Why We Will And Won't Miss SoundCloud, And Other Stories
WHAT YOU MISSED THIS WEEKEND
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Welcome to What You Missed This Weekend, a roundup of the stories from this weekend that you missed while you were out living your life.​ Inside:making peace with SoundCloud, catching bougie thieves and scoping out some seriously cool space stuff.

SoundCloud Changed Music, But It May Not Live On

It's entirely possible you've never really used SoundCloud, but you've almost certainly listened to a musician who caught their break there. At its peak, SoundCloud was the place to discover new, exciting music. It carried the torch once held by earnestly-kept MySpaces and underground, copyright-dodging MP3 blogs. I remember uploading my very first attempt at a podcast to SoundCloud. For a time, the site was the "2007-era YouTube" of anything audio.

Now, it isn't. Jeff Ihaza's piece at The Outline is a snapshot of SoundCloud today: now burdened by the residual baggage of its golden era. Ihaza weaves the familiar story of an internet business struggling to make profit with the almost-quaint, underdog successes of SoundCloud as a taste-making hub. There are no rose-tinted glasses here; SoundCloud's mistakes that have jeopardized the streaming platform's future are pin-pointed here, without getting bogged down in internet biz jargon.

Whether SoundCloud rebounds, restructures or collapses, its history-to-date deserves attention and respect. It's the rare kind of business that prioritized an exciting prospect — in this case, a worldwide network of music creation and adoration — over feasible, safe profit. It didn't commit to a smart business model, but it achieved things we'll only truly appreciate once it leaves a void.

[The Outline]


Don't Steal, Especially From A Crime Expert

Is theft always bad? Not in the abstract or in fiction (if you watch a good heist movie without identifying with the criminals, you need help). Is it bad even in super-bougie San Francisco? Well, yeah — especially because, as this article about boutique owner Chelsea Moylan suggests, "Robin Hood"-style and desperate crimes might be outnumbered by thieving flights of fancy from well-off customers.

Moylan, a trained criminologist, has tracked down shoplifters in her spare time basically as a hobby, counter to the recreational thievery of her many perps. The profile of the average thief at Moylan's store "Anomie" is a chatty customer who pays for other items while choosing to pocket a necklace or stuff a garment in their bag. This is San Francisco! If they can afford a purchase in the hundreds of dollars, stealing an accessory on top is just an insult to retail's precarious survivability in a tech-driven metropolis. Moylan's the boss but her employees are laborers — the idea of them having to be extra wary of cheery customers with sticky fingers is downright frustrating.

On the other hand, Moylan seems invigorated by the chase. Honestly, it's a story ripe for a movie adaptation. Question is, would you be rooting for the shoplifters or the storeowner gumshoe?

[Yahoo/Racked]

Space Travel Stuff Will Always Be The Coolest

Got a few thousand dollars handy to drop on some astronaut doodles? Or perhaps a few million to invest in a bag that once held some moon rocks? If you answered "yes" to either of these questions, hopefully you're already prepared for the upcoming Sotheby's space flight auctions on July 20th.

Multi-million dollar space rock fanny-pack aside, the more affordable range of space travel memorabilia up for sale runs the gamut from the practical (a thermal spacesuit cover) to the silly (an Apollo 10 Snoopy doll). All of the items are worth checking out — I'll let your bank account decide whether or not they're cool enough to ever consider owning.

It'd be easy to assemble an auction lot that's just US space travel ephemera but Sotheby's has wisely widened the net to include USSR contributions as well. This simple quote from cosmonaut Yuri Gargarin on one of the auction items captures why all this stuff is so cool (in a way that astronaut caricatures can't):

Thanks to a thorough training I experienced no discomfort from the effects of space-flight factors. At present I feel fine. 

We humans did that. We've sent people to space and we did a good enough job that one of the first to do it reported feeling just "fine" after the go-around. That's why even a once-full rock sack is still amazing enough to fetch such a high price tag.

[Business Insider]


One More Thing…

A factor that seems like it'll only further enhance space-race nostalgia is that our new goals in space are just so much dang harder to attain. Mars is the next place we want to explore but it's damn hard to land anything on, as this video from "minutephysics" explains. Still, there was a point at which we only dreamed on landing on the moon. We got good enough at that to pull it off a few times — so here's hoping.

<p>Mathew Olson is an Associate Editor at Digg.</p>

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