How will SoundCloud’s revolution save itself and their community?
by Ant Maxfield

The underground omnipresence of SoundCloud within music culture has become vital for many artists and fans alike, but how will their recent $170 million backing salvage their apparent misuse of resources? The layoff of 40% of it’s workers and closure of many office’s from San Francisco, London and New York has been the fuel to buy more time, but only to float above water. Appointing a new CEO Kerry Trainor has been made the face of new change for the company, who’s been recognised for tripling and expanding Vimeo’s (video-sharing) user base to 280 million after standing down as their CEO. It’s thought his expertise will formulate a new effective plan, which predecessors and founders Alex Ljung and Eric Wahlforss (now chairmen and chief product officer respectively) eminently failed to effectively monetise from the claimed “170 million monthly users” with a plausible long-term marketing strategy.

The current attempt at monetisation of the social music platform, with SoundCloud Go and Go+ has still left much to be desired from the offerings made in their plans. Although you get ad free listening experience with these plans, the ads present within SoundCloud don’t seem to be that intrusive or give reason to pay for ad free content. The experience for free users isn’t that bad compared to sites like Youtube, that have much heavier ad content between videos and pop-ups, giving all the more reason to sign up for a Youtube Red membership which features access to exclusive content (including movies and series). Besides, if users on SoundCloud are paying for no ads it means that the amount of users that actually see ads is reduced, deterring companies from wanting to buy into advertising through their platform. This may be the reason why they’ve found it hard to network with companies interested in advertising.

SoundCloud’s reach and amount of user traffic on the platform means they have direct access to open up to so many possibility’s, which is why it’s hard to understand why they haven't jumped on many revenue opportunities between the artists and listeners of their service, like a proper middle man. They have the ability to quickly expand and extend their product line, by giving artists the ability to sell things like their music and even merch directly from the site, allowing SoundCloud to take a cut from sales made, much like the route Bandcamp has taken.

Hopefully the addition of a new CEO will bring fresh ideas into what appears to be a lackluster attempt at being ahead of the curve in the music marketing industry, and we’ll finally see Trainor re-design a more relevant website which hasn’t seemed to change much in what feels like years. Breaking into the spectrum of music videos could be just what SoundCloud needs to stay ahead, and could easily be monetised just like YouTube. For example Kendrick Lamar’s recent hit “HUMBLE” spiraled to success because the visual concept of the video helped bring to life the message of the song, creating a more relatable experience for consumers. The power of music videos is more relevant than ever, helping artists create further hype towards their music, which could be SoundClouds next step forward.
What do you think SoundCloud’s next step forward is?

