Category: Music Related

In this article I will analyze SoundCloud as of January 28th, 2020 as a longtime user of the platform. I’m not some huge artist, so I can only give the perspective of the features I use as well as from the vantage point of what is probably your typical user. So without any further introduction, let’s analyze!

What We Love

Free

Who doesn’t like free things? The fact that you can sign up for SoundCloud and within a few minutes broadcast your music to the world is insane. This fundamental aspect of the platform is a huge reason why it is successful in retaining and adding new users. For musicians, bands, and artists of any audio medium, SoundCloud is a great choice for hosting your content for consumption.

Some would complain that under SoundCloud’s free tier they only get 180 minutes (3 hours) of upload time. But we can’t fault SoundCloud for limiting free tier users to this allocation limit. It’s free! And they’re hosting millions of audio files for free! They have to draw a line somewhere. Let’s be thankful this is even still an option. We love this about SoundCloud.

Pro & Pro Unlimited

Want more upload time? Try a pro account and get double the upload time of that of a free tier account (6 hours total). Oh, you want no cap? Get a Pro Unlimited account and have no cap at all!

Now, I won’t bore you with all of the details on the differences between a pro and pro unlimited account, after all you can just compare here – https://help.soundcloud.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003568408-Learn-about-our-Pro-plans.

Nonetheless, there are some great features packed into the Pro tier plans.

Statistics

For example, I have a Pro Unlimited account. I’ll show you my (low, but growing) statistics so that you can see the insight SoundCloud provides users with this plan.

Scrolling down I see more stats:

And yet more statistics as I scroll down:

Finally the last section as I scroll down a bit more:

The main thing that has been helpful for me with the stats is being able to see what people are listening too. If you have listeners who do not like or comment, but do indeed listen to your music, you can start to glean what people are interested in and cater your content to your stats.

Discovery

The ability for you to be discovered, and the ability for you to discover new music on SoundCloud really is limitless.

Lil Nas X was basically discovered over night via his release of “Old Town Road” on SoundCloud.

Connections

The ability to make meaningful connections on SoundCloud is awesome. Whether it’s just making a new friend by leaving a comment on a track, making a connection to a music label, or finding a new podcast to listen to the tools to communicate on SoundCloud are there to support you making connections.

The ability to private message, leave comments, like uploads, and follow creators you care about allows you to make those connections.

For example, as of recent I discovered a new artist on SoundCloud – Veridium. I genuinely like this guy’s music and mixes. We’ve since followed each other and have sent each other a few messages back and forth. You should check his music out – https://soundcloud.com/jerri-mperdempes

Here’s my favorite mix of his:

Collaboration

Want to collaborate with someone but don’t know anyone to work with? Start asking artists on SoundCloud! Again, you can find all skill levels, all genres, and types of people to work with on the platform if you really try.

For example, I recently finished a side project up for another website I co-founded called devjams.com where I collaborated with 5 other SoundCloud artists.

Here are some of the conversations I had with some of the artists from the project I just mentioned:

And another:

What We Hate

Broken Comment Statistics

To clarify, I need to explain where the system for comments “breaks”. If a user comments on one of your uploads, and that user is deleted or you block them (and you indicate to remove their likes/comments upon blocking them) the comment counter stat is not reduced for that upload on your public profile. What do I mean? Let me show you an example on my profile.

Tags Seem Useless

Not entirely, but under certain circumstances tags do seem useless. This is more the case when you create your own user defined tag. Again let me you an example.

I created a user-defined tag of “OriginalWorks” as seen below:

So when I click on that tag I get the following:

Bots

I’ll be honest I don’t even know how this one could be fixed… but it is super annoying nonetheless.

If you haven’t seen this specific bot network before, then I doubt you’re a regular user of SoundCloud. Which bot service am I talking about? Yeap, you guessed it – soundviral.com

Compression

I must say SoundCloud within the past year or so seems to be getting better at not compressing, or introducing artifacts into your uploads. With a pro unlimited account I no longer worry too much about this as I can upload HD files such as wavs with the upper tier account type. But free users do report this fairly often. I only mention this in passing – they;re getting better. I guess I mention it just to say, hey, SoundCloud, make sure you’re always putting a priority on this topic.

Conclusion

Are there other things I could talk about? Oh for sure, but this is just a subjective view of the SoundCloud platform. These are the big things that, to me, are what make me have a love/hate relationship with SoundCloud as a whole.