After SoundCloud laid off 40 percent of its staff and disclosed the extent of its financial troubles earlier this month, executives across the industry have been eager to share their opinions on the struggling streaming platforms' recent decisions.
Audiomack told us that they thought SoundCloud "turned their backs on their core audience" and now WeTransfer's president Damian Bradfield has shared an open letter about SoundCloud's recently displaced employees.
In the letter, the file sharing platform executive explains that he emailed each of the 173 SoundCloud employees and offered them $10,000, "not as a loan or an investment but a gift."
"What we would like to see is a proposal for something you could design, build or manage that could be the new mail-order record club, SoundCloud or iTunes," he says.
"Hidden at the core of this crazy notion is a very serious idea," Bradfield continues. "We need to keep innovating. Everyone — the folks at SoundCloud included — would love to see these former employees go on to develop great things. $10,000 isn’t enough to build an entirely new company, but it is enough to get an idea going, to design something, or have it designed. It’s enough to get an iOS developer friend to build an MVP that we could introduce or shine a spotlight on. That is, after all, how WeTransfer started."
You can read Bradfield's open letter here and see a copy of the emails he sent out below.
