By Jason Epstein
When a new version of software or a website or just a single feature comes out there are bound to be fans just like there are bound to be nay-sayers; it’s just the nature of change. SoundCloud just updated their design last week and strangely enough, it seems like everyone (or at least everyone who has decided to be vocal about it) is against the new changes. But are their concerns valid or will it just another case of people getting upset at a website for changing their interface and then getting used to it and never speaking of it again? Let’s take a look at the new SoundCloud.
After months of private beta and a lot of user feedback, SoundCloud returns with a bevy of new features. You can now repost sounds into your own stream for others to listen to or follow your sounds as they’re spread across the SoundCloud community. You can also make entire sets of your sounds, creating new themes. Continuous play is a new option as well as an improved search and an explore function to show you what’s new and popular.
But therein may lie an issue – if it’s only showing you the most popular sounds, who’s to say that the they fit your personal tastes? Wouldn’t it be better to have access to sounds that are closer to your own interests, that can be extrapolated from your previous listens or your own uploads? SoundCloud also has improved time comments, added keyboard shortcuts and a new sound shuffle feature.
There’s also a social network inspired activity tab that helps to keep you informed about what’s happening with your content and personalized ‘who to follow’ lists for other’s content. It’s all designed to keep you engaged for a longer period of time, to share more and to follow more, just like any good social network. SoundCloud isn’t done rolling out the new features either, soon enough they’ll be unveiling work on other areas of the web as well as mobile apps to make it a cross-platform experience.
SoundCloud users have been coming out of the woodwork to complain about the new interface. One member complained that there are fewer stats on the dashboard, fewer links on profile pages to artist they’ve worked with or are inspired by, truncated bios on the artist page instead of being shown in their entirety, details removed from streams and the disappearance of the Spotlight page (this hasn’t disappeared, it’s just gotten harder to find which is ironic since it’s called the Spotlight page). SoundCloud says they took a lot of customer feedback into consideration, but so many of the users leaving comments say they were not consulted, even ones with premium paid memberships. More complaints are about the cluttered layout of the dashboard and the overall dilution of many of the original features that made SoundCloud so great.
A SoundCloud representative responds, “Thank you for your critique! To address some of your concerns now – Spotlight is still in there, but now it’s a part of user profile stream, namely it’s at the top of your Stream. We have built faster, more scalable play stats into Next, we will be also adding additional metrics to it in the future. In the meantime, you can see all the detailed stats here like before: http://soundcloud.com/you/stats. As for the user profiles, we have reduced the text information in favor of displaying more audio players. We hope that your listeners will appreciate the increased focus on your sounds. And yes, we are committed to make SoundCloud the best experience both to sound creators and listeners and we’ll continue to improve it.”
It seems like some of SoundCloud’s new features and rearrangement of old features may be misunderstood by some of their community. However, it also seems like SoundCloud is trying to fit in more with Facebook, Google and other companies that provide less niche experiences than they are know for. But is this the right audience to experiment on? Are they cheapening the experience to make it more “shareable”? Check out the new SoundCloud for yourself and feel free to comment your thoughts.
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