for upper management and executives. All for a company that doesn't make money. Hence the observation about the cars.
AFAIK the two Teslas frequently seen around the Factory belong to the same guy (one of the founders of the Factory). There's not that many execs at the Soundcloud office as well, from what I reckon.
Also: there's multiple companies in the building complex (including a bunch of seats on the coworking space reserved for offsites from executives from Lufthansa and some other giants)
That would explain the high concentration of super cars, then, but It was at least 4 teslas, 2 blue ones, one in red, one in white.
Source: I lived in the area for 7 months last year
As a music producer I pay 79 EUR / year since 2011 because I enjoy having a practically unlimited storage space for my own productions, may it be a complete song or stems (individual instruments) that I share with musicians I collaborate with.
80% of the tracks on my account are private. I mostly use Soundcloud as a musical post-it system so I can easily listen to my productions in different settings (car, friend's hifi system, earphones etc.), share tracks with label in a "secure" fashion.
I was really saddened to see they introduced ads even for people who actually pay for their service, I felt literally betrayed and angry but fortunately it did not last long. However it leaves traces.
I still find it amazing that they did not introduce basic filters for the stream, like "just grab house mixes at least 45 minutes long"...
Anyway, I am still quite happy with the service even if I could do the same on my own dedicated server, minus the social network thing.
I just wish them good luck but I hope that their longevity will not be due to ads served even to subscribers...
Do you have backups of your tracks into case Soundcloud goes away?
EDIT: Its on my to do list to write a pipeline for Soundcloud for Archive Team this weekend. Just in case. That doesn't pickup private tracks though. Backup your stuff!!
At my company we have a bunch of content that's only archived on SoundCloud. The main barrier I've had to backing up original uploads (only available through the web interface) is the terrible reliability of all the AJAX calls. Even with browser automation, it requires a LOT of error-handling just to navigate between resources successfully.
It seems that all these microservices[1] are there for the sake of blogging about using microservices[2] as there haven't been any new significant new features delivered in years, and the whole application now seems to be delivered through AJAX calls.
Oh, I didn't know that. I ended up writing my own SoundcloudSync.py to keep a backup. Not very sophisticated but easy enough to run by hand whenever I upload something new.
Yes I have all the originals on my music computer, plus do regular backups of all my music projects to my dedicated server.
I'm not afraid to loose what I created. 8 years ago, I lost 200 tracks. When I realized it, I decided consciously to make it a good experience, no grief at all.
I found it to be a formidable opportunity to start fresh, change my process, change my habits and create more!
As a heavy user (but not uploader) I remain almost entirely unmonetised (for better and for worse). I'm fed almost no ads either on the web or app, and there is no premium plan for listening.
Not yet but nothing they charge for has been relevant to me yet as a consumer. I am launching a couple of podcasts in the next month though and want to embed audio on Twitter so will be doing so soon which is one reason I'm concerned at this news as nothing else is suitable IMHO. (I pay for lots of online services, but not if there's no product targeted at my use case.)
