Title image source: www.musically.com

 

“Everything that we are doing here is based off of a central premise that streaming is not enough for the vast majority of artists. 99% of artists don’t make a living wage from streaming alone. But we also believe that streaming is not enough for fans, and that’s where things start to get interesting for where we fit in the ecosystem…”

SoundCloud CEO Eliah Seton is talking to Music Ally ahead of his company’s latest announcement: a new ‘all-in-one’ subscription plan for the musicians, podcasters and creators who upload to the service, which launches today.

“Streaming is not enough,” is not a message you hear publicly from many streaming-service CEOs. But that’s the point: SoundCloud doesn’t see itself as just a streaming service any more. 

It has come a long way from the days when it seemed to be pivoting into Just Another Spotify-Alike, but one with stark financial challenges hampering its chance to actually compete with Spotify.

Since Seton joined as president in 2021 – he took the CEO role two years later – the company has pivoted back towards its original ethos as a platform providing tools and services for independent artists. It’s still a consumer-facing streaming service too, but the emphasis is as much on distribution, promotional tools and ways to make money from fandoms.

Today’s announcement brings all of those together. SoundCloud’s two tiers of artist subscription, the $3.25-a-month ‘Artist’ plan and $8.25-a-month ‘Artist Pro’ plan, are bundling in more features.

They include distribution to other streaming services (with artists keeping 100% of the royalties); a ‘Fan Support’ button to get direct donations from fans; plus on-demand vinyl pressing, merch and artist storefronts.

SoundCloud already offered most of these services – ’Fan Support’ is newly out of beta, for artists in the US, and the 100% royalties on external distribution is new – but the change is bringing them into the all-in-one subscription.

Seton sets the context for all this in SoundCloud’s evolution, having in the last year added zero-fee merch sales; ticketing through a Ticketmaster integration, and vinyl-on-demand via a partnership with startup ElasticStage. It also recently added a new layer of social features for listeners. This all comes back to the ‘streaming is not enough’ mantra – including for fans.

“For some fans, the streaming model does work: they put on a ‘Today’s Top Hits’ playlist on the way to work and have this lean-back experience. And that’s fine, but for the fans who are actually driving commercial activity and listenership and engagement, streaming is certainly not enough,” he says.

“In a way, streaming and the access model has suppressed fandom and superfandom.  It’s as old a story as the history of commercial music that fans have a willingness to pay for artists and music that they love.”

“They used to walk into Tower Records and spend the amount of money buying up the catalogue of their favourite artists that they now spend for access to 100 million tracks for an entire year. There’s been this gap between what streaming can give to a fan and what a fan actually wants to give to an artist, in terms of their attention and their engagement and their dollars.”

Before we get into the specifics of how the new subscription and features might overturn this dynamic, Seton provides a snapshot of where he thinks SoundCloud stands in 2025.

“The company is the healthiest it’s ever been, and that’s across a variety of dimensions. We’re a profitable growth company, so the financial operation is really good. Our engagement with rightsholders and artists is very healthy,” he says.

“And the reason that the company and platform is the healthiest it’s been is because we are orienting the product – and what we give to fans and to artists – based on why we are unique. Our fan business? Yes, it looks like a DSP, but it is totally different from a DSP. There are 440 million tracks on the platform, and 85% of our listening time is UGC [user generated content],” he continues.

“So, you get your 100 million tracks that you’d get at Apple Music and Spotify, but then you get another 300 million-plus which are new artists looking to get discovered, DJ sets, remixes, live recordings, podcasters, hobbyists… and 85% of the listening time is against that.”

“People might listen to a Beyoncé or a Taylor [Swift] or a Billie Eilish track on the platform, but what they’re coming for is something they can’t find anywhere else. Not even on YouTube. And more than 50% of listening time is against new music. That’s three times the number for a traditional DSP. SoundCloud is about discovery. It’s crate-diggers, it’s tastemakers. It’s folks who are coming to discover what’s next.”

“We are the only distributor in the ecosystem with direct access to fans at scale…”

Eliah Seton

That’s the pitch for SoundCloud’s continued importance as a place where artists can find their first fans and build their communities, but today’s announcement is about bringing the tools together – and shouting about them more loudly – for artists to capitalise.

Take distribution, for example. SoundCloud has offered distribution to other streaming services since 2019, but “it has never been a primary feature, and it has never been priced aggressively or integrated with the rest of the product,” Seton explains.

“That is one of the things that’s changing now. Historically, I think artists felt like they could get traction going on SoundCloud, but then they would need to leave the ecosystem and enter a different ecosystem, and pay a different subscription with a different dashboard and a different set of economics to somebody else to get their music out there,” he continues.

“That never made sense to us, and we’re now trying to aggressively right that ship where, once you’ve tested your music, once you’ve started to build that fanbase and traction, you can stay within the ecosystem, distribute out to all the other DSPs and keep 100% of the economics around that.”

“And then suddenly you’re distributing with a platform that owns direct access to fans. We are the only distributor in the ecosystem with direct access to fans at scale, and we think that’s going to be very powerful for artists to really build their traction and control what’s available to them, while keeping 100% of the economics.”

We’d argue that SoundCloud is actually one of two companies in music distribution that has ‘direct access to fans at scale’ – TikTok’s SoundOn is the other. At a time of renewed disruption in the distribution space, and arguments about major labels buying up independent firms, it’s significant that two of the biggest consumer-facing music platforms are doubling down on distribution.

It’s a world Seton knows well, of course. Before SoundCloud he was president of WMG’s ADA division, and oversaw that major label’s independent music and creator services business.

“Ultimately, distribution itself is a commoditised capability. Getting a piece of metadata from point A to point B has a marginal cost of nothing. So from our point of view, that means that the cost to the artist should be nothing,” he says.

“Where we fit in is, instead of it being a separate, not-integrated capability in a very commoditised competitive landscape, we’re using it as a feature of this all-in-one creator subscription, where you’re able to find your fanbase on the platform, build your fanbase on the platform, and control who else you distribute it to and when you’re going to do that.”

“You shouldn’t need 50 million followers on SoundCloud to be able to earn a living wage and make this your craft”

Eliah seton

The new ‘Fan Support’ button also says something about how SoundCloud sees the industry evolving. It’s not a new idea: Spotify launched its ‘Artist Fundraising Pick’ feature during the Covid-19 lockdowns and later renamed it… ‘Fan Support’.

The idea behind SoundCloud’s version is similar: a quick way for fans to donate to creators who they like: as little as $1 and as much as $1,000. In return, they can be acknowledged on a ‘top fans’ section of the artist’s profile.

“You shouldn’t need 50 million followers on SoundCloud to be able to earn a living wage and make this your craft. You should be able to do that with an active fan base of 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 fans. And that’s what a product of this nature will do,” says Seton.

“We’ve already rolled this out with a beta focus group, and what we’re seeing is artists who are making more from fan support than they’ve made from streaming in their entire careers. And that’s overnight.”

The ‘Top Fans’ part is important, he adds. SoundCloud’s research suggested that “it’s sticker and it’s more valuable if there’s a transaction in some way”. So, not just a button to donate, but an exchange of value.

“It feels more than just donating. It can be anonymous if that’s what somebody wants, but it allows for this acknowledgement from an artist to a fan, which I think fans really crave. And it forms a foundation on which we can do so much more,” he says.

Merch, vinyl and artist stores are already part of the package. “The roadmap will continue. This is obviously a beginning and not an end. We want this to be the early days of a long-term journey for us,” says Seton.

“This is the reason I came to SoundCloud four years ago, I felt the next major format on top of streaming would be fan-to-artist monetisation, and what better place to build that commercial business than a two-sided marketplace where fans and artists are already interacting at scale?”

“50% of our fans are superfans. They’re spending six times more money and time on music than a traditional fan is spending. So we are leaning into the experience that those superfans are trying to have,” he adds.

“Forgive the business jargon, but it’s really about the network effect. Fans who come to SuondCloud are hungrily looking for music discovery: to find what’s next in music; to be a tastemaker, a crate digger for new artists. And the artists who are coming to the platform are looking to find exactly those fans who they can engage with, test new music on, monetise different products and build a community.”

“We’re creating this virtuous circle of giving the fans what they want with new artists, and giving new artists what they want with new fans. If we can fuel fandom, we will fuel creators. If we fuel creators and their ability to get heard, we will fuel fandom.”

“Even in a world with synthetic artists and synthetic music, in the end, the fans will not be AI. Fans will always be human”

Eliah seton

As the interview draws to a close, there’s time to sling Seton a question about the dominant music-industry topic of 2025: AI. We have two conflicting theories to put to Seton.

The first is that SoundCloud’s emphasis on artist-fan relationships and the communities around them might make it a challenging place for fully AI-generated music. Human connections are intrinsic to this platform, so it may be barren ground for projects like The Velvet Sundown.

But here’s the second theory. If kids are out there making some genuinely weird, out-there, innovative new music using GenAI tools – and they are – wouldn’t SoundCloud be one of the first platforms they’d upload it to? So if there is a coming wave of GenAI music, it may spike there first.

So, Eliah Seton. With five minutes of interview time to go, what do you think about, well, All Of The AI Things? He laughs, thinks for a few moments, then offers some views.

“As the artist-first platform we’ve always been, we feel we’re stewards of artists’ self-expression. They’re coming here to share their life’s work with audiences, find their fans and get it out there. What more human, vulnerable, exposed thing could they be doing?” he says.

“And fans are seeking their own form of self-expression through the music that they listen to. So connecting those on a human level is core to who we are. That’s the lens through which we do everything. That said, we believe that AI is becoming the great democratiser of music creation…”

This is the strand of thought – which we’ve seen within both AI and music-industry circles – that AI could be a positive tool for people with music in their heads (and souls) who haven’t had access to instruments, training, studio time (or home technology) to get that music out.

“Now with generative AI tools, as long as we get the right ethical, legal and commercial framework in place, those tools are putting the ability to play with music and become a music creator in the pockets of everyone – like Instagram turned two billion people into photographers,” says Seton.

“Maybe there won’t be two billion music creators on the planet. But there’ll be billions of people who have access to these fun, playful tools to write a lyric, write a beat, write a hook, remix a song you love, share it and become social. That, I think, is a major unlock.”

He quickly repeats the ‘right ethical, legal and commercial framework’ caveat. “But with that in place, these AI tools will just become new tools like sampling, like AutoTune, like the violin, like the microphone… All of these things changed how artists can make music, and this, I think, can do that too.”

SoundCloud, like all the big streaming services, is already using AI in another context: algorithmic recommendations. Indeed, it’s crucial to the platform’s ‘First Fans’ feature, where artists’ music is served up to 100 listeners who might like it, with their response triggering the next steps for SoundCloud’s recommendation engine.

“That’s using AI to get human artists the thing they need, which is to get heard,” he says. That does lead on to considering the desire of the creators of AI-artist projects like The Velvet Sundown and Xania Monet to get their music heard, though. How does that sit with SoundCloud?

“Even in a world with synthetic artists and synthetic music, in the end, the fans will not be AI. Fans will always be human. And while humans may want to hear a synthetic track – it might have a good beat or a lyric that speaks to them – we know that human fans also want to connect to an artist in their music,” says Seton.

“They want to go to cross state lines and spend their disposable income buying tickets for a concert or buying merch. Music is a form of their human identity and expression, and AI can’t replace that. That’s a key thing that keeps me an optimist in this space!”

Article Originally Posted on www.musically.com