It’s funny, much as I’ve used SoundCloud daily for all these years now, I’ve never really found use, myself, for the stats. Likely, that’s because almost all my focus is on the Groups functionality. I do post a track occasionally, but not with any particular hopes of a broad listenership, just to participate, to float a musical idea, or to mark a milestone, like the addition of a new module to my little synthesizer rig.
For the Disquiet Junto group each week, all I look at is three things:
(1) where we’re at in active users (not members, but accounts that have actually posted tracks, which just topped 500),
(2) the number of tracks in the most recent project (I don’t even keep track of the numbers, but I do note it mentally — we’ve been as high as 70+ in a week and as low as around 10, and we’re generally around 30 or so), and
(3) the number of total tracks (we’re so close to 4,000 in just over three years).
I tend to be more qualitative than quantitative in general, but, yeah, maybe if there were Groups-oriented stats, that’d help me a bit, but I wouldn’t make it a priority. I look at the Junto qualitatively — are folks commenting on each other’s tracks, and is the commentary constructive; are the projects being met with enthusiasm, not so much in terms of number of participants in a given week but the sense that effort was expended by those who did participate; are there any obvious breakouts, in terms of levels of listenership, that sort of thing.
I think I’m more focused on functionality than on stats. You know what I would love would be the ability to transfer a track. I’d love if someone who’s posted a track but didn’t want it associated with their account any longer could transfer it to me, or to someone else.
Note: I originally posted this in a conversation on Facebook, but figured I’d post it here, too.