“Soundcloud started off with good intentions,” Angela Durden begins, “they truly wanted to give a place for the DIY and indie scenes to showcase their work, and I thought they were an honorable company.”But the road to Hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions. Angela is the founder & CEO of MyDigitalCatalog.com, an online platform that provides and easy way for content creators and owners to document their prerelease ownership stake and other metadata. She recently sat down with us for an interview where she discussed ‘the Soundcloud scare.’
Soundcloud stumbled very badly. Currently, a private equity firm saved the company but, “if they don’t get an infusion of cash, they’re done for.” This means that when the website goes down, all the files that are on soundcloud that may not be archived or stored properly elsewhere, are going to disappear.
So where does this leave you, the artist, and how can Durden help?
Well first, she advises, get a hard drive or two for cheap, head over to Soundcloud and download all your assets to those hard drives ASAP. Next, set up a dropbox, or similar service, account and upload all your files there. Now you’ve got a second backup in case of technology failure. But the other part of the business, and what most people are forgetting to do, is where MyDigitalCatalog.com comes into the picture.
What MyDigitalCatalog.com does is walk you through the process of collecting and documenting all that information so it can be kept safe and completely under your control. That might seem like a lot of paperwork, but if you think of your music as a real business, real businesses have to do paperwork, you won’t regret taking the time to fill it out. Durden also warns about the myth that songwriters can simply register their songs with a PRO and get all the protection they need. In fact, PRO databases are notoriously ill-maintained, even making users agree that the PRO isn’t responsible for accurately maintaining their data, or even losing it.
As a Dropkick Release Plan partner, Indiehitmaker Dropkick artists get special discounts to join mydigitalcatalog.com. Not already an IHM artist? Get started here.
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