Do Yourself A Favor And Backup Your SoundCloud Files. Right. Now.

You may not know it, but one of the most influential music and podcast streaming platforms for classical musicians is SoundCloud. If you’re not familiar with the service, just think of it like YouTube for music. The service attracts large numbers of classical music artists (instrumentalists, composers, and ensembles alike) so when the company unexpectedly announced on 7/6/2017 it was shuttering offices in San Francisco and London along with eliminating 173 employees (or approximately 40 percent of its workforce), it hit that community like a ton of bricks.

If this may not seem like that big of a deal for the classical music field, think again.

In addition to headlines across major tech publications, cornerstone media outlets inside our little niche of arts and culture are already publishing articles about how this potentially impacts the development of new music.

For example, NewMusicBox.com published an article by Gahlord Dewald on 7/18/2017 that examines just how much composers have come to rely on SoundCloud as a reliable, forward-thinking platform for sharing and distributing their music.

I have several clients that use SoundCloud extensively and although they’ve never gone so far as to quantify its impact on a granular level, they are hard pressed to image their success without it.

Within the tech sector, third party groups are already organizing to implement large-scale backups of everything on SoundCloud…just in case.

While that’s comforting, it shouldn’t stop anyone with files on SoundCloud from making their own backups. By that, I mean go back up your files right now.

SoundCloud power users may also consider finding a way to export their Key Performance Indicator (KPI) data. To that end, be aware that SoundCloud does not offer any sort of integrated stats export feature so you’re going to need to do some digging in order to archive the metrics you find most important.

If you’re already looking at other providers just in case SoundCloud shuts down, know that there’s no way inside of SoundCloud to mass message your existing followers to let them, know where they can find your music.

Hopefully, you’ve been pushing followers to something like a Facebook or Twitter account or even better, getting them to subscribe to an email list. If you have, you’ve already done the heavy lifting needed to make sure you don’t lose those connections you’ve worked so hard at building.