This summer, an engineer named Matthew Healy moved to Berlin to work at SoundCloud, a popular music-streaming service. He started his job on a Monday. On Thursday, a companywide meeting was called. Healy and his new co-workers assumed it was about the acquisition rumors swirling around the company.
Instead, Healy learned that he and 172 other employees — roughly 40 percent of the company’s staff — were being laid off. ‘‘The rest of the day is a blur,’’ he wrote in a post about his experience online. ‘‘I now realize that I was in shock.’’After the layoffs, the technology blog TechCrunch published a report claiming that SoundCloud had enough money to finance itself for only 80 days. Though the company disputed the report, the possibility that SoundCloud might disappear sent a shock through the web. Data hoarders began trying to download the bulk of the service’s public archive in order to preserve it. Musicians like deadmau5, a Canadian electronic-music producer, tossed out suggestions on Twitter for how the company could save the service. Chance the Rapper tweeted: ‘‘I’m working on the SoundCloud thing.’’
Since its start in 2008, SoundCloud has been a digital space for diverse music cultures to flourish, far beyond the influence of mainstream label trends. For lesser-known artists, it has been a place where you can attract the attention of fans and the record industry without having to work the usual channels. There is now a huge roster of successful artists who first emerged on SoundCloud, including the R.
&B. singer Kehlani, the electronic musician Ta-Ha, the pop musician Dylan Brady and the rapper Lil Yachty, to name just a few.Part of what made the service so vital was the way that established artists stayed plugged into it. When an unknown Atlanta musician named Makonnen self-released an EP online and on SoundCloud, Miley Cyrus shared an image on Instagram flagging one of his singles, while another song, ‘‘Tuesday,’’ caught the attention of the Toronto rapper Drake. Drake recorded a remix of the song and eventually signed Makonnen to his own label, OVO Sound. This, of course, is what most musicians want, but Makonnen later said in an interview that he was frustrated by the glacial label process, which delayed the follow-up to his EP. SoundCloud allowed artists to bypass that process.
Even now, the site houses a large pool of musicians, many of them unsigned, who are part of international music cultures that largely do not exist anywhere else online. In a recent Times article, my colleague Jon Caramanica chronicled the rise of ‘‘SoundCloud rap,’’ a subgenre of rap released primarily on the streaming service that he described as ‘‘the most vital and disruptive new movement in hip-hop thanks to rebellious music, volcanic energy and occasional acts of malevolence.’’ As he noted, it rose as a rebuttal to the hyperproduced sound of artists like Drake. It was music made entirely to be distributed online, yet it created its own culture offline — something unlikely to…
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