Employees Say SoundCloud Has 80 Days to Live

After seeing 173 coworkers laid off, Soundcloud employees went to an all-hands meeting on July 11th hoping to be assured that the cost benefit for Soundcloud of cutting 40% of its staff would be enough to keep the music-sharing company afloat for the long haul. Instead, they were told the cuts ensured that the company would be afloat only until the end of Q3.

According to a bombshell report from TechCrunch which talked to sources at Soundcloud, Souncloud co-founders Alex Ljung and Eric Wahlross admitted to their employees that the layoffs would only keep Soundcloud afloat until Q4, which is just 80 days away. The announcement put a dark cloud over the heads of the remaining Soundcloud employees. “It’s pretty shitty," said one anonymous Soundcloud employee. "Pretty somber. I know people who didn’t get the axe are actually quitting. The people saved from this are jumping ship. The morale is really low.”

The news contradicts the company's more positive spin on things. A few days before the meeting, Soundcloud founder Alex Ljung wrote a blog post addressing the massive layoffs, saying, "By reducing our costs and continuing our revenue growth, we’re on our path to profitability and in control of SoundCloud’s independent future." The site's PR team echoed Ljung's sentiments, though when TechCrunch pressed Soundcloud's PR team about the reports, they admitted they were "fully funded into Q4" but were also in talks with potential investors.

Though Soundcloud is extremely popular and provides unique content such as unofficial remixes and long DJ sets, the company has had trouble monetizing their content, and has lost massive amounts of money in recent years--$44 million in 2016 and $52 million in 2015.

According to sources at the meeting, Soundcloud heads knew for months that they would have to cut jobs, yet continued hiring people, resulting in some people getting laid off before they'd even worked a day. The report tells of one employee, Vojta Stavik, who was laid off just days before he planned to move to Berlin to start his job at Soundcloud. Stavik is considering legal action, as his signed job offer guaranteed him four weeks notice before dismissal.

Twitter, Spotify and Google are all rumored to be potential buyers of Soundcloud, though it's unclear what effect a major corporation would have on a platform beloved by independent music makers who sometimes don't have the copyrights for the music they mix and upload to the site. The effect of Soundcloud's potential death, however, is clear: the loss of the largest collection of independent music on the internet.

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