Soundcloud is a platform that musicians use to make their songs and audio files accessible to a large number of people free of charge. Music listeners can register with Soundcloud and listen to as many pieces of music as they like.
Development of Soundcloud
Soundcloud was founded in August 2007 by founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, who are still employed today as managing directors and technical directors. Soundcloud has experienced rapid growth. In May 2010, the service passed the magic mark of one million users. In January 2012, the operators announced that they now had ten million registered users. In December 2012 there were already talks of almost 30 million registered users.
Functions
The main functionality of Soundcloud is the upload of your own pieces of music, which are then offered to other users for download. If you want to upload music, you need a registered account. This is not necessary just to call up the music files. Soundcloud offers the following detailed functions, among others:
- Embedding the pieces of music in third-party websites using widgets and apps
- Insertion of listener comments corresponding to a specific point in a piece of music in a graphical representation of the piece as a waveform (time list)
- automatic promotion of new audio files via a connected Twitter account
- Calling up the music files via various web players
- Upload without file size limitation
- Music suggestions based on music preferences imported from a Facebook account
- Subscription to musicians’ profiles
- Creation of playlists
- Mark favourite songs
- Upload remixes and edited songs as comments
This YouTube video shows how music can be marketed on Soundcloud.
Costs
The free basic account allows users to upload music with a maximum duration of two hours. Initially, in addition to the free basic account, there were also four paid accounts with annual costs between 29 and 500 US dollars. They enabled the musicians to upload a larger volume of music files (even unlimited in the ProPlus account). In March 2013, the pricing model was redesigned. Now there are only two pro accounts:
- Pro: up to 4 hours of music for 3 euros/month
- Pro Unlimited: unlimited music uploads for 9 euros/month
Legal
Soundcloud is also used again and again to distribute copyrighted material. The service attempts to counteract this using an automated Content ID system designed to filter out this content. However, this works too inaccurately, as it happens, again and again, that content that was actually composed by the respective artists is deleted and that copyrighted material remains available.
Importance for online marketing
Soundcloud is of course an important marketing platform for music and audio files of all kinds. Marketing opportunities similar to those for Facebook have already been found for this purpose, for example, the option of buying “SoundCloud Plays” in order to imitate a song’s great popularity.
In addition, the portal can also be used for advertising. As a Pro Partner, you can advertise your profile here and, for example, play an advertising jingle when you click on the profile photo with the mouse.