In an effort to maintain their independence, the founders of SoundCloud have closed their San Francisco and London offices, laying off 40 percent of their staff members in the process. Alexander Ljung announced the move in a blog post earlier today (July 6).

"With more focus and a need to think about the long term, comes tough decisions," Ljung  wrote. "Today, after careful and painful consideration, we took the difficult step to let go of 173 SoundCloud staffers and consolidated the team into two offices: Berlin and New York. We are extremely grateful for the contributions of each and every staff member who will be leaving SoundCloud, and we wish all of them the best. Without them, we would not be where we are today."

For SoundCloud, a brand that had its COO Marc Strigel, finance director Markus Harder and CCO Stephen Bryan leave within the last five months, this appears to have been a long time coming, with signs of trouble circling the brand for at least the last year. Back in February of last year, the folks at Music Ally reported the company had lost $70 million in 2013 and 2014.

The platform, which Spotify was in talks to buy late last year, attempted to fortify its worth by launching SoundCloud Go, a streaming service that users have to pay $9.99 per month to use, but it appears that wasn't enough.

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