I was interstate in Sydney that week, interviewing for a new position. This happened around 2am local time, sitting at a hotel-room desk.
On 27 January the user487 account had been uploading tracks faster than people could keep up, and SoundCloud’s free tier capped uploads at 3 hours of audio. The account was visibly closing in on it. The WATMM thread (35+ pages by then, growing several pages an hour) started routing around the looming wall. Someone posted, half-jokingly, “kickstarter for pro account?”. The next page, someone dropped the gift-purchase URL:
How do I give the gift of SoundCloud Pro membership?
You can purchase a gift of Pro membership here: soundcloud.com/pro/gifts. Once you make your purchase, you will receive a confirmation email with a gift code that your recipient can redeem here: soundcloud.com/pro/gift
I’d been turning over the same idea but hadn’t realised you could gift it without an email address. I asked the thread, to make sure nobody else had already done it:
did anybody gift the account a pro soundcloud account? because i will right now if they haven’t
Nobody had. I bought the Pro Unlimited tier (no 6-hour cap) for $145 US, but then panicked after as I hadn’t quite realised I couldn’t directly gift it to another account at checkout time:
oh jeez. i just paid for a Pro Unlimited account gift ($145 !!) and it turns out you can’t put in a username, you have to email the user a link for them to accept. messaged the soundcloud account but I fear I just wasted $145 on something nobody is going to use. hopefully they accept
worst case scenario i’ll just gift to somebody else. i pondered my sanity doing this, but it’s $145, in context it’s less money then i’d end up spending in a night going to see a major act play live by the time you add in the ticket and all other costs. worth it if it means he’ll upload more tracks beyond the 3 hour free limit imho!
The thought that ran through my head before clicking checkout: fuck it. Everything else had gone sideways that year. The gesture might have been pointless, it might not even work, but what the hell. I sent a message to the account with a link to the gift code, hoping this might encourage him to upload more tracks, but mostly expected it to go unused.
While I waited to find out if the account would even accept the code, the thread wasn’t entirely taking it seriously:
it’s a nice gesture, if a bit mental to some of us! if he doesn’t take it i’ll paypal you the money, been meaning to get a pro account anyway
About 75 minutes after the purchase post, a regular noticed the account had upgraded:
Just noticed he now has a Pro Unlimited account!
the account has gone pro, did he take the gift?
Don’t worry about the upload limit guys… he is now an Unlimited Pro user… he plans to put up more tracks!
He’d accepted. And he kept uploading.
The thread briefly lost it and got a little silly, the way WATMM was always a little silly:
nice, did xf pay it for him? ps mind-blowing stuff richard, all of it!
BASED XF
holy shit dude bravo, hope you get a special gift
gonna be awks if he doesn’t use it
XF IS OUR NEW KING LONG LIVE XF
I posted once more and went to bed:
looks like he accepted my gift: back to sleep :)
The reply that mattered came from inside SoundCloud, not the forum. Two words, no greeting:
That was the entire reply. I don’t think “maniton” is a typo. He writes the way he tags tracks, lowercase, type-as-you-talk, the same register the track titles are in. Every message after that one read the same way.
I’d followed up immediately, with somewhat embarrassing wording I’d change if I were sending it again:
And then, in a longer message I mildly regret reading back, I wrote something about how the dump was helping make my current situation more bearable.
What it did
The practical bit: the account stopped being upload-capped, and over the following ten months it grew to 268 tracks. The 6-hour Pro tier would have been far less; the Unlimited tier I’d hesitated over at checkout didn’t. I posted about it two weeks later, mildly relieved I’d stuck with the larger one:
so i’ve been travelling the last two days, holy crap, more music!? are we over 6 hours now? bloody glad i gifted the unlimited over the pro now (which is limited to 6 hours). i hesitated when purchasing it, never in a million years did i think we’d get >6 hours of files but i thought the gesture would feel cheapened by buying the limited account type.
The bigger thing: it opened a SoundCloud DM thread between him and me that didn’t close for years.
The project I ended up building on the back of all this was good for me in the period it most needed to be. Watching the count tick up from 35 to 80 to 200 across early 2015 gave me something useful to do with a bad stretch.
I don’t know if Richard always intended to upload this many tracks, but the Pro account gift was a clear signal that there were people who appreciated the dump and wanted to see more of it. I like to think it encouraged him to keep going, but I have no way of knowing if that’s true.
The voting-site offer came four months later, on a different page of the same WATMM thread, in a different headspace. That’s a couple of chapters away.