Image via Complex Original
I hate the new Soundcloud. The change from classic Soundcloud to this new layout turned a functional and cool way to share music into a full-blown platform with features that we ultimately have no use for. Because we like to ensure our angry rants are valid, we waited a couple months after the Beta release became permanant to form an opintion. I reached out to Soundcloud and let them know exactly what sucked about it (consider me the voice of the young people), and actually got a response. Go figure.
Track Removal
A lot of DJs have complained about the removal of their mixes. The whole idea behind BEING a DJ is providing seamless segments of music for people to enjoy. There doesn't seem to be any backlash from sites like Mixcloud in regards to copyright material, so why has SoundCloud been so adamant about removing mixes? Soundcloud gave us this response:
"Based on current copyright legislation, community members uploading sounds to the platform need to have the permission from the rightsholder, even if parts of various tracks are used in a modified way (since relevant rightsholders still retain the copyright for those parts). The terms for removal are stated in our Terms of Use (https://soundcloud.com/terms-of-use) and there's also more information on copyright here: https://soundcloud.com/pages/copyright. We understand this is frustrating for DJs, but we hope you can understand that while some producers and publishers are fine with DJs using their material in DJ sets and publishing them on SoundCloud, some others are not and do not want their works altered or distributed without explicit consent."
I have a bit of leverage in this industry, but I doubt I'm getting explicit consent from a major record label. They'll either say "fuck off," "we don't care," or fail to respond. And all of these responses would be valid. So your best shot is to knock out a mix, and hope it doesn't get pulled. Don't think that failure to provide a tracklist will do anything for you though. They scan material and have a content identification system. They will catch you.
Price
Producers and singers have a better deal than DJs, as their displays of art are generally 3-5 minutes long. DJ mixes take up more space (and surely cost soundcloud more to host), but it creates an unfair pricing scale. Sites like Mixcloud don't charge anything, and Beatport is PAYING DJs for mixes.
In our discussion with them, SoundCloud says they don't have any plans on providing a sliding pricing scale, but hope to revisit and revamp their Premium subscription plans in the future. A busy DJ will likely want the "Pro" account to take advantage of their 36 upload hours. At €221/year, (nearly $300 USD), this isn't cheap. If you are a company that has a website that relies on Soundcloud for posts, you may want to consider the "Pro Plus" for it's unlimited feature. This costs €471/year (more than $600). This will push anyone that uses the service to find ways to recoup the money (additional advertising), or use another outlet altogether.
Organization
I let my Solo plan expire, and this created quite a mess. A free account means that you cannot have any of your external links, so people won't be able to navigate to your Facebook or Twitter accounts. Your upload limit is two hours, and you are limited to 100 downloads per song. There are ways to work around this (adding an external link in the description is the standard solution), but being limited to two hours of audio is crippling. So I switched from a free account to a "Lite" account, and had an incredibly difficult time figuring out how to trim the songs out that I wanted to get rid of. Luckily, they still allow you to use the Classic Soundcloud, or this would have never gotten done. The fact is, this new SoundCloud doesn't allow you to organize your data like the old one did, making things a bit frustrating.
Notifications
No matter how many times I read that last message from the asshole that says, "Hi Mate, how would you like thousands more followers and plays on your SoundCloud track?," notifications continue to tell me that this message is unread. I don't want people to inbox me, and there's no way to turn this off. With the limited number of messages, and the push for people to pay for these services, I find it amazing that I'm getting spammed.
Likes
I know when people are looking through my likes. It's a bit annoying as a blogger, as we often find the things that we want to post through the site. So imagine I hit "Like," draft a post, and notice a lone comment from someone that jumped ahead of me to post it up. We pride ourselves on finding stuff before other people can get their hands on it. Even if you're a DJ, you don't want hundreds of other people biting your sound and trolling through the stuff you're finding. SoundCloud let me know that there's no way to turn this feature off, so I simply had to stop liking people's tracks.
Automatic Playlist
How SoundCloud fucked up such an amazing feature is beyond me. You can now bounce around from track to track or move from your songs to your stream without the music stopping. That's pretty cool, but sometimes it redirects to your stream. Sometimes it moves through tracks that are "related." And there's no way to skip something you don't want to hear except by finding where you're at in the stream and doing this yourself. There's also a new waveform on the top right of your screen, but it's not functional in a traditional sense. On ANY other website that waveform would allow you to skip through the track. They could scoot everything over and allow for a bigger waveform, and give you this option, but they didn't. They could also let you know what track they decided you should listen to next, but they don't. You have to click the waveform to go to wherever the sound happens to be coming from to identify the track.
Lack of Buttons
Wouldn't it be nice to have a skip button, be able to pause, or have text showing you what's playing? None of this exists. You need to click the waveform to figure out where the sound is coming from, and track it down manually. If I hear a cool sound and it's downloadable, I'd love to be able to just click "download" as it's playing without all of the extra steps, then skip to the next song.
Lack of "Shuffle" Feature
I suggested to SoundCloud that they should allow people to shuffle their songs. Imagine I'm listening to my "Likes" while driving; why do I have to listen to them in the order in which I liked them? That's ridiculous. It's a playlist that never changes in its order, and makes the function almost useless.
Track Layout
Why do I have to go into the actual track link to see how many plays I have? Ah, because they didn't know how to sort the layout. Often the ONE thing I want to see (how many times people have played a song) is covered up by buttons that are too large. This is just an annoyance.
Comments
When sifting through a mix or track, you need to navigate around other people's comments. From time to time it registers as if I want to respond to a comment. I don't know if there's an option to mute all comments, but I'm a grown-up. I don't need to see 1000 comments to make an opinion on what I'm listening to.
