> saying that anything of value is released on CD already would be like saying that the personal correspondence of Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, etc is worthless because we already have their published books.
No, not at all. What I meant to imply is that if something is of worth culturally then at least some people would put some effort in keeping it alive. Like I said, it needn't be a CD. A pirated rip that is spread over bit torrent would be just as good.
The bible is still around because people painstakingly copied it not because some single entity kept one copy alive for good.
As far as general sounds are concerned, there are other places like freesound.org or archive.org. Thus I don't think soundlcoud has a monopoly on sound.
Soundcloud contains an incredible collection of sound clips. If you take the virtual bulldozer to it, then you're just increasing the chance that something of value doesn't get copied over to archive.org or freesound.org, because the original owner isn't willing or able to do so.
I guess the best we can do is to encourage people not to upload their stuff to soundcloud or any other for-profit website in the first place if marketing their stuff is not what they aim for.
In this way, I think it's also unique vs. other music sharing sites, in that people don't typically post their recording of a Chinese night market on their CDBaby or YouTube channel ...
Soundcloud:sound :: Flickr:photos