GO VIRAL: Soundcloud Promotion Services Best Practices

The music streaming company Soundcloud has been defined as the “YouTube of audio” because of its plenty of user-generated content, has some heavy, strategic investment news now. The company has raised $75 million in funding from spacecraft radio giant SiriusXM, owner of streaming titan Pandora, which has an ad partnership with SoundCloud.

Let's get back to company history and find out the company fails and success. SoundCloud, a Berlin-based streaming service, 2007 founded, started so many young rap careers with its music genre, has increased sales worldwide by more than 80 percent from 2016 to 2017. However, the company felt ashamed of the financial disaster. 

But, as an independent startup, the SoundCloud of yesterday never actually managed to overcome the licensing and larger monetization issues that all streaming companies do, despite raising a massive $404 million in funding before now. Notwithstanding its wave of viral popularity and obvious street credit with a long list of creatives using the platform to try out new things and send their tracks and other music-based work into the world.  

Organic Soundcloud Promotion Looks to the Future 

While streaming services have the unprecedented power to drive artist success, SoundCloud set its flag as a "creator forward". Not too long ago, the SoundCloud launched the Premier program, which assists to each artist to promote their music to new fans on SoundCloud and send it to every major music service and get paid for generated plays wherever directly from Soundcloud account instead of organic promotion. Direct revenue platform designed to make it easy for fans to support artists and empower music consumers. Finally!

"The diversity of SoundCloud is one of the strengths of the platform. We see content from all genres, by gender, by geography. A big part of our mission is to be as complete and open as possible, and to SoundCloud Premier," said Kerry Coach, CEO of SoundCloud, "We believe that one of the most interesting things about this expansion step is that we now have the opportunity to open it further and allow artists to choose tools to use.''

Soundcloud promotion - true domination of the digital spotlight

Premier: From Beta to the Real Deal

After first testing SoundCloud Premier with a selected group of artists, this service will now be more widely available. To get started, artists must have at least 5,000 works in the past month, and this program will be limited to countries that offer SoundCloud Pro SoundCloud ads and advertisements. Trainor intends to improve Premier services so that they are accessible to the entire music community on the website, so artists can show that they have full rights to the work they do to make money and benefit from great perks which have been made since it was launched in 2007.

"Where other platforms maybe have single-digit million creators, again, we have content from over 20 million creators," said Trainor. "Where some streaming platforms might be inviting hundreds of artists to monetize directly on the platform, we're inviting hundreds of thousands of artists to monetize directly on the platform."

The service provider ethos also extends to the financial side of Premium, where Soundcloud will reach or exceed the portion of revenue each creator can produce with their music on different platforms. They also promise direct monthly payments, hoping to avoid discord or problem of late payment with services like Tidal. SoundCloud has had some financial problems in recent years, but money for Premier will come from a combination of advertisements that are part of the free customer experience and subscription account fees.

Moving Towards Success: Explore Soundcloud Premier Monetization

SoundCloud is perceived as a first home and outlet for artists like Chance the Rapper and Kali Uchis who moved on to reach major success, and part of the Premier expansion will come to curate and winner rising acts. It plans to continue the "Fresh Pressed" and "First on SoundCloud" playlists, while also launching programs like a recent one where it helped artists on the platform shoot their first music videos. SoundCloud additionally partnered with Noisey earlier for an initiative where artists picked from the Premier program would detect increased exposure in the form of editorial coverage, playlist placement, and listening events.

Ride the tide of success by increasing your Soundcloud play count

"The foundational work that we do is to give creators the very best tools to share with the world however they want. And then when it comes for listeners discovering creators, the listening experience on SoundCloud is defined by that connection back to the creator," Trainor explained. "So for the listener, it's all about discovering creators, connecting with creators, giving them feedback such as likes, reposts, shares. And then also, now, supporting the creator."

Premium will completely be for original music, but Trainor said that SoundCloud is drawn to explore how to join other forms of audio content like podcasts, remixes, and DJ sets into the Premier program.

The program extension comes at a particularly critical time for SoundCloud, as Spotify declared that it is rolling out a program where independent artists could upload music straight to their service, apparently cribbing a major part of what has set SoundCloud apart from its streaming competitors. Still, Trainor is convinced that SoundCloud's open audio importance will remain to distribute it from the pack.

"Even as we deliver one of the largest streaming services in the world, it's just built a very different way," he said. "SoundCloud is built from the creators outward, and the tools we offer creators are what allows for the unique experience that we offer listeners."

SoundCloud Premier monetization, like many others, obeys in his footsteps to clarify a few things. It's necessary to know where to go to get the most benefit from the platform. This is the current approach to the money train. 

Key Monetization Facts:

•  Users hear advertisements when playing their music on mobile and other devices
• Whitelist: there are no copyright issues that prevent uploading
• Prior approval ensures that your order is set correctly
• Monetization is only possible in the current area
• We ensure that your route stays online for approval
• This service is similar to YouTube, but with a different process

The territories Soundcloud monetize - Australia, the US, and its territories: Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Marianas, Virgin Islands, the UK, and its territories: Guernsey, Jersey, Isle of Man, Ireland, France and its territories: Guadeloupe, Martinique, Reunion, New Zealand, Canada, and Germany. 

The amount you get from Soundcloud depends on how much grip your song and associated profile has. So do your best to promote yourself and get more attention! In early April 2019, the platform announced that more than 100 of these first partners were fully responsible for the invitations they paid with advertising revenue of more than $ 1,000,000.

The new model is a SoundCloud solution for the ongoing tension between platform and rights holders, especially major labels and publishers. Given the explosive growth of the platform in terms of available content, shared games and unique users, these rights holders inevitably have to be paid for. But they were not a year ago. This tension led to legal action from large labels, which then led to potential investment negotiations where majors were asked to license platform content in return for equity.

At the time of the announcement, no discussion took place. Soon after, Warner Music Group signed a license agreement with SoundCloud. This makes them the first major-label financed by the new advertising system.

What About Gray Zone

During this time, SoundCloud has closed a hole in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that allows them to transfer responsibility for the nature of content as a host for users, who are free to upload almost anything. This is user-generated content.

DMCA SoundCloud can avoid legal issues as long as the right-holder can report abuse, has a system to download infringing content, and actively prohibits repeat infringers. This passion is exactly what many of us like about SoundCloud. This is one of the few places on the web where developers can share bad content, from a mixture of uncleared DJs to unofficial pirated remixes. The freedom to do whatever you want with music is at the heart of the SoundCloud community and its extraordinary focus on electronic music fans. This gap given freedom is also a reason why SoundCloud is not legally forced to pay music owners. Paradox.

After finally reaching their scale with 175 million listeners per month (reported in December 2014) and receiving many threats to the legal process, it's time to make a decision.

How to Get Soundcloud Promotion Taking into Account New Facts

The platform launches its monetization system on SoundCloud. Like the YouTube advertising system, SoundCloud will display audio ads across all its platforms. To implement these features, they introduced a new account level - SoundCloud Premier - offered to several partners, offering monetization and other feature options such as visual banners, behind-the-scenes art, and geographical control.

These features were launched in stages, and SoundCloud has created some selected partners to deploy and test these features. This includes large publishers, distributors and multi-channel networks (this is a large YouTube channel), which in turn can activate their customers (artists, labels) as SoundCloud Premier users.

Primary partners can allow certain monetization content to serve audio ads and generate real plays. This is a short snippet that is played at the beginning of the upload or on an external content player. In addition to content-related ads, SoundCloud also displays audio advertisements with strict brands in the platform sidebar.

Ads only appear on content activated by Primary Partners and are currently only visible in the United States. Many independent artists use this future to promote their content. Ads will not appear on other content. Therefore, ad saturation with a small number of Premier partners is currently very low.

To monetize content, Premier partners need permission from the master's right to commercialize their works and collect relevant publication information. In other words, if the label or artist has master rights and publishes the rights to the work, the content can be easily monetized. If you work as an artist with a third party, for example, if you use a different label and only published, you must obtain permission from the label and collect the details of the publication.

Monetize Your Original Music!

Premier partners' main feature is access to all traditional Pro Unlimited subscription features, as well as visual profiles, the ability to monetize content, create detailed statistics and manage content geographically.

Subscription fees are also eliminated, making partnerships free - except for advertising revenue that someone can pay to their distributor (provided by Premier) or SoundCloud himself.

Primary partners are immediately recognized by large horizontal banners that are hosted on their account calling it a visual profile. They can be used to mark and promote versions and can even include links to links. However, SoundCloud doesn't like it when you write more than text. You want to keep ads for yourself.

In addition to the visual profile, Premier partners can highlight their publications with high priority by activating visual songs - by integrating graphics with selected uploads.

They highlight tracks across platforms and display "visual tracks" on the Premier partner profile and the flow of followers of this account. Visual songs are also expanded when played and display more than works of art, which is not the case with conventional uploads. Main partners are limited to a maximum of five visual titles at a time. Every time you reach the limit and want to activate a new version, doing best you must delete the function from older uploads.

Key partners can control their content geographically, which can limit uploads to certain regions - but also ensures consistent content publishing in certain regions. The latter is very useful for artists and labels who only provide content in a few countries or want to license others in that specific area. It generates closer collaboration between artists, labels, and advertising channels on the platform that lead to getting an organic promotion - especially for specialties that often publish content in various areas and dates.