SoundCloud Ready to Play With Apple Music & Spotify

CBx Vibe:Lucid Dreams” Juice WRLD

By CultureBanx Team

  • SoundCloud allowing artist to distribute music directly to Spotify & Apple Music
  • Currently SoundCloud has 20M creators on its platform

Artist first platform SoundCloud has thrown their hat in the ring for music distribution, by adding its own tools to premium accounts. The Premier tier of SoundCloud will allow artists to upload their tracks to music streaming services like Spotify (SPOT +1.80%), Amazon Music (AMZN +0.75%), Apple Music (AAPL +1.12%) and even Instagram. Most SoundCloud rappers can host a masterclass in self-promotion. With the top streaming artist being from the hip hop genre, SoundCloud will need to entice more indie rappers to join its platform.

Why This Matters: SoundCloud’s new Premiere distribution channel should streamline the money artists receive from various platforms, and help monetize their music through a revenue sharing program. By Investing in tools artists need they can offer more value and potentially become a more profitable company, instead of trying to directly compete with Apple Music and Spotify.

Rapper Juice WRLD was SoundCloud’s top streaming artist

Musicians collectively only made 12% of the $43 billion generated by the music industry in 2017, according to Citigroup. That’s just a little over $5 billion going to the artists, many of of whom want to own their masters and not share revenue with the labels. SoundCloud has 20 million creators on its platform and plans to grow this number with its new distribution approach.  The site won’t take a cut of the payouts artist receive from the other music streaming services.

Rapper Juice WRLD was SoundCloud’s top streaming artist, and let’s not forget when Chance the rapper got on stage at the Grammy’s and thanked the platform during his 2017 Best New Artist acceptance speech. Mainstream artists who already benefit huge from streaming include Drake, Post Malone and Travis Scott. All of these hip hop artists fall in the top 10 most streamed of 2018.

Situational Awareness: Last year, Spotify took a minor stake in music distribution service DistroKid, however it only allows select artists to directly upload music to its platform through their Spotify For Artists account. Also, Apple acquired artist distribution platform Platoon in hopes of doing the same thing.

CBx Vibe:Lucid Dreams” Juice WRLD

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