To fix SoundCloud, it must become the anti-Spotify

 Startups die by suicide, not competition. It wasn’t  that anyone was  stealing Sound  Cloud's  underground   rappers, bedroom   re mixers    and   garage bands.   Sound  Cloud  stumbled because it neglected these  hardcore  loyalists  as it  wrongly strove to usurp Spotify as  the  streaming home of music’s  superstars.

But four months ago, after laying off 40% of its stuff,  and brought in a new CEO. Now the question is whether SoundCloud can get back in the groove. I sounded the alarm about soundclouds mishandled headcount cuts, misguided direction and morale problems, so it feels important to lend some suggestions alongside the criticism.

SoundCloud has something no one else does: the world’s biggest archive of user-uploaded music and audio — around 120 million tracks. And so that must be the center of the service.

It once was, but rather than doubling down on independent creators, helping them monetize with ads and commerce and selling subscriptions to enhanced ad-free access, Sound Cloud wasted year chasing the major record label in hopes of building a Spotify competitor full of the most popular music. Finally in mid-2016 it launched the $9.99 SoundCloud Go+ subscription with ad-free access to mainstream music and indie stuff, but it was already years behind Spotify and Apple Music.

In the meantime, the distraction led to extraordinarily , both in terms of the volume of ads on the sites and the independent artists who could get a revenue share. Ads weren’t a big part of SoundCloud, so many users don’t feel it’s worth paying to get rid of them. Creators strayed to YouTube and Patreon, investing their attention and driving their audience to where they could earn money. And spurious take-downs of creators’ music that they already paid SoundCloud to host further burned the company’s cred with its core constituents.

Luckily, Sound Cloud has now booted its former management team, replacing Alex Ljung with former Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainer. That gives Sound Cloud an opportunity to realign its strategy with the creators who made it unique in the first place. Here’s what we think it needs to do.