Instead they made a conscious decision to push ahead with bizarre business strategies and without providing any meaningful functionality updates to their core service (I even think they regressed in this regard, the dumpster fire that was song reposting was the final nail in the coffin for me).

Honestly I think the service needs to make a graceful exit to let another service emerge who actually wants to push things forward for developing new artists.

Absolutely, repost spam (particularly repeat reposts of the same song so it would stay at the top) making the feed unusable was what drove me away. Then all the random bugs that persisted for ages, and frequent weird/unnecessary UX semi-redesigns. One bug I recall is that going to a song page then back to the feed would never put me back at the same point in the feed.

Exactly.

SC was too focused on the social aspect instead of trying to be a useful tool for music/audio pros.

> Honestly I think the service needs to make a graceful exit

Couldn't agree more.

Looks like it expires soon, and even so it's been restricted to a shopping cart model.

Gonna apply for the patent on two-click purchases...

I mean, maybe I'm hanging my ignorance on the clothesline here, but the product is built, yea? Do they really need that massive warehouse in the Tenderloin, AND their global offices?

Twitter on the other hand could never have been built without being venture funded from the beginning, the growth of their product was only possible because it could scale and have the kind of uptime it did, and that venture funding allowed them to hire the engineering talent that made it all possible. Maybe now, twitter could lay off 90% of their staff and figure something out, but it seems pretty unlikely that would be the case.

Patreon could help, but not every artist on SC is fine with staying indipendent when a big label approaches them, at least in the space I follow (electronic/EDM), simply because the real money is in live shows, and you get bigger shows if you have bigger "shoulders"

I think bandcamp is doing well because it's a different service (store first), for different customers (people that mostly can't care less for popular music), where the music uploaded (almost?) never is in copyright gray areas...

Maybe you're speaking statistically here, but every time I find an artist's music on SC, I end up finding 3-5 more artists like them that I really like. So, maybe it's anecdotal, but I certainly enjoy SC for its discovery aspects.

If you mean financially, it's because they take a 15% cut of an artist's sales, up to $5k, after which it drops to a 10% cut and they also take out CC processing fees.

IMO, if SoundCloud were smart they'd find a way to team up with BandCamp right away. Unfortunately, I don't know what BandCamp would get out of it.