Written by Zim Ahmadi
No more making separate accounts for your Spotify, Apple Music and SoundCloud. The life of SoundCloud artists just became significantly easier with the new integrated Premier feature.
With at least 175 million users as of 2018 (5 million more than Spotify), SoundCloud has always been a force to be reckoned with. There’s even a whole generation of hip hop artists that have changed the tide of mainstream music around the world whose career would not have been possible without SoundCloud such as Chance the Rapper, Travis Scott, and Lil Yachty, just to name a few.
Now with their new distribution feature in open beta, SoundCloud has become even more accessible. If you’re a subscriber to SoundCloud Pro and Pro Unlimited, you can now distribute your music, without any extra cost, to the likes of Amazon Music, Apple Music, Instagram, Spotify, Tencent, YouTube Music and more – without ever leaving your SoundCloud account.
Besides that, SoundCloud doesn’t take any additional cuts from the artists’ earnings on other platforms. The Berlin-based company has promised that they would “streamline payments from everywhere – directly from SoundCloud.”
This move by SoundCloud is a strategic one, as Spotify is also increasingly becoming a multi-platform distributor. Last October, Spotify bought a small share in the firm Distrokid which allows people to upload to other services from the Spotify for Artists dashboard.
SoundCloud already has an advantage by being home to 200 million tracks from 20 million creators heard in 190 countries.
There are requirements of course. The creators’ music must not contain the copyrighted work of other artists, and the artist must be above 18 years old.
Left to right: Sasha Ningkan and Airliftz
In spite of all the requirements, SoundCloud remains to be one of the most accessible platforms with instant upload options that aren’t available elsewhere. Local independent artistes would benefit greatly from this,especially those who are predominantly on SoundCloud, like singer-songwriter Sasha Ningkan, Miri math rock band South China Sea, or even Airliftz earlier productions from when he was in high school!
This move is good news not just for creators but for listeners too. The probability of your favourite SoundCloud artist also being on other platforms like Spotify and Apple Music are now higher than ever. Those frustrating days when you find awesome music on SoundCloud but can’t add it to your Spotify playlist might now be gone forever.
