Snippet from the guardian article, with link to the full thing below. Was amazed by their user base and catalogue size….
The music and audio streaming firm SoundCloud is launching its long-planned subscription service, but for now the $9.99-a-month service will only be available in the US.
The new feature, SoundCloud Go, is being launched on Tuesday, and the company hopes a mammoth catalogue of more than 125m tracks – quadruple those of its rivals Spotify and Apple Music – will persuade a chunk of its 175 million subscribers who listen for free to start paying.
Tidal says it has “over 40 million” tracks. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the libraries of the various streaming services by genre, anyone ever seen one ?
SoundCloud says its library includes 125 million songs, but as The Verge notes, around 110 million of those are remixes and other user-uploaded tracks that were already there. This would leave SoundCloud Go with 15 million tracks, or about half of what Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal and others each offer.
No. From what I heard on the radio this morning, I understood that SoundCloud will enable users to upload their own collection to their database - as thats sort of how it was setup. Whether this is a simplification or not Im not sure. I assume Apple do this too with their ‘match’ service - letting users fill in the blanks in their catalogue quickly.
Unless Ive completely misunderstood of course. Wouldn’t be the first time.
I only know soundcloud because have a few friends that are DJs/composers and they sometimes link files there if they’re sharing their work. Never knew it was so big.
The more the merrier I guess. If only Roon could support them all, but I guess the flip side of having such a tight integration with streaming services is the much greater amount of work to integrate to each service.
Funny that the streaming format isn’t mentioned. The Soundcloud uploading notes say:
Please be aware that we transcode all tracks to 128kbps mp3 for streaming playback. When you make your track downloadable, however, this allows your listeners to download your track in the same format you uploaded it in, without any additional transcoding.
