Sound­cloud is the largest of most of the stream­ing sites. For those of you who are well versed in the busi­ness world of stream­ing music, I already know what you’re think­ing. The rumors of Sound­cloud’s demise have been wide­spread for some time now, and who buys a tick­et on a sink­ing ship? You could be proven right in the end, and you won’t be the sole prog­nos­ti­ca­tor pump­ing your fist in the air and yelling “I told you!” if the end does in fact come. Until you’re proven cor­rect, how­ev­er, let’s exam­ine why some­one just might want to pur­sue a job at Soundcloud.

Soundcloud’s Good Side

Sound­cloud is one of the largest and most pop­u­lar lis­ten­ing plat­forms out there. It’s also been the launch­ing pad for more than a cou­ple artists who end­ed up with major record­ing con­tracts thanks to expo­sure through the Sound­cloud lis­ten­ing algo­rithms. It’s also, arguably, been one of the pre­mier plat­forms for bring­ing artists and fans clos­er togeth­er and help­ing the cause of music in gen­er­al. Pod­cast­ers love it too. All in all, there is real­ly very lit­tle if any­thing neg­a­tive to say about Sound­cloud as a ser­vice. It’s pret­ty awesome.

Soundcloud leaves Questions

While the Sound­cloud ser­vice and plat­form are great, the busi­ness mod­el has left some­thing to be desired. After almost a decade in busi­ness and some very suc­cess­ful invest­ment rounds total­ing over $300 mil­lion, they recent­ly had to acquire $70 mil­lion in debt fund­ing due to an unsuc­cess­ful attempt at a new $100 mil­lion invest­ment round. Debt fund­ing isn’t usu­al­ly a pos­i­tive sign.

They’ve also just missed out on being bought sev­er­al times by the likes of Twit­ter and Spo­ti­fy, but all of the would-be suit­ors have up until now got­ten cold feet and pulled back. Last year they launched a paid sub­scrip­tion ser­vice to help, but it has­n’t had much suc­cess to date. So despite the mas­sive sup­port from fans and users, the word on the street is that the future is ques­tion­able at best.

A Big Boat

How­ev­er… Sound­cloud isn’t exact­ly alone in the woods. Very few stream­ing music ser­vices have been known to turn a prof­it worth speak­ing about. But many have also failed or been bought, and oth­ers are owned by com­pa­nies large enough not to care if their music offer­ing makes mon­ey (I’m look­ing at you, Ama­zon, Microsoft, and Google). There’s also the pos­si­bil­i­ty that Sound­cloud just has­n’t found the right part­ner yet, and a white knight buy­er could emerge from nowhere any­time to snatch them up and save the day — which would gar­ner loud applause from the public.

So from my per­spec­tive here at Media Jobs, there are two very good rea­sons that you should con­sid­er pur­su­ing a career with Sound­cloud. 1) There is a very, very real pos­si­bil­i­ty that they’ll be acquired — prob­a­bly from some­one with more cash and clout than Spo­ti­fy and Twit­ter, and 2) it may be that you are the per­son that has the idea that turns the Sound­cloud ship back onto the road towards prof­itable suc­cess. If you have a pas­sion for music and have exper­tise in busi­ness turn­arounds or in tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion, Sound­cloud could be a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty for you.