Soundcloud Alternative focussed on privacy

[SongBox]

Hi everyone,

My name is Michael and I'm from Scotland. In a former life I was a professional, touring musician and I had a recording deal with Universal records. For what it's worth, the period of my career where I was signed with Universal was basically the death knell of my time in the music industry. After my time in the band I worked for several years in music media doing software development at a couple of the UK's biggest music magazines (Metal Hammer and Classic Rock Magazine).

Before I continue it's important to note that before posting here I communicated with the admins of this forum and they gave me permission to post here.

I've thrown everything I have into building something that I wish I had 15 years ago. My product is called SongBox and it's a platform where you can upload your music and send private pages "SongBoxes" to individuals and get detailed reporting on listening activity.

https://songbox.rocks/?ref=soundboard

The product tells you how many times your SongBox was looked at, what tracks were played and how many times they were played and crucially - the listening time.

Back in the day when I was sending out literally hundreds of CDs (remember them?) every month, I was basically sending them out into a black hole. I'd send to radio stations, booking agents, promoters, magazines etc and after I put that package in the post I would have no idea what happens next. Now, with SongBox I can create a page for persons A, B and C and i know exactly who is engaging and how long they're listening. I find the listening times extremely valuable as even though it's often not nice to see that someone only listened for 16 seconds... it lets you know what tracks resonate; if i send out a SongBox with three tracks in it and one of them has an average listening time of 3 minutes or more then I know that is the track that's sticky.

Sorry... I'm rambling now but I didn't want this just to appear as a spam post.

To finish... what I'm doing is trying to build a viable alternative to Soundcloud that values privacy above all else and the security of your tracks, I've lived this life and music is a passion to me. One of my earliest customers emailed me to say "this is kinda like Vimeo for music" and I loved that. I want SongBox to be to Soundcloud what Vimeo is to Youtube.

If Soundcloud is for the masses chasing likes and "thumbs up" or whatever, then SongBox is for the more serious musician who wants to know what happens with their music after they send it out.

Anyway... feel free to check it out: https://songbox.rocks/?ref=soundboard

Thanks for making it this far, if you did.

[Tanuj Tiku]

Hi Michael,
Welcome to TSB!

I think, this is a fantastic idea. I love the idea that it is focused on professionals to an extent.

A few questions:

1. Playback quality - This is something Soundcloud is not good at and Vimeo does very well with video. So, what is the technical aspect of your service? Soundcloud has bit crushing type effects, high frequency smearing and loss of audio quality over all. How does Soundbox fare in this department? What control do we have over this?

2. Page customization - Can we customize the page where our music is hosted? If yes, then what features exist to do this?

3. Technical glitches - At the moment, I visited your Songbox on Google chrome and Firefox - On Chrome, for some reason it does not work properly. I repeatedly have to click on the play icon but it does nothing for a bit. Eventually, it works but it is a bit glitchy. I tried it a few times.

On Firefox, the waveform has trouble loading at times but the song will start playing immediately.

One thing I found slightly odd is the omission of the pause button. Once I press play, I would expect the pause button to show up. This is because as the song is loading to playback or the waveform is loading, I am not sure if the play button is now broken because it is static and did I hit play or pause because I hit it a few times due to inaction.

The last point is less consequential at the moment as you are still setting it all up or it could just be a technical snag for now.

[Guy Rowland]

Good luck with this Michael, Soundcloud is a very troubled platform and a better version is long overdue.

[SongBox]

Thanks so much for this feedback! I will address each point later. Don't have time right now but I wanted to acknowledge your reply!

Thanks again!

Hi Michael,
Welcome to TSB!

I think, this is a fantastic idea. I love the idea that it is focused on professionals to an extent.

A few questions:

1. Playback quality - This is something Soundcloud is not good at and Vimeo does very well with video. So, what is the technical aspect of your service? Soundcloud has bit crushing type effects, high frequency smearing and loss of audio quality over all. How does Soundbox fare in this department? What control do we have over this?

2. Page customization - Can we customize the page where our music is hosted? If yes, then what features exist to do this?

3. Technical glitches - At the moment, I visited your Songbox on Google chrome and Firefox - On Chrome, for some reason it does not work properly. I repeatedly have to click on the play icon but it does nothing for a bit. Eventually, it works but it is a bit glitchy. I tried it a few times.

On Firefox, the waveform has trouble loading at times but the song will start playing immediately.

One thing I found slightly odd is the omission of the pause button. Once I press play, I would expect the pause button to show up. This is because as the song is loading to playback or the waveform is loading, I am not sure if the play button is now broken because it is static and did I hit play or pause because I hit it a few times due to inaction.

The last point is less consequential at the moment as you are still setting it all up or it could just be a technical snag for now.

[SongBox]

Thanks Guy

if it's not too much trouble could you elaborate on why you perceive Soundcloud to be very troubled?

Thanks for replying!

Good luck with this Michael, Soundcloud is a very troubled platform and a better version is long overdue.

[Guy Rowland]

Re Soundcloud troubles - the two big ones for me are audio quality (this may have improved recently, not too sure, but it always was atrotious), and piracy. Essentially the way I see it now is putting something on Soundcloud equals giving it to anyone who cares to register it as their own.

[SongBox]

Ok that's great because it's the piracy thing that's one of the main things I'm looking to help with.

Well actually i guess it depends. Technically there is no way to stop someone stealing your audio once you put it on a browser. Whether it's streamed or whether the audio file is loaded into the browser doesn't matter. If it's playing on your computer then you can steal it. The person who solves that problem will be an overnight billionaire.

What I'm doing differently is allowing music creators to create unique pages with the intention that they only share the link with that individual or that group, and then all activity on that page is reported on. I'm also looking into audio watermarking and other such things.

My background as a songwriter... i couldn't put an unreleased track on a social network (which is what Soundcloud is), it's obviously a no no. So SongBox is more for those types of people who need to share audio with people or groups, but not just put it out there for the masses to consume. Does that make sense?

Re Soundcloud troubles - the two big ones for me are audio quality (this may have improved recently, not too sure, but it always was atrotious), and piracy. Essentially the way I see it now is putting something on Soundcloud equals giving it to anyone who cares to register it as their own.

[tack]

Re: Tanuj's comment about technical glitches, no problems on my side with the waveforms on Firefox. Also when I click play, the icon does change to pause. However, pressing the pause button does not toggle it back to play. And also pressing play on another track doesn't change the currently playing track's button back to play: it remains as a pause button even though it's already paused.

So, yeah, a few odds and ends of polish still to be done. But I do agree with the sentiment that Soundcloud can use more competition.

[Guy Rowland]

Thanks Michael. I suppose for private sharing I currently just share a dropbox file - what are the main advantages with SongBox vs Dropbox would you say?

[SongBox]

Ok here we go, if I can take these one at a time....

1. Right now playback quality is maintained at whatever quality of file you upload, I don't do any compression or anything on the file. I am looking at this as more of a way to differentiate the plans. for example on the free tier I would match Soundcloud and on one of the paid plans keep the quality as per the original file.... still contemplating this.

2. No right now you can't customise your template but its not out of the question if I get a lot of people asking for this.

3. BUGS!! Thank you for spotting these. I've since fixed them so please go try again.

With regards to the waveform - some larger files can take a few seconds to render. This is also something I'm actively looking into right now.

Thanks so much.

Hi Michael,
Welcome to TSB!

I think, this is a fantastic idea. I love the idea that it is focused on professionals to an extent.

A few questions:

1. Playback quality - This is something Soundcloud is not good at and Vimeo does very well with video. So, what is the technical aspect of your service? Soundcloud has bit crushing type effects, high frequency smearing and loss of audio quality over all. How does Soundbox fare in this department? What control do we have over this?

2. Page customization - Can we customize the page where our music is hosted? If yes, then what features exist to do this?

3. Technical glitches - At the moment, I visited your Songbox on Google chrome and Firefox - On Chrome, for some reason it does not work properly. I repeatedly have to click on the play icon but it does nothing for a bit. Eventually, it works but it is a bit glitchy. I tried it a few times.

On Firefox, the waveform has trouble loading at times but the song will start playing immediately.

One thing I found slightly odd is the omission of the pause button. Once I press play, I would expect the pause button to show up. This is because as the song is loading to playback or the waveform is loading, I am not sure if the play button is now broken because it is static and did I hit play or pause because I hit it a few times due to inaction.

The last point is less consequential at the moment as you are still setting it all up or it could just be a technical snag for now.

[SongBox]

Thanks a lot for checking it out. The thing you mentioned about play going to pause, but pause not going to play has since been fixed.

I did a massive overhaul on the javascript on that page the other night and looks like I introduced a few bugs. Thanks to you guys they are now crushed!

Thanks!

Re: Tanuj's comment about technical glitches, no problems on my side with the waveforms on Firefox. Also when I click play, the icon does change to pause. However, pressing the pause button does not toggle it back to play. And also pressing play on another track doesn't change the currently playing track's button back to play: it remains as a pause button even though it's already paused.

So, yeah, a few odds and ends of polish still to be done. But I do agree with the sentiment that Soundcloud can use more competition.

[SongBox]

This is an awesome question and one that I struggled with myself as SongBox was growing and I was putting more time into it.

The answer is part tangible and part opinion / personal taste.

The tangible part is, I believe, the reporting and the separation. So for example I create a SongBox and send it to radio programmer A, and I create another SongBox and send it to booking agent B. With SongBox I know exactly which person is engaging, listening to what tracks and for how long.

So I can tell that radio station guy listed to track 1 for 15 seconds, track 2 for 20 seconds but he listened to all of track 3, and he listened to it 7 times!
In the same vein I can see that booking agent guy didn't even look at the page.... so screw him!

The personal taste part is just around whether you're the type of person that's happy with DropBox because is kinda does the job well enough, or if you're the early adopter type that likes new things and likes how something like SongBox might make you feel. It won't be for everyone :-)

As an aside, one of the original features of SongBox was instant notifications when someone listened to your track. This is actually very cool. The system would send you an SMS message IMMEDIATELY when someone clicked play on your track. So it would be like "Someone right now, is listening TRACK A in SONGBOX B. However I had to take this feature away as it was costing me a fortune... one of my first customers is a school in America who are using SongBox to send tracks the kids record in classes to their parents... so they were getting hundreds of plays a day for weeks at a time!

I'm looking at bringing the instant notifications back in as a paid for bolt on.

Thanks Michael. I suppose for private sharing I currently just share a dropbox file - what are the main advantages with SongBox vs Dropbox would you say?