It would seem music-streaming site Soundcloud is in some serious danger. Last week it laid off some 170+ employees and closed it’s offices in San Francisco and London. Citing the closures and layoffs were to “to ensure our path to long-term, independent success” while is secured more funding from investors, it seems that was just the start of a rapid spiral downward for the audio-streaming site.
As TechCrunch reports, a meeting held by the company across all channels explained that the layoffs were simply a way to buy a bit more time to figure out how to save Soundcloud as a whole. The company, which hosts millions of music uploads from indie and professional musicians across the world, has been hemorrhaging funds and having a difficult time closing with new investors. It also sounds that, given the suddenness of the layoffs and lack of foresight, remaining Soundcloud employees don’t seem to have a lot of faith in the company being able to turn things around, stating “The morale is really low”.
A large amount of content from indie game composers and video game musicians are hosted on Soundcloud, as an alternative to Bandcamp and Spotify in terms of streaming music and sharing with audiences without having to pay a fee. Certainly, it’s been a useful tool for OSV when linking to artist’s music and sharing with readers, so the news of it’s potential crash is a troubling one all around.
Be that as it may, users and artists of Soundcloud are urged to back up their works in case things go even more sour than they have already. Soundcloud’s founders Alex Ljung and Eric Wahlforss stated the layoffs bought time for funds to last into the 4th Quarter, with anything beyond that being a matter of securing more invested funds or being able to secure better revenue streams by restructuring Soundcloud’s subscription services that expand is library and remove ads for users. For the time being, we wait and see what the future of Soundcloud and its value to the VGM community ends up becoming.
