Soundcloud CEO swears they aren't shuttering their doors. What else could he say?

by Angela K. Durden
The first domino to fall is never the only one. As the founder of MyDigitalCatalog.com and a songwriter who wants to place her music, I stay abreast of the business and ahead of the curve of where the music business is heading. On May 19, 2017, I wrote this article on Linkedin entitled "2017: The Year the Music Business Died." In that article I said:

The Bigs and The Majors have lost track of the money, y'all.Making the distribution system so complicated that the creators of the music cannot figure how they are getting screwed, The Bigs and The Majors ended up outsmarting themselves. Yes, while giving the old "eff you" to the creators, they ending up effing themselves. The more they lost control, the tighter they squeezed. We know this from the consolidations in the business making all but a very few of these companies publicly traded [and] who had better meet quarterly stockholder performance expectations — or else.

And in this January 29, 2017 article entitled "Music Streaming Services Conundrum" wherein I said:

On the other hand, as streamers’ dance the light fandango, their balance sheets turn a whiter shade of pale.

As a company who thought they would try streaming, Soundcloud soon found themselves in trouble when a UK performing rights society sued them.

Soundcloud, one of The Bigs, and other of The Bigs and The Majors, have been and still are playing fast and loose with creators' digital assets, and it is biting them in the butt. Archive Team, a group of volunteer rogue code monkeys, has already started downloading Soundcloud's customers' digital assets, that is, several petabytes their music. Since it cost a lot of money to archive these, Archive Team would not be doing that if they thought there was no danger of the files being lost.

In any case, of course Soundcloud's CEO swears the company won't fold. What else would he say as he desperately attempts to unload the company on unsuspecting buyers? A yard sale this is not. It's a conflagration in the making and lots of people have already been burned.

Financial Times reported Soundcloud is running out of cash. And Soundcloud has closed locations and held massive layoffs.

Most notably to be hurt are the creatives who have been using the service.