Jacob Kastrenakes, writing for The Verge, on SoundCloud’s new subscription service.
Though anyone can create a SoundCloud account and upload songs unworthy of your time, some huge artists also use it to publish tracks that you won’t find anywhere else. Kanye West, for instance, posted a new song over the weekend that you won’t even find on Tidal. It’s his fourth track exclusive to SoundCloud.
But bonus tracks only go so far. What matters for a subscription music service is how many paid tracks are available, and SoundCloud Go appears to have far fewer than its top competitors. SoundCloud is advertising a library of 125 million songs, but at least 110 million of those are free, user-uploaded tracks. While Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, and the other big streaming services have around 30 million paid songs, SoundCloud Go appears to include closer to 15 million.
This feels like a divergence from what makes SoundCloud unique.