Shaking off the doom and gloom headlines over the last few months streaming platform SoundCloud has officially unveiled their long-hyped subscription service, Go. The new membership offer comes on the heels of new licensing deals with Sony Music and Universal Music Group.
Listeners can try out the premium service with a 30-day free trial, continuing at $9.99 per month for ad-free streaming on an updated, clean-looking app. This puts it directly in league with competitor Spotify, only with 100 million more tracks to offer. Like Spotify, the service lets you listen offline – a major benefit to Soundcloud’s 170 million regular users.
As for artist incentive, the streaming argument often gives the artist the short end of the stick. However, in regards to royalties a spokesperson for the company said that the goal is “for every creator to get paid on SoundCloud,” according to Billboard.
“It was important to us to preserve the creative elements that make SoundCloud so popular with artists and fans, while evolving the business model to better recognize the value of music, and provide a range of new commercial opportunities,” said Warner Musc Group CEO Stephen Cooper. WMG was the first company to sign up with SoundCloud’s advertising program On.
Fans may see exclusives a la Tidal and Apple Music as a means of drawing new subscribers.
“Now we have two portions,” says SoundCloud founder Alexander Ljung, “ads and subscriptions. So the creator has the choice what to put where. Like we’ve always done, we want to give artists control. You could imagine a case where superstar x has a brand new album, one track in free and have that run across the entire internet, generating ad revenue and promotion… and put the rest of the album behind the paywall.”
Learn more and try SoundCloud’s premium membership right here.
Now to give this thing a spin for myself…
