SoundCloud is touting improvements in both music discovery and tools for creators in its year-end wrap up. 2016 was the year that the music streamer finally added a paid subscription service and began paying more, but not all, creators.
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A few weeks SoundCloud added Recently Played tracks and Listening History to help listeners rediscover music and access their most recent plays. But over the last few months the music streamer has also introduced new features that it hopes will help new and emerging creators to get discovered.
In a year end post to users, SoundCloud offered this 2016 product wrap-up:
- Stations is our never-ending radio-like stream of music which can be started from a track or an artist profile. It’s one of the easiest ways to lean back and enjoy tracks. You can like or unlike a Station to save it to your Collection for further listening.
- Suggested Tracks learns your tastes and makes suggestions based on your likes and plays.
- Charts is the place to find the tracks that are getting a lot of buzz on SoundCloud. The ‘Top 50’ updates every day to show the 50-most played tracks for the past week, and ‘New & Hot’ updates multiple times a day to show the tracks that are trending right now. We’re currently rolling this out and it will be available to all users soon.
- Albums enable you to easily find old classics alongside new favorites. This gives you more control around how you organize your sounds on SoundCloud.
- Recently Played and Listening History gives you the ability to access your recent plays via your Collection.
- Offline Sync is available when you subscribe to our subscription service SoundCloud Go which is available in the US, UK, Ireland, France, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Germany. It gives listeners access to over 135 million tracks from the greatest and most established artists, ad-free, alongside tens of millions of tracks not found anywhere else.
Updates For Creators
SoundCloud’s creator-focused app, SoundCloud Pulse, was also upgraded during 2016 including the ability to edit track titles, genres, tags and descriptions, and to choose whether a track is public, private or downloadable. Creators can also access listener comments via the mobile app.