When's the last time you went to a fast-food restaurant, paid $10-15, finished your food in 10 minutes, and that was it? A tummy full of tasty, but unhealthy, food for the same price as a MONTH-LONG subscription to music. #perspective
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Soundcloud’s New $9.99 Streaming Service to Compete With Apple Music [Updated]
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When's the last time you went to a fast-food restaurant, paid $10-15, finished your food in 10 minutes, and that was it? A tummy full of tasty, but unhealthy, food for the same price as a MONTH-LONG subscription to music. #perspective
I don't think most of the people commenting here know what soundcloud is. Soundcloud is a service that allows users to upload their own music to the web. Nearly every artist that has a producer does not upload their music to soundcloud. This leaves only song covers, wanna be rappers, and other stuff on soundcloud. It is nowhere near Apple Music, and for $10/$13 a month, you don't get anything out of it.
I use soundcloud only to listen to remixes and original indie production. As long as I can still get that for free, then I don't care about any subscription plan. I can deal with some ads like I already have been from listening to some users, they just better not get carried away with it.
Zune Music Pass used to offer this. Unlimited streaming, fill you Zune player (*snicker*) with as much DRMed offline music as you want, and choose 10 songs per month to keep permanently. It was $15/month. One those examples when a Microsoft product was too far ahead of its time. Compared to today's landscape, I would take that subscription plan over Spotify and Apple Music.
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That's sort of the problem right? It costs about as much as one album, and at the end of the month, you have zero albums. Unless you pay again...
Or another perspective, you currently buy less than $10 of music a month and discover new music on the radio. For me I buy 2-3 tracks a month at the cost of less than half a subscription price so for me and many people it looks very expensive. Only the family plan Apple do is anything close to what I'd pay.
Correct. Furthermore, it was Soundcloud's decision to pass that 30% on to subscribers, not Apple's. Soundcloud should eat the cost for access to the iOS user-base.
Most platforms (Android, Amazon, Windows, Xbox, PlayStation, Wii/3DS, etc) do the same thing, though. Brick-and-mortar retail is a lot worse too.
Don't pay for MPEG-1 Layer 3 (aka: mp3), and - the worse thing - at 128 kbps. It's 2016. Don't also look at "320 kbps" trick in services like Spotify: it is just bigger mp3 file in size, and sounds the same as mp3 192÷224 kbps. This is why iTunes and Apple Music does not oversizes their MPEG-4 files, sound quality is just superb at 256 kbps - no need for tricks with "320 kbps" bobs. MP3 can't compete with MPEG-4, which is far way better format when it comes to main thing in music: sound quality.
So I can buy 
Music for $10 a month and have access to a much larger library of music including exclusives, or use Spotify Free and not have to pay a thing and only deal with the occasional ad.
So what the hell incentive does Soundcloud think anyone has to use their service, especially for $13 a month?
Music for $10 a month and have access to a much larger library of music including exclusives, or use Spotify Free and not have to pay a thing and only deal with the occasional ad.So what the hell incentive does Soundcloud think anyone has to use their service, especially for $13 a month?
Agreed. Maybe you can get away with this if you're Spotify, due to the major name recognition they already have, but a new service trying to charge a 30% premium? No one will go for this.
I'll be upgrading my Soundcloud account soon for podcasting purposes, I'd be interested to check out this service if it was rolled into the package, but as a stand alone I see no compelling reason to use it instead of Apple or Spotify. There isn't even anything that piques my interest enough to do the free trial.
This subscription BS is out of control. Everyone wants a monthly subscription service now. Everything from professional software, gaming, music, television...you could easily be losing $100-$200/month on subscriptions. This is one thing I hope eventually does out. It probably won't, but one can dream.
This is why for Crunchyroll, I'm switching to charging my subscription directly from the site instead of iTunes. The site offers high quality anime content straight from Japan, and it was disappointing to find out that Apple is taking 30% of my subscription revenue to the site. Seems excessive, even for Apple.
This is why for Crunchyroll, I'm switching to charging my subscription directly from the site instead of iTunes. The site offers high quality anime content straight from Japan, and it was disappointing to find out that Apple is taking 30% of my subscription revenue to the site. Seems excessive, even for Apple.
I can't upvote this enough times. All subscription services offered by third parties on iOS should be eating the cost of doing business on iOS. It is a privilege to have access to the App Store for distribution, and the hundreds of millions of paying customers that Apple has cultivated for them...these companies should be thanking Apple that it is only 30%.
Every time someone posts stuff like "$9.99 is VERY EXPENSIVE for music", a musician gets a proper job.
Yeah, it's a small price to pay for access to such huge libraries. I've used streaming music subscriptions for probably 12+ years. I don't like filling up my hard drives with music and movie downloads. Unfortunately, out of all the formats, streaming is probably the worst for paying the actual artists.
I've posted some of my instrumental music to Soundcloud ( soundcloud.com/fdporco ), but to me it's a YouTube for audio, not an iTunes or Spotify. I hope they don't mess up what has been a great platform for free music distribution so far, but I guess they need to make money.
I enjoy music as a hobby not a business, so my stuff is free to download as well as streaming, and as I often post about, options are good - but I don't really see Soundcloud as a direct rival to services like Apple Music, and I think it'd be a shame if that's what it ended up as.
And I don't know why anyone would sign up through the app store and pay $3 pm more if they didn't have to (if paying for this at all, which itself is arguably quite niche...).
I enjoy music as a hobby not a business, so my stuff is free to download as well as streaming, and as I often post about, options are good - but I don't really see Soundcloud as a direct rival to services like Apple Music, and I think it'd be a shame if that's what it ended up as.
And I don't know why anyone would sign up through the app store and pay $3 pm more if they didn't have to (if paying for this at all, which itself is arguably quite niche...).
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Hah that made me laugh! Seriously though musicians get more money for a purchase than an occasional stream. I'm not against spending money on music but there is no point streaming and giving most of that cash to the streaming service if you wouldn't have spent that money on an album. It's like a gym membership, great if you use it bad if you don't.
Simply buying the song for $1.29 is probably the equivalent of a 1000 plays for an artist from a streaming service.
So I can buy
It's funny - I hear this a lot about Apple Music and Spotify, just how they have huge libraries that dwarf those of all other services. But when I was trying out Apple, Spotify, and Pandora, Apple was by far the worst when it came to hearing frequent repeats within a genre. I ended up going with Pandora because I didn't see that the extra five bucks would make a practical difference!
Now, I listen to pretty mainstream stuff - jazz, swing, latin, etc. Perhaps if your tastes are more niche, the size of the library might mean something; and certainly if you're a fan of an artist that is exclusive to a service that will matter. But it seems to me that all of the services have libraries large enough that a typical user probably won't be able to tell the difference.
Funny thing is, that $3 going to Apple is far more profit than SoundCloud will make out of each subscription - these subscription services are operating on wafer thin margins. Even Apple Music.
