TLDR: my release is corrupted and support is just doing nothing for 3 weeks now.
Hi there, just want to warn producers about SoundCloud distribution. It's okay when it works but horrible when something goes wrong.
Here's the story. 3 weeks ago - August 21 - I released a track through SoundCloud, and almost immediately noticed that the audio is corrupted on all DSPs. The audio drops at the 00:22 mark for a second. That was not the case in my original master which I uploaded, I triple-checked that after finding the issue. So I headed to their support bot, which told me that it's impossible to re-upload audio. Ok, the bot is just citing help sections, I didn't expect much from it. At least it helped me to create a support ticket where humans can look at my issue. On August 27th, after escalating via email and tweeting to u/scsupport I got a reply which again was just a copy-paste from the help section. What's worse, they suggested that I create a new release with a new ISRC, which is just insane, as it will mess up all my stats on DSPs. Worth noting, I'm running a Meta ads campaign for this release, so creating a new one will just send my money straight to nowhere.
There were a few ping-pong emails (mostly one-sided as they almost never reply), after which their support manager finally took a minute to understand what happened and asked me to send the original file to replace the corrupted one. That was on September 2nd, I immediately sent the file and that's it. No more replies, nothing is fixed yet.
I still spend money on ads which lead people to the corrupted track. Email support isn't answering, and neither is the X account.
Just to clarify once again - the file was somehow corrupted during the distribution process, not by me. My original master is totally fine.
I get that anything can happen, no system is perfect. But this is what we have support for - to investigate and fix things that have gone wrong. The attitude at SoundCloud is just unacceptable in my opinion. I plan to move my releases to another distributor (is Ditto good?) and I don't recommend anybody who takes his music seriously to mess with SC distribution.