Congrats to all who work at soundcloud, and the tumblr intergration that they collaborated on has been a brilliant additiion to us music bloggers. Although I haven`t got `into` the soundcloud community too much I have made some good connections and it has made working with people I don`t have to time to record with usually much more easier. Thank you, you do more for music than any major label has done for a long time.
Having said that, there`s a few things that do my head in about it.
Firstly, one huge gripe that I have with the service is the piss poor search feature - it`s just too cumbersome to find what you`re looking for.
If I search for all the bands in my city Leeds during one week, and I listen to 7 or 8 pages or tracks, when it comes to the following week, I can`t jump to page nine and carry on where I left off, I have to keep clicking "next" to get where I was. So, If you`ve listened to 22 pages out of 6540 and you`re bored shitless of pressing "next" 22 times to carry on where you left - well that`s put paid to you checking out the songs that have been uploaded in the past - You`ll just "find" songs somewhere else, by other means.
If they can get that sorted, THEN joe public will have a better experience on the site if they`re a crate digger - trawling through music to find that `gem`. A good feature in soundcloud is their music groups, it works like a mini community, and yeah, groups are a great way of finding what you want - The groups focus on a particular style, or a genre or sometimes on a location, but a popular group will still suffer the same problem if they have masses of pages that music lovers have to wade through.
My other bone of contention - with has nothing to do soundcloud itself, is the hit and run followers. There`s a breed of soundcloud user who are just in the numbers game. they follow you, you think "Cool, I`ll check them out and if they`re good I`ll follow back" , as soon as you start to follow them, they unfollow you. You never find out when someone unfollows you, so you`ve been duped into making someones followers stats look good.
How Piss Poor is that?
Not only does it NOT make you want to check out your sounds in future - it just makes me unfollow you. I`ve been lucky that I`ve been able to pick up around 4 followers a week, sometimes, occasionally I get that in a day. It`s nice, but it`s not my goal to have loads of followers just for the sake of it - you get zero downloads. What I`m not doing is the scratch my back thing - how will you ever know I rate you as a musician?
Having a Soundcloud account is like being in love -
YOU SHOULD ONLY FOLLOW YOUR HEART.
Join it for the music and follow for the love of interacting with other musicians. Don`t do it for fame.
FAME IS SOOOO 20th CENTURY. YAWN.
[MY SOUNDCLOUD PAGE]
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