Sound Cloud or Spotify: Content Marketing and Social Music

The evolution of music streaming platforms has been an important topic. As a user of SoundCloud and Spotify, a lot of people are not only attracted to the platform's service, streaming audio files, but also the active communities that are formed by active users.

With the prevalence of social media platforms, and music marketing sites like buyplaysfast.com combined with the unique ability of the music to bring unity to the people, regarding of race, gender, or race, create a captivating niche (the one where people with the same taste in music can share, discuss, and relate the songs that they are listening). In this article, we would like to investigate how two of the most popular music platforms could be used as a tool to support an online community.

SoundCloud

It is a platform that is built around consumptions of user-generated audio files. Usually, it's the first social media platform that comes in mind if you are talking about music from independent musicians and underground record producers.

Today, a lot of major record label, music artists like Damian Marley and Zedd, favorite indie bands like Red Bull, as well as well-known news personalities or organizations like NPR, are using SoundCloud as their main publishing social media platform to share and distribute exclusive audio contents.

After registering to the platform, all users can record as well as publish not more than 120 minutes or 1 hour and 30 minutes of audio content. People who decided to pay for premium accounts can gain access to additional features like more hosting space or more in-depth engagement analytics.

A few years ago, SoundCloud announced that they would be introducing advertisement to its premium United States users who frequently publish to a broader audience. According to the news agency, The Guardian, SoundCloud is the second biggest music streaming service platform all over the world, behind YouTube. It was launched in 2008, with active users of over 250 million, 175 million monthly listeners, and with 12 hour worth of audio uploaded per minute.

It has features like music discovery, Timed Comments that allow users to comment on specific timestamps in the audio contents, advocacy, and inviting discussions. The SoundCloud's application programming interface makes it a lot easier to share and use audio using its mobile application and embedded widgets. First, you need to consider how SoundCloud will fit in your content strategy.

Are you ready to committo a new channel? Adapting and adjusting to a new social media platform and neglecting it after, is a total waste of time. So before you record your content first, make sure that the publishing calendar, as well as the target audience, are adequately developed, and your objectives are apparent. Doing Podcasts, interviews, or transcribed blogs are an excellent way to start with SoundCloud

Spotify

Spotify is not a platform to publish audio contents like SoundCloud, but rather it is a music streaming service that is integrated heavily on social sharing. As of today, Spotify is the most successful music streaming service with at least 10 million paying subscribers.

To know more about Spotify, check here.

That is thanks to their royalty agreement with the biggest record labels in the music industry; users can listen to any music without the risk of copyright infringement. Spotify has this model called "Freemium" model, where non-paying subscribers are denied mobile download access and must experience advertisements — paying users to get an advertisement-free music listening experience with access to their offline mobile features.

Subscribers can follow or unfollow famous music artists subscribe to public playlists or listen to a real-time live feed of what other subscribers are listening to.

Social music platforms gain strength from the music industry's unique ability to unite people with the same interest, and what better interest to share than one's favorite singer or band playing their songs. You need to remember that music and social media are not meant to drive services or sell products, but rather bring people together and connect with one another. That connection is essential, no matter what business, brand, or user.