Well, I can’t believe it. After all these years, I finally signed up with Soundcloud. I have no idea where this is going to lead but I’m going to share my initial thoughts on the site.
First off, for those who don’t know, Soundcloud is a site where you can upload your music for other people to hear and comment on. The site has other functionality as well, such as the ability to message other members.
Now, the free account (you knew there was a catch) limits you to uploading 2 hours of music. That’s not a lot when you’ve written thousands of songs like I have. There are two other account options The one is pro, which allows you to upload up to 4 hours and the highest level is unlimited which has virtually no restrictions at all as far as uploading of music. If I wanted to, I could upload all 5,000 plus songs that I’ve recorded.
Pro costs $6 a month or $55 a year and Unlimited costs $15 a month or $135 a year if you pay it all at once. All in all, it’s a pretty good value.
In just the one day that I’ve been a member, I already have 4 followers. And I did this without any promotion of any kind. That is very encouraging.
Of course the bottom line is what you can get out of this site. Well, a lot of that depends on what you expect to get out of it. If it’s just exposure for your music, I can already see that happening as I already have close to 50 plays of my various tracks. And I haven’t even uploaded that many yet. There is no question that my musical exposure will grow over time.
But what exactly is this going to do for me?
That’s the question that’s hard to answer at this point in time. Honestly, I don’t know. Right now, other than getting me a few followers and having some of my music heard, it hasn’t really done a heck of a lot. I can see potential here and that’s what I want to touch on next.
One thing it can do is attract somebody to my music who might want to hire me for some scoring work. I’m going to assume that not everybody who goes to Soundcloud is a musician. Maybe some people visit the site to check out artists for the purpose of hiring talent. I’m obviously guessing here but it is possible. I would not rule it out just yet.
More likely, however, is this scenario. Another artist on Soundcloud hears my music and wants to collaborate with me for whatever reason. This collaboration, should I chose to go ahead with it, could lead to some great things. You never know. Like I said, it’s only been a day so I really don’t know what to expect. These are just things I’m spit balling around.
If nothing else, Soundcloud gives me another place to upload my music to should I run out of server space with my hosting account. I’m not sure, but I think there is a private upload option which will help me protect my work from being downloaded if I want to upload music for selling purposes. Not sure how that would quite work yet. But I’m guessing there is a way.
So far, I’m liking what I see. The site does take a little time to get used to. There are some quirks to it that are a little annoying.
For example, let’s say you go to another member’s page and he has about 50 songs on it. You go through the list and decide that one song looks interesting and decide to play it. After the song finishes playing, it doesn’t stop. It goes down to the next song in the list and plays that one.
Now this isn’t a big deal if you’ve decided you want to listen to all of this person’s music. But if you just wanted to hear the one song, well, it’s a little annoying to have to manually stop the playback. A little nitpick? Yeah, I guess. And if that’s the worst thing about the site, I’d say the site was pretty darn good.
There are a lot of statistics you can get from the site if you go pro or unlimited. For the free account the stats are very basic and not very useful. Another way they get you to cough up the money to upgrade. Hey, they have to make a buck or the site goes out of business.
Soundcloud does have a search feature and it’s quite good. You can’t imagine how much music there is in any one category. You could literally spend hours on the site and not even put a dent in it.
Oh, one other feature I want to touch on that I think is pretty cool if you’re a paid member.
They give you the ability to “spotlight” one of your tracks. What this does is it pins it up at the top of your page so it’s the first thing people see when they get there. So if you have some new music, or something you want people to hear above everything else, this feature will allow you to do just that.
Unlimited gives you another extra feature that I think is pretty cool. At least it sounds cool. This is right off their site.
“With Pro Unlimited, in addition to Pro stats, you can also see where your tracks are being played most; from blogs, to apps, to social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr) and even individual pages on SoundCloud.”
Now THAT is what I call tracking data. I’m probably going to upgrade to unlimited. At $135 a year that comes out to $11.25 a month. In my opinion, that’s a pretty good deal. The exposure alone is worth it. After all, Soundcloud is a pretty big site.
So, if you’re a musician and you want to get your music out there, Soundcloud is one way to do it.
You can check out my Soundcloud page below.
Steven Wagenheim’s Soundcloud Page
You never know what it might lead to.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim