You may have noticed that SoundCloud has removed their dropbox feature. This enabled anyone with a SoundCloud account to accept track submissions and also allowed users to submit tracks to their favorite artists and labels.
Here’s SoundCloud’s reasoning for removing the feature:
“We are disabling this feature because it was broken — meaning that private shares were not being sent to everyone properly, and private tracks were often getting lost or not appearing in the Stream. We also got a lot of feedback from our community about people abusing this feature, and sending tracks to people who were not interested in receiving them. This placed tracks on Streams that could not be removed and caused a lot of confusion.”
Labels like Diplo’s Mad Decent used to accept tracks through the SoundCloud dropbox. Mad Decent has since switched to e-mail submissions. Accepting e-mail submissions is a lot less convenient, so what should you do?
One option is to accept tracks in a message. This option is ideal for sharing private tracks between users. Messaging fills up the inbox and leads to a lot of annoying notifications, so if you want to accept a large amount of tracks via SoundCloud you should probably try something else.
Take a tip from Phantogram and Dave Sitek’s Federal Prism label, who have both started SoundCloud groups to accept remix submissions.
Users can submit public tracks to your group during upload, or they can choose one of their previously uploaded tracks straight from your group page.
You can even embed your group onto other websites, making it extremely easy for people to submit tracks.
If you do this it would be a good idea to keep your group moderated. Federal Prism hasn’t been moderating their group and it has filled up with irrelevant tracks, which makes the process less appealing.
Nina Ulloa covers breaking news, tech, and more. She also runs West Coast Fix. Follow her on Twitter: @nine_u
A few labels are now accepting demos via DropTrack.
DropTrack: The best way to send music.
For example, my label accepts demos here
terrible. they’ve taken away the ability to be successfully industrious and instead sell the dream of lucky popularity (viral success) to get people to create the media that drives the net value of their music services. the new boss is a far larger scumbag than the old boss.
I met a guy from SoundCloud recently who was working on the DropBox feature back then. They have indeed retired way back as it was a content acquisition tool / part of their content growth strategy. There are a few alternatives out there (like the one below that Paul mentioned) or these guys have rebuilt pretty much the same as the old SC dropbox: https://www.hypesong.com
Cheers, JD