Music streaming website and app Soundcloud recently announced to public that they only have enough cash to operate for 1 more quarter. However, recently Soundcloud has raised a $169.5M USD investment from merchant bank, The Raine Group and investment firm, Temasek Holdings. Alexander Ljung, the current CEO, is being replaced by former Vimeo CEO, Kerry Trainer. Soundcloud has recent closed 2 of their offices and laid off 40% of their workforce. The company plans to make more sound business choices in the future. Read more here.
Will Soundcloud survive? Or will be hearing the same bad news in a year?
How can Soundcloud improve their strategy to compete with music streaming giants such as Spotify and Apple Music?
SoundCloud needs to heavily monazite their songs like spotify does, plain and simple
Agreed, does Soundcloud even have a paid premium membership like Spotify does?
Yes. They have a $4.99/per month (soundcloud go) and a $9.99 per month (soundcloud go+). They both allow no ads and offline listening. GO+ gives you exclusive tracks.
This would defeat the whole purpose of Soundcloud. The purpose of Soundcloud is to listen to music created by amateur people. You could monetize songs from legitimate artists who decide to release their music on Soundcloud but that's really it.
Exactly, and the latter portion of what you described has already occurred. They do have a premium service which gives unfettered access to all of the music added by major musicians.
Yeah but there is no point in listening to that premium service because not many mainstream artists are making their music available on there when they come out. The music streaming industry has become a duopoly, dominated by both Apple Music and Spotify. Those are the two services that people listen to the most as they have larger libraries of songs, better artists, etc.
When Soundcloud first came out, I don't really think they set out trying to make money, but genuinely wanted to make a platform for amateurs to make their music. But something like this was bound to happen and now it's killing them. Soundcloud should either start charging a small fee for amateurs to put their music up on Soundcloud or run a model similar to Bandcamp and give amateurs the options of selling their songs/albums and taking a small commission out of whatever they make.
100% agree and I think that was very well articulate. I would also like to add that I think Soundcloud could stay profitable with a minimal monthly service fee for users, as low as $2-3 a month. They could charge the musicians a one time fee of say $50 to pay for the storage of their files and server maintenance. I believe that both Soundcloud and SNAP have the potential to become relatively profitable, but it will take some out of the box thinking and further trail and error testing of ideas until that point comes around.
I do think Soundcloud provides its own sort of niche service which will always attract amateurs. The site is well structured and user friendly, and it will be interesting to see what direction it moves in.
Imho I feel like the monthly service feel could deter a lot of users away. I think they should focus more on monetizing the artists rather than the users. But yeah the one time fee of $50 would be a brilliant idea and might even draw more serious musicians to the platform as well.
With regards to Snap, they need to evolve from more than a social media platform. On their IPO document they defined themselves as a camera company. Therefore, they need to expand beyond the app and venture out more into the camera industry.
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