We’re sad to announce we’re closing the Soundslice community section (aka channels).

This was the part of our site where you could post music to your public profile, follow other accounts and find new music to learn. It was a little-used part of our site — many Soundslice users probably don’t even know it existed — but had a small and loyal user base, mostly among jazz musicians sharing licks and obscure transcriptions.

Why are we closing it? A few reasons:

• Music publishers have been increasingly reporting copyright violations to us. Unfortunately some people have been posting copyrighted music to their channels, which was never the intent of this part of the site. We’ve taken posts down accordingly, but it’s not a sustainable situation for publishers or for us.
• Product focus. We’ve found that the community section caused a fair amount of confusion with new Soundslice users: is our site a social network, or a private practice tool? We’re hoping this brings some clarity to our offerings.

Here’s our plan for winding it down:

• You can still post to your channel for one more week. On July 4, we’ll disable the ability to post to your channel.
• Public channels will remain accessible for another week after that. On July 11, we’ll disable channels — meaning channels and all slices posted to channels will no longer be publicly accessible.

If you’ve posted slices to your channel, they will continue to be in your account for your own private usage. The only thing that’s changing is that they won’t be visible publicly anymore.

If you’re one of the vast majority of Soundslice users who don’t use channels, this change has no effect on you.

In the future we intend to build some sort of long-term replacement for channels. Possibly something oriented around public-domain music, to avoid copyright issues. If you have ideas or suggestions, please let us know.

Finally, thanks to everybody who posted to their Soundslice channel over the years. Personally I learned a good number of jazz guitar licks and discovered many new musicians. It was a delightfully obscure and niche corner of the Internet.