If you are into music and love discovering fantastic new artists and tracks, but you haven’t joined SoundCloud yet, then you are really, really missing out on a whole new and vast world of music listening pleasure.
The Dawn of a New Music Era
Originating in Stockholm, Sweden, the official launch of the SoundCloud website took place from its headquarters in Berlin, Germany, in August of 2007. The platform was designed as a way to help artists gain discovery and fans and to allow listeners and music lovers the opportunity to indulge in a brand new era of music availability. SoundCloud has certainly grown since its inception, but the basic premise remains the same: Artists upload and share music and listeners enjoy a veritable feast of new sounds that they may never have had the chance to hear in days gone by.
These days SoundCloud has some 50 million registered users and around 200 million unique monthly visitors. So it’s a huge website that gets monumental amounts of interactivity.
SoundCloud is for Everyone
SoundCloud isn’t just for big name artists, nor is it devoted to fans or a music hungry audience. SoundCloud equally caters to everyone involved in, or who loves music. It has proven to be the launch pad for many unknown artists, songwriters, composers and producers, allowing these people with practically no musical platform an opportunity to get noticed and gain some fans.
On a platform so vast and with so many registered users, gaining visibility is still no easy task, but SoundCloud makes it a lot easier than trying to do it via social media or other means. SC is super simple to use and navigate and people can search for songs by genre, artist, track title or by certain relevant tags. Therefore, artists should take the time to fill in all the details thoroughly when they upload a track so it has the best chance of being found.
SoundCloud is Free!
For the most part it is anyway. There are two paid upgrade options for artists in order to be able to gain access to advanced statistics and get more upload time, but for listeners you can browse and listen to millions of awesome tracks at no cost; even being able to leave comments, likes and interact with the artists. Some artists make their tracks available for download, and tracks can even be purchased via SoundCloud.
Both artists and fans alike can follow each other on SoundCloud, get up to date information about new releases from their favourite musicians right in their account feed. Users can create playlists of their most liked tracks and even share them to their social media accounts.
Most of the tracks uploaded on SC are of quite a high sound quality and tracks range from very short to being full-length albums of more than an hour. There are tracks with vocals and quite a huge selection of instrumentals as well. Anyone can upload music to SoundCloud and everyone is welcome to join the platform and listen to as many tracks as they like.
My Music On SoundCloud
I create instrumental music tracks, mainly aimed at the music licensing and sync licensing marketplaces. Most of my tracks are either EDMs or cinematic production music. If you would like to connect with me on SoundCloud, you can access my profile and music tracks by clicking on the SoundCloud logo below. I look forward to seeing you there.
First, thank for your review about SoundCloud. Actually, I have visited Soundcloud before. I thought Soundcloud is for the professional musicians. But, I know I was wrong after reading your article. It was not for the mainstream. That’s great. So, I can find some interesting music for my videos next time. Is the variety of music genre wide in SoundCloud? BTW, thank for sharing a great resource.
Glad you found it helpful. SC is both for mainstream and unknown artists. The great thing abut SoundCloud is that it works like a social media platform for music, with much sharing going on. You can find all types of music on SoundCloud. Not sure what you mean by finding music there for your videos, as any video you create that is for public display will require a sync license for the music you use, unless you create the music yourself.