It doesn’t matter whether the genre is 70s rock, hip hop, classical music, or techno: Artists use the SoundCloud service to publish their music and reach an audience. Due to the ease of publication, the SoundCloud site has also developed into the most popular platform for uploading mixtapes, remixes, and even whole DJ sets. According to SoundCloud’s official figures, the service has over 175 million users and is a platform beloved by both producers and consumers of music: artists and labels use the website for distribution and marketing, while music lovers can listen to the latest releases and discover new artists. And, officially speaking, SoundCloud isn’t solely a music platform. There are plenty of other audio files uploaded to the site, the most common one after music being podcasts.
The fee-based subscription package SoundCloud Go is designed to change the website forever. With the huge new music catalog available to them, SoundCloud intends to do battle with Apple, Spotify, and Co. in the subscription-based music streaming service industry. By increasing the amount of music they can offer users, SoundCloud is also expecting to see a greater number of new users crossing over from the other streaming platforms. This could be to the advantage of unknown artists who publish their music on SoundCloud: the more users on the platform listening to music, the wider the reach meaning that there’ll be more potential listeners for undiscovered artists to tap into.
One of the main benefits of SoundCloud for unsigned acts compared to its alternatives is the ‘Similar Tracks’ feature. This is orchestrated by an algorithm that searches SoundCloud for similar music based on genres and tagging. So if your music is similar to that of Kendrick Lamar, and you’ve tagged your music properly so that SoundCloud’s music recognition software can find and categorize it properly, you have a chance of being listed under the Similar Tracks heading on the right-hand side of Kendrick Lamar’s SoundCloud artist page. Once a listener has played through all of the songs on the Kendrick Lamar page, the Similar Tracks will start playingautomatically – giving undiscovered artists an amazing opportunity to reach their target audience.
Another useful tool is the ‘Suggested Tracks’ feature. This is conducted by another algorithm that assesses the listening habits of all SoundCloud users as well as their likes and shares. Through doing this it can decipher the user’s music taste and then recommend a mixture of popular artists and undiscovered acts tailored to the individual user’s listening habits.