SoundCloud Getting Worse

Well, the enshittification of the streaming environment seems to be progressing. I had signed up for an Artists Pro account with SoundCloud several years ago. For a monthly fee, I was allowed unlimited uploads and a chance, which never materialized, to get paid for my streams. I got a decent number of streams per month and was fairly happy with the service. But after the regular increases of subscriber numbers vanished, I began to suspect SoundCloud was limiting my reach. A couple of months ago I decided to end the Artist Pro subscription. I saw an almost immediate decline in streams, going from 5-7,000 streams a month to less than 100 a day. Today, my stream count for the past 7 days was 15.

I maintain a “free”, ad-supported, limited playback account to upload my music to SoundCloud. I normally don’t listen to music on that account, but after the downturn, I decided to give listening a try. What I found was that apparently SoundCloud has raised its need for advertising dollars by a couple of means. One, make the ads more intrusive by requiring the user to click on a play button to serve the ad first, then playing exactly one song, before the cycle repeats. Two, constantly pestering the listener with ads to upgrade to a paid, $5.99 a month service with some vaporous advantages. Note this is not their premium service which gives access to their whole library of songs.

On the whole, SoundCloud seems to be on the Shittify path, extracting maximum profit from its users, while providing poorer and poorer service. I know SoundCloud is a German company, but as of yet have not found a source that publishes its financials, like I found with Shittify. Updates to follow.