[throwaway431234]

SoundCloud is the worst company, so hostile to former paying users! I am a hobbyist songwriter and have posted my rough mixes (Apple's Music Memo app which adds drum and bass automagically with two clicks & then mix it in Garage Band) on my SoundCloud for more then ten years. I signed up for their Artist Pro account and was a member for of such consistently for a few years at $17 a month. Once you cancel they then hold all your music hostage by hiding it and later threat to delete it. Horrid!

[direwolf20]

A former paying user is not a customer. If you don't pay, why should you receive service? I buy a pizza at this pizza shop every week, but I still don't get free ones.

SoundCloud is European, so most of the dark patterns used by American companies to offer "free" service are not available to them, and they are required by law to actually delete data instead of pretending to delete it.

[Scoundreller]

> I buy a pizza at this pizza shop every week, but I still don't get free ones.

Do they take the leftovers from your fridge when you stop buying?

[internetter]

The analogy was bad. You're effectively renting space in their fridge. In that case, absolutely.

[direwolf20]

If I haven't bought pizza for two months, they use their magical ray, reach into my fridge and turn the leftovers into mold.

[hombre_fatal]

The difference between Artist vs Pro is three hours vs unlimited uploaded music.

So if you had over three hours uploaded, it seems reasonable for them to restrict the service. If you had <= three, then it would a problem.

[goblin89]

SoundCloud used to be good prior to the redesign.

Recently I decided to evaluate it for serious use and start posting there again, only until their new uploader told me I need to switch to a paid plan, even though I triple-checked I was well within free limits and under my old now unused username I uploaded a lot more (mostly of experimental things I am not that proud of anymore).

It looks like their microservices architecture is in chaos and some system overrides the limits outlined in the docs with stricter ones. How can I be sure they respect the new limits once I do pay, instead of upselling me the next plan in line?

Adding to that things like the general jankiness or the never-ending spam from “get more fake listeners for $$$” accounts (which seem to be in an obvious symbiosis with the platform, boosting the numbers for optics), the last year’s ambiguous change in ToS allowing them to train ML systems on your work, it was enough for me to drop it. Thankfully, it was a trial run and I did not publish any pending releases.

If you still publish on SoundCloud, and you do original music (as opposed to publishing, say, DJ sets, where dealing with IP is problematic), ask yourself whether it is timr to grow up and do proper publishing!

[storystarling]

This sounds like a classic consistency vs latency trade-off. Enforcing strict quotas across distributed services usually requires coordination that kills performance. They likely rely on asynchronous counters that drift, meaning the frontend check passes but the backend reconciliation fails later. It is surprisingly hard to solve this without making the uploader feel sluggish.

[LoganDark]

That would explain why the front-end would allow you to attempt something that goes over your limits, but not why the back-end would reject something that doesn't go over your limits.

[goblin89]

My bet at the time was that they have a bunch of hidden extra limits based on account age, IP/user agent information, etc. If that is true, their problem is that they advertise the larger limits instead of the smaller limits (to get more users signed up), and that they do not communicate when their extra limits apply and instead straight up upsell you, which are both dark patterns.

[storystarling]

That sounds plausible. I've had to implement similar reputation-based limits on my own backend just to keep inference costs from exploding, so I sympathize with the fraud prevention angle. Masking that as a generic quota issue to push an upsell is pretty hostile though.

[goblin89]

The feeling of being gaslit, when I calculated and recalculated the length of my tracks and compared it with limits on their pricing page, was quite unpleasant.

Another possibility is maybe they reduced their limits from 3 to 2 hours of audio around the same time. I don’t know if it happened before or after my experience, did not read their blogs or press releases, only made sure I was well under whatever limits were currently listed on their pricing & plans page (I was probably under 2 hours as well, but as this point can’t be bothered to check). Perhaps that transition was chaotic and for some time their left hand did not know what the right hand is doing.

[storystarling]

Fair point. I suspect it comes down to ghost reservations or stale caches. If a previous upload failed mid-flight but didn't roll back the quota reservation immediately, the backend thinks you're over the limit until a TTL expires. Or you delete something to free up space, but the decrement hasn't propagated to the replica checking your quota yet.

[storystarling]

Fair point. I suspect it comes down to how they handle retries. If an upload times out but the counter already incremented, the system sees the space as used until an async cleanup job runs. It is really common to have ghost usage in eventually consistent systems.

[goblin89]

That’s a possibility.

[jacquesm]

You mean you never kept your originals but just uploaded and deleted the masters?

[throwaway431234]

Date of publication (copyright) is important to a songwriter even if there are a hobbyist.

[jacquesm]

That was a solved problem before the days of the internet.

[PunchyHamster]

that just sounds like customer not paying for service not getting the service

[bestham]

The service is freemium, so they had a limited account. Decided to pay for a premium account. And apparently can’t downgrade and get back what they once had.

[input_sh]

I'm just guessing, but this:

> and have posted my rough mixes [...] on my SoundCloud for more then ten years

...easily implies >3h of uploads, which is over the free plan limit. If you're over that limit and stop paying, yes, it makes perfect sense that they'd threaten with deletion of some of your existing uploads.

[throwaway431234]

They first hide your songs and as time goes on they start threaten to delete your songs if you dont pay

[colordrops]

What should they do instead? spend money continuously holding your music on disk forever even though you aren't paying them for the service? Sounds like they are being cool about it by keeping it around for a while and warning you before deleting it.

[goblin89]

The marketing move of offering an unlimited plan reveals that storage and traffic are not that expensive and someone made a choice that light users will subsidize heavy users. With that, hiding your data from you and subsequently deleting it, at least without first encouraging you to download it within some post-downgrade grace period, would be a choice, not necessity, and is user-hostile.

If it is an actual necessity—a service chose to market an unlimited plan to attract more users, and then realized they are losing money on storage and traffic so much that they would unapologetically burn bridges with existing users who showed themselves as willing to pay (who maybe needed to downgrade temporarily for whatever reason) with the above move—and yet their strategy is apparently to keep offering that plan (in hopes to turn things around with more light users joining?), I would question whether that service has serious issues with even medium term planning.

[direwolf20]

No matter their actual costs to provide the service, I'm struggling to see why they should not immediately delete all of your stored files upon cancellation of the storage service.

They are a European company, so you are the customer, not the product and recipient of subsidies. They use less manipulation and dark patterns than an equivalent American company.

You pay, you get service. You don't pay, you don't get service. If they can't bill you, they should try to communicate with you for a few months before treating it as a cancellation. If you cancel, then your choice is clear and you should expect your service to be immediately terminated at the end of the current billing period. If their service is storing files for you, termination of the service means deletion of the files.

There is no need for a grace period when you knowingly and voluntarily make the decision to terminate a file storage service.

[goblin89]

> you are the customer, not the product and recipient of subsidies

They also do advertisement (promoted tracks and audio ads) but this is irrelevant to my point, what I described applies regardless, including the fact that heavy users of the unlimited plan and free users definitely receive subsidies, both from light users and from ad revenue of the platform.

> You pay, you get service. You don't pay, you don't get service

The definition of the service you receive and how good it is includes what happens when you decide to off-ramp from receiving it. Changing your service plan is your indication that you want to change service, what happens after that is how they handle it. There is no stipulation whatsoever that things stop being available to you immediately.

In fact, in case of SoundCloud, they themselves prove this, because they did not delete data but instead continued to keep data for free, which means providing you a service that you presumably stopped paying for. The silly move of them was to do that and not allow you to download it, and then emailing the victim urging them to pay to access this data, which makes it 100% a dark pattern and means they are effectively blackmailing customers with proven ability and willingness to pay.

If I remember right, Apple (an American company) handles it better and gives you a month to download excess data if you downgrade, but sure, “dark patterns”.

> There is no need for a grace period when you knowingly and voluntarily make the decision to terminate a file storage service.

If you terminate your use of a file storage service, you would expect your personal data to be deleted. However, no one terminated their use of a service, somebody apparently downgraded their payment plan (temporarily or not).

[dzhiurgis]

As a listener I'd pay (a reasonable amount like <$5 per month) to only listen to mixes, especially if it can be filtered by bitrate.

Their best feature is social feed - I only see reposts from people I follow. But for branching out / discovery might be cool to see what their feed looks like, so something like "show followees feed".

[throwaway431234]

Overall what Im saying is they treat their non-paying customers better then their paying ones. Once I was a paying customer after having and using my free account for over 7 years then converting to a paying customer and having to cancel Soundcloud became hostile.

[direwolf20]

Did you have more stored data than the limit for stored data for unpaid accounts?

[dzhiurgis]

I'd pay for Soundcloud, but not sure what I'd get for over free version. It costs more than Apple Music and offering offline nowadays is lol feature.

[crazybonkersai]

You can export your entire profile using yt-dlp. Of course you have to do it, when you are still a paying customer.

[thenthenthen]

Do this regularly, like youtube soundclownd ‘silent’ deletes favorites and also blocks songs based on your vpn/geo location. I lost so much music… so i need to resort to scraping. Simple solution: make the song unavailable but please just keep the entry (name-title) in your fav. list.

[dylan604]

Why would someone that writes their own songs, mixes in GarageBand, uploads to a 3rd party website need to use yt-dlp to get back the files that they themselves made?

Yes, I'm intentionally victim blaming here. The victim is complaining about a 3rd party site deleting files. Who cares? Why would you have as your only source of your files the copies stored by the 3rd party?

[crazybonkersai]

You get a point there, but export is mostly about metadata, eg images and description.

Data loss happens too. Soundcloud may be your only source of your own tracks.

[throwaway431234]

Date of publication (copyright) is important to a songwriter. Soundcloud im sure knows this! Probably should have said this from the top!

[direwolf20]

Not only that, the victim is complaining about a paid file storage company deleting the files when the victim stops paying

[gmueckl]

Are there any alternatives?

[tern]

A lot of people use apps like this lately: https://untitled.stream/, https://gatefolded.com/, https://samply.app/

[dewey]

Isn't everyone on YouTube or Bandcamp now for this use case?

[alexalx666]

YouTube is the domain of Satan, also the name is hilarious - you tube? really? I don't tube thaanks

[efreak]

It's YouTube, not MeTube, so you can use it as you want and I'll stay away.