soundcloud
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SoundCloud’s ‘The Upload’ uses machine learning to help you find new tracks
SoundCloud made a name for itself among the landscape of music streaming services as the one where creators themselves uploaded music and other sound recordings — picking up the moniker “the YouTube of audio” in the process. Now the company is launching a new discovery feature that plays on that idea and highlights what’s getting added. The Upload, as it is called… Read More
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Report: Free trials push Apple Music ahead of Pandora and Spotify on mobile usage
Spotify may be the reigning leader when it comes to the largest number of paid subscribers for a streaming music service, but it’s Apple that comes out on top when their respective audiences translate into monthly unique users, specifically on mobile. A report published this week from mobile analytics firm Verto has found that Apple Music attracted 40.7 million monthly unique users to… Read More
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Yep, more later-stage companies are taking on venture debt
Venture debt has been much in the news lately. Are desperate times beginning to call for desperate measures? That might be an overstatement. At the same time, the venture debt firm Western Technology Investment has seen plenty of cycles and amassed plenty of data over its 37 years in the business, and CEO Maurice Werdegar says the firm just finished its busiest quarter ever. Read More
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Soundcloud confirms new $70M credit line, still closin $100M round
Soundcloud — the popular, but unprofitable platform that lets creators post and share music and other audio files — may have been unsuccessful (so far) in closing a new $100 million round of funding, but it’s not running out of money soon. The company has secured a $70 million round of debt funding from three new investors — Ares Capital, Kreos Capital, and… Read More
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SoundCloud revamps its subscription service with cheaper $4.99 option
SoundCloud has rebooted its paid membership plan with a new budget option less than a year after it launched. The Berlin-based company today revealed a cheaper tier of $4.99 per month, down from the initial $9.99 subscription that it rolled out last March, in a bid to make its plans more appealing to users. The company isn’t abandoning that higher pricing, though, and it will offer… Read More
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Dubset raises $4M to legalize remixes for Spotify and Apple Music
Record labels refuse to allow streaming of remixes and hour-long DJ sets unless copyright owners get paid for every little sample. Dubset just raised $4 million to handle that legal mess so Spotify and Apple Music can offer the type of music that used to live illegally on SoundCloud. Read More
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SoundCloud amps up advertising with programmatic buying in the US
On the heels of hiring a new CTO from Yahoo and trying to position itself either as a stronger acquisition target or standalone entity, SoundCloud is getting a lot deeper into the business of advertising. Today the audio startup — which streams both licensed music tracks and is also a go-to platform for user-generated content (similar to YouTube) — announced that it would be… Read More
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SoundCloud co-founder takes product role, Yahoo alum steps in as CTO
On the heels of losses that appear to be growing faster than revenues, and reported acquisition interest from Google, the music streaming service SoundCloud today announced some executive movements. Eric Wahlforss, who co-founded the audio streaming startup with Alexander Ljung, is stepping away from the role of CTO and taking a new position as chief product officer. Meanwhile, SoundCloud… Read More
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Spotify has backed out of talks to acquire SoundCloud
The digital music marriage that many wanted to happen isn’t happening after all. Spotify has given up on its latest effort to buy SoundCloud following months of talks between the two, according to a source at Spotify who is familiar with discussions. Read More
Latest Crunch Report
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Spotify could out-dance Apple if it does acquire SoundCloud
SoundCloud as a company is a disaster, but it’s the only streaming service with the DJ sets and remixes kids love. So it makes perfect sense that Spotify is in advanced talks to acquire SoundCloud, the Financial Times reports. Spotify already declined to buy it twice over the past year and a half; talks broke down over pricing. But since then, SoundCloud has hammered out deals with the… Read More
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How Bon Entendeur mixed French sound bites with electronic music and thrived on SoundCloud
What happens when you mix sound bites from French artists and politicians with eclectic music ranging from electro swing, nu-disco, remixes of classical French hits, lounge music and more? You get more than ten million plays on SoundCloud, play your music on a yacht near the Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy and become a popular music brand in France. Read More
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SoundCloud turns on ads and Go premium subs in the UK and Ireland
Now that SoundCloud has inked licensing deals with all the big music rights holders, the startup is wasting no time rolling out subscription services and advertising to a wider number of markets to better monetize its 175 million users and compete better against the likes of Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music and the rest. The music-streaming company — sometimes referred to as the YouTube… Read More
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Twitter Moments become tweetable playlists thanks to SoundCloud
An upgrade to Twitter’s Moments feature, originally designed to offer users a curated “best of Twitter” experience, now turns Moments into a source for tweetable playlists. Through an ongoing partnership with music streaming service SoundCloud, Twitter Moments will now allow curators to create and share Moments containing SoundCloud’s audio cards – that is… Read More
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It’s Go time for SoundCloud: $9.99 tier aims to rival Spotify with millions of premium music tracks
SoundCloud is often billed as the “YouTube for audio” because of its huge trove of user-generated music and spoken-word tracks, uploaded by some 12 million creators and now listened to by some 175 million monthly users globally. But today the Berlin-based startup is (finally) taking the wraps off a new subscription service that could turn that concept on its head — and put… Read More
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Crunch Network
Revisiting Brian Eno’s ‘The Studio as a Compositional Tool’
In 1979, Brian Eno gave a lecture at the inaugural New Music America Festival in New York on a very Brian Eno-ish topic. Titled “The Recording Studio as a Compositional Tool,” it is most definitely worth a listen or a read. In the lecture, Eno discusses the ever-evolving relationship music has with technology, beginning with the invention of audio recording. Read More
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SoundCloud confirms its deal with Sony Music, paving the way for its subscription service’s launch
Streaming music service SoundCloud today announced that it has finalized a deal with Sony Music, confirming reports from earlier this week citing sources who claimed the deal had finally been done. The deal will increase the number of songs listeners can access via SoundCloud and will allow Sony Music Entertainment artists to make money off of their tracks hosted on SoundCloud’s… Read More
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SoundCloud hires its first revenue chief, NBCU’s Alison Moore
SoundCloud — the audio streaming startup approaching 200 million users whose catalogue is based around user-generated content — has struggled with mounting losses and label licensing, while it plans new monetizing features. Now, it has hired an exec to tackle those business challenges head on. Today the Berlin-based startup is announcing that Alison Moore has joined… Read More
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SoundCloud Pulse, A Dedicated App For Music Creators, Arrives On iOS
SoundCloud Pulse, the music streaming service’s dedicated app for artists and creators, is now available on iOS. In an odd move in a market where apps tend to release on iOS first, Pulse first debuted on Android back in November. Like the Android version, the iOS app also aims to make it easier for users to share their sounds and tracks, interact with fans, and track their performance… Read More
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