Wud Records: SoundCloud accidentally deleted our account

SoundCloud accidentally deleted the Wud Records account. It is now in the process of being restored again. It may take some time, but apparently everything should be fixed. Eventually.

You may have noticed that our SoundCloud disappeared for a while and that our pages there are somewhat degraded. This was caused by some sort of error at SoundCloud. We have been told that SoundCloud are working to restore our pages and information so that they will be as they were before the error took place.

On Sunday 20th July, we reported some spam on one of our pages. There are a lot of fake accounts that try to use SoundCloud to funnel new users – and hopefully naive users, in their business model – into joining a fake streams scam site. These things are useless and easy to spot. Don’t ever fall for their tactics!

Unfortunately, either an errant automated system or a sleepy Sunday lunchtime employee believed that our label’s SoundCloud was the spam, not the actual spam we were the victim of. As a result, SoundCloud accidentally deleted our account, along with all of our songs, playlists, comments and everything else.

Naturally, we were horrified. It’s not easy to contact the customer support section of SoundCloud. They are hopelessly understaffed.

When we first joined SoundCloud, their customer support was first class. Due to staffing cuts, all of the best people we were in touch with there disappeared. The company put in place systems that were not for for purpose. They are a little better now, but still not terribly good, especially compared to some years ago.

All the same, eventually we managed to have our pleas heard and our account started being restored, about 22 hours after it was deleted.

It is stilll in the process of being repaired and a number of things are not right yet. We have been told that this is a caching issue. Should it not repair itself, SoundCloud‘s techies should be able to fix the things that remain broken. Let’s hope we will be lucky on those fronts!

This issue has highlighted how reliant we are upon this one platform to drive our embedded players. We shall be looking at ways to diversify our catalogue across more platforms in the coming days and weeks.

Meanwhile, something like normal service may soon resume.

SoundCloud accidentally deleted our account!