SoundCloud survived a serious financial scare that would have seen the giant music streaming site bid goodbye the music streaming business. SoundCloud debuted nine years ago, and has garnered so many users since it was user friendly and it made it easy for users to access, stream music, analysed users and knew their music tastes hence suggested new releases for them and to cap it all, it was free. This last feature was the doing and the undoing of SoundCloud. It made music access so easier for the listeners but didn’t make any financial gains to the artistes.
To access SoundCloud one needs to just sign up, and it’s even simpler as one can sign up using his/her social media pages. To get the songs, one doesn’t have to pay. SoundCloud failed to capitalise on the much traffic it was getting. Other companies like Spotify, Boomplay and Tidal have all monetized their platforms with soundCloud failing to launch a subscription service.This made artistes look elsewhere, and the other music streaming sites made a kill.
In the recent past, SoundCloud lost huge amounts of money and acquisition opportunities. As a result, the company laid off 173 workers. It was facing closure when merchant bank The Raine Group and investment firm Temasek Holdings stepped in. They both gave $169.5 million to bail it out. Former CEO and co-founder Alexander Ljung said: “SoundCloud is here to stay.” He himself isn’t staying as he’s to be replaced by Kerry Trainor, former CEO of video-sharing site Vimeo.
Now, what this means to musicians and other SoundCloud users is that new regulations shall be put in place. The new management shall come up with new ideas which will most probably seek to recover the money invested in resuscitating it as well as making profit out of it. This is not good news for listeners and other users who relied the site on discovering new talent and sampling new music. It will however be a benefit for the artistes with their music on the platform. Whether this will keep SoundCloud afloat is a question of time.
