# Soundcloud subscription - sigh



## Mornats (Jan 17, 2022)

I've just let my Soundcloud subscription drop from Pro Unlimited to free. Why?






And this year they were gong to charge £90. What pisses me off is that they never tell you the price, or that there's been a price rise, up-front. I only found out because they tried to take a payment from my old card that expired last year so I went along and checked. (The Pro plan got discontinued or bumped down in features if I recall so the Pro Unlimited was the replacement for that. Correct me if I'm wrong!)

They also tout monetisation as being a benefit of the pro unlimited plan and keep advertising that feature to me. Whenever I try to sign up for it I'm never eligible. So it's a not a feature of the plan is it? Urgh.

This sucks because I receive some really nice encouraging comments on my Soundcloud tracks and it's a great way to get some music up there.

So the tl;dr of this is that I'm annoyed because they put the price up without informing you and never tell you in advance that they're about to take a payment. Oh and the monetisation bullshit. Oh and also the fact I can't filter those bloody annoying reposts from my stream so I can never see the tracks from the people I actually follow!

Thanks for listening! I feel better now


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## Nico5 (Jan 18, 2022)

I honestly have no idea what the value proposition of SoundCloud is these days compared to distributing to the big streaming services via DistroKid or similar.


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## TomislavEP (Jan 18, 2022)

I've joined SoundCloud at the end of 2018. as a Pro member and since then, it automatically renews my Pro plan on a yearly basis. If I'm not mistaken, even though you can't purchase a Pro plan anymore, it is still available to those who never upgraded to Unlimited one. I could be wrong, though.

From my experience so far, monetization is a joke; perhaps it makes sense if you have really high play count.

Anyway, I'll hope that they'll keep the possibility of retaining a Pro subscription. For me, SoundCloud definitely has its values but ultimately not so much that I would want to pay a premium price for the service.


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## el-bo (Jan 18, 2022)

Nico5 said:


> I honestly have no idea what the value proposition of SoundCloud is these days compared to distributing to the big streaming services via DistroKid or similar.


Because Soundcloud works for many audio sharing needs that are not fully-realised, and/or intended-for-release projects. Would love an SC alternative, to continue to be used as a publicly-accessible cloud share-space, that wasn't now so geared towards big commercial activity, and was preferably cheaper.


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## Alex Fraser (Jan 18, 2022)

el-bo said:


> Because Soundcloud works for many audio sharing needs that are not fully-realised, and/or intended-for-release projects. Would love an SC alternative, to continue to be used as a publicly-accessible cloud share-space, that wasn't now so geared towards big commercial activity, and was preferably cheaper.


Yeah, this really.
The web player/API is still a quick way to share and get music on a webpage. Which is still tricker than it needs to be in 2022.

This was the basic sell when SC was setup. I'm not a fan of the continued push to monetise the service, but I guess staff and server costs don't come for free.


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## Nico5 (Jan 18, 2022)

thanks for offering your perspectives, @el-bo and @Alex Fraser -- love both of your avatars btw! 

Yeah SoundCloud has been pivoting repeatedly over the years in the search for the golden trick that allows them to make enough money for the significant amounts of investment they've taken in. 

So your use case is becoming more friction loaded or expensive or both.

p.s. For WordPress sites, I found that the plugin MP3 Audio Player for Music, Radio & Podcast by Sonaar is good enough to have become my SoundCloud replacement. (I also used to have a paid SoundCloud account for several years, but gave it up some time ago).


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## Mornats (Jan 26, 2022)

I set up a Bandcamp account a while and have started putting together albums of my tracks. I've got one up so far and more to curate and put together. This is great as it's allowing me to group tracks by theme to try and create something cohesive. I'm not sure about how its player would work compared to Soundcloud's. The Soundcloud player is so handy to embed, especially on forums like VI-C.

There's a lot of tracks I have which are experimental, one-offs, random things which suit Soundcloud but not Bandcamp so I'd miss SC for that. I've long been a "hey, I've chucked something on SC, whatcha think?" kind of person. The likes of distributing to Spotify, Apple Music etc. isn't quite where I'm at. That's a step up from Bandcamping my tracks in my view. Although if Soundcloud had told me that I had distribution as part of my Pro Unlimited account I would have maybe tried it! I checked back through all my emails and not once was it advertised or announced to me when I upgraded to Pro Unlimited or renewed it.



Nico5 said:


> p.s. For WordPress sites, I found that the plugin MP3 Audio Player for Music, Radio & Podcast by Sonaar is good enough to have become my SoundCloud replacement. (I also used to have a paid SoundCloud account for several years, but gave it up some time ago).


You know, I like the idea of that. I'd started building a Wordpress site a few years back just to sharpen some of my old dev skills but abandoned it when I got a new job that had a different focus. Although I suspect having over 100 FLAC files streaming would eat up disc space and bandwidth quite quickly.

Anyway, thanks for listening to my rant and for your comments! I'm going to keep moving on with Bandcamp and will most likely sit tight and see if Soundcloud ever offer me a half price deal to renew, in which case I probably will.


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## Nico5 (Jan 26, 2022)

Mornats said:


> Although I suspect having over 100 FLAC files streaming would eat up disc space and bandwidth quite quickly.


Yeah - for high numbers of streams, bandwith may get more messy, but if the target audience is more occasional specific client demos - then it's not as much of a problem. 

However disk space isn't crazy expensive in many hosting plans. 100 FLAC files at 10 MB each is only 1 GB


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## Mornats (Jan 27, 2022)

Nico5 said:


> Yeah - for high numbers of streams, bandwith may get more messy, but if the target audience is more occasional specific client demos - then it's not as much of a problem.
> 
> However disk space isn't crazy expensive in many hosting plans. 100 FLAC files at 10 MB each is only 1 GB


I just checked the hosts I've used in the past and it's less than £5 a month for 100GB of SSD storage and unlimited bandwidth. My FLAC files come out around 40-50MB but I'm exporting as 24 bit/44.1khz audio so that's probably why! Still, with that hosting plan it's not a problem.


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## Mornats (Feb 28, 2022)

Ok, so yesterday I looked at SoundCloud at there was an offer to upgrade to Pro Unlimited for a year for half price (£45 per year) so I went for it. Since I cancelled by subscription they've emailed me about the benefits of monetising my music (which I'm not actually eligible to do according to their sign-up page for it) and the benefits of Repost - a feature that's free with a Pro Unlimited subscription but otherwise is $30 a year. This, despite being named the same as their repost feature on SoundCloud, is actually a service to distribute your tracks to Spotify, Apple Music etc. So I checked it out.

What I found was, buried in their terms and conditions, a fair few page-downs through them was the 20% fee they take from your earnings. I went and checked Distrokid (which would be top of my list of services if I were distributing this way) and they charge just under $20 a year and take no further fee. So that's SoundCloud out of the picture for that, especially if you consider their $30 a year charge, plus 20% of earnings vs $20 a year and 0% of earnings. Even when included in Pro Unlimited I feel that paying $20 to Distrokid is better value if you expect to earn money from distributing your music.

So, sigh, again, at SoundCloud's marketing of included features that are either unavailable to you or have hidden 20% fees. And I mean hidden as I could only find them after scanning through the T&Cs.

But anyway, I have my Pro Unlimited back and I can upload music again. Oh yeah, that was another thing. When my subscription was cancelled I was 540 minutes into my 180 minutes of free uploads. So if I wanted to upload more I'd have to delete around 2/3rds of my music. It would have been better if a new track would have pushed an older one out of the available tracks but no. So cancelling a Pro Unlimited subscription if you're over the 180 minutes is effectively killing your ability to do anything more (other than listen) to your music on SoundCloud. It does make it free I guess but it really got me down that I could make music and not share it. I'm also now thinking if I'm being over-entitled at this aspect of it? 

So my tactic now is to cancel my subscription before it expires, let my account die for a bit whilst I look out for a good offer.


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## Pier (Jun 13, 2022)

Mornats said:


> Although I suspect having over 100 FLAC files streaming would eat up disc space and bandwidth quite quickly.


That's one problem but there are more.

Typically cheap hosts put many sites in the same server sharing resources (CPU, network, etc). Given enough traffic, both your audio streaming and page serving will be affected.

Another issue is that if your server is say in NY and your user is in New Zealand, server responses might take seconds to reach the user (internet weather, user network, server load, etc).

Typically you want to setup a CDN to alleviate these problems, but for audio it's more complicated. For example, Cloudflare doesn't allow caching of audio or video files. See the section 2.8 on Cloudflare TOS. Other CDNs will make you pay per GB and the setup is not super straightforward either.

BTW not all browsers support FLAC. You should provide MP3s too as a fallback which is universally supported. Safari desktop didn't have FLAC support until 2-3 years ago. Firefox officially supports FLAC but it was flaky until the more recent versions.



Mornats said:


> I just checked the hosts I've used in the past and it's less than £5 a month for 100GB of SSD storage and unlimited bandwidth. My FLAC files come out around 40-50MB but I'm exporting as 24 bit/44.1khz audio so that's probably why! Still, with that hosting plan it's not a problem.


You should check that "unlimited" policy in the fine print of the terms of service. In the vast majority of cases this only applies to text based files (HTML, JS, CSS). Trust me, nobody gives you a free lunch. I've been in web dev and the hosting business for over 20 years.

Of course, if you don't have much traffic, hosts will turn a blind eye. The fundamental issue is not that they are paying for bandwidth (as in $ per GB) but that they are paying for a network pipe with a capped speed they don't want to saturate.


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## Mornats (Jun 13, 2022)

Pier said:


> That's one problem but there are more.
> 
> Typically cheap hosts put many sites in the same server sharing resources (CPU, network, etc). Given enough traffic, both your audio streaming and page serving will be affected.
> 
> ...


Many good points here, thanks for your detailed response. I'd probably stay clear of this route unless I find somewhere that offered specifically what I'd need. Another consideration is that I'd have to drive every single bit of traffic to the site myself.


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## Pier (Jun 13, 2022)

Mornats said:


> Another consideration is that I'd have to drive every single bit of traffic to the site myself.


You mean that being in Soundcloud gives you an extra audience?


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## Damarus (Jun 13, 2022)

songbox is a pretty good alternative. I believe the dev is on this forum and open to feedback.



Pier said:


> Typically you want to setup a CDN to alleviate these problems, but for audio it's more complicated. For example, Cloudflare doesn't allow caching of audio or video files. See the section 2.8 on Cloudflare TOS. Other CDNs will make you pay per GB and the setup is not super straightforward either.


Also you might not really have a problem with this under a paid subscription.. Alternatively, AWS S3 has a generous free tier to which you can link your files if you really wanted to host yourself.

EDIT: These two options are good for sharing demo links n such. Not for public facing stuff like Soundcloud.


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## Pier (Jun 13, 2022)

Damarus said:


> songbox is a pretty good alternative. I believe the dev is on this forum and open to feedback.
> 
> 
> Also you might not really have a problem with this under a paid subscription.. Alternatively, AWS S3 has a generous free tier to which you can link your files if you really wanted to host yourself.
> ...


My previous comments were in the context of serving music publicly from your website.

For sharing a demo with someone you don't even need something like S3. You could even use Google Drive or Dropbox. Email still works too.


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## SupremeFist (Jun 13, 2022)

I use a free SoundCloud accunt exclusively for the purpose of temporarily throwing up pieces to link on here to demonstrate my opinion about some library or other. Otherwise I've embraced the discipline of only putting things online publicly if I'm actually releasing them to Spotify etc. Concentrates the mind.

For sending things to friends or clients for feedback, Reelcrafter is very very good.


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## Mornats (Jun 14, 2022)

Pier said:


> You mean that being in Soundcloud gives you an extra audience?


Now you mention it, no  In theory it should but it doesn't really. I do have followers who get to hear any new tracks I put up and I do get listens that way but I don't think I get new followers unless I post something on this forum that catches someone's ear.


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## reborn579 (Jun 14, 2022)

i don't think soundcloud is worth this money nowadays. maybe 5-10 years ago when you couldn't put your songs on spotify & co and it was the only real alternative for and indie musician to get your music out there. but now with things like cd baby and bandcamp, i don't think so.

it is worth using for linking audio files - like many mentioned in the replies. but even for that - the quality of the player is very poor, and if it's a more dense track you can really hear how much it's squashed. i think the player streams an mp3 128kbps, which is not enough nowadays. and not necessary, considering how fast internet is.

i do admire them for being the first streaming service to have a more fair share of revenue for artists who sign up for their music streaming option. and that way of paying artists has been adopted by tidal as well. maybe in a few years more streaming services will be more fair? although, judging by the direction in which things are moving, i would be surprised if spotify will ever be fair to their artists. anyway - this is a bit off topic.

soundcloud used to be really cool back in the day. and they had a community going and everything. but they just kinda lost that and now it feels like it's a platform that doesn't know which direction to go.


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## Chamberfield (Jun 14, 2022)

reborn579 said:


> i think the player streams an mp3 128kbps, which is not enough nowadays.


Ain't that the truth. I haven't posted anything on SC for a while, but recently went there to listen to some of my old stuff and i couldn't believe how atrocious the sound quality was.


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## Pier (Jun 14, 2022)

reborn579 said:


> soundcloud used to be really cool back in the day. and they had a community going and everything. but they just kinda lost that and now it feels like it's a platform that doesn't know which direction to go.


I've felt the same way about it even 10 years ago.

They started as "the social media for audio" but it ended up being "the imgur for audio" where everyone just dumps their audio files to share in other social websites or company websites.

And yeah I totally agree Spotify et al makes more sense for artists to share their finished stuff. These days artists share their link tree instead of sharing their Soundcloud.



Chamberfield said:


> Ain't that the truth. I haven't posted anything on SC for a while, but recently went there to listen to some of my old stuff and i couldn't believe how atrocious the sound quality was.


I totally agree the audio quality is bad but, to be fair, I think it may have been worse in the past. They probably never re-encoded old uploads.


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## SupremeFist (Jun 14, 2022)

Chamberfield said:


> Ain't that the truth. I haven't posted anything on SC for a while, but recently went there to listen to some of my old stuff and i couldn't believe how atrocious the sound quality was.


I feel the same way about my old stuff but SoundCloud wasn't the problem.


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## Mornats (Jun 14, 2022)

SupremeFist said:


> I feel the same way about my old stuff but SoundCloud wasn't the problem.


Ditto


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## Chamberfield (Jun 14, 2022)

SupremeFist said:


> I feel the same way about my old stuff but SoundCloud wasn't the problem.


But I would like all my old shitty tracks to at least have good sonic quality


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## Chamberfield (Jun 14, 2022)

Pier said:


> but, to be fair, I think it may have been worse in the past. They probably never re-encoded old uploads.


Good point, that would explain why all the old stuff sounds squashed.


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