SoundCloud is cutting over 40 percent of its staff, the company announced on its blog. The streaming service will let go 173 of its 420 employees in order to "ensure our path to long-term, independent success," SoundCloud CEO Alex Ljung wrote. The news was first reported by Bloomberg.
As part of the reduction, the company will shutter its offices in San Francisco and London, leaving only its New York and Berlin offices operational. It's been a trying year for SoundCloud to say the least. The company announced it may possibly run out of money before the end of 2017 back in January, before landing a $70 million credit line from investors to stave off certain collapse.
Source: The Verge
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Music hosting biz SoundCloud, having just axed 40 per cent of its staff, is now trying to ward off rumors that it will go broke in less than two months.
The song-sharing service was rumored to be in crisis mode and had to shut its doors, with just 50 days of funding left before it ran out of cash. A spokesperson insisted Thursday, however, that this is not the case, and that following last week's layoffs, SoundCloud is going to be able to turn a profit soon.
[...] This comes as SoundCloud struggles to get its advertising and subscription revenues up high enough to push the music-sharing service into the black. Since 2008, the company has relied on VC funding to stay afloat and, after nine years, is still trying to turn a profit.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/13/soundcloud_insists_not_dying/
Previously:
SoundCloud is Cutting Nearly 40 Percent of its Staff
According to Techcrunch, Soundcloud has secured the emergency funding which will allow the service to survive:
SoundCloud has just closed the necessary funding round to keep the struggling music service afloat. CEO Alex Ljung will step aside though remain chairman as former Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor replaces him. Mike Weissman will become COO as SoundCloud co-founder and CTO Eric Wahlforss stays as chief product officer.
Further coverage at Ars Technica and BBC News.
Soundcloud's layoff of 40% of staff and the subsequent rumours of a collapse have been covered here before.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday July 07 2017, @08:10AM (1 child)
Which 40%, from the upper half or the lower one?
(don't mind me! flu, headaches, fever, muscle pain, runny nose, all the kit)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @06:05PM
They just keep cutting because times are bad. Also, musical genres on the platform are being consolidated. From now on, only Synthwave, Emocore or Symphonic Metal tracks are allowed to be uploaded and played.
/wrists
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 07 2017, @09:01AM
People treat YouTube like a natural monopoly. Competition is impossible.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by tonyPick on Friday July 07 2017, @09:32AM (3 children)
What the hell do all those people actually *do*? I mean Soundcloud is basically a Javascripty-HTML5-media sharing app plus player in a browser, that mainly serves to annoy the hell out of people when they can't actually download a file.
The backend might be marginally interesting in terms of scaling & distribution, but it's not *that* interesting, and this stuff isn't rocket science. four sites with over 400 people sounds insane...
(Score: 2) by ledow on Friday July 07 2017, @09:52AM
Removal of copyrighted content, I would imagine, given the attitude legal entities have to their responsibility for what's available online.
I imagine something like that could suck up dozens of people's time.
Hell, I work in a small prep school and we have 187 staff.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday July 07 2017, @11:33AM
The advantage of only hiring inexperienced smart young things to staff a startup is sometimes the kids are creative, which is useful sometimes in some creative roles early in a companies life, and they're cheaper than old timers, maybe half price. The disadvantage is a lot of NIH and youthful inexperience and judgment errors means there's plenty of non-creative positions that now require ten people to do the work of one competent experienced person, especially when dis-economies of scale set in like coordination and communication.
So if you move the decimal point one spot to left the numbers makes sense. But then you'd have to pay 1/10th the number of employees twice as much individually, which is "too expensive".
Aside from outright empire building games. If you want a title promotion your direct reports direct report needs to implement a manual data entry department updating /etc/hosts files and password files, you can't have DNS or LDAP AND get a promotion for managing a larger team.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday July 07 2017, @07:29PM
I'll hope that users now write some script to bypass various obstacles and download all worthwhile on soundcloud to ensure it's not caught in the black hole of Chapter 11.