SoundCloud mentioned as we speak it’s rolling out a TikTok-styled discovery feed with vertical scrolling and brief clips from songs. The music streaming firm began testing the characteristic in March, and now it will likely be out there to all customers on iOS and Android within the coming days.
The up to date app will permit customers to take heed to a 30-second clip of a track to allow them to resolve in the event that they need to take heed to the complete monitor. Customers can faucet on the play button whereas listening to the preview to listen to the complete model.
Whereas artists can choose 30-second highlights from their tracks, SoundCloud depends on Musiio’s AI — a startup it acquired in 2022 for an upgraded music discovery expertise — to choose the very best 30 seconds from a track mechanically.
Picture Credit: SoundCloud
The brand new discovery feed UI additionally has useful shortcut buttons so as to add a track to a playlist or library and to love a monitor so it reveals up in “Favored tracks” later.
Customers can nonetheless entry the old-styled following feed by means of the “Following” tab on high of their screens to have a look at tracks revealed by artists they observe.
In March, Spotify additionally introduced a vertical feed with brief previews for each music and podcasts. Plus, ByteDance’s TikTok Music and Resso each depend on vertical feeds for music discovery.
SoundCloud says it hosts over 320 million tracks from 40 million creators. Whereas the corporate didn’t present particulars about lively customers, a weblog put up from earlier this 12 months indicated it has 130 million “engaged followers.”
The corporate has been engaged on initiatives for artists to raised floor their songs and join with followers. In Could, it launched a collection of engagement instruments together with options like analytics and the power to DM followers. In June, it began testing a perform known as First Followers, which ensures {that a} new monitor will probably be really helpful to some customers with matching tastes to present it an preliminary enhance.
In a current interview with, Music Enterprise Worldwide, the corporate’s head of music Emily Lovell mentioned that greater than 500,000 artists are actually a part of SoundCloud’s fan-powered royalty program, which was launched in 2021. The undertaking distributes advert or subscription cash to artists primarily based on artists customers take heed to slightly than on a pro-rata foundation that simply counts various general streams.
The corporate laid off 8% of its employees in Could with an purpose to succeed in profitability this 12 months. Previous to this, SoundCloud reduce its workforce by 20% final August.
