Audiomack Co-Founder Says Soundcloud ‘Turned Their Back on Their Core Audience’

While the future of Soundcloud still seems to be up in the air, Audiomack is still here. Pigeons and Planes interviewed David Ponte, co-founder of Audiomack, on where he thinks Soundcloud went wrong and why Audiomack is still doing right.

“They turned their backs on their core audience in order to attract new listeners and placate the other stakeholders in their business (investors mostly),” Ponte says. Ponte believes there are three main examples of this, mostly pertaining to their ad platform and Content ID system, as well as “Not developing features their core audience (artists) have been requesting for years, instead focusing on premium consumer facing features.”

Soundcloud has been having financial trouble for the past few years, and within the last few weeks, it only seems to have gotten worse. The company just recently laid off 40% of its staff and was for a while rumored to going out of business within the next two months.

However, reps from Soundcloud have been refuting this claim. Chance the Rapper gave an official word from the company on Twitter, writing “Just had a very fruitful call with (Soundcloud Co-Founder) Alex Ljung. Soundcloud is here to stay.”

Just had a very fruitful call with Alex Ljung. @SoundCloud is here to stay.

— Lil Chano From 79th (@chancetherapper) July 14, 2017

For competitors like Audiomack, such a demise would provide a bittersweet opportunity. Soundcloud and Audiomack have, to an extent, worked together, as Ponte says to P&P. “We were just given an API key which allowed artists to upload tracks to Audiomack which streamed through the Soundcloud API, just as sites like Pitchfork and Hype Machine do… Until May of 2017, Audiomack enabled artists to add songs to their Audiomack profiles via the Soundcloud API, which many of our major artists did. This allowed those artists to market themselves beyond SoundCloud while still consolidating their play totals on Soundcloud.”

Ponte believes that, although if it would be “unfortunate”, if Soundcloud going down could provide new chances for Audiomack: “This is an opportunity for Audiomack to showcase our platform, which contains much of the functionality that Soundcloud has (for free) in addition to offering different ways for users to discover new artists they will love.”

See the full interview on Pigeons and Planes here.