SoundCloud refreshes its creator suite

SoundCloud is looking to improve its creator offerings. In the first phase of "SoundCloud for Artists," there's a new creator dashboard where you can see your stats at a glance. One of the newest things is seeing your top fans. Soon the app can show you your top contributors and give you the option to connect with these superfans better.

“We can actually go back to that concept of you don’t need scale. You need to focus on your 1,000 [or] 100 true fans,” says Tracy Chan, SoundCloud's creator division lead. Last year, SoundCloud introduced a new system for allocating royalties. A listener's subscription revenue was divided among the artists they listen to, a move different from the standard pro rata model at Spotify and Apple. The big streaming services' subscription fees are pooled and allocated to artists based on the largest amount of streams.

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Paid music streaming services to have bigger impact on Billboard charts in 2018

With paid streaming services changing the music landscape, it’s not surprising to us that Billboard is changing its ranking system to reflect this new reality. The streams from paid subscription services like Amazon Music and Apple Music as well as those hybrid paid/ad-supported services like Spotify and SoundCloud will have a bigger influence on Billboard’s charts in 2018.

According to a post on Billboard’s site, “Beginning in 2018, plays occurring on paid subscription-based services (such as Amazon Music and Apple Music) or on the paid subscription tiers of hybrid paid/ad-supported platforms (such as SoundCloud and Spotify) will be given more weight in chart calculations than those plays on pure ad-supported services (such as YouTube) or on the non-paid tiers of hybrid paid/ad-supported services.”

SoundCloud gets fresh round of funding to keep it going

Musicians and creators are going to be at the heart of SoundCloud moving forward, we'll probably see more improvements to features like this stats page

A new round of investment into SoundCloud is keeping the music streaming service going for the foreseeable future. As part of the deal, SoundCloud Chief Executive Officer and founder Alex Ljung will be stepping aside and former Vimeo head Kerry Trainor will be the new CEO. Another former exec from Vimeo, Mike Weissman, will be coming in to serve as SoundCloud's chief operating officer. Ljung will act as chairman and will stay on for the long term. His co-founder Eric Wahlforss will stay on with the company as chief product officer. The Raine Group, a boutique merchant bank, together with Singapore-based investment company Temasek, led the US$169.5 million investment to give SoundCloud the much-needed cash. 

Trainor wants to put greater emphasis on developing tools for musicians and other creators, including a "more robust creative toolkit" for them via the Pro Unlimited subscription. The service is used by a lot of artists to do things like public collaborations, promote new songs, or get private feedback before a track is released to the world. Trainor claims this is what gives SoundCloud a unique brand in the digital music arena. He tells Billboard, "SoundCloud is the largest open audio platform in the world. Millions of creators choose these tools to share their work with the world—that will remain at the focus and center of the company." 

The SoundCloud iOS app adds support for Chromecast, limits it to paying subscribers

A case of better late than never seems to have happened for SoundCloud. The music streaming service finally adds Chromecast support for its iOS—a feature that has long been available for Android. This means, iOS users can play music through more devices like TVs and speakers. To use the feature though, you’ll need to be a SoundCloud Go+ subscriber, the service’s US$10 per month subscription plan. Shared playback has also been introduced into this latest iOS update. This will let multiple users control what’s playing.

Source: SlashGear