Having buttoned up the complex legal issues, the company is now ready to launch SoundCloud Go. If you’re an influential music blogger, you’re embedding tracks from SoundCloud in your posts. If you’re a brand-new artist in 2016, you’re most likely coming to SoundCloud first. By comparison, on-demand apps like Spotify and Apple Music require unsigned musicians to go through a third-party service to upload their tracks for a fee. At the same time, SoundCloud is now where most up-and-coming artists of note head to start uploading tracks. But the noise generated by the upload-it-yourself model is outweighed by a huge asset: Megastars like Drake, Rihanna, and Kanye West are active on the platform, often using it to upload tracks that won’t be found anywhere else. Bedroom demos and remixes of questionable quality are all over SoundCloud. Sure, that offering includes a ton of junk.

By combining that with their own new library of on-demand albums and tracks (thanks to recently finalized deals with the major and indie labels), SoundCloud is able to boast what Ljung calls “the biggest content offering in the world.” The biggest advantage that SoundCloud has over the likes of Spotify and Apple Music is its vault of over 100 million user-uploaded tracks. “We have everything from the bedroom producer’s sketch to something Kanye just recorded and put up on the site,” says Ljung. But to thrive in this already crowded space, SoundCloud has its work cut out for it. At first glance, it’s a pretty good deal. For people willing to pay, all of that will be available ad-free and with offline syncing.

The end result is something that nobody-not Spotify, Pandora, Apple or anybody else-will easily be able to copy: An all-you-can-stream library of albums from major and indie labels fused with millions of additional user-uploaded recordings, remixes, and DJ sets. Today, he’s here at Fast Company’s New York headquarters to show me something he’s been waiting years to unveil: SoundCloud Go.įor $10 per month, the new subscription tier will offer access to a massive, Spotify-style library of music that will sit on top of SoundCloud’s existing trove of user-uploaded audio. That’s because Ljung runs SoundCloud, a service that I, along with 175 million other people around the world, already use regularly.

Soundcloud rihanna work