Strongly worded opinions. My views expressed here are my own and not of any of my employers.

If you weren’t aware, Soundcloud is running out of money. Seems their method of garnering cash (by annoying the shit out of Content Creators by introducing upload limits) is failing them due to the large difference in paying listeners and free listeners and the fact that they’re getting sued by copyright holders for the large amounts of songs they’ve on their servers without paying royalties.

Initial worries were mostly sparked due to the fact that they fired a large part of their staff. So, the usual suspects who pop up if a website shuts down (ArchiveTeam) arrived on the scene, ready to move all files to a safe and secure server… until Soundcloud shoo’ed them off the scene by telling Jason Scott (ArchiveTeams public face and mascot) to stop it.

I personally was infuriated by it. There’s a lot of worthy content and podcasts on Soundcloud, and seeing those lost to a shutdown would be a great loss for all involved. So I set to work, creating an archive script for an entire Soundcloud page. You can see the fruits of my labor in the repository below, a full script to archive an entire user account to an archive.org item. Feel free to use it as you wish, and please do archive as much channels as possible.

Now having said that, you may be wondering… didn’t Soundcloud recently get a 170 million rescue fund^(archive.is), thereby solving all issues? While, it’s true that they did get a 170 million fund, I wouldn’t say this solves any issues with Souncloud potentially shutting down. To quote yahtzee:

“You don’t keep a life raft afloat by throwing huge bags of coins at it.”

~ Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, on Mighty No.9

Although Yahtzee in this context was talking about overfunded kickstarter games, it still counts. This money injection is nothing but a temporary measure. It’s basically putting Soundcloud on life support, but it’s likely at some point it will run out and they’ll be begging for money again, as they have been having issues ever since August 2015, and personally, I don’t see that changing anytime soon, simply due to the way their business model is set up.

So that is why I personally consider Soundcloud to still be severly endangered, and I urge you to use my tool and archive as much channels as you can, since if you don’t, you may endanger parts of history. Don’t just sit idle and wait for the doom timer to run out as Soundcloud will eventually have to shut down. Be active and start archiving it. You have a shot today at securing culture and history. You may not have a shot tomorrow, because tomorrow it might be gone. Archiving is important.