Soundcloud — English Music Catalogue

Disclaimer: This and the articles that follow are an attempt at understanding the music tech industry from a Product perspective. We do not claim to be experts in the field. All we claim is to be students of music tech. We hope this series will help others understand music tech and hopefully appreciate the industry

“SoundCloud is an online audio distribution platform based in Berlin, Germany, that enables its users to upload, record, promote, and share their originally-created sounds. It was founded by Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss in September 2007.”

I know, I know. When you think of Germany, the first thing you think of is amazing beer or Zinedine Zidane or maybe something else but not Soundcloud. Theres a good reason for that. Soundcloud primarily has a lot of user uploaded music and I feel that soundcloud’s objective is to promote those people who are smaller and trying to make it big.

For eg. When I searched for “Katy Perry” in the search box, the results that came out was

1. Dark Horse
2. Remix of one of her songs by someone
3. Radio edit of one of her songs

Soundcloud says this on their homepage “Discover, stream, and share a constantly expanding mix of music from emerging and major artists around the world.” It seems to me that they are very clear about what they want to do, and being a musician and the Sole Proprietor of a Studio, I see the lack of platform for a budding musician. I see a lot of good artists who come to my studio, spend months on writing a song and making changes until its perfect, they then track it and then they get like 50 listens which is heartbreaking even for me.

Soundcloud seems to be trying to focus on that problem. The problem of young and growing artists not having a platform to put their music up. Have they solved the problem? I don’t think so. Why? Because an average music listener would not come to Soundcloud to listen to music. He wants to listen to Ed Sheeran and Katy Perry and not someone doing Radio Edits of them. Would they like the Radio Edit? Maybe they will. But is a user generally willing to go play a song that says Radio edit/Remix? Maybe not.

In Soundcloud’s defence, I did find a lot of the music I was looking for. Not everything, but a lot of it. But what kills it for me as a user is that when I type “Katy Perry” in my search, I’m expecting to see all her songs and not edits/remixes of it. My suggestion would probably be to have separate sections to show all her music and another one to show people doing covers/remixes/radio edits of it.

Overall experience of Soundcloud? I did like what the platform stands for and what they are trying to do, but execution wise, they can improve a lot. As a general music user, would I use Soundcloud? Probably not.

Note: This is the fifth article among a series of articles that I will be writing related to the music tech industry under a publication called “Uncovering Music Tech”. Do let me know what you think. You can get in touch with me via LinkedIn Here, Instagram Here and my Twitter Here.