[Read in full on NHAM]
Soundcloud?
[This article is an excerpt from a chapter of The Human Guide to Doing Music Online by @kit]
Don’t bother.
It’s unfortunately true that SoundCloud is still – at least at the time of writing this – the only platform out there making DIY music into a full-on shared social experience, what with the timestamped comments, reposting, and repostable playlists and such. But it’s also unfortunately true that SoundCloud is a terrible value no matter how you look at it.
As a free service, you’re limited to three hours of audio uploaded. That may sound like a lot for some people, but even if you don’t finish a lot of music, three hours will still run out pretty fast, and then you have to start deleting old stuff to post new stuff. Want unlimited uploads? That’ll be $100 per year, and you don’t get anything else for that money that’s worth caring about.
The social side of things isn’t worth much either, these days. For the most part, the only ones still using SoundCloud socially are musicians desperate to collaborate with anyone and everyone, shameless self-promoters trying to leech attention from everyone else through their comments sections, and bots. Mostly bots. If your friends are on SoundCloud, you can expect them to be the only people leaving genuine comments on your uploads at least 95% of the time, if they leave comments at all. Comments aside, if you’re just starting out there now, you can also expect to never be discovered. Even if you’re ruthlessly promoting yourself across platforms, 100 plays per song would be an incredibly high achievement, assuming you don’t already have a large audience that will follow you over.
You will get much more of a valuable social experience almost anywhere else, even on YouTube. Record your screen with your DAW open and upload that, no editing necessary. There’s a surprisingly large community of people doing that there, and outside of hip-hop and beatmaking where everyone is ruthlessly self-promoting all the time, it’s a very genuine and friendly community. Post the link to your videos on any other social media as well, and you will end up with a far wider potential audience and a higher likelihood of anybody even finding you in the first place than you would get from SoundCloud, because even if your social media following is small or nonexistent, the YouTube algorithm is still pretty good for discovery in this niche.
SoundCloud hasn’t been worth using in any capacity, or even looking at, since the beginning of 2020. It’s been in decline since 2016. Let it fade away.
The closest thing to an alternative at the moment – aside from Audius, which would be a great choice, if only it wasn’t built on a blockchain and centered firmly around cryptocurrency – is hearthis.at. I don’t really know anything about it though, or what it’s like to use, how many people use it, or anything like that. I only know enough to feel confident that it’s better than SoundCloud, but you should do your own research on it.
There’s also Funkwhale, a promising, if a bit clunky open source audio sharing platform, but it lacks much of the social aspect. If you’re curious about it, you can host it yourself or explore the existing public instances. Bandwagon is another very promising music sharing platform that’s much less clunky, but also less complete.
Aside from that, there is also PeerTube, which does have social features, and despite being primarily a video-sharing platform like YouTube, it actually allows you to upload audio files on their own as well. Branching further out, most federated microblogging software, like Misskey and its forks, Mastodon, Akkoma, and so on, also allow uploading audio files directly as attachments to your normal social media posts, which can then be streamed from there.
Even though none of this is the same as SoundCloud, these are all great options if you just want to freely post stuff as you feel like it.
[Read The Human Guide to Doing Music Online in full]
