Soundcloud revealed last week that they were preparing to launch a subscription membership service for their site that would be in place by the end of the year. Now, in advance of that service, users are starting to see advertising injected on their feeds, including short non-music advertising that disables playback and forces users to listen.
The Soundcloud subscription service details are still unclear – with a basic summary having been somewhat leaked:
Free service reportedly includes a limited catalog and ads while the cheapest paid model includes an ad-free experience and a larger catalog. If users want to listen to SoundCloud’s entire catalog without ads, they will allegedly have to shell out even more.
The Soundcloud Ads So Far
The first round of Soundcloud ads that were rolled out earlier this summer were in-stream promoted tracks, similar to Twitter’s advertising (promoted tweets), that still deliver the same type of content. These new ads are quite a bit more abrupt – in my testing, we heard the same anti-smoking ad twice within a half-hour of listening to songs in my timeline.
The strange thing is that these ads are present for all users – even those who are currently paying for a Soundcloud Pro account – and there’s no way to yet sign on to the subscription service that would enable ad-free playback. It seems like the company is attempting to start testing a monetization strategy right away and roll out the subscription model when it’s ready.
We’ve written before about DJs dropping Soundcloud – check out this guide to six alternative sites to upload your DJ mixes.
Never fall into the trap of investing all of your promotional power in one platform – as we warned for Facebook when Pages started losing their natural reach.
