But will this be enough to convert SoundCloud’s 175 million users to its paid subscription service, ‘SoundCloud Go’?
Earlier in the year, SoundCloud announced the addition of a stations feature. Now, the streaming service has announced an update to this feature which allow users to discover music in what SoundCloud calls ”a lean back, seamless listening experience”.
The new update allows users to create stations from artist pages, as opposed to previously just being able to create stations from tracks.
How it works…
When you start a station from an artist’s page, the algorithm creates a long queue of tracks tied to the artist. The songs included are of a similar genre of music, new songs and other popular songs. The tracks are skippable and are continually updated and refreshed.
For existing listeners it will include suggested stations based upon artists that the user has liked, or previously experienced. For new users, the streaming platform will offer some starter suggestions. SoundCloud Go users will have access to the platform’s entire library which consists of more than 125 million songs, and those that use the free service will have access to tens of millions of songs.
This is SoundCloud’s latest effort to get its 175 million free users converted to its paid subscription service, SoundCloud Go, which launched in March this year. Last month, the service launched a ‘suggested tracks’ feature which is very similar to Spotify’s ‘Discover,’ as it uses the listening activity of its subscribers to automatically find new artists and tracks.
But, whether this is enough to covert even a small percentage remains unknown, especially when the platform has a long-established reputation of being free.