When you talk about the Streaming Wars, SoundCloud always feels like it's in 8th place heading the wrong way round the track with that Koopa in a cloud holding the "REVERSE" sign flying out front.
Then you hear something like this: SoundCloud hosts about 100 million more songs than competitors Apple Music and Spotify.
In a blog post published August 23 intended to introduce users to some new features, SoundCloud begins by referring to itself as "the world’s largest audio and music streaming platform." Wait, what? And then continues: "now with more than 135 million tracks from the biggest names, to new and emerging artists you can’t find anywhere else." They even threw in a few infographics to really twist that screw in.
If we're to judge a streamer by the size of its songbook — instead of, say, its brand name exclusives, which maybe might soon be on the outs — SoundCloud is roughly four times better than the big subscription-based platforms who almost uniformly boast about 30,000,000 tracks.
And in March, the Swedish streamer finally penned a distribution deal with Sony, garnering the last of the major catalogues. What's stopping listeners?
Before, we said SoundCloud, hemorrhaging millions of dollars, looked to be in trouble, but maybe, just maybe, they haven't kept up with the pack because they know another route. The post also points to the platform's 175 million monthly listeners — larger than Spotify's 100 million, Apple's 15 mil, and TIDAL's 4 mil.
If they can figure out monetization, there might be a surprise new leader.
SoundCloud’s song catalogue is actually four times larger than Spotify’s by chris hampton | Chart Attack.
