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Comment by josephpmay | Hacker News Reader

It's a huge shame that SoundCloud is likely dying, because large segments of the music industry and literally entire genres of music are solely on SoundCloud. This may sound hyperbolic, but I feel like them shutting down would be the "burning of the Library of Alexandria" of 21st century music

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As another mentioned, the Alexandria analogy is best applied to what.cd being shut down last year. Here's an article describing it.

https://qz.com/840661/what-cd-is-gone-a-eulogy-for-the-great...

I wasn't ever a member, but it's clear to me that an immense body of knowledge was lost when it was shut down. Much more so than SoundCloud shutting down, unfortunate as that may be.

edit: anyone who was familiar, how did the categorization and documentation of what.cd compare to Discogs now? I find Discogs invaluable and immensely useful, but it certainly doesn't have the rigorous QC that what.cd had. Anyone can edit entries, and it's not infrequently that I encounter something incorrect.

The private torrent sites (What, and others that I won't name here) all tend to refer to Discogs as the authoritative source of catalog information. The difference is that while Discogs knows about metadata, it doesn't have any music.

I think I was depressed for a week when What shut down.

But that involved people (say it with me now) steeeealing!

I don't know, Soundcloud actually does have an extraordinary amount of independent content ("folk music") that what.cd wouldn't have ever been able to facilitate.

I'd argue that they are both quite prolific, just different.

Largely already happened previously with MP3.com

Not to say "we" couldn't do better but there's always been a huge amount of content, music and otherwise, from amateurs and mostly amateurs in particular that isn't preserved in any systematic way.

MP3.com and SoundCloud are not as comparable. SoundCloud has really re-defined how new music is released and how new artists promote their music.

> SoundCloud has really re-defined how new music is released and how new artists promote their music.

For promotion Soundcloud undoubtly serves its purpose, but actually releasing the music has to happen somewhere else. And in my opinion the actual re-defining service in that regard is Bandcamp. After all, you can't buy music on Soundcloud, can you?

You can buy music on Soundcloud.

Where? As a long time Soundcloud listener and artist I have never seen an option to buy or sell music on Soundcloud. Unless you mean the "Buy"-link which you can setup to redirect your listeners to actual stores and purchase options.

Oh, you're right. I'm mistaken.

For some reason I assumed there was a buy link on the preview tracks people put up.

Another one was RCRD.LBL. Loved their daily mp3s in my inbox.

So true. I feel like I'm frantically bookmarking all the Facebook/Bandcamp pages of musicians that I've found on the service.

The Alexandria analogy already occurred this year. When what.cd was shut down.

>"This may sound hyperbolic, but I feel like them shutting down would be the "burning of the Library of Alexandria" of 21st century music"

Except that all the original content still exists and could be made available somewhere else.

could

won't

Do you believe that if Soundcloud goes out of business in a couple of months artists affected will never again make those tracks available on the internet?

Why would you believe that?

A large number of them never will. Any archive of user-created content ends up dominated by "zombie" works from creators that have moved on from that sort of thing or aren't terribly concerned with ensuring that their older works remain accessible (if they even still have their own copies).

>"Any archive of user-created content ends up dominated by "zombie" works from creators that have moved on from that sort of thing or aren't terribly concerned with ensuring that their older works remain accessible (if they even still have their own copies)."

Except when they are artists and that content is their art and that art is their passion and/or career. It's also how they build awareness and get gigs. We are talking about music not animated gifs and memes. Its unlikely that most artists no longer have the original tracks.

The music industry has always had works that have gone out of print often because the record company goes bankrupt. And those out of print works are then reissued often with enhancements. In fact there are record labels whose whole business model is reissues. And at the extreme there are cases where the original master tapes were lost and reissues were cut from secondary sources.

It would be unfortunate if SC were to disappear but if it did I doubt any appreciable amount of music would simply be "lost to the dust bin of history."

It's difficult for me to believe that they would actually go out of business. Somewhere between the price they would want and going out of business, I feel that a Google/Apple/Netflix/Amazon acquisition is a near-certainty. Not sure how that would work if they don't have sufficient runway for due diligence & acquisition closure, but I'm sure the above companies could deal with that scenario if necessary.

Agreed. Anecdotal, but I was in a "band" in high-school. We recorded our music and that music was and is solely hosted on soundcloud. I like to go back and listen to it occasionally as a part of my life that's fun to kind of laugh about, but also appreciate the good memories I have of it. It's both sad and strange to see that part of my life is fading from the world already.

I almost feel like they should go non-profit a la wikipedia.

That's the cloud for you.

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