SoundCloud is a Swedish German-based music company that was founded in August 2007 by Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss.
History[]
SoundCloud was established in Berlin in August 2007 by Swedish sound designer Alexander Ljung and Swedish electronic musician Eric Wahlforss, and the website was launched in October 2008. It was originally intended to allow musicians to collaborate by facilitating the sharing and discussion of recordings, but later transformed into a publishing tool for music distribution. According to Wired magazine, soon after its inception, SoundCloud began to challenge the dominance of Myspace as a platform for musicians to distribute their music.
In April 2009, SoundCloud received €2.5 million Series A funding from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures. In May 2010, SoundCloud announced it had one million users. In January 2011, it was reported that SoundCloud had raised US$10 million Series B funding from Union Square Ventures and Index Ventures. On June 15 2011, SoundCloud reported five million registered users and investments from Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary's A-Grade Fund, and on January 23 2012, it reported 10 million registered users. In May 2012, it was announced that SoundCloud had 15 million users, and site usage was increasing by 1.5 million users per month.
In March 2014, Twitter announced it would partner with SoundCloud in developing its first integrated music app. However, the project never moved forward because SoundCloud was unable to accommodate licensed music due to a lack of necessary arrangements with music labels. In July 2013, SoundCloud had 40 million registered users and new users were joining at 20 million per month.
SoundCloud announced in January 2014 that it had commenced licensing negotiations with major music companies to address the matter of unauthorized, copyrighted material regularly appearing on the platform. The announcement followed a round of funding in which US$60 million was raised, resulting in a $700 million valuation. According to media sources, the negotiations were initiated in an attempt to avoid similar problems faced by Google, which had been forced to handle a large number of take down notices on its YouTube video-sharing platform.
In May 2015, it was reported that Twitter was considering the acquisition of SoundCloud for approximately US$2 billion. However, the prospect of acquisition was discounted by the media, with one report stating that "the numbers didn't add up", and Bobby Owsinski hypothesizing on the Forbes website in July that SoundCloud's ongoing inability to secure deals with the major music labels was the foremost culprit.
On September 28 2016, Spotify announced that it was in talks to buy SoundCloud, but on December 8 2016, Spotify was reported to have abandoned its acquisition plans.
In Spring 2017, SoundCloud initially faced being sold after not raising the $100 million needed to support the platform. The initial evaluation of SoundCloud at $700 million did not hold as strong to investors after their financial shortages.
In July 2017, SoundCloud announced layoffs and the closure of two of its five offices in San Francisco and London in an effort to manage costs. In August 2017, SoundCloud announced it reached an agreement on a $169.5 million investment from The Raine Group and Temasek. In connection with the investment, veteran digital media operators Kerry Trainor and Michael Weissman joined the SoundCloud team respectively as chief executive officer and Chief Operating Officer. Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss remained with the company—Ljung as chairman of the board, and Wahlforss as Chief Product Officer until 2019, when Wahlforss transitioned into an advisory role.
In May 2019, SoundCloud bought artist distribution platform Repost Network.
In January 2020, a US$75 million investment by Sirius XM was announced.
On March 2 2021, SoundCloud announced a new pay model for artists, entitled "fan-powered royalties", which went into effect on April 1 2021. Under this new model, royalties come directly from the subscription and advertising revenue that listeners earn for SoundCloud, instead of allotting a certain portion of the total "pool" of revenue earned by SoundCloud to each artist based on streams. This means that a fan who listens to more advertisements or pays for a SoundCloud Go subscription will be more valuable to an artist, supposedly benefiting smaller independent artists with fans who listen to their music frequently. SoundCloud claims that under fan-powered royalties, Canadian electronic music producer Vincent's earnings would jump to US$600 a month, up from US$120 a month under the pooled revenue model. To commemorate this announcement, English trip hop band Portishead released a cover of ABBA's 1975 song SOS exclusively on SoundCloud. Little is known about how beneficial fan-powered royalties have been for artists, beyond SoundCloud's claims, over the traditional pooled royalties model, which most competing services such as Spotify continue to use.
In December 2021, SoundCloud Chief Financial Officer, Drew Wilson, said the company is "at the doorsteps of break-even" and said the company expects to generate a net profit by 2023.
Channel[]
SoundCloud uploads videos of certain and content, such as interviews with people. Besides interview videos, the channel uploads features or updates coming to their website. The channel went inactive after an interview video was uploaded to the channel.
Trivia[]
- Many famous musicians rose to fame with SoundCloud.
- Spotify was planning on buying SoundCloud, until Spotify dropped their acquisition plans.
