SoundCloud alternatives for musicians and producers

Millions of users publish their music on the internet platform SoundCloud. The spectrum for SoundCloud users is broad – ranging from established musicians and music producers to small, undiscovered bands and solo artists. This has helped develop SoundCloud into the most-used service of its kind, but there are plenty of alternatives. Bandcamp, Mixcloud, hearthis.at, and many more online music streaming websites are similar to SoundCloud, giving amateur and professional musicians alike a platform to upload their own songs and market them. So which is the best platform and how do these services differ?

SoundCloud was founded in Stockholm 2007 and has its central office headquarters in Berlin. The original idea for the website was just to provide a platform for musicians and producers to swap recordings with one another. But the service quickly developed to allow everyone access to the songs uploaded by artists – with users able to stream songs directly from the website without registration.

This has led to SoundCloud becoming a sort of YouTube for playing songs. As a result, SoundCloud had been mostly used by musicians that have no involvement with major music labels until recently: most of the artist profiles on SoundCloud belong to musicians who work more or less independently, perhaps with the backing of a small, independent record label.

2016 marked a significant change for SoundCloud: The release of SoundCloud Go. In the years running up to this, the music streaming service negotiated with major music labels to gain rights to a huge back catalogue of songs, allowing them to increase the range of music on offer and compete with established streaming sites like Spotify, Apple Music, and the new but influential Tidal. These major artists are now available to listen to on SoundCloud, but only for users who subscribe to SoundCloud Go - a new, fee-based package. But songs uploaded directly to SoundCloud - be it from unsigned artists, worldwide superstars, or music labels – remain free to stream for all users.

It doesn’t matter whether the genre is 70s rock, hip hop, classical music, or techno: Artists use the SoundCloud service to publish their music and reach an audience. Due to the ease of publication, the SoundCloud site has also developed into the most popular platform for uploading mixtapes, remixes, and even whole DJ sets. According to SoundCloud’s official figures, the service has over 175 million users and is a platform beloved by both producers and consumers of music: artists and labels use the website for distribution and marketing, while music lovers can listen to the latest releases and discover new artists. And, strictly speaking, SoundCloud isn’t solely a music platform. There are plenty of other audio files uploaded to the site, the most common one after music being podcasts.

The fee-based subscription package SoundCloud Go is designed to change the website forever. With the huge new music catalogue available to them, SoundCloud intends to do battle with Apple, Spotify, and Co. in the subscription-based music streaming service industry. By increasing the amount of music they can offer users, SoundCloud is also expecting to see a greater number of new users crossing over from the other streaming platforms. This could be to the advantage of unknown artists who publish their music on SoundCloud: the more users on the platform listening to music, the wider the reach meaning that there’ll be more potential listeners for undiscovered artists to tap into.

One of the main benefits of SoundCloud for unsigned acts compared to its alternatives is the ‘Similar Tracks’ feature. This is orchestrated by an algorithm that searches SoundCloud for similar music based on genres and tagging. So if your music is similar to that of Skepta, and you’ve tagged your music properly so that SoundCloud’s music recognition software can find and categorise it properly, you have a chance of being listed under the Similar Tracks heading on the right-hand side of Skepta’s SoundCloud artist page. Once a listener has played through all of the songs on the Skepta page, the Similar Tracks will start playing automatically – giving undiscovered artists an amazing opportunity to reach their target audience.

Another useful tool is the ‘Suggested Tracks’ feature. This is conducted by another algorithm that assesses the listening habits of all SoundCloud users as well as their likes and shares. Through doing this it can decipher the user’s music taste and then recommend a mixture of popular artists and undiscovered acts tailored to the individual user’s listening habits.

There are a number of options available to you if you want to use SoundCloud to publish your music. The free account allows you to upload up to a total of 3 hours of audio material. A Pro account is still very affordable, but offers you 6 hours of upload material instead. It also offers certain other features like listening stats. The Pro Unlimited account meanwhile is just under double the price of the Pro account but comes with unlimited audio file uploads and detailed information on locations of user plays and types of web pages and apps that your listeners use most often. Full pricing and other information about the options available to artists is available on the SoundCloud Pro packages page.

There are also a number of different models when it comes to listening to SoundCloud too. Streaming of all audio files uploaded to SoundCloud by users (so not ones covered by SoundCloud Go) works completely free of charge and without registration. But a free registration also lets you download many songs for free too. The songs you can and can’t download are decided by the musicians themselves on a track by track basis. SoundCloud Go offers you a music database of over 135 million tracks including releases by some of the most famous artists worldwide, but it comes at a monthly subscription price. Pro Unlimited SoundCloud users can add SoundCloud Go to their account for a very small extra monthly fee. SoundCloud Go also offers subscribers the chance to make certain songs and playlists available for offline playback, and – unlike the free package – it’s completely free of adverts.

SoundCloud doesn’t just offer music, it also functions as a social network. Registered users can follow the profiles of other users as well as liking and sharing tracks. One of the trademarks of the SoundCloud service is that the duration of every song is depicted in wave form. This makes it possible for users who are logged in to leave comments on different bars of a given song’s wave form. Other functions like the Suggested Tracks feature that we mentioned earlier, are available to everyone who has a registered account. These features are offered with all account types too, including the free one. Lastly, it’s also possible to link up your SoundCloud account with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Tumblr, in order to market content from SoundCloud.

Perhaps the biggest plus point for SoundCloud is the fact that the web service is an authentic, respected, and lively part of the current music scene. The brand is extremely well-known and used by music makers and enthusiasts the world over. Many musicians and music producers consider it a matter of course to operate a SoundCloud page. This is because it’s quick to set up, easy to manage, and can become the perfect digital business card for an artist if properly marketed and maintained. It’s also possible to manage your account from your fingertips by using the SoundCloud app (available for iOS and Android).

The downside for musicians is that it’s not possible to sell your music directly via the platform – meaning that songs can only be either downloaded for free or not at all. Online sales are possible from external sites with embedded SoundCloud links, however. This is one advantage that other providers (like Bandcamp) offer – the ability to sell music directly from within the streaming platform. This is more practical and lucrative for artists, while also simplifying and shortening the customer journey from artist discovery to sale transaction.

For those who don’t want to use SoundCloud there are plenty of alternative ways to promote music online. Some of these services focus on providing their users with as much music as possible, while others focus more on selling the music that is uploaded by artists. We’ll take a look at some of the best-known providers and assess their pros and cons. AS with SoundCloud, all of the examples below are aimed at music makers as well as everyday music fans.

SoundCloud has many advantages. It’s easy to use, works smoothly, and offers a huge user reach - so there’s not much surprise that it’s the most popular platform around for the free upload and publication of music. You can also set up an account quickly and easily, and even the free account can turn an amateur musician into a very professional sounding artist. So as a music maker, it makes a lot of sense to use this popular portal to reach the biggest audience possible and market your releases.

But there are also a number of alternatives to SoundCloud when it comes to music marketing. This is especially the case for users who want to sell their music online as SoundCloud has no option for this. It can be a daunting task to organise payment transactions and receipts yourself, so Bandcamp and hearthis.at are great options for musicians looking to make money. Both these services already have the infrastructure to cope with sales, and they also offer more than reasonable commission rates for products sold on their platforms. So if you want to sell your music on a streaming service, it makes sense to use one of these two.

But even if you’re not looking to sell music online and just want to find attractive, reliable streaming sites like SoundCloud, there are still plenty of worthwhile options. Certain platforms are targeted to particular musical genres and niches: Bandcamp is the platform of choice for many rock and indie bands, while The Future FM (and to an extent also Mixcloud) is focused more on DJ mixes. So if you fit one of these genres, then you can take advantage of the built-in target market these sites offer and also benefit from the relatively fewer artists to compete with compared to SoundCloud.

The truth is, when it comes to marketing your music and promoting yourself as an artist online, the approach should be the same as with any other online marketing campaign: A thorough, properly targeted marketing plan is the key to success. It stands to reason that using a combination of several streaming services is the best way to reach the biggest possible audience and give yourself the best chance of succeeding in music.