SoundCloud

URL • • • Project status Endangered Archiving status Halted, see Project status Project source https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/soundcloud-grab Project tracker https://tracker.archiveteam.org/soundcloud IRC channel (on EFnet) Project lead Unknown

SoundCloud is a global online audio distribution platform that enables its users to upload, record, promote, and share their originally-created sounds.[1]

In August 2015, SoundCloud was threatened to be pursued through the courts for unpaid royalties.[2]

In February 2016, a report casted “significant doubt on the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”[3]

In July 2017, SoundCloud announced that they are firing 173 staff members to get "on [their] path to profitability".[4] Later in July, leaks from within the company revealed that it was "fully funded into Q4", yet was uncertain about future survival, giving it an estimated shutdown date of September 1st. [5] Digital Music News revealed that SoundCloud's investors could effectively terminate the company on August 11th by voting no to a round of "rescue" funding that would give lower priority to past investors, as well as introduce numerous leadership shakeups.[6] On that day, SoundCloud revealed that investors voted yes to the proposal.[7]

In December 2019, SoundCloud announced that they are introducing a new limit for free accounts. Instead of being able to upload up to 3 hours in any number of tracks, the new limit is either 3 hours or 15 tracks. In practice, this lowers the upload limit to below 1 hour for most users.[8][9] Per API data, this would affect a total of about 2.3 million users that have collectively uploaded over 75 million tracks, 40 % of all of SoundCloud (meaning that about 40 million tracks or 22 % were at risk of getting deleted as the users wanted to upload more content). Two days later, they backtracked.[10][11][12]

Archive Team considers the SoundCloud service in danger and, as it hosts a lot of original content, finds it important to prepare to save it selectively (a full grab would be too big and would raise concerns of mass copyright infringement).[13][14]

Thus, a discussion has started in the (on EFnet) channel.

SoundCloud stored 2.5 PB of data on Amazon Glacier in May 2014.[15] As of April 2017, the 128 kbit/s MP3 streams of all public tracks on SoundCloud total 855 TB[probably TiB]. Based on API grabs, this grew to 900.1 TiB in 134.6 million tracks as of July 2017 and to 1230 TiB in 174.9 million tracks as of September 2019.

Project status

07/20/2017 : IA disclaims the project and SketchCow/Jason Scott uses his influence toward ending any official AT project. He says he is prevented from public discussion of the reasons. [16]

: IA disclaims the project and SketchCow/Jason Scott uses his influence toward ending any official AT project. He says he is prevented from public discussion of the reasons. 07/19/2017 : API Grab completed, We are now pre-processing the data to get all the jobs ready for the big pull. We should be ready to go and downloading music by 07/24/2017

: API Grab completed, We are now pre-processing the data to get all the jobs ready for the big pull. We should be ready to go and downloading music by 07/24/2017 07/18/2017: API grab from all comment and misc data is underway. SC is throttling our User Agent heavily. Code is being worked on to resolve this.

07/14/2017: We are currently working on getting all the API data. So far, rate limiting has not had an effect. We also are writing the scripts to get a good grab of everything we can. The warrior project is expected to start on July 18th.





References



