Mixcloud 10 mix upload limit for basic users

#1

https://campus.mixcloud.com/changes-to-mixcloud

‍From December 1st, we’re introducing a maximum allowance of 10 published shows for creators on the basic tier.

I have a lot of respect for what mixcloud is trying to do – be fair to everyone, especially artists, and try and play ball with the major labels and distributors. But hot damn this platform is getting stilted beyond usability.

If someone sends me a mixcloud link I basically don’t listen. lots of my mixes are up there but i’m being honest as a listener that’s just the reality. it’s just too likely that I will hear a song i like and literally not be able to skip back to it to ID it. Can you imagine youtube if you were only able to scrub 3 times per video?? forget it.

and then to add this restriction and tax your only people that actually are rooting for you – the creators – it just seems hard to see how this will ever pan out for them.

#2

Yeah I have always uploaded there but the whole point is to have an archive. I’m not going to spend £100 a year to be able to maintain an archive that doesn’t get many listens and where the listening experience is gradually getting worse.

A lot of these platform companies seem to be on borrowed time - they run at a loss for years, with the aim to eventually become monopolies and jack up prices. I don’t see it working for Mixcloud as they aren’t really a monopoly.

I dunno where else to go. SoundCloud might be more affordable, but I haven’t checked. Might make an attempt to upload to YouTube but would probably get loads of takedowns. Might just pack it in altogether and just mix for myself which would be a shame for me.

#3

I did talk to a guy a few months ago about a new service they are thinking of developing but whether it’ll ever come to anything I’m not sure. Also it’s streaming focused rather than archive focused as far as I can see.

But it did sound interesting - a bit more focused on the audience and crowd than the dj which I think could be interesting, but probably plays more to the strengths of big name ppl who could draw a crowd.

https://castrooms.com/

#4

What about a website? Host all your mixes and create an archive. You can get a domain and server space for very cheap these days. Post your limit on the platforms and link people to the main course :slight_smile:

#5

I thought about this more today and it’s like their business model is this:

  • As a listener, your experience is going to suck (no scrubbing backwards, 5 scrubs forwards, etc) unless you fork over $5
  • As a creator/uploader, your experience is going to suck (10 mix upload limit) unless you fork over $5

its just like :flushed::flushed::flushed: the whole experience sucks for all parties unless you pay. how is anyone going to visit this website and get a good first impression? they’re taxing both ends. at least make it suck less for one of the two parties.

@str_apx i think you’re right that all of these companies never made any financial sense and they’re coming to a logical end. we’re just reaching the end of that era where these early 2010s companies started dumping petabytes of music onto Amazon S3 with no real plan of how to make it viable or usable (Soundcloud included). It never made any financial sense but for 10 years we had a nice run while they slowly ran out of cash.

#6

And also, I should say that I realize that this part of the experience is due to arcane and ass-backwards requirements imposed by music distributors/major labels/licensing laws and it’s not Mixcloud’s fault. It’s some kind of logic where skipping backwards equals “on-demand streaming” equals free streaming which is frankly absurd and no human being is going to pirate music that way.

But nonetheless, even if it’s not Mixcloud’s choice and is their concessions to music distribution and laws, that is the experience that you are faced with as a mixcloud user and so when you take an overall look at the site it’s pretty grim

#7

+1! I think this is really the only way you can have proper control over your archive. There is a slight time and skills investment, but imo the skills are transferable and the time is well spent :slightly_smiling_face: You can also run your own server off a recycled laptop, if that works out being cheaper than paying for server space lol

#8

I can barely be fucked to upload to Mixcloud these days lol. And I just feel like they will get zero engagement. Most of my promo is posting here, on Twitter (where almost all of my followers will be political ppl uninterested in music, and posts probably won’t get seen), Instagram (where I have almost no followers and posts probably won’t get seen). It seems like a lot of work. But then again… I would be sad to have it all go.

And I guess it would be fun and useful to learn how to make a website? But ideally I’d just get a kind of easy, free solution where I might get a few random algorithm-listens.

Quite a few of the ppl on the mixes thread seem to upload to YouTube so I might try that.

#9

Yeah it is quite mad, the platform company economics. I don’t know much about it but whenever I see any articles about it it’s always quite pessimistic.

I’m seeing a lot of ppl on Twitter atm saying it’s going to die bc of Musk taking over (I’m a bit sceptical of this) and someone was commenting basically that there was never any prospect of it being profitable and the prior owners have wanted shot of it for years. I’m always seeing stuff about these huge companies that have become omnipresent like Uber or Deliveroo, and that they’re haemorrhaging money or can’t turn a profit. But it all just carries on. It’s surreal.

Facebook / Meta seems to have a death wish at the moment, but maybe they just have so much money they can’t die? Apparently they have also caused a load of havoc bc lots of media orgs pivoted to video based on what turned out to be hugely inflated play counts on fb video. And a similar thing has happened with online ads, revenue is much less now bc previously the impact and reach was very overstated. So the ads are cheaper to buy now and so media companies that rely on online ads are taking a big hit. All the Metaverse stuff looks hilariously terrible as well. But maybe they’ll make a success of that.

I think it’s interesting bc ppl do really struggle to predict what’s going to work in the future, and I feel like it’s sort of like natural selection. For every successful adaptation there’s a million maladaptive mutations that just sink without trace. And the ideology of the age is that Zuckerberg and Musk etc are big idea men with great vision and strategic nous. But maybe they’re just as blind as the total randomness of genetic mutations and they just got lucky with an idea at the right time.

I really like this show called Halt & Catch Fire that’s about tech ppl in the 80s and 90s and it is just about constant march of progress and they are all involved in a load of failed enterprises. It doesn’t really feel like that atm bc the platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Spotify etc are so huge and omnipresent, and there’s been what feels like quite a long period of stability (even though 10-15 years is quite short in the long view). But maybe we’re on the cusp of another big shift like you suggest? It would be interesting to see what comes next if we are.

Incidentally no one watched the H&CF show and it didn’t get a full dvd / bluray release. It’s been taken off streaming services so now if you want to watch it you have to buy it from Amazon or YouTube and it’s like £20 per season for 4 seasons! They’ll push ppl back to piracy with stuff like that.

In fact maybe that’s what I should do. Go back to the prelapsarian utopia of torrenting.

Sorry that this post has so little relevance to the actual Mixcloud issue, but it is something that interests me even though I don’t really know what I’m talking about.

#10

@nickecks @sleepers do you have any advice for learning how to make a website / what’s a good way to learn? I’ve done a tiny bit of research but it looks hard so I thought I’d ask as I’ll probably end up wasting time looking at something crap or outdated.

Is it possible to get mixes up on the podcasting services? I’d always have assumed not but there seems to be a lot of advice telling you that you can. Would be good to get a decent interface that doesn’t rely on having a website loaded in a browser tab but it seems a bit too good to be true (also I know there’s a technical side to it, hosting costs etc.)

#11

Re: websites, the easiest and cheapest way I can think of is probably github pages? Tbh I’m fairly early in the process of learning this stuff too, so not sure if my advice will be the best tbh. But github make it fairly easy to do for free. The sites have to be static pages though, but imo that’s not the worst thing. Otherwise, I’ve built a more dynamic site before by using a server in node.js with p5.js for the front end, and that worked OK for me, although I’m sure it wasn’t the most stable site and I probably wouldn’t recommend that route. Ofc there’s also squarespace and the like…

Re: podcast apps, I’m sure it must be possible, because there’s a tonne of mix podcasts out there - i know illian tape has one, as do Dekmantel etc… but I have no idea how to sort that out tbh. They might be using something along the lines of distrokid but never looked into it so I couldn’t say for sure, sorry! Podcasts do seem like a good approach to it tho!

#12

I’d never heard of Github Pages - I am not a code-y guy at all so it’s a bit intimidating in some ways but it does look interesting. When I was looking up (mostly old) tutorials about how to make a website, the big problem for DJs seemed to be hosting and bandwidth of files. I don’t know if that’s something that Github Pages has a solution for (I couldn’t quite figure it out from looking at the website). I would be interested to see what you come up with if you’re making sites.

I’m halfway tempted by a podcast as you can get them where they have free websites and stuff, but you’re paying a fair amount for hosting and distribution. You can’t get them on Spotify either at the moment. Kind of defeats the object with regard to money as they all seem to cost about as much as or more than Mixcloud. I think you can get taken down, but I doubt they would unless they have an automatic feature like they do for youtube.

Still, it does feel a bit like it would be more enjoyable to do it the podcast or website way - people listening at least won’t have a terrible experience. I might try youtube first as it’s free and then see what I think.

#13

I’ve made basic websites using Wordpress. I pay a company $1.99 a month to host what I built for free on Wordpress.

Start simple and just watch tutorials on YouTube, but the reason I chose Wordpress is because I felt like it was less of a paid / controlled platform and more open source.

I’m sure there’s a ton of options that may be better suited to your needs, but that’s what I chose if it helps. Just building a basic website and learning how to keep it lean is really rewarding.

#14

The hosting company is Network Solutions, you can also buy a domain from them in addition to upgrading to more space if you get ambitious and want to put a lot of media up…

#15

Oh shit was meaning to reply to this ages ago sorry!! I didn’t even think about hosting lol 🤦 Not exactly sure how that’d be handled with github pages tbh! I think @nickecks is spot on - WordPress + hosting company is probably the best way