In the regiment of paid streaming services arrived - SoundCloud launches a monthly “Go” subscription (UPD)

SoundCloud, often called, or - more precisely, called "YouTube for audio", is changing. This service for many years, in contrast to Pandora, Spotify and later Tidal, Google and Apple Music, was a haven for all those who do not chase the "box office" from selling their own music. The audience, free of charge access to the tracks of non-world-famous artists, found its place on SoundCloud several years ago.

At Megamind, we wrote about the preparation of the SoundCloud team for the introduction of a paid subscription for 12 million musicians and 175 million monthly listeners. Today a startup from Berlin presented its own service called SoundCloud Go .
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For $ 9.99 per month and $ 12.99 when buying a subscription through the AppStore (due to Apple's high commission), the listener gets the opportunity to listen to songs offline and without ads, using the search for millions of albums and tracks.

“What has changed?” You ask. Now, all “free” listeners will play ads, and artificially limit the amount of “premium content” available for consumption. For example, musicians will have the opportunity to choose who will hear the track first: premium subscribers or not paying listeners, and the creators of the service say that this is just one of the opening possibilities.

SoundCloud previously announced about 100 million tracks, now the figure of 125,000,000 sounds.

Apparently, the difference of two numbers is 25 million tracks, and that is exactly the “initial” base of premium content. For comparison, Spotify has a whole collection of 30 million songs. And since we started to compare: the subscription from Spotify is bought by 30 million users, with a total number of monthly listeners of 75 million. That is, SoundCloud numbers are very, very weighty.

By the way, on Sunday, Kanye poured on SoundCloud a two-minute track called Ultralight Prayer - a goshell inspired by the track “Ultralight Beam” and in less than 24 hours it was listened to 300,000 times (at the time of writing the publication about half a million). SoundCloud wants to get more of these stories by earning more.

And, as Re / Code correctly notes, SoundCloud makes it a “service like everyone else.”

UPD .: Business Insider tells us that Spotify wants to borrow $ 1 billion, and in the case of an IPO, the debt can be converted into company shares so as not to fall behind. Now Spotify has more money, and SoundCloud has more users, but only one will win in this race with Apple / Google Music. Spotify representatives declined to comment.