Got this email from SoundCloud this morning. Seems like their switching to lossless, however free / basic accounts got this catch 22 thing going:

"As a free user on a Basic plan you can upload a total of 3 hours of audio or 15 tracks, whichever comes first."

To sweeten this nonsense, they got this:

"Anything you upload before December 9th, 2019 when the new upload limit goes into effect will remain on your account, will not be hidden, and will continue to be available to you and all listeners."


I had soundcloud for years, but now feel a bit abandoned. They should of at least honored the limits to which users signed up originally.

Ideally, I would like to see PG own "cloud" thing for tracks made with BIAB...Probably will not happen soon.

I am interested to know an opinion on alternatives that people are using. I use BandLab to upload some of my tracks. Seems that some folks here use Reverbnation...

I've used their free account for several years and hit the limit on that a couple of years ago. I've been reluctant to go pro because I've seen so many signs that they are not gonna be around for long. I really have no problem with them changing the terms on a FREE account. I mean, c'mon, it is FREE! And they are letting you fill it up if you want to the current limit before they change the limits.

One more interesting thing is I have never seen them offer a discount on the pro plan in the time I have been with them. No Black Friday specials. Nothing. But today they sent me an offer to go pro for 30% off. I wonder if that is also an act of desperation meaning they may not survive?

As for recommendations on a replacement, I'm becoming convinced it doesn't matter where you put your music. The platform is NOT going to provide you any plays/listens anyway. It all comes down to the traffic you drive to your music site. I'm probably going to change to self-hosting all my music on my own website as it is cheaper and gives me far more control.

Well, soundcloud has had financial problems forever, so I’m not surprised they are going to tighten up the free accounts.

I have a paid account there which allows me more space than I’ll ever use, plus I can update mixes which I do from time to time.

But I much prefer reverbnation, sound quality is better IMHO, site looks better too. The free reverbnation account has no limitations on the amount of songs you can upload. There is a file size limitation on each song, forget what it is off the top of my head, but for most songs less than four minutes I found I could upload a 256K MP3 and still be under the limit.

P.S. also wanted to mention that reverbnation is the only site where I get listens without me pointing people to the site. I hardly ever get that with soundcloud.

JohnJohnJohn,
Sure, free is "free", however cutting time (number of tracks) that was there from the start seems a bit evil. I think you did not receive "promotions" because you already signed up with them. I was spammed heavily past weeks with all kinds of wonderful promotions from SC.

I was thinking of upgrading once I fill my account, which I still have a little left of. With this thing now, I will most likely go elsewhere.

It would be evil if they were forcing you to remove tracks but they are just changing it going forward.


But you are "already signed up with them" too! Since I already use their free account you'd think I would be their preferred customer to send offers to as existing customers are always easier to convert than new ones.

Def keep us posted as to what you decide to do. As I said, I'm prolly gonna just use my own website.

I have a ReverbNation account too but I've not seen it do any better than SoundCloud for directing people to my songs. I originally got a ReverbNation account because they had a really cool player that would embed in Facebook for sharing my songs. Then they removed that player and I just went back to using SoundCloud. I honestly don't find either platform to be of much use in promoting my music.

They have a great player for embedding songs IMO. You can also embed a reverbnation player on your own website (check my website link if you are interested in seeing it)

As far as the traffic goes, that didn’t happen overnight for me. I’ve been there 15 years or so. They have a chart system, once you move up the charts, and that takes time, you get more listens.

I really LOVE their embedded player on my website! It is great. But on Facebook they stopped working. Maybe it was Facebook that caused that.

I just signed in and remembered a couple of things about ReverbNation that annoyed me. 1) They are constantly marketing to me whenever I log in and 2) they are always telling me I'm top of a list or a rising star but when I look closely I find it is meaningless as I am "top" in a list with no one else or only 2 or 3 others!.

Yes, forget those lists and the rising star thing, those are bogus. I’m talking about the charts, and those are certainly legit.

I like the embedded player and mobile website, but more important to me is actually being able to make the songs & playlist private from random discovery and I be in control of who I share the links with.

My current tracks are fine but if I want to upload more I'll either have to create a secondary account, find an alternative, or perhaps just host them on my own website (But I would have to find some decent 'player' webcode.

Yeah - that felt like a kick in the teeth from SoundCloud. I really never relied on the site for promotion purposes, and I'm just not in that league to get that type of exposure. I really view it as more of a self-contained community with other SoundClouders where I can find really talented people and great songs, and where I can get some amount of recognition and feedback on my own tracks. They have a pretty big user base, and seem to have a lot of professionals and semi-professionals on there, and its great to have that mix of people from hobbyists to pro. I've always found it to be a very positive, supportive and active community, so I'll hang on for a while and see what happens.

From the con point of view if you're not a Pro subscriber, you're basically going to be pretty limited. They are kneecapping a lot of the people that are potential Pro members - I mean I don't you don't just show up one day and sign up for a Pro account - you've got to start somewhere, and maxing out at 15 tracks which could be a single album seems like a non-starter.

Ohh, I do not care about traffic.
My audience are my friends from physical dimension and friends from PG forum

Even telephone companies allow "grandfathered" plans. I just feel it is a bad juju on behalf of SC to do this. I was on the brink of upgrading, all they had to do is keep me for a few more month. Ohh well, thankfully there are choices. What sucks is that I wanted to keep everything in one place and in more or less in chronological order. Now it will take me looong time to locate the tracks I posted to SC to transplant them.


Dave, thank you for suggestion. I registered with reverbnation. Your tunes always sounded better there than tracks posted on SC. I think BandLab is in the same basket as reverbnation in terms of quality of sound.

P.S. I have a question to SC paid subscribers... Does paid option allows you to download "back" your own content in the same form it was uploaded?

Thank you.

Misha.

This might be the thing that causes me to abandon SoundCloud. Not complaining about it - it's served me well as an easy place to put songs out there to share for many years - probably the longest, least spammy, least dishonest free platform that has existed for that purpose for me.

I have a Reverbnation account, but quickly abandoned it for Soundcloud when Soundcloud came on the scene. I think the charts thing on Reverbnation is completely bogus.

Not sure what I will do come February time frame, when I participate in February Album Writing Month; writing 14-15 songs and recording as many to share in the community that participates there. I probably will pay for hosting with that organization for that time frame and figure out what I will do next.

I do have a wordpress blog that I might use if I can directly host mp3 files there.

Or go with johnx3 and finally pay for my own hosting through Squarespace or the like.

Yes. I upload WAV and even though they are converted to mp3 format for streaming (as I understand it at least), I can download the oringal WAV file I uploaded.

I just read their latest Blog and it says all creators can download their own songs.

https://blog.soundcloud.com/2019/12/02/soundcloud-introduces-lossless-hd-storage-and-downloads-for-all-creators/

Why?



I've paid to have my own website hosted for a long time, 20 years or so. I could stream my music from that site, but prefer instead to imbed the reverbnation player on my site, because it looks and works great.

I host all my music on my own website (and sell it from there too, along with other courses, ebooks, etc). Do all my own marketing. One of the BEST things I have ever done.

Check out
BANDZOOGLE

They have awesome features for bands.

Full disclosure: this is my affiliate link.

I haven't heard anything about YouTube. It's still free and the quality is decent. Opportunity to display lyrics, etc. too.

Noel, Josie
Thank you!
I had permissions set "not to download" and it affected even how files are handled when I was logged into my own account. That what got me confused. I set permissions and was able to download my stuff.

Again, thank you!

Why?

Because there is simply no way I charted like they said I did. Should have been a zero on the chart and if I recall correctly, I was always at the top. That's just not reality.

I get a chuckle out of my ranking on Reverbnation. Whether it pronounces me #1, 2, 3 or 4 in my town (by name), I know I am the ONLY jazz musician in my town (which is quite small).

The other three musicians who each live about an hour away seem to trade places with me in that top-four list. The 'ranking' is not really useful.

I think either you are thinking of a different site (soundclick maybe?) or you didn’t spend much time looking into how that charts work at reverbnation.

Charts are by genre and location. Location charts are Local, Regional, National, and Global.

In my case my genre is blues. My local location is the town I live (very small town), Regional is Toronto, National is Canada.

When I started there I was #1 in my local charts from the start, but that’s because there was no one else on reverbnation in the blues category in the town I live. I think I was maybe around #75 in Toronto, and well into the hundreds for Canada.

The charts position is based on something they call band equity, and is computer generated. The number is mostly based on the number of plays you have, and the number of followers you have. Followers is a combination of people signed to your mailing list, facebook followers, and twitter followers. Also you can link your YouTube account, and those plays count also.

The more plays you receive and the more followers, the higher you rise in the charts, and that generates more plays because it’s much more likely that someone visiting reverbnation to check out blues in Toronto will hear your music if you are in the top 10 than at 75.

In my case it took years to slowly work my way up the Toronto (and Canada) charts, and the higher I get the more listens I get from people just randomly finding my music, and the more listens the more likely someone will like the music enough to follow us on facebook, twitter, or subscribe to the mailing list.

Works for me anyway, I’m really happy with the site.

you know what - it was Soundclick! Sorry to incorrectly diss Reverbnation.

No problem! I thought that might be the case, I had an account there at one time too and found the same thing.